How Government Ruins Everything, Including My Lunch
Limited government, I'm all for.
What we have is vastly overreaching government.
I ruined my lunch by spending most of it on the phone with the Kaiser West LA pharmacy -- with the sort of people who sound like they have the look in their eyes of a dead fish (one of whom was a pharmacist).
I have a prescription for the generic for Adderall, which helps me function as a writer. I have ADHD, which is misnamed attention deficit disorder. It actually reflects too much attention. Adderall helps calm all that down so I can be a little more unidirectional (or at least not tornado-directional) in my thinking, so I can write.
I find that Kaiser stocks this drug as if it's a rare leukemia potion, not one that a probably an eighth of Los Angeles is on, so I do what I always do when I get a prescription: Call the pharmacy to find out if they have it in. I make it clear that this is a prescription from my Kaiser doctor, and they can see this because they made me give them my medical record number when I got on the phone.
So, I ask, do you have the amount I need?
Kaiser West LA pharmacy android: "We don't give out information about our stock of schedule two drugs on the phone."
Well, they have -- for all the years I've been in LA (since the mid 90s) -- which is pretty much how long I've been taking ADHD drugs.
I tell the dead fish-eyed voice on the phone -- and later, a pharmacist, after dead fish eyes dumps my call and I have to call back (recording, recording, press one, press five, go fuck yourself with a sharp stick...)...
I try a new tactic: I ask if they tell me if they can fill the amount in my prescription -- which they can see...prescribed by my Kaiser psychiatrist.
Pharmacy android and then, later, pharmacist android: It isn't their policy to tell me that -- or to hold the drugs until I can get there.
When, by the way, the Kaiser pharmacy nearest me is holding part of my prescription (but can't fill the whole thing), and told me exactly how much of the drug they had and let me have it all.
But, again, this is the West LA Kaiser I'm being shafted by. What they're asking: That I would rush to my mailbox place, pick up my prescription, rush there, and then...find that they don't have it.
They said they could then call other Kaisers for me. But, if I'm again lucky, those Kaisers will be run by kowtowing functionaries instead of human beings with empathy (and sense), and they won't hold it, either.
Oh, goody! Then I could drive around to all the 24-hour pharmacies in California under the same notion -- that they might have it but won't tell me for sure and won't hold it, even if I'm speeding there right then in my car to go pick it up.
And let's explore why a pharmacy can't tell a member of their HMO whether they can or cannot fill her prescription: Because the fucking government is so panic-stricken about somebody, somewhere doing meth, or some college student Adderalling their way to an A when they would have gotten a B without the drug.
So I spent my lunch hour on the phone, got terribly stressed out and upset, and only got part of my prescription...meaning that I will go through this whole stressful experience far sooner than I would have otherwise.
Fuck you, government lovers. Fuck you, all of you who think nothing of voting for big government and its self-serving representatives.
How To Keep Legal Help Unaffordable
Forcing people to pay lawyers for every little bit of paperwork that must ever be filed benefits the lawyers, of course, who don't get fees when people avail themselves of the information in the wonderful Nolo books, for example.
Tom Gordon writes in the WSJ that "Hell Hath No Fury Like a Lawyer Scorned" (forced to compete with businesses offering legal services that don't involve costly attorney fees):
Jackie LaPlatney was fighting back tears as she entered the brightly lighted Watertown, N.Y., storefront called Legal Docs By Me in the summer of 2014. She told the store manager how her ex-husband had never been part of their now-teenage daughter's life, though the girl still bore his last name as an unwelcome reminder of their painful history. All her daughter wanted for Christmas that year was to be able to take the name of her stepfather instead.Ms. LaPlatney's experiences up to that point had been frustrating and disheartening--she couldn't afford an attorney's high fees for a name change, which could be $1,000 or more. The store's staff assured her that helping customers represent themselves was something the business did every day and quoted her a flat fee of $249 that Ms. LaPlatney could afford. Ms. LaPlatney's daughter's name change was completed in a few weeks, in plenty of time for a merry Christmas.
Legal Docs By Me is just one example of the booming innovation currently going on in the market for legal services. There are thousands of storefront businesses nationwide providing services that empower consumers to handle tasks like name changes and uncontested divorces without a lawyer. In addition, dozens of online companies are providing consumers with document preparation and other self-help legal assistance. The flow of venture capital to these companies has been rising, increasing from $66 million in 2012 to $458 million in 2013.
But booming business and happy consumers have attracted the attention of the local bar association in Jefferson County, where Watertown is located, causing the New York attorney general to file suit last May against Legal Docs By Me for the unauthorized practice of law. The bar claims that unauthorized-practice restrictions protect consumers. In truth, bar associations often use them to crack down on competition from innovative new service providers, preventing people like Ms. LaPlatney from getting affordable legal assistance.
A 2013 study by Stanford Law School professor Deborah Rhode demonstrates the scope of the problem. Ms. Rhode surveyed the lawyers in charge of state agencies nationwide responsible for enforcing unauthorized-practice laws in their jurisdictions. The survey revealed that the most common source of referrals for enforcement actions was attorneys, who stand to profit from restricting competition.
Ms. Rhode also found that more than two-thirds of the enforcement lawyers surveyed could not even name a situation during the past year where an unauthorized-practice issue had caused serious public harm. Of those who were able to recall such cases, almost all involved undocumented immigrants paying scammers who misrepresented themselves as lawyers and did nothing for their "customers." While such outright fraud is problematic, it can be prosecuted under existing consumer-protection laws, and doesn't justify applying unauthorized-practice restrictions to document-preparation services.
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Don't forget to wipe the seat.
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Sorry, Gwyneth, But That Particular "Carpet" Doesn't Need Steam-Cleaning
Ann Robinson writes in The Guardian of a recommendation Gwyneth Paltrow made on her goop.com website:
...A recommendation that women steam-clean their vaginas for extra energy, to rebalance female hormones and for a squeaky clean uterus:The real golden ticket here is the Mugwort V-Steam. You sit on what is essentially a mini-throne, and a combination of infrared and mugwort steam cleanses your uterus, et al."
...To give steamed vagina the seriousness it doesn't deserve, let's see if there's any science behind the extravagant claims. Mugwort, for instance, is an aromatic herb used in Chinese traditional medicine and as a food flavouring. In South Korea it's used in rice cakes and soup. And in LA it's used to steam vaginas.
Not in my part of Los Angeles.
Robinson explains why this is squirrel poop. An excerpt:
The water vapour in steam isn't a good idea either. The vagina is kept naturally well lubricated with oily substances. Water isn't hydrating to cells. On the contrary, water can wash away natural oils, leaving the vagina poorly lubricated and more prone to cuts and irritation. Thrush, caused by an overgrowth of candida, thrives on warm, damp conditions, so is a definite risk from steaming.All of our orifices, including ears, nose, anus and vagina, are essentially self- cleaning. The pH of the vagina, natural mix of bacteria that live in it, mucus plug that sits at the top of the vagina and lining of the womb all work harmoniously and effectively together to ensure that bugs from the outside world generally don't invade upwards from the vagina to the fallopian tubes. Infection can happen from sexually transmitted infections, contraceptive coils or other surgical procedures. But mostly it's a very well-run system.
The claim that the steam clean could balance hormones is irrational. Hormones are produced by organs such as the brain and ovaries, travel in the bloodstream and have specific effects on their target organs. Steaming the vagina cannot possibly impact on hormone levels. I urge you to put the kettle away, throw the mugwort in some soup and consciously uncouple from this website.
When It Comes To Free Speech And Tolerance, Progressivism, Increasingly, Is A Pretty Name For Totalitarianism
Tolerance means tolerating other people's views. Letting them be heard -- and maybe listening because you might learn something or just improve your arguments by hearing holes in somebody else's.
Fredrik deBoer writes at QZ.com:
I have seen, with my own two eyes, a 19-year-old white woman--smart, well-meaning, passionate--literally run crying from a classroom because she was so ruthlessly brow-beaten for using the word "disabled." Not repeatedly. Not with malice. Not because of privilege. She used the word once and was excoriated for it. She never came back. I watched that happen.I have seen, with my own two eyes, a 20-year-old black man, a track athlete who tried to fit organizing meetings around classes and his ridiculous practice schedule (for which he received a scholarship worth a quarter of tuition), be told not to return to those meetings because he said he thought there were such a thing as innate gender differences. He wasn't a homophobe, or transphobic, or a misogynist. It turns out that 20-year-olds from rural South Carolina aren't born with an innate understanding of the intersectionality playbook. But those were the terms deployed against him, those and worse. So that was it; he was gone.
I have seen, with my own two eyes, a 33-year-old Hispanic man, an Iraq war veteran who had served three tours and had become an outspoken critic of our presence there, be lectured about patriarchy by an affluent 22-year-old white liberal arts college student, because he had said that other vets have to "man up" and speak out about the war. Because apparently we have to pretend that we don't know how metaphorical language works or else we're bad people. I watched his eyes glaze over as this woman with $300 shoes berated him. I saw that. Myself.
These things aren't hypothetical. This isn't some thought experiment. This is where I live, where I have lived. These and many, many more depressing stories of good people pushed out and marginalized in left-wing circles because they didn't use the proper set of social and class signals to satisfy the world of intersectional politics.
I mentioned in a blog post that we recently went to hear UC Riverside law dean Erwin Chemerinsky speak, and a guy we know sneered about what a lefty he is (as if this made him unworthy of hearing). I don't agree with all of his positions -- I'm a libertarian and a fiscal conservative. But the man has argued before the Supreme Court and we have a meeting of the minds in how we both care deeply about civil liberties and the sort of society Martin Luther King called for, where people are judged by "the content of their character" instead of by skin color.
That's right -- even people you disagree with can have things of value to say.
And if you disagree with them, the way to maybe bring them over to your side isn't to throw them out for "crimes" against your version of what is permissible to say. It's to keep them there and have a dialogue.
This is what I often do when strangers are rude to me by email. I try to "turn" them by not responding in kind. Instead, as I write in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck,", I ask whether they think "Fuck you, bitch" will help me understand why they're right and I'm wrong and whether they'd haul off and talk that way to a woman standing in front of them in the grocery store.
It usually takes a couple of emails before they apologize for what jerks they were.
Je Suis Charlotte? Um, Non
France is for free speech until...well, it isn't -- just a few weeks after all the marching in the wake of the slaughter for Allah at Charlie Hebdo.
"Blasphemous" artwork -- showing women's shoes on Muslim prayer mats -- was removed from a Paris exhibition after warnings of possible violence.
The answer, of course, is the long view. Not to squelch free speech, punishing the speaker because people may get violent but to do everything possible to stop the violent people from doing bodily harm and laying waste to the values of a free society.
The story by David Chazan in the Telegraph/UK:
The French-Algerian artist, Zoulikha Bouabdellah, withdrew the work from an exhibition in a northern Paris suburb with a large Muslim population after an Islamic group told local authorities it could provoke "uncontrollable, irresponsible incidents".
More from ArtNet, by Coline Milliard, with a photo of the art at the link:
Bouabdellah, who was born in Moscow and grew up in Algeria, was due to exhibit her installation Silence (2008) at a recently-opened show "Femina ou la Réappropriation des modèles" at the Pavillon Vendôme in Clichy, a suburb north of Paris.But the day before the opening on January 24, she was told by one of the show's co-curators, Christine Ollier, that the town hall had been in touch saying that a group "representing Muslims in Clichy had alerted the authorities to the possibility of a violent reaction provoked by the presence of the piece in the show."
According to Bouabdellah, who spoke to artnet News from her home in Morocco, the Clichy officials showed no support for the exhibition.
The artist explained that her piece was inspired by a group of Muslim feminists she had come across in Morocco, that it is an homage to strong women in the Arab world─and in no way blasphemous.
"[But] since we were not supported by the mayor, the guarantor of the French Republic's principles, I didn't want to take the responsibility, so we decide to remove the work," Bouabdellah said.
"Yes, it was self-censorship, I completely accept that," she continued. "It was a real moral dilemma for me, and I thought, 'I'm giving in,' but on the other hand, I didn't want the other pieces to be at risk or the show to close down."
Celebrated French performance artist Orlan took to Facebook to condemn the pressure to which Bouabdellah was subjected. "This act of self-censorship hides a more serious censorship," she wrote in an open letter published on the social media platform on Sunday.
"While I understand the reasoning [that led the artist and curators to remove the piece], I cannot support it as it opens the doors to all kinds of insidious restrictions of our freedom of speech, risking that we progressively move, consciously or unconsciously, from self-censorship to self-silencing, and from self-silencing to an inhibition provoked by fear," the letter continues.
Mousy
Squeaky links.
Or They Could Just Avoid Getting So Trashed That They Pass Out Or Lose All Control Of Themselves
Susan Svrluga writes at the WaPo about how backward we've gone, with UVA sorority sisters ordered by their national chapters to avoid frat events this weekend.
Sorority sisters at the University of Virginia were ordered by their national chapters to avoid fraternity events this weekend -- a mandate that many of the women said was irrational, sexist and contrary to the school's culture.It's not about one night of parties, several students said, but about their ability to make their own choices.
And they're not taking that lightly.
The rule came after a traumatic fall semester in Charlottesville, including the violent death of a student and now-discredited allegations of a gang rape at a U-Va. fraternity.
Women aren't men's equals if they need to be shielded like this instead of told to act like adults -- to not get so plastered they lose consciousness or come close.
No, nobody should be raped because of this, and sure, there are date rapes that have nothing to do with intoxication, but a person jeopardizes their safety (and not just in terms of sexual assault but mugging or worse) by allowing themselves to become so drunk they're no longer in control of who does what to them.
More from the piece:
A petition, started online on Monday, had almost 2,000 signatures by midday Tuesday. It reads, in part:"Instead of addressing rape and sexual assault at UVa, this mandate perpetuates the idea that women are inferior, sexual objects. It is degrading to Greek women, as it appears that the [National Panhellenic Conference] views us as defenseless and UVa's new fraternal policies as invalid. Allowing the NPC to prevent us from celebrating (what used to be) a tight-knit community, sends the message that we are weak."
Besides the ugly underlying message that women are weak and unable to care for themselves, the other ugly message is that men are out-of-control animals.
RELATED: On the supposed "rape culture" -- which does exist...in ISIS territory, but not on college campuses.
via I R A Darth Aggie
What's Yours Is The Government's!
Glenn Reynolds writes at USA Today:
Obama proposes to tax the appreciation on inherited homes. When you sell property at a profit, you pay capital gains on the difference between the basis (what you paid) and what you sell it for. (Obama also proposes to increase the capital gains rate). That's not a big issue for most middle class people, because right now if your parents leave you their house, you get what's called a "step-up" in basis.That means that the basis isn't what your parents paid for the house decades ago, but rather what it was worth when you inherited it. Thus, the appreciation your property experienced while your parents owned it comes to you tax-free. For many families, that appreciation is their biggest inheritance. Now, subject to some exemptions Obama plans to tax those gains, and other gains via inheritance.
Why would the White House even consider such a thing? As McArdle observes: "The very fact that we are discussing taxation of educational savings -- redistributing educational subsidies downward -- indicates that the administration has started scraping the bottom of the barrel when seeking out money to fund new programs. Why target a tax benefit that goes to a lot of your supporters (and donors), that tickles one of the sweetest spots in American politics (subsidizing higher education), and that will hit a lot of people who make less than the $250,000 a year that has become the administration's de facto definition of 'rich'? Presumably, because you're running out of other places to get the money."
When a government is desperate for cash, it goes after the middle class, because that's where the money is. Yes, the rich are rich, but the middle class is far more numerous. And this has raised other fears. As McArdle also notes, if 529 plans aren't sacrosanct, what about Roth IRAs? People have worried for a while that the government might go after retirement accounts as another source of income -- to the point that there have even been calls for Congress to make such grabs explicitly off limits.
...The truth is, in our redistributionist system politicians make their careers mostly by taking money from one group of citizens that won't vote for them and giving it to another that will. If they run short of money from traditional sources, they'll look for new revenue wherever they can find it. And if that's the homes and savings of the middle class, then that's what they'll target.
Beyond the money, what this inheritance tax would mean for some is that they'd lose the home their parents willed to them -- a home they are perhaps living in.
The Holocaust: How Could All These People Sit By While It Was Happening?
When I was in my late teens, my dad showed me a newspaper headline in a paper he'd saved about Jews being slaughtered in Europe.
I asked why nobody did anything and he didn't really have an answer.
I saw a tweet that reminded me of this: 
Here's the link to the piece on it in today's Telegraph, by Roy Greenslade.
The newspaper reported that mobile gas chambers were being used for industrialised murder and that "an average 1,000 Jews were gassed daily".The article, reproduced on the Telegraph's website, also lists the death toll from massacres in seven towns and cities. Here are two paragraphs:
"Children in orphanages, pensioners in almshouses and the sick in hospitals have been shot. In many places Jews were deported to 'unknown destinations' and killed in neighbouring woods.In Vilna 50,000 Jews were murdered in November. The total number slaughtered in this district and around Lithuanian Kovno is 300,000".
Yet the article, which referred to "the greatest massacre in the world's history", was published on the fifth page of a six-page issue. And it got no traction elsewhere.
Hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered and no traction.
Was it because they were Jews? Some other reason?
I heard a woman on CNN -- a woman who was sent to Auschwitz at age 10, and was experimented on by Mengele -- and teared up at the horror intentionally shoved on a child.
How Can You Be This Dumb And Still Be President?
Tax college funds? Hello?
Peter Suderman at reason sees a bright side in it. As the headline to his piece goes: "How Obama's 529 College Tax Plan Debacle Proves the Welfare State is Doomed":
To understand just how bad the politics of Obama's now-withdrawn plan to tax 529 college savings were, think about it this way: Obama, under heavy pressure from both Democrats and Republicans, made a public show of pulling a proposal that already had no chance of passing.Even as an inert fantasy proposal, it was so widely disliked that the White House had to back down.
It's a minor but revealing political fiasco--one that shows how distant the White House is even from the interests of its own party while offering a preview of economic policy debates and welfare-state fiscal challenges for decades to come.
The political optics of the plan were flat-out terrible for Obama, who put forth the proposal in the context of a State of the Union address built around the theme of Middle Class Economics. The gist was that Obama proposed taxing the wealthy in order to pay for new middle class benefits, like free community college tuition.
But, somewhat awkwardly, given the president's chosen theme, 529 plans are tax-advantaged savings vehicles that currently benefit an awful lot of middle class people. In particular, they benefit middle and upper-middle class families in high-tax blue states.
So it is not exactly surprising to find that, in addition to the entirely predictable GOP pushback against the proposal, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, and Rep. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, lead a seperate Democratic push for the White House to drop the plan. This is an administration that is now so isolated and out of touch that it does not grasp the obvious interests of its own party.
The plan was also tremendously awkward for Obama himself. As the folks at Americans for Tax Reform have noted, Obama was not only a public booster of 529s, someone who as a Senator voted to make them permanent and praised them as tools to help families with college expenses in his book, he was also someone who had relied on a 529 himself, contributing $240,000 to a 529 college fund for his own children back in 2007. Obama took advantage of the plan's tax benefits--then proposed closing the door behind him.
Goopy
Oatmeally links.
Fear Funded That!
Fear pays.
That's the advice of former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes, via PrivacySOS:
If you're submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you're not going to submit the proposal that 'We won the war on terror and everything's great,' cuz the first thing that's gonna happen is your budget's gonna be cut in half. You know, it's my opposite of Jesse Jackson's 'Keep Hope Alive'--it's 'Keep Fear Alive.' Keep it alive.
via @normative
Yanking Of Due Process Leads To Sue Process In Campus Sexual Assault Cases
Not surprisingly, some of the men on campus who were denied their due process rights when accused of sexual assault are not going quietly.
The Obama administration forced schools to set up kangaroo courts on campus, leading to the expulsion of some students under "standards" of evidence that would never fly in an actual court.
Ashe Schow writes at Wash Ex that, predictably, some of these students are now suing, which means that colleges are paying for the results of the sick the edict forced on them by the Obama administration:
A Voice for Male Students has compiled a list of 57 lawsuits against universities for such acts. By comparison, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights is investigating nearly 100 complaints filed by students claiming they were sexually assaulted and their allegations mishandled.Two weeks ago, Saint Joseph's University settled a lawsuit filed by a student claiming he was expelled due without adequate due process. That settlement, too, was confidential.
In November 2014, Swarthmore College settled with a student who had his case re-opened after the Department of Education began investigating two non-related cases at the university. In the original investigation, no charges were brought against the student. But months later, when the case was re-opened, a fast-tracked hearing found him guilty of sexual misconduct.
In addition to these recent cases, 14 other students (from the list of 57) have settled with their universities following lawsuits and another seven had their school rulings overturned or received favorable rulings on certain counts of their lawsuits.
In eight cases, courts ruled against the students.
So government lays down edicts and men end up paying with their futures -- stripped of the rights they'd have in the justice system -- and then colleges get socked with lawsuits and pay in dollars to the students who have been ruined by a system they were forced into by the government.
More and more, this country is operating on the principle you see in communist countries of "anyway you slice it, you're fucked."
The "Perceptive Disability" In How The Left Sees Criticism Of Islam
Counter-jihad is about human rights, and "to truly be a liberal, you have to be for counter-jihad." Eric Allen Bell on Islam and human rights.
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A guy on TV before I was born.
Hey, Little Girl, Don't You Know That Hairstyles Are Segregated?
White, blonde 12-year-old Mallory Merk liked box braids and posted a selfie of herself in them -- and was promptly blasted as racist, black culture-thieving and all sorts of other stuff.
I think she looks pretty. Looks like she has a wheat field growing out of her head.
From Opposing Views' Dominic Kelly:
"Yes, something as 'trivial' as a hairstyle can be triggering or upsetting," Jamilah Lemieux tweeted. "Let us have it. This goes to everyone, btw. It's feeling like psychological torture, esp against the backdrop of state-sanctioned murder and the #BlackLiveMatters movement. ...our bodies, our music, our fashion, our lips, our hair...everything about us is ripe for the picking by people WHO DO NOT TREAT US WELL. This is not happy cultural mixing where you bring the blonde and I bring the braids, because you hate me and tell me as much all the time."Still, others defended the young girl's hairstyle.
"Black women saying white women can't get braids while they're running around with blonde hair," a user pointed out.
Great point.
Guess what: America is a place where the world's cultures come together into probably the most diverse place on the planet. Jews eat Chinese food on Christmas (although most of it is Chinese like Taco Bell is Mexican). Black people go to Passover seders. And a friend in the music business who knows and loves American musical history describes American music as unique -- an amalgam of "the Jews and the Blues." (He talked to me about how Gershwin went down and lived in the South to create "Porgy and Bess.")
You really have to laugh at a woman who talks about a 12-year-old's hairstyle as "feeling like psychological torture."
This is what people do when they live in the freest country on the planet and, in lieu of identity through accomplishment, really need a hobby.
For the record, I love some black women's hairdos -- especially the braids. I wouldn't get them but only because I'd look like crap in them with my big white head showing through.
UPDATE -- RELATED: Via Rap-Up, Azealia Banks slams Iggy Azealea and T.I. for appropriating black culture (and said so as tears!! rolled down her face):
As tears rolled down her face, she explained how white America and capitalism have robbed her of her identity. "At the very fu**in' least, ya'll owe me the right to my fu**in' identity. And to not exploit that shit. That's all we're holding onto, like hip-hop and rap. And Bill Cosby, and whatever the f**k it is. Ya'll putting that on TV for the youth to fu**in' see."She called T.I. a "coon" for promoting Iggy and blasted his wife Tiny. "You out here trying to promote this white bitch. They got your wife on VH1 and that bitch can't fu**in' read. You're a fu**in' shoe shinin' coon. How dare you."
She's never been in the same room as Iggy, who she once called "Igloo Australia," and she has no interest in ever speaking to her. "It's not interesting to me."
But she does like artists including Rae Sremmurd, DeJ Loaf, Big K.R.I.T., Young Father, and Manolo Rose.
Something's Wrong When Multiple Cops Fire Their Guns To Disarm A 17-Year-Old Girl With A Knife
Elizabeth Nolan Brown blogs at reason that 17-year-old Kristiana Coignard, who apparently had some psychiatric problems, showed up at the Longview, Texas police station "brandishing" a knife.
A knife is certainly not nothing. But it is also not a gun. And one can't help but wonder why three cops, in the middle of their own lobby, were unable to subdue a knife-wielding teen girl without the use of lethal force. Coignard was shot multiple times--some sources are saying four times, though I couldn't confirm this--and three police officers have been placed on administrative leave in conjunction with the shooting.
Coignard was killed by the gunfire. Police statement here. Nolan continues:
Coignard had been living with her aunt, Heather Robertson, who told ThinkProgress that the girl struggled with depression and bipolar disorder and had previously attempted suicide several times. "I think it was a cry for help," said Robertson about her niece's actions. "I think (police officers) could have done something. They are grown men. I think there is something they are not telling us."People claiming to be with the hacker collective Anonymous are rallying around Coignard's case. "We ask you what kind of people you hire as a police officer that can't take a knife from a small 17 year old girl?" they ask. "We ask you why are your officer's carrying tazors if they will only reach for their guns first? ... To the citizens of America it looks as if police are trained to kill and not to serve and protect us."
Tasers? Talking to her while holding a shield -- standard or improvised?
If you can't defuse a situation with a girl holding a knife in a police station lobby without gunning her down, you shouldn't be a cop.
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The Religion Of Myers-Briggs -- The Fad That Just Won't Die
Just got an email from columnist and and supposed business expert crowing about giving four students the Myers-Briggs test -- a test that supposedly measures personality (as in, measures it in a way more accurate than having your tea leaves read). Argh.
Here's Wharton School's @AdamMGrant at HuffPo on what crap it is:
My name is Adam Grant, and I am an INTJ. That's what I learned from a wildly popular personality test, which is taken by more than 2.5 million people a year, and used by 89 of the Fortune 100 companies. It's called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and my score means that I'm more introverted than extraverted, intuiting than sensing, thinking than feeling, and judging than perceiving. As I reflected on the results, I experienced flashes of insight. Although I spend much of my time teaching and speaking on stage, I am more of an introvert -- I've always preferred a good book to a wild party. And I have occasionally kept lists of my to-do lists.But when I took the test a few months later, I was an ESFP. Suddenly, I had become the life of the party, the guy who follows his heart and throws caution to the wind. Had my personality changed, or is this test not all it's cracked up to be? I began to read through the evidence, and I found that the MBTI is about as useful as a polygraph for detecting lies. One researcher even called it an "act of irresponsible armchair philosophy." When it comes to accuracy, if you put a horoscope on one end and a heart monitor on the other, the MBTI falls about halfway in between.
Now, if you're an MBTI fan, you might say it's typical of an INTJ to turn to science. Touche. But regardless of your type, it's hard to argue with the idea that if we're going to divide people into categories, those categories ought to be meaningful. In social science, we use four standards: are the categories reliable, valid, independent, and comprehensive? For the MBTI, the evidence says not very, no, no, and not really.
1. I'm Not Schizophrenic
A test is reliable if it produces the same results from different sources. If you think your leg is broken, you can be more confident when two different radiologists diagnose a fracture. In personality testing, reliability means getting consistent results over time, or similar scores when rated by multiple people who know me well. As my inconsistent scores foreshadowed, the MBTI does poorly on reliability. Research shows "that as many as three-quarters of test takers achieve a different personality type when tested again," writes Annie Murphy Paul in The Cult of Personality Testing, "and the sixteen distinctive types described by the Myers-Briggs have no scientific basis whatsoever." In a recent article, Roman Krznaric adds that "if you retake the test after only a five-week gap, there's around a 50 percent chance that you will fall into a different personality category."
The rest at the link.
Grant wrote an inspiring book, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success
Fake Engine Noise: The Socks In The Bra Of The Auto Industry
Drew Harwell writes in the WaPo:
Stomp on the gas in a new Ford Mustang or F-150 and you'll hear a meaty, throaty rumble -- the same style of roar that Americans have associated with auto power and performance for decades.It's a sham. The engine growl in some of America's best-selling cars and trucks is actually a finely tuned bit of lip-syncing, boosted through special pipes or digitally faked altogether. And it's driving car enthusiasts insane.
Fake engine noise has become one of the auto industry's dirty little secrets, with automakers from BMW to Volkswagen turning to a sound-boosting bag of tricks. Without them, today's more fuel-efficient engines would sound far quieter and, automakers worry, seemingly less powerful, potentially pushing buyers away.
Softer-sounding engines are actually a positive symbol of just how far engines and gas economy have progressed. But automakers say they resort to artifice because they understand a key car-buyer paradox: Drivers want all the force and fuel savings of a newer, better engine -- but the classic sound of an old gas-guzzler.
Later in the piece, Harwell asks a question:
Does it matter if the sound is fake? A driver who didn't know the difference might enjoy the thrum and thunder of it nonetheless. Is taking the best part of an eight-cylinder rev and cloaking a better engine with it really, for carmakers, so wrong?
Well?
via Jay J. Hector
Muslim Imperialism: The Problem Of Jihadists And Sharia-Seekers In Europe
Sabia E. Demian writes at Gatestone Institute:
Even presuming that the majority of Muslims in Europe wish to adapt and blend in with the "natives" and live not only side by side, but totally intermingled in all aspects of life, they are hampered by the violent minority. Many immigrants, also, have a hard time moving away from their past. They can feel lost. They have left behind their origins and heritage but are not in tandem with their progeny, even though they were the ones who willingly and deliberately sought this monumental change. Actually, their offspring frequently reject their values as well as them, mostly because they simply don't comprehend them. It is equally true of the "natives." The "generational gap" is not often bridged for the sake of peace and harmony.The militant minority, though, have a totally different agenda. They are hell-bent on the Islamization of every single person in Europe, which is the same across the globe. They are a power to be reckoned with because they are recruiting other newcomers from all corners of the earth, and the prize they offer is so temptingly salacious to youths with still-confused emotional needs. The guiding and funding sources are mostly away from the scene of the fray. If these sources could be dried up, there would be more hope for a peaceful resolution. The politics of separateness -- whether churning up racial divisions in America or separating Muslims in Europe from their non-Muslim hosts -- is now a big business and will not easily be given up.
One unanswered question is whether Islam is a religion of peace. First, the Arabic word Islam does not mean "peace" but an act of subjugation to God (Allah) and His will. Second, the basis and teaching of Islam is understood universally to consider non-Muslims as infidels. Third, infidels have to be wiped out. There is no gainsaying the word of Allah in the Koran, the hadith of the Prophet Muhammad and the shari'a. Thus, Muslims by birth or conversion, regardless of whether they are ultraconservative, moderates or secularists, are trapped in this vise-grip of enforcing the will of Allah on everyone, non-Muslim or Muslim, if they veer away from the straight and narrow.
What is poignant to me, an Egyptian Coptic Christian who has lived and worked as a physician in Muslim and non-Muslim countries, is the abysmal lack of understanding of Islam by the Western media, leaders and the man-on-the-street. It is mind-boggling to see the degree of ignorance of blatant truths and facts in the way many policies are handled.
Europe is in the middle of a civil war like no other -- for the grand prize of religious dominance by the few over the many. Regardless of the denials of many Europeans and observers from around the world -- who say that the terror acts are not related to Islam, or if in any way Islamic at all, are merely committed by deviants from the "true" origins of Islam -- in reality, the mayhem we see currently is generated by jihadist Islam. This minority is bolstered by others of a similar conviction, but with even more militant ideas and deeper purses.
The rest of the world is at risk of the same fate. There is chapter and verse, other than 9/11, 7/7, the Madrid train bombing and attacks in India, Argentina, Russia, Israel, Canada, Belgium, Australia, Britain and France, among others. As first steps, governments in the West need honestly to study Islam; and an ominous force must confront, contain and cut off the supply of jihadists and their sources of funding.
If European Islamists wish to leave the continent to fight in Syria and Iraq, that should be allowed to exit, but they should not expect to be allowed back.
"Do As I Say..."
Pharrell Williams wants to talk to you about your energy consumption...
Via @instapundit
Lily
The floral of the linky story.
Advice Goddess Radio, Sun, 7-8 pm PT: Dr. Michelle Skeen On How To Stop Letting Your Fears Sabotage Your Relationships
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
*"Best Of" replay. We'll have another for Superbowl Sunday, then I'll back with live shows.
Tonight's show will help you stop pushing potential partners away by exploring why you do that and explaining how you can stop.
Psychologist Dr. Michelle Skeen explores how our "core beliefs" can set the stage for our developing unhealthy, fear-based patterns of behavior that keep us from having happy and healthy connections with others.
Join us on tonight's show as she explains the underlying causes and how to yank yourself out of the unhealthy thinking and patterns and develop the skills you need to have loving and happy relationships.
Skeen's book we'll be discussing: Love Me, Don't Leave Me: Overcoming Fear of Abandonment and Building Lasting, Loving Relationships
Listen to the show at this link at 7pm PT or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2015/01/26/dr-michelle-skeen-on-how-to-stop-letting-your-fears-sabotage-your-relationships
If People Were Like Dogs
I'm dogsitting for Mingus, my friend's ginormous old Bichon.
This calls for some strategic food-locating, because Mingus will eat my dog Aida's food if Aida doesn't happen to have her face right in the bowl.
Imagine being at a restaurant and having a guy reach over the table divider to grab food off your plate.
Yeah, sometimes we really are more civilized than dogs.
That said, I think Gregg would be flattered if I greeted him not just with a kiss or few but more like Aida does -- running up and down the porch stairs three or four times out of excitement, twirling around, jumping up on him, and then peeing a little on the cement.
Maybe Allah Really Is All-Powerful: No Line For The Louvre!
Sure cleared the tourists out of Paris. A friend there says even some of the fashion people aren't showing up for the collections.
Here's the long line at the Louvre -- even in the rain --and the commentary of a guy who took the shot.
The line on the right consists of several hundred people (I'm not exaggerating - click on the other photos if you don't believe me!) who will spend an hour or more on this rainy Sunday afternoon queuing to get into the Pyramid, where they will have to queue again to buy their museum tickets.
Yes, even in ugly weather, you'd see people lined up outside the Louvre.
Here's the line for the Louvre this week, in the wake of Allahu Akbar! slaughters at Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery store: 
Less For You; More For MEEEE!
From a Daniel Pink tweet. And actually, to be grammatically correct, that would be "fewer" things. (All the money in the world and the guy can't buy grammar!)
@DanielPink
Americans need to have 'less things', says US billionaire who flew wife, kids, & 2 nannies to Davos on private jet. http://dailym.ai/1uxuM65
Sure, he can afford the jet and all, and I sure don't begrudge him those things.
And I'm all for having things and not being run by them.
And there have always been people who live beyond their means.
But the reality is, right now, many people are just not able to find the jobs to give them the means. We have a president who toppled the healthcare applecart instead of taking care of serious economic problems in front of him, and many people are still paying for that.
The Republicans bear responsibility for this, too.
But this President could have focused on economics when he needed to and instead he played around with his pet. To all of our detriment.
It Isn't The Muslims Being Assaulted In Sweden
A non-Jewish reporter puts on a Jewish skullcap and scary and ugly times ensue, reports the Times of Israel:
A Swedish reporter who walked around Malmo while wearing a kippa to test attitudes toward Jews was hit and cursed at by passersby before he fled for fear of serious violence.Sveriges Television on Wednesday aired secretly recorded footage from Petter Ljunggren's walk through Malmo, which documented some of the incidents that occurred within the space a few hours.
In one scene, Ljunggren -- who, in addition to wearing a kippah was also wearing Star of David pendant -- was filmed sitting at a café in central Malmo reading a newspaper, as several passersby hurled anti-Semitic insults at him.
...One person on a scooter approached Ljunggren to warn him to leave for his own safety. In the heavily Muslim Rosengard neighborhood, Ljunggren was surrounded by a dozen men who shouted anti-Semitic slogans as eggs were hurled at his direction from apartments overhead. He then fled the area.
...Dozens of anti-Semitic incidents are recorded annually in Malmo, a city where first- and second- generation immigrants from the Middle East make up one third of a population of roughly 300,000. Several hundred Jews live there.
Fred Kahn, a leader of the local Jewish community, told JTA that most incidents are perpetrated by Muslims or Arabs.
Seems that #illridewithyou should be #illwalkwithyou and that it should be the Muslims who aren't haters accompanying the Jews to protect their safe passage throughout their day.
Remember European civilization? Take a picture of it where you see it, because there's a good chance it won't last much longer.
Shminky
Think link.
Smartsale
Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success, which looks like a smart book, is only $2.99 on Kindle -- today only -- at Amazon. I saw it recommended by a researcher on Twitter and just bought one myself.
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This Is Not The Behavior Of People In A Free Society (Attempt To Ban Germaine Greer From Speaking At Cambridge)
It's like people are pining for an Orwellian unfree society with all their outcry every time somebody whom they disagree with is going to give a talk. Pathetic and dangerous.
Charlotte Ivers writes at Cambridge.tab.co.uk that the members of the "CUSU Women's Campaign" at Cambridge are rising up to condemn the Cambridge Union for hosting Germaine Greer as a speaker:
Greer, a prominent feminist theorist, has previously been accused of transphobia. Most notably, she publically opposed appointing a trans woman to an academic position at Newnham.
From a statement that CUSU Women's Officer Amelia Horgan posted on Facebook:
Greer does not represent feminism, and she does not represent us.
Why should a speaker "represent" you or your views in order to be allowed to speak?
A totally childish view -- the view of entitled brats who see no danger in yanking the Enlightenment value of free speech. (Children, the world does not owe you emotional comfort at every turn.)
The answer to speech you don't like is more speech, not squashing speech.
Oh, and happily, the president of the Union, Amy Gregg, and her colleagues seem to agree:
"The Union maintains its commitment to free speech and, as ever, rejects no platform policies. We neither condemn nor condone the viewpoints of any of our speakers, but provide a neutral forum where they may be questioned and challenged by our members. We respect the decision of CUSU LGBT+ to issue their statement condemning someone they believe to represent views contrary to their core aims, but our speaker program will remain unchanged."
via @adamkissel
If There's Unregulated Fun, Never Fear, The Government Will Leap In To Stop It
An Encinitas hardware store had a popcorn machine and free popcorn for customers coming in -- until it was shut down by the health department, writes Ken Harrison for the San Diego Reader.
I'm sorry -- if they had a raw oyster machine, I could see the possible danger.
But this is another example how we have too many laws, too many lawmakers, and too many people employed to stop things that aren't actually endangering anyone.
Harrison reports:
According to ACE's assistant manager Mark, an inspector from the San Diego County Health Department came into the hardware store a few weeks ago and said the establishment had to stop offering popcorn, as the store didn't have a health permit to serve food. Mark reported that the inspector said her department received a formal complaint about it."We've always been very conscious of cleanliness [of the popcorn machine], said Mark. "We cautioned people not to reach in with their bare hands," he added. While Mark says the inspector was cordial, almost apologetic, her concern was that the popcorn was unattended.
Unattended? Do we think a few kernels might jump out and try to run away?
Oh, maybe they're worried somebody would try to poison everybody. Guess what: All the food in the grocery store and the OTC medicines in a drugstore are largely unattended. So is all the produce. So are those scoopable candies in the containers that people eat/steal while walking around the grocery store.
More from the piece:
ACE employees said they checked into what would was entailed to get a permit to offer free popcorn. "We'd have to have it like a restaurant -- three sinks, food-handler cards, just to serve popcorn," said an ACE supervisor.
Do you like what this country is coming to?
We're now a land of overlegislated weenies.
Oh, and who complains about "illegal popcorn"? My wild guess: The hardware store without the popcorn machine.
Why The U.S. Swaps Prisoners But Doesn't Pay Ransoms
Piece at Rand by think tanker Brian Michael Jenkins, whom I heard speak there a while back:
The policy against negotiating with terrorist kidnappers has its origins in the early 1970s, when terrorists began seizing diplomats and other government officials to attract publicity, win the release of imprisoned comrades or demand cash payments. Initially, the United States took the position that the host country was responsible for the safety of diplomats accredited to it. Therefore, if American diplomats were kidnapped, it was up to these host countries to secure their release. The governments of Brazil, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia have all released prisoners, arranged for the payment of ransom or allowed terrorists to escape in order to secure the safe release of American diplomats.But attitudes hardened as the tactic proliferated. The U.S. policy of refusing to negotiate with terrorist kidnappers was sealed in blood in 1973 when two U.S. diplomats were taken hostage by the terrorist group Black September in Khartoum, Sudan. The terrorists initially demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, members of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang held in Germany, and Sirhan Sirhan, the man who shot Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.).
The United States was willing to talk to the terrorists, but not release a convicted assassin. President Nixon made this clear when asked at a press conference specifically about the demand to release Sirhan. He responded: "As far as the United States as a government giving in to blackmail demands, we cannot do so and we will not do so." News of the president's remarks was broadcast in Sudan, where the terrorists heard them. Hours later they murdered the two Americans along with a Belgian official. The response to a specific question in specific circumstances became general policy. It has been U.S. policy not to make concessions or negotiate with terrorists ever since.
The premise is that yielding to terrorist kidnappers only encourages more kidnapping. However, a RAND study in the 1970s showed little correlation between the negotiating policy and the occurrence or absence of further political kidnappings. The study found that, even when their demands were not met, terrorists derived benefits from kidnappings, including publicity, alarm, and throwing governments into crisis. Still, U.S. government officials insisted that terrorists were aware of and affected by the policy.
Hostage situations are political kryptonite that can threaten government survival. This is precisely why a number of European governments are willing to quietly pay cash ransoms and avoid debilitating crises. Many people believe that the inability of the Carter administration to rescue or negotiate the release of Americans taken hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran in 1979 contributed to his defeat in the 1980 presidential election. And the revelation in 1986 that the Reagan administration, in contravention of U.S. policy, had secretly sold arms to Iran in an effort to bring about the release of Americans held hostage by Iran's protégés in Lebanon, caused an embarrassing political scandal. Evasions aside, the policy stands.
U.S. policy does not prohibit private parties from paying ransom. In domestic cases, families routinely negotiate and pay ransoms with the assistance of the FBI, which uses information gained during ransom exchanges to help apprehend kidnapping suspects. And U.S. policy discourages but does not prohibit American families or corporations from paying ransom in kidnapping cases abroad. Whether these private actions contribute to the greater good is arguable, but banning them would expose families to prosecution for doing what they will desperately try to do anyway.
Paying large ransoms to terrorist kidnappers -- whether the source of funds is public or private -- finances further terrorist operations. The kidnappers of James Foley reportedly sought a ransom of $132 million, among other demands. That is the equivalent of several hundred thousand AK-47s at black market prices or more than 200 times what it cost al Qaeda to carry out the 9/11 attacks. One can only imagine the uproar if it were revealed that the United States had paid millions of dollars to the group it currently regards as the most serious global threat to U.S. national security.
What would you do? Cash payment? Prisoner exchange? Other?
Loopy
Wacky links.
The Case For Using Drugs To Enhance Our Relationships And Minimize The Pain From Breakups
Ross Anderson of The Atlantic interviews Oxford ethicist Brian Earp about the thinking behind papers he's written with colleagues Anders Sandberg, and Julian Savulescu:
At first blush, love may seem like a poor prospect for pharmacological intervention. The reflexive dualist in us wants to say that romantic relationships are matters of the soul, and that souls ought to be free of medical tinkering. Oxford ethicist Brian Earp argues that we should resist these intuitions, and be open to the upswing in human well-being that successful love drugs could bring about. Over a series of several papers, Earp and his colleagues, Anders Sandberg and Julian Savulescu, make a convincing case that couples should be free to use "love drugs," and that in some cases, they may be morally obligated to do so. I recently caught up with Earp and his colleagues by email to ask them about this fascinating ethical frontier. What follows is a condensed version of our exchange.
An excerpt:
What's the threshold for the use of anti-love drugs? Should people use them in cases where they aren't in any particular danger, like in the case of a tough break-up? Some might argue that you can't learn from a break-up without experiencing it in full. Do you buy that?In a forthcoming paper, we argue for four conditions for the use of anti-love biotechnology: (1) the love in question is clearly harmful and needs to dissolve one way or another; (2) the person would conceivably want to use the technology, so there would be no problematic violations of consent; (3) the technology would help the person follow her higher-order goals instead of her lower-order feelings; and (4) it might not be psychologically possible to overcome the relevant feelings without the help of anti-love biotechnology. But the question here seems to be, what if it were possible to overcome the attachment, only it would involve a lot of protracted pain and difficulty, and the person would rather just move on with the business of living?
Philosophers will disagree about what should be allowed in a case like this. So-called "bioconservatives" would probably remind us that even great and seemingly unbearable suffering can impart unforeseeably important lessons, and that people should be very careful about turning to drugs to solve their problems or dull their pains. They tend to say things like: "With suffering comes understanding" - and of course, there is a kernel of truth to that. Bioliberals, on the other hand, would be likelier to point out that "traditional" methods of getting over heartache aim at changing our brain chemistry just as much as drugs would, only indirectly and sometimes less effectively. "Sometimes suffering is just suffering," they would add, and then they might go on to suggest that such fruitless pain should be eliminated by whatever means the individual judges for himself are best.
For our part, we certainly don't deny that there can be great value in experiencing the world "as it really is" - in its heartbreak and agony as much as in its joys. But we think that even if it could be shown that human beings had some sort of existential duty to experience pain along with happiness, this duty would not absolute: it could be trumped by the debilitating effects of certain traumas, and sometimes a broken heart might qualify in just this sense.
Related, from my column:
Brain imaging research by UCLA's Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman finds that the same regions of the brain that are activated by physical pain are activated by social pain, and Eisenberger reports that "individuals who are more sensitive to one kind of pain are also more sensitive to the other." Further pointing to a connection, what's good for a sprained ankle seems good for a sprained ego. In research Eisenberger collaborated on, 500 milligrams of acetaminophen (think Tylenol) taken twice daily was actually found to diminish emotional pain.
Your Hiding You Is On You, Not Your White Or Chinese Roommate
"I'm tired of suppressing myself to get along with white people" is the headline on the Priscilla Ward Salon piece. The subtitle: "I pocket my black rage, and swap 'hey girl' for hello. But in making others comfortable, I'm making myself sick."
Wow -- not being true to yourself makes you sick. This is not a surprise.
She writes that her roommate, a few weeks after Michael Brown got shot in Ferguson, had only a vague sense of what went on there.
Guess what: Not everybody pays attention to the news. I mentioned Charlie Hebdo to someone I know -- someone highly intelligent but who's not really all up in the news -- and she hadn't heard of it.
Ward writes:
I was tired of catering to everyone else's comforts. How much of my day-to-day experiences as a black woman do I have to filter? I replace "hey girl" with boring hellos. I eat my leftover fried chicken outside the office. In order to have some common point of identifiable communication, I pretend to care about Taylor Swift, or white movie stars on their I've-lost-count remarriages and those other white pop stars I could not care less about. "Oh yeah, she's cute," I tell them. "Yeah, that's cool."
Ridiculous. That's on her, not on the white, Chinese, and whatever people around her.
If you're around people who think ill of you because you eat fried chicken, maybe they're recent converts to low-carb. Fried chicken is one of my favorite foods ever. If you eat it, I won't think ill of you -- unless you don't offer me a piece. And I'm the color of fresh Wite-Out.
Could it be that you just think they think ill of you? Because it helps you maintain what might be your (covertly narcissistic) identity as being special because you are an "outsider"?
There's still DWB -- getting pulled over for Driving While Black -- and other absolutely rotten and sometimes deadly stuff people go through just by virtue of being black. But the reality is people are divided by class in this country more and more. My black friends don't stick out from my white friends -- and same goes for friends of other races and from other countries. We're all in the same social circle and have the same sort of jobs and similar lives and concerns.
On the language issue, I'm from Detroit, and I absolutely love hearing "Hey, girl" and the way some black women speak, same as I love hearing Southern accents. A woman manning the Hardee's drive-through in Detroit once called my boyfriend "baby" -- "Thank you, baby" -- while I was on the phone, and it was so sexy (without trying to be) that I still remember it.
Quite frankly, if you are in Western society and don't talk how you want to talk or eat the lunch you want to eat, or aren't real about the music you listen to, you're probably doing that because you don't have real (intrinsic) self-esteem.
About the music thing, I got scared the other day because I had to get a second mammogram. When I'm scared, I listen to Julie Andrews. At full blast. (Also at other times. I just love Julie Andrews.) I tell people this on occasion. When it's relevant. Though I think you probably couldn't get uncooler in musical taste.
As for Ward, I suspect that her problem is that she sees herself as a black person first and a person second.
Back on the language thing, my Catholic boyfriend told me his (Jewish) Hollywood agent used the word "macher" today. I don't think he was troubled that the guy didn't speak the Latin of the whatever mass my boyfriend talks about everybody getting their panties in a bunch about somebody changing.
Who has time to be this agitated that the world is not formed exactly to their cultural specifications? That some people listen to Taylor Swift when they listen to something else? (As I noted about feminists the other day, the victimist focus does allow one to avoid the hard thinking about life and working toward becoming somebody.)
Oh, and if she wants something worth being upset about, there's this from her piece:
I don't talk about what happens every 28 hours -- a black person is killed.
These are mainly black men being killed by other black men.
But that misses the mark of her agenda, so...never mind!
Tax Rates Are Higher In Floodville -- Imagine That
Jeff Harrington writes in the Tampa Bay Trib that Floridians pay more for insurance -- an article accompanied by a photo of mobile homes partly under water:
It's still more expensive to buy homeowners insurance in Florida than anywhere else in the country.In fact, Florida homeowners are now paying more than double the national average.
Average insurance premiums statewide for the most common type of homeowners policy rose nearly 8 percent in 2012 to $2,084, according to data released this week from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
That makes Florida the first state to cross the $2,000 mark in average premiums and widens the gap between the next two states on the list, both of them coastal: Louisiana (average premiums of $1,742) and Texas ($1,661).
The national average: $1,034. For the record, Florida's premiums are 102 percent higher.
And the truth is, taxpayers do a whole lot of subsidizing of seaside-dwelling wealthy people and others who choose to live in areas where disaster is prone to strike. This should be on them, not on the rest of us.
UPDATED: ("Flood," which I erroneously included before "insurance," has been removed.)
via @reasonpolicy
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My Boobs Got A Passing Grade -- Despite How Obamacare Killed My Healthcare
Yes, I have healthcare -- still -- I just can't afford to use it.
Mammograms are considered part of preventive care, so I only had to pay $30 for the visit today, but I'm in a small group of people deemed by a breast surgeon I saw a while back to need a little more than just a mammogram. (Sorry to get so personal, but large, dense breasts and Ashkenazi Jewish origins -- see BRCA bit below.)
I went for a follow-up mammogram and ultrasound today -- scary -- because the radiologist thought he saw something on the mammogram I got a few weeks ago. Thankfully, upon closer examination, it seemed to be nothing.
I joined my HMO 20-some years ago, thinking I'd get in when I was at my youngest and healthiest and then have good rates as I aged. (The rate was only going up with age, not health conditions, as long as you were "in.")
Before Obamacare, I had a small co-pay for services, like $50 for the boob MRI I was supposed to get every two years, per a breast surgeon who, per family history, decided to test me for BRCA. (BRCA-negative back then, phew!)
After Obamacare, my monthly dues shot up -- unaffordably -- and the care I'd get for them shot down...dramatically. With Obamacare, I have a hefty deductible to hit.
This means that breast MRI I'm supposed to have is now $700. Not in the budget. Beyond not in the budget.
Also, I've been having really bad lower bad pain, but realized that the look-see for that is an MRI. So I'm doing back exercises and hoping -- just like I'm hoping I won't get breast cancer and hoping that they catch it in mammograms if I do get it, despite how difficult my boobs are to see into in a mammogram.
"Hope for change"?
Well, yes. My hope is that someone will invent a time machines and I can go back two elections and successfully campaign for people to elect a libertarian President and a bunch of Senators and Congresspeople who won't pass a huge, costly, and damaging shift in healthcare that they didn't even bother to read.
Of Course This Was Coming. (Did You Think TSA's PreCheck Would Stop At Just Sticking A Finger In Your Personal Data?)
There's a story at The Hill by Thomas P. Bossert about where the TSA is going with PreCheck:
You know those PreCheck lanes at the airport that promise expedited screening? The TSA wants to fill them and it has come up with a troubling new twist on an old, contentious scheme to do it. While Congress and the rest of us were slipping out for the holidays, the TSA quietly published its intent to hire big data companies to solicit you for PreCheck enrollment, and seek your consent to mine your grocery receipts, your credit card purchases, and even your Facebook posts to determine if you are a terrorist risk - not just once but on an ongoing basis.The TSA's approach raises serious concerns about citizen privacy, and security...
...TSA hopes to not tell you what exactly their private sector contractors will collect or what they will use to determine your suitability for reduced screening. The government will remind you that the program is voluntary, rightly. But, how do we give informed consent? It is unknown what predictive factors will be used in the algorithm to determine whether a passenger is a threat.
Beware what you post on social media while you are enrolled in PreCheck - it is fair game, according to the TSA's request for proposals. It is also unclear whether the information collected by the agency's private sector contractors could be used for other government or private purposes. The type of information collected appears to be unlimited and the government will not say what these big data companies may or may not collect. Worse, if you are rejected by a private sector contractor, you may never know why.
The privacy and civil liberties implications alone are astounding. But, there is a more important issue. The TSA is gambling with the security of civil aviation and expanding its scope irresponsibly. The problem with computerized passenger profiling is that it simply does not work.
Frequent flyer miles might be a factor in the secret algorithm. However, Mohamed Atta, a ringleader and 9/11 hijacker, had a frequent-flyer gold card. Current members of the military are considered low risk by the TSA. Yet, Nidal Hasan, the convicted Fort Hood shooter, was a U.S. Army Major. Perhaps the algorithm will be programmed to trust doctors. Yet, the attempted 2007 car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow were planned and executed by doctors.
According to a recent report on Homeland Security News Wire, "about 40 percent of lone-wolf terrorists are driven by mental illness, not ideology."
If you voluntarily submit for a PreCheck background check and are green-lighted by the big data companies who have fed your discoverable personal data into their algorithms, you are promised quicker transit through airport security, dedicated faster moving lines, and you will not be asked to remove your belt, shoes, liquids and gels. If you do not, you are guaranteed the opposite. So, either these security measures--removal of belts, shoes, liquids and gels--are unnecessarily kept in place to drive passengers into the allure of PreCheck, or they are prudent flight security measures waived by the TSA because it is willing to gamble on the effectiveness of its prescreening. Either conclusion is unsettling.
Of course, the place to profile people is before they get to the airport, and the way to do that is using highly trained intelligence officers operating according to -- yes, that old Constitution thingie -- probable cause.
Linkeroonie
Macaroni art links.
Blame "The Patriarchy"! (Beats Working)
A friend wrote me about a 20-something female employee in her workplace who goes on about "the patriarchy."
My reply: "The patriarchy"?! Women (like her) grew up in the land of opportunity, the freest country in the world, at the time women have it better than at any time in history.
But rather than having identity through accomplishment (takes work, ick!), women like this one have it through shared whining.
Somebody should open whine lodges (like sweat lodges) for feminist women. They'd make a mint.
Frum: Obama's Entire State Of The Union Address Was Aimed At Hillary Clinton
Interesting analysis by David Frum at The Atlantic that the President's State of the Union address was aimed at forcing Hillary to campaign and govern on his terms:
There's a subtext to President Obama's slew of domestic policy proposals since the November elections: President Obama does not trust Hillary Clinton very much.None of the president's domestic-policy brainwaves has much chance of becoming law in the next two years: not free community college, not cash grants to selected middle-income households, and certainly not heavy tax increases on upper-income earners. The president knows these odds better than anybody. So why keep propounding such no-hopers? The intent, pretty obviously, is to box in his presumptive successor as head of the Democratic Party.
Every time the president advances a concept that thrills his party's liberal base, he creates a dilemma for Hillary Clinton. Does she agree or not? Any time she is obliged to answer, her scope to define herself is constricted.
Hillary Clinton emerges from the Democratic Party's business wing. Whatever her own personal views--still an elusive quantum after all these years in public life--she is identified in the public mind with her husband's record, her husband's appointees, and her husband's donors. Not just in the public mind, but seemingly in the president's mind, too. So as the clock runs down on his administration, he seems determined to set the post-Obama Democratic Party on a more leftward course than he himself had the strength to steer.
via @kayhymowitz
"My Gullible Americans..."
We'll open with a little bullshit bipartisanship, my tweet of a quote from the President's State of the Union address:
@amyalkon
"We can come together, Democrats and Republicans..." And I will wake up tomorrow morning & flap my arms & fly to the 7-Eleven. #SOTU
Other bullshit and assorted nibbles, from my #SOTU tweets:
@amyalkon
If we "condemned the persecution of women" & LGBTs, we'd have govt officials being vocal daily on what goes on in Islamic countries #SOTU
@amyalkon
"We stand united" against terrorists... that is, from across the ocean while all the other world leaders are marching in Paris. #SOTU
@amyalkon
Veterans have been ignored by VA medical facilities. They are convenient at speech time. #SOTU
@amyalkon
The truth is that we are a people who've grown lazy and too comfortable about big government and erosions of civil liberties. #SOTU
@amyalkon
Apparently, "who we are" is people who see nothing wrong w/ removing due process from men on campus (Obama admin interp of Title IX) #SOTU
@amyalkon
"Avoiding another Mid-East conflict"? How? By clicking our heels together three times & saying "Take me back to Kansas"? #SOTU
@amyalkon
Obama, OCTOBER 2004: "What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman ..." (a politician's right to opportunism) #SOTU
@amyalkon
Congress does not work on OUR behalf. Anything but. #SOTU
@amyalkon
"Top one percent" -- Obama's special Satan. Yawn. #SOTU
@amyalkon
"I won both of them" was kinda yicky. When you're the "leader of the free world," it's gross to gloat. #SOTU
@amyalkon
FREE! FAIR! FREE! FAIR! FREE! FREE! FREE! #SOTU
And about the response from the other team, given by former Hardee's employee and current freshman Republican Senator Joni Ernst:
@amyalkon
Sorry, but this sounds like a Saturday Night Life Opener #SOTUresponse
@amyalkon
Why is she talking to us like we're learning-disabled children? #SOTUresponse
Also, I think she stole Newt Gingrich's hair.
Your thoughts on any or all of the above?
Your Govt, Selling Your Personal Data To The Highest Bidder
The President talked pretty talk about privacy and techno threats to it in the State of the Union address:
"No foreign nation, no hacker, should be able to shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets, or invade the privacy of American families, especially our kids. We are making sure our government integrates intelligence to combat cyber threats, just as we have done to combat terrorism."
Oopsy. Peter Suderman at reason notes that the President said this on the same day it was revealed that HealthCare.gov shares citizens' private information with outside marketers:
Earlier tonight, the Associated Press reported that HealthCare.gov, the federally run web portal for Obamacare's health insurance exchanges, has been quietly sharing potentially identifying personal information, including age, zip code, and Internet address, with as many as 50 third party advertising and marketing agencies. The White House could not say how it was ensuring that the outside firms were complying with federal data privacy guidelines, according to the AP. In September of last year, the Government Accountability Office reported that HealthCare.gov still had security vulnerabilities that left personal information submitted to the site "at risk."
And regarding "no foreign nation" being able to "invade the privacy of American families," they'd just have to get in line. Beyond the HealthCare.gov selling of citizens' info, there is the DEA and NSA spying on us.
So, what we really need is to "combat cyber threats" from our own government.
No promises on that, unfortunately, from the President.
Is Somebody At The LAPD High On Drugs? (Illegal Drug Dropoff Box At Police Station)
How many people do you think drive their illegal drugs to the police station to carry them in and drop them off in a "drug drop box"? Posted by @Venice311.
Deal Of The Day For Your Fun Parts
50 to 70 percent off bras and panties (and leggings, PJs, robes, stockings, socks, and more) today only at Amazon
Bake Slaves: Forced By The Govt To Make Cakes That Violate Their Beliefs
First it was bakers who are Christians who had the state come down on them for their refusal to make wedding cakes for gay couples; now there's a bakery in Colorado under investigation for refusing to make an anti-gay cake.
From KDVR: "Man takes legal action after Denver baker refuses to make anti-gay cake." A religious discrimination complaint has since been filed with the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies.
In case it's important for anyone to know, I'd run the bakery that refused to make the anti-gay cake. However, what's important overall is that we should not be allowing the state to force businesses to do business that violates their beliefs.
There have to be some exceptions, like if you're a hospital owned by people who dislike, oh, the Irish or people from Toronto, and somebody comes in having a heart attack.
But as law professor Jonathan Turley points out:
Bakers and photographers view themselves as engaged in a form of speech generally. The loss of a bright-line defining free speech has meant that we are finding ourselves increasingly on a slippery slope of speech regulation. On the other hand, we fought hard to guarantee accommodation for all races in places of public accommodation. Stores are not allowed to ban black customers under the same rationale. The question is whether there is a difference between refusing to serve customers on the basis for sexual orientation generally as opposed to taking an active or direct role in a same-sex wedding.
And actually, horrible as it is, I think private businesses should be allowed to exclude customers if they so desire. I would not patronize these businesses and I would probably organize boycotts and pickets of them. But also support what should be their right to choose who they do and do not do business with.
"Every Year, The Rulebooks Get Thicker"
We have become a land of way too much government and way too many laws and rules. Philip K. Howard writes at The Daily Beast that regulations are strangling Good Samaritans, making it harder to do the right thing:
In January 2014, a lifelong District of Columbia parks employee, Medric Mills, collapsed while walking with his grown daughter. They were across the street from a fire station, close enough for his daughter to yell for help. Mills was lying on the sidewalk, dying, right in front of people trained to save him. But they refused to cross the street to help because, they told bystanders, the rules required them instead to call 911. By the time the ambulance arrived, over 10 minutes later, it was too late--Mills died soon after arriving at the hospital.This is how many public safety officers are trained nowadays. In 2011, firemen in Alameda County refused to rescue a suicidal man who had swum out to sea because they hadn't yet been re-certified for "land-based water rescues." Therefore, they explained to passers-by, it would be illegal for them to try to save the man's life. Later that day, when the fire chief was asked by a reporter what he would have done if it had been a drowning child, he said, "Well, if I was off duty I would know what I would do, but I think you're asking me my on-duty response and I would have to stay within our policies and procedures because that's what's required by our department to do."
Law is essential to freedom because it safeguards citizens against misconduct and abuse. By drawing boundaries against wrongful conduct, law provides a protective zone of freedom within those boundaries. Companies can't pollute; businesses can't cheat; people must honor contracts. On this open field of freedom, people can act spontaneously without undue defensiveness
Modern law goes a giant step backwards--it often bars people from doing what's right. Law's proper role is now seen as instructing people how to make daily choices. Instead of providing the framework for freedom, law has replaced it, creating a legal minefield rather than an open field for free choice.
We see it every day. Teachers are told never to put an arm around a crying child. Principals are required to suspend students who did nothing wrong, such as the seventh-grader who had "possession" of a pill for one second before immediately rejecting the supposed gift. Employers don't give job recommendations. Children are barred from playing tag. Doctors are prohibited from doing what a patient needs by rigid practice guidelines. Social workers can't rescue a child from a dangerous home because of mandatory waiting times. Workers escaping the Deepwater Horizon explosion couldn't cut loose the lifeboat and nearly died because of a rule that prohibited them from carrying a knife.
We need a Department of Repeal, and we need to start complaining about idiocies like these above and demanding our freedom and freedom of choice back.
via @overlawyered
Mississippi Wants To Yank The License Of An 88-Year-Old Doctor For Treating The Poor Out Of His Toyota Camry
Peter Holley writes in the WaPo:
In small-town Mississippi, where poverty is endemic, transportation is limited and a trip to the emergency room can lead to financial ruin, an alternative exists for those in the know.His name is Dr. Landrum -- Carrol Frazier Landrum -- and, even if your pockets are empty, the 88-year-old physician from Edwards, Miss., will schedule you for an appointment.
For the last two years, Landrum has been working without an office, but he's happy to meet his patients wherever they are. Sometimes, the meetings occur in a home; sometimes they take place in a parking lot. Other patients meet the doctor on the side of a quiet country road -- or inside his 2007 Toyota Camry.
The location doesn't matter because Landrum, a World War II veteran who has been in private practice for more than 55 years, believes it's his duty to help anyone who calls on him.
"I've always had a heart for the poor," Landrum told The Washington Post this week, struggling to hold back tears. "I grew up poor, and when the doctor would come to us, and he was happy to see us, I pictured myself doing that some day. I try not to ever turn people away -- money or no money - because that's where the need is."
But his work may soon come to an end.
Landrum said he's being asked by the Mississippi State Board of Medical Licensure to surrender his medical license, which he's carried in his pocket with pride since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. The reason for the request, according to Landrum, is that the board balked several months ago upon learning that he was operating his practice out of a car.
At a recent hearing, Landrum said, he was labeled "incompetent" by the board. He said the charge is a catchall, one designed to avoid citing a specific occupational violation, and he maintains he's done nothing wrong. He said he doesn't recruit patients and only responds to those who have nowhere else to turn.
... A visitation starts with a phone call in which Landrum tries to get as much information about the patient's condition and medical history as possible. Next, a meeting is arranged, with the doctor driving as far as 50 miles to reach patients who can't come to him. Appointments might occur while he leans his head inside the cab of a pickup truck as it idles in a vacant parking lot.
I love this guy. It's sick what we've come to, where we want to grind a guy like this out of business -- the business of helping people nobody else is going to help.
Meanwhile, a headline: "Rural hospitals even fewer and farther between"
Linked Out
A networking site for umbilical endings.
Murder Meets The Sharing Economy In Chicago
No, not for real -- a parody piece in The Onion:
Chicago Introduces New Citywide Gun-Sharing StationsCHICAGO--Touting the program's convenience and affordability, Chicago officials unveiled Monday the city's new gun-sharing service, "QuikShot," which allows individuals to check out a loaded firearm for short periods of time.
The municipal initiative, through which users can rent semiautomatic pistols, shotguns, rifles, and submachine guns at more than 250 self-service kiosks, has reportedly been designed to make firepower easily available to residents and tourists alike nearly everywhere within the city limits.
Adds the element of speed to contract killings and drive-by shootings. Always nice to modernize!
Manblaming
"Manblaming" is my word for the desire by elite but weakly women to generalize that all men are guilty -- of something -- simply because they're male.
Believing that they're "oppressed" by men gives these women a shortcut to an identity and a sense of belonging to something (and never mind how hard they have to work to feel "oppressed" in the freest society in the world).
Strong, rational women, on the other hand, get their identity through their accomplishments -- they don't need to drag men down and deem them guilty as a gender to feel better.
Unfortunately, as I've said before, feminism has degenerated to demanding that women be treated as eggshells, not equals. (Feminists tend not to be into scrapbooking, so they need some sort of hobby.) In this world, a man with his legs spread on the subway isn't a lazy oaf; he's part of a crime syndicate acting out on female humanity.
This thinking would be hilarious if it didn't also serve to infantilize women and lend social support to serious, state-supported discrimination against men, like the removal of due process from men on campus by the Obama administration.
Elissa Strauss, at The Week has a piece on the "man-izing" of all problematic behavior -- with "mansplaining," "manspreading," and "manslamming" (called "the sidewalk M.O. of men who remain apparently oblivious to the personal space of those around them.")
The origins of "mansplain" lie in a fantastic essay by Rebecca Solnit called "Men Explain Things to Me," which opens with a story about the time a man explained to her a book she had just written. That guy definitely sucks. But most men, or people for that matter, are not that deluded and deserve to be heard out. After "mansplain" caught fire, it became all too easy for women to avoid conversations with men who disagree with them; all they had to do is charge them with "mansplaining" and case closed.
I wrote a blog item about this "fantastic" essay, "Rebecca Solnit Is A Sniveling Idiot":
Meanwhile, Solnit herself, who, most annoyingly, Likes To Use Capital Letters For Emphasis All Over The Damn Place, says that even she, a woman who has "public standing as a writer of history," had a moment when she "was willing to believe Mr. Very Important and his overweening confidence over (her) more shaky certainty."Sorry, but if you have "shaky certainty," do you blame men, or sign up for a little assertiveness training? So much of what women do blame men for -- women's lower starting salaries in the workplace, for example -- traces back to women passively accepting what's presented to them, whether it's some boorish jerk's assertion, or the first dollar offer they're made for a job. This is correctable, but not by writing long-winded screeds against men in the Los Angeles Times.
Although Solnit comes up continually short on guts in conversational situations, she's remarkably gutsy about aligning herself and other privileged Western women with a silenced sisterhood of women living under Islam, "where women's testimony has no legal standing; so that a woman can't testify that she was raped without a male witness to counter the male rapist."
Of course, the difference is that women in Muslim countries are not, by law, allowed to testify. Western women like Solnit simply refrain from speaking up. Some loudmouth cut her off? Wow. While Muslim women fear lashings and death if they speak their minds, Solnit's simply too limp-willed to say, as I've said numerous times, and to men and women, "Don't interrupt!" or "My turn to talk!"
When that doesn't work, as it didn't when I was on the TV show, "Faith Under Fire," with the booming blowhard Frank Pastore, I began removing my mike, and told the host I was going to walk off if Pastore kept shouting over me. (I may not have been born with balls, but I keep a little set in my makeup bag, and bring them out on an as-needed basis.)
And guess what: People in bars or at parties sometimes tell me all about evolutionary psychology or behavioral science research -- often telling me wrong notions about research I've read or a paper I've heard presented at a conference. Why? Because they're trying to show me they know more than these subject than I do? Fuck, no.
These are their attempts to seem knowledgeable and interesting.
Because they are not mind readers, they have no idea I know anything about these subjects.
Because my life does not center on feeling that men are always trying to get one over on me, I am able to understand this.
Strauss continues:
The fixation on male entitlement creates a world in which the genders are at war, and women must spend their days stationed on enemy lines. Not only is this bound to exhaust all the energetic young women, it's also a distraction from the big issues at hand.
Women I know who are accomplished and doing things with their lives have no time for this sort of crap.
Licky
Links with tongue.
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE, Tonight, 4-5 pm PT: Dr. Laurence Steinberg On The Science Of Helping Your Kids Succeed
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
**Slightly different time tonight to accommodate an East Coast guest.
The smartest kids aren't necessarily the most successful. Instilling resilience and self-control are essential in helping kids succeed, explains Dr. Laurence Steinberg, a world-renowned expert on adolescent psychology. Steinberg makes a strong, science-based case for changing how we parent, teach, and understand young people.
On this show, he'll take us through science on the brain and motivation -- including his own ground-breaking research -- to bust widely held myths and explain how to support and guide kids to develop traits they need to be at their in their work and other endeavors and to live to their fullest.
His book we'll be discussing: Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence
Listen to the show at this link at showtime (4-5 pm PT today) or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2015/01/19/dr-laurence-steinberg-on-why-adolescence-is-the-age-of-opportunity
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
My show's sponsor is now Audible.com. Get a free audiobook download and support this show financially at no cost to you by signing up for a free 30-day trial at audibletrial.com/amya (It's $14.95 after 30 days, but you can cancel before then and have it cost you nothing.)
Please consider ordering my new book, the science-based and funny "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," (only $9.48 at Amazon!).
Along with positive reviews in the WSJ and other publications, Library Journal gave the book a starred review: "Verdict: Solid psychology and a wealth of helpful knowledge and rapier wit fill these pages. Highly recommended."
Kids Today Are Treated Like Felons Doing Time
They're always behind gates. Never without a "guard." Driven to gated play dates where they are watched by other "guards."
My childhood?
We walked over to the park everyday (sans adult!) after school and were expected to come home before dark for dinner. Which we did.
This allowed me to play in the stream and get an understanding of salamanders and do all sorts of testing of my limits on the swings and monkeybars. While having unsupervised fun.
I also biked miles and miles all by myself, probably from the age of 13.
Accordingly, there's advice for parents today in an op-ed by Lenore Skenazy, per a tweet by Virginia Postrel:
@vpostrel
Oped by @FreeRangeKids: "Instead of imagining the worst, send your kids out to do something you did at their age." http://buff.ly/1xH84CI
Age 97 And Back In Junior High
Jennifer Weiner NYT piece about her 97-year-old grandmother's move to a retirement home, "Mean Girls in the Retirement Home":
"Well," Nanna began. Her apartment was lovely. The food was just fine, and there were all kinds of classes and courses to while away the hours. "Have you made any friends?" I asked, in the same chipper tone I used when my younger child returned from her first day at kindergarten.There was a pause. Then: "They won't let me sit at their table!" Nanna cried.
"Wait, what? Who won't let you sit at their table?"
"You try to sit and they say, 'That seat is taken!' "
"Oh, my God," I said, instantly thrust into a painful flashback of junior high, when I walked into the cafeteria and was greeted with the sight of leather purses looped across the chair backs and the sound of one girl with dramatically plucked eyebrows announcing, "Those seats are taken!" I hadn't known enough to carry a purse. I had a lunchbox. (And it would take me another decade to figure out the eyebrow thing.)
"And just try to get into a bridge game," Nanna continued. "They'll talk about bridge, and you'll say, 'Oh, I play,' and they'll tell you, 'Sorry, we're not looking for anyone.' "
"Mean girls!" I said. "There are mean girls in your home!"
"It's not a home," Nanna said sharply.
Weiner continues:
Whether you're brawling on the playground or battling over the best seats in chair-cercize, bad behavior is constant, and the rituals for trying to get in with the in-crowd don't change much. Nanna's quest for "the Cadillac of walkers," a $400 number not covered by Medicare, mirrored my search a decade ago for the nearly thousand-dollar Bugaboo that would signal to my urban-mommy cohort that I belonged.What transforms with age are the criteria for judgment: not looks, not wealth, not the once-coveted ability to drive at night. When you get to be Nanna's age, you're reduced to a number -- the younger the better. Even in a residence for the elderly, the 80-somethings will still be cold to the 95-year-olds. Now 99, my Nanna is completely cognizant of what's going on. Her memory, both short- and long-term, is excellent. But once her new neighbors heard her age, they knew they didn't want her at their table.
Consumer Protection Bureau Or Bellagio D.C.?
Kenric Ward writes at Watchdog.org about costly building renovations at the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:
A government report pegs the price of the work at $210 million -- $120 million more than initial estimates, with off-site leasing costs included."That's more per square foot than the Bellagio hotel-casino in Las Vegas," said John Berlau, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
And, critics add, CFPB doesn't even own the building.
...Lawmakers have mocked the project, which includes a glass staircase, concession kiosk and a 'water wall' ending in a splash pool.
...House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling said the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which created the CFPB, made the agency "unaccountable to taxpayers and to Congress."
"We're seeing the results of this dangerous unaccountability today in a Washington bureaucracy that is running amok, spending as much as it wants on whatever it wants," the Texas Republican said.
Hensarling estimated that halting the renovation plans and finding a cheaper office would save the bureau about $100 million.
via @reasonpolicy
Brainwashing For Allah
Below is "The Jihadist in Our Family," a NYT video by Poh Si Teng and Ben Laffin, looking for the answer to the question "Why would Mohd Lotfi Ariffin leave his wife and children behind in Malaysia in search of martyrdom in Syria?"
Note the kid in the class who eats up the martyrdom message.
Note that it has nothing to do with the Jews.
He became a "martyr" in September.
His kid didn't know better than to be thankful. "Allah has to choose you," the kid says.
Look at the Sony and Apple electronics in the video.
Modern technology; primitive ideology.
Doogie
Linkhauser.
What Is The Government Doing With All Those Raisins It Steals From US Farmers?
For those who sneer about the "free market capitalism" in our country, look at all the ways government leads our country to resemble a totalitarian state -- one of which is finally about to become the subject of a Supreme Court case.
This case is about the way our government demands that raisin farmers hand over a portion of their crop -- a large portion -- and then sometimes pays them nothing in return.
David A Farenthold writes in the WaPo in 2013 about the disgusting federal raisin reserve:
A Florida congressman has introduced a bill that would eliminate one of the U.S. government's most unusual institutions: the Raisin Administrative Committee, keepers of the national raisin reserve.The raisin reserve is a program established by the Truman administration which gives the Agriculture Department a heavy-handed power to meddle in the supply and demand for raisins.
To limit the supply of raisins on the market, the government can simply take tons of raisins from the farmers who grew them. The raisins go into a "reserve." They are often kept off the U.S. market: sold overseas, perhaps, or given to needy schoolchildren.
Sometimes, the farmers don't get paid a cent in return.
A decade ago, California farmer Marvin Horne defied the reserve, refusing to hand over his raisins to the government.
More on how there wasn't "just compensation" via Volokh, thus violating the "Takings Clause" of the US Constitution. Will Baude at Volokh blogs:
The government does kind of defend a variation of the second argument -- that there is no taking because the raisin farmers get some proceeds from the raisins they're forced to set aside. But I'm not really sure how that can be right either. If property is taken, the government has to provide just compensation. If the government can render property "not-taken" simply by providing 50% (or 10% or 1%?) compensation, then the government can redefine the just compensation requirement at will.
The Supreme Court will now hear his case.
From Barbara Leonard at Courthouse News Service:
Nearly mirroring a 1938 dispute involving walnuts, the raisin case pits the U.S. government against growers Marvin and Laura Horne and the Raisin Valley Marketing Association, a coalition of 61 raisin growers in Fresno and Madera Counties.Both cases involve dissatisfaction with federal marketing rules that direct a share of every grower's annual harvest to a crop-specific committee, which then sells the reserves for export or donates them to school-lunch programs or foreign governments. The Department of Agriculture began the program in the late 1930s under the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act (AMAA), hoping it would stabilize commodity prices, market disequilibrium and the nation's floundering credit system.
The Hornes, who have grown raisins in California since 1969, tried to circumvent the law in 2001 by cutting out the middle man: buying packaging equipment and contracting with 60 local farms to stem, clean and sort their raisins. Claiming that they were now "producers," not "handlers," and that reserve requirements applied only to handlers, they said they should no longer have to contribute. The federal Raisin Administrative Committee did not agree and imposed nearly $700,000 in fines.
The committee also rejected the Hornes' claim that the reserve rule violated the Fifth Amendment's takings clause, which prohibits the federal government from seizing personal property without compensation.
The Hornes filed their complaint against the Department of Agriculture in Fresno, Calif.
How disgusting is this? The Government charged the Hornes nearly $700,000 in fines for refusing to allow their goods to be stolen.
I'm grateful to them for bringing this case. Every time somebody defends an attack on our civil liberties, they're defending not only their own case but the civil liberties of all of us.
And people wonder why I'm for "limited government."
If The Oscars Are "Too White," Is The NBA Too Black?
2014 was a "banner year" for black actors and directors. Per Mashable:
The Steve McQueen-directed 12 Years a Slave took home three awards, for Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong'o), Best Adapted Screenplay (John Ridley) and Best Picture. Furthermore, lead actor Chiwetel Ejiofor was at least nominated for Best Actor.
Good question asked by Michele Hickford at Allen West's site about the claim that the 2015 Oscars are "too white":
As the Washington Times reports, Reverand Al "announced he was holding an "emergency meeting" to discuss Hollywood's all-white list of Oscar nominees and talk about possible action against the Academy Awards' powers-who-be.""The movie industry is like the Rocky Mountains," he said in a statement reported by Business Insider. "The higher you get, the whiter it gets. ... I have called an emergency meeting early next week in Hollywood with the task force to discuss possible action around the Academy Awards."
Now bear in mind this is only the second time in the last 20 years that only white folks were nominated for best actor, actress or director Oscars, so it's not like there's a continuing pattern of racism.
But I'll tell you where there IS a clear pattern of racism. It's in the NFL!
I did a quick review of the starting line-ups for the four playoff teams (Seahawks, Packers, Colts and Patriots) and 65 percent of those players are black. I'd say that's a little lop-sided, wouldn't you -- considering blacks make up only around 14 percent of the U.S. population.
And don't get me started on the racism in the NBA!
In fact, if we're going to have affirmative action on campus, why don't we have for where it's the least diverse -- Big 10 football and basketball?
Oh, right -- nobody would want to come.
But hey, maybe that's the price of diversity!
The Shifting Standards Of When It's Okay To Blame The Victim
Ashe Schow writes in the WashEx that it's okay to blame (and punish) the victim only when the victim is a man or men falsely accused of rape [annoying auto-play at link]:
Nowadays, you can't suggest that a woman watch her drink, avoid getting blackout drunk or to walk in well-lit areas without being accused of victim-blaming. But why is it okay to claim that students falsely accused of sex crimes somehow deserved to be falsely accused?The most recent example of this form of victim-blaming, where the men who were falsely accused are the real victims, can be seen in the University of Virginia's ham-handed response to an uncorroborated but explosive allegation of a brutal gang rape at one of its fraternities. U.Va. responded to the allegation by banning Greek social activities until Jan. 9, and only allowing fraternities and sororities to resume such activities if they sign new contracts. Those contracts are of course much more stringent for fraternities and have led to two campus organizations refusing to sign.
...The university still wants fraternities to sign the agreements and accept punishment, even though local police found "no substantive basis" for the allegation that the rape in question occurred at Phi Kappa Psi. Instead of punishing just Phi Psi without evidence, U.Va. decided to punish all fraternities without evidence -- the stated reason being that past behavior at fraternity parties warrants such restrictive punishment.
The implication is that even if no one at the fraternity actually raped a woman, they still deserve to be punished because the university doesn't like fraternity parties. Imagine the outcry if women who had been sexually assaulted were punished en masse for underage drinking. Or consider the reaction when women are asked about their past sexual histories when testifying about their sexual assault.
I keep waiting for men to rise up and protest. Dismayingly, we aren't seeing much of that.
Draw Linky
(Binky's busy.)
Got The Hots For The Girl; Hate The Cackle
I'm answering a question from a guy who's into a girl and wants to ask her out but is disturbed by her laugh. He's wondering -- assuming things go well between them -- if he could maybe, eventually, subtly hint to her to change her laugh.
The "expected" answer to a question like this is to say to the guy, "How dare you, you shallow pig!"
Yes, I know, we "should never" ask anyone to change. And I'm aware that qualities that you find mildly annoying at first can make you want to chase someone around the living room with a hatchet once you've been involved with them for a while.
The thing is, some people who have weird (and upsetting) laughs have created those laughs, possibly out of a desire to be unique or get attention. They create their laugh and repeat it and it becomes part of them, and they forget that it may no longer be serving the purpose it was created for.
(And yes, you can change your laugh or your style of speaking -- it just takes consciousness and practice.)
But, on the other hand, maybe this is truly who she is, and reflects a love of life and a "big personality" -- too big and brash for this guy.
My prescription in the past has been to tell people to think not of all the wonderful things about a person (because nobody breaks up with you because you're hilarious and great in bed), but about all the annoying and not-so-great things about a person, and see if you can live with them.
The reality is, the guy could go out on a date with her and find something else that makes her a dealbreaker. I think dating is the test kitchen of who you can have a relationship with (among other things), and it isn't wrong to go out on a date with somebody for further experience to see whether you can deal.
(I'm reminded of how, when I can't answer a question, I often haven't done enough research or thinking -- meaning that I don't have enough input/information.)
In short, I'm thinking I'm going to offer a somewhat unexpected response to this question.
I Think, Therefore I Am (...A Vagina?)
Meet feminism as patheticism, a not-quite-a-word that came to mind while I was writing this blog post.
I've never understood women who get all excited about "The Vagina Monologues."
I'm empowered -- by my brain and my willingness to speak up for what I feel is right and against what I feel is wrong (even when I'd meet with criticism or suffer consequences).
The Vagina Monologues seems, if anything, a celebration of women as the lesser sex. (Men don't feel a need to buy tickets to Broadway-stage encounter groups to scream about their penis.)
Christina Hoff Sommers has a transcript of her 2004 speech on this at AEI -- the ridiculousness of the content of the play. Poor dear, she sat through the whole thing.
A few of my favorite bits from her piece:
The play itself consists of several monologues, which are distilled from more than 200 interviews Ensler conducted with women on the topic of their vaginas. At the Off-Broadway production I attended, the theater concession stand sold lollipops and cookies in the shape of a women's-well, take a wild guess. The young man who ushered me to my seat wore a nametag that read, "Hi, I am Vagina Larry." The theater was packed with women who laughed riotously at each mention of the v-word-which was more than 100 times.I have so many objections to the play it is hard to know where to start. I'll limit myself to three. 1) It is atrociously written. 2) It is viciously anti-male; and 3) and, most importantly, it claims to empower women, when in fact it makes us seem desperate and pathetic.
Her favorite awful quote from the play:
"My vagina is a shell, a tulip, and a destiny. I am arriving as I am beginning to leave. My vagina, my vagina, me." P.50
More:
But perhaps the most appalling and insulting aspect of the V-Day phenomenon is the way in which it demeans and weakens women even as it claims to empower us. Empower. That's the buzz-word for this play....The woman who "discovers" that her clitoris is her "essence" and says, "My vagina, me," is insulting herself, and all women. One of the many laudable goals of the original women's movement was its rejection of the idea that women are reducible to their anatomy. Our bodies are not our selves. Feminist pioneers like Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth fought long and hard so women would be respected-not for their sexual anatomy-but for their minds. The struggle for women's rights was a battle for political and educational equality. Feminist foremothers like Mary Wollstonecraft or Elizabeth Cady Stanton demanded that women have the opportunities to develop their intellects and to make full use of their cognitive powers.
...I feel sorry for young women who consider themselves empowered because they have said the word "vagina" over and over again. I am sorry for girls who consider V-Day to be the high point of their college career. Some high point! College is the one period in your life when you can immerse yourself in the works of transcendent genius. It is a time to develop yourself by studying biology or astronomy or economics-or learning Latin, or reading the history of philosophy. If you want to see genuine female empowerment, look at the work of Nobel Laureates such as Barbara McClintock and Rita Levi-Montalcini. Or, to mention my personal favorites, look at the astonishing achievements of two of the greatest field biologists of the 20th Century-both women: Diane Fosse and Jane Goodall.
Jane Goodall provides an instructive contrast to Eve Ensler and her work. Goodall radically transformed the field of primatolology by taking a very personal (some say conventionally female) approach to the chimpanzees she studied. She was the first to give individual names to the chimpanzees-instead of referring to them by numbers. Some of Goodall's colleagues accused her of anthropomorphizing and ridiculed her feminine sensibility.
Yet Goodall persevered, and in the process, she revolutionized the fields of primatology and ethology (the study of animal behavior). It was Goodall who discovered that Chimpanzees use tools, hunt for meat, and engage intensely complicated emotional relationships. It was Goodall who pioneered the study of chimpanzee societies in the wild, and of the intricate hierarchies and social maneuvering that occurs.
Now that is empowerment. Becoming so passionate, so devoted to your field of study, that you overcome prejudice, orthodoxy, and dogmatism and succeed in transforming the way people approach your subject.
Here's a woman I know -- Dr. Barbara Oakley -- who doesn't have to go around screaming about her vagina.
She was too busy going into the army, working as a translator (and the only non-Russian) on a Russian trawler in the Bering Sea. (When I was in Michigan, we went with my boyfriend to dinner with Elmore Leonard, who absolutely loved a hilarious story she told about how she started a squirt gun fight on the boat that ended up getting a KGB agent thrown off.)
And then, despite failing her math and sciences class in high school, she taught herself how to do math, became a tenured professor of engineering, and went on learning from there -- to the point where a Coursera course she created -- on learning how to learn math and science -- became their second biggest course ever, with over half a million students in the first two sessions.
Here's her recent (and terrific) book on learning how to learn, the number one best-seller in its category on Amazon: A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)
Does PETA Go After The Bear That Rips Open The Goat?
Nature being "red in tooth and claw" isn't just a poem. It's the reality.
People who complain about how animals are killed on farms should go out and try to talk the bear or other wild animals into eating vegan.
I'm serious. if you want the ugliest form of killing to stop, you'll have to stop the wild animals from doing it.
The latest act of logical genius from the anti-meat crowd is the response to the overturn of the ban on foie gras in California.
From LAist's Emma G. Gallegos, chefs who use foie gras are getting death threats from animal rights nutbags:
Sean Chaney, executive chef of Hermosa Beach's Hot's Kitchen and a part of the coalition to overturn the ban in the courts, told the Huffington Post that he's been getting threatening messages on the phone, through email, Instagram and Facebook, like this: "I'm gonna find you; I'm gonna murder you; I'm gonna find where you sleep and shove a pipe down your throat. If I don't do it, somebody else will."Ken Frank, owner of La Toque in Napa Valley, said he's been getting similar threats: "A good share of them talk about shoving a pipe up my ass or down my throat. But it's the ones who would like to see me hung by my feet and bled to death with no anesthetic--those are the most disturbing."
Welcome to pathological altruism -- people convinced they have the moral high ground making death threats to humans to protect the geese.
Stinky
Smelly links.
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Mavea filtering pitchers and replacement filters
60 percent off or more on cold weather accessories
And some of the hats aren't winter hats, like the San Diego ribbon braid sunhat
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Thanks so much to all who buy through my links! Much appreciated!
Even Ugly Speech Provokes Thought, Not Violence -- Well, In Civilized People
It might provoke anger, but the retaliation of an angry but civilized Westerner is not to gun down the speaker, but to use speech in return.
Yet, here's another disgustingly misguided piece calling for speech restrictions by Karen Rosenbaum at Medium.com:
Although a few people have, in the wake of the massacre, condemned the magazine for publishing the cartoons in the first place, the general consensus now seems to be that the magazine was in the right to publish those cartoons, and that inciting religious hatred against Muslims in this manner was somehow an act of "free speech." This is in stark contrast to how the world reacted when Charlie Hebdo first published the Muhammed cartoons a few years ago. Why was it hate speech back then, but "free speech" after the massacre? Just because the people responsible for the cartoons were killed does not lend their cartoons any legitimacy.Freedom of speech always has limits. Nobody believes that racial vilification should be legal. Nobody believes that advocating violence should be legal. Nobody believes that harassment should be legal. Nobody believes that publicly approving of terrorism should be legal. Nobody believes that threatening people should be legal. Even the most dedicated, die-hard free speech zealots agree that all of these things should be against the law. Freedom of speech always has to be balanced against other freedoms, such as freedom from racial vilification. Everyone recognizes that freedom of speech is not absolute, and nobody is saying that it is. But the international response to Charlie Hebdo does not seem to take this into account.
No, you can't call for your neighbors of a certain religion to be killed -- as Islam and the Hamas Charter do, by the way. And as Muslim protesters in Paris did before they attacked a synagogue this summer.
But so-called "hate speech" -- mocking, demeaning, awful speech -- is a part of free speech, and must be allowed. I realized this from a young age, growing up Jewish and feeling that the Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois, a place with a large Jewish population, must be allowed.
Violence is not caused by non-inciting speech to civilized people; it's caused by violent people and a death-inciting ideology.
In other words, the problem is the violent people, not the speech.
You don't transform a society and live as prisoners to fear because some people are violent. You do your best to prevent their violence -- and do as I do: speak out against their ideology that calls for the conversion or slaughter of others not in their group (or, at the very least, the removal of their civil liberties, which include free speech).
Oh, and P.S. Ms. Rosenbaum, a number of Muslims do run around with "Death to the Jews" signs, though some have a little trouble with the spelling.
via @moonmetropolis
Coming Soon: If You Have Penis, You're Guilty
The expansion of what is considered sexual assault on campus has ensnared a 20-year-old autistic student -- after a case of mistaken identity led to a truly benign interaction.
Hans Bader writes at Minding The Campus:
Brian Ferguson, a 20-year-old autistic student, has been suspended from special-needs classes at Navarro College in Texas for mistakenly hugging a woman he did not know and kissing her on the top of her head, according to the student's mother, Staci Martin. She said, "And then they labeled it 'sexual assault' because of the kissing," Martin said. "They said a kiss is considered an assault."This is an interesting potential case that illustrates how the ever-expanding definition of "sexual assault" on some college campuses apparently reaches well-meaning conduct that is not sexually-motivated at all and does not even involve intimate areas of the body, much less sex. (It may also pit broad college policies designed to comply with the Obama administration's interpretation of Title IX against broad duties to accommodate disabled students under the Rehabilitation Act and Americans with Disabilities Act).
This sort of application also is a logical argument against broad "affirmative consent" rules that require advance permission for not just sex, but also ordinary touching and kissing, and classify any failure to obtain advance permission as "sexual assault" (even if it was not against the will of the complainant at the time it occurred). "Affirmative consent" activists now want to extend such rules micromanaging commonplace interactions into the nation's Kindergartens to cover even non-sexual contact. Sexual assault policies and laws should protect people from violence and unwanted intimate invasions, not relatively harmless activities that simply lack advance authorization.
Let's be clear: These laws are about power, not protecting from harm.
The "Tough Shit" Files: Islam In Europe Version
In a WaPo piece by Anthony Faiola, "French Muslims feel deeply torn by viral 'I am Charlie' slogan," Nasser Lajili, 32, a Muslim city councilor and youth group leader in Gennevilliers, remarks:
"But I think freedom of speech needs to stop when it harms the dignity of someone else. The prophet for us is sacred."Then leave Western society and go back to one of the lands where they lash or slaughter people for having opinions not approved in the Quran.
Yabadabalink
Meet the Flinkstones.
Lining Up For Charlie
My tweet from this morning of a photo a Paris-dwelling friend emailed me: 
I actually had a couple old Charlies that I threw away just a few weeks ago in one of my periodic attempts to make my house look more like a home than a symptom of hoarding.
The "Magical Jew"
Muslim man, Paris burbs: "Magical Jews" behind Hebdo attack. Not ordinary Jews, but a "hybrid race of shape shifters."
I'm now an atheist, but I'd like to be thought of as a "magical Jew." (I think it might make people back out of parking spaces for me.)
Quick -- somebody make t-shirts!
Campbell's Soup Can "Empowerment" For Alabama Schoolchildren Facing A Gun-Toting Evildoer
Hey, kids, if you see a man with a machine gun in school, be sure you have a can of food in your backpack so you can throw it at him.
Oliver Darcy blogs this absolutely incredible story at The Blaze -- an Alabama middle school letter sent home to parents last week to inform them of a brilliant new precaution for students:
W.F. Burns Middle School -- located in the small city of Valley, Alabama -- wrote that as part of "enhancing our procedure for intruders" they would like to arm each student with a canned food item to possibly strike the suspect with."The procedure will be the same as we have done in the past with the addition of arming our students with a canned food item," the letter sent home to parents read.
"We realize this may seem odd; however, it is a practice that would catch an intruder off-guard," the letter continued. "The canned food item could stun the intruder or even knock him out until the police arrive."
Principal Priscella Holley and assistant principal Donna Bell added in the letter that "the canned food item would give the students a sense of empowerment to protect themselves."
"We hope the canned food item will never be used or needed, but it is best to be prepared," it concluded.
"Take that, you big meanie!"
Feminism-Driven Hippie Puritanism On Campus
Heather Mac Donald, in the Dallas Morning News from November, has a terrific piece about the absurd new feminism-driven combo of sexual liberation and sexual puritanism on campus:
The new order is a bizarre hybrid of liberationist and traditionalist values. It carefully preserves the prerogative of no-strings-attached sex while combining it with legalistic caveats that allow females to revert at will to a stance of offended virtue.Consider the sexual consent policy of California's Claremont McKenna College, shared almost verbatim with other schools such as Occidental College in Los Angeles. Paragraphs long, consisting of multiple sections and subsections, and embedded within an even wordier 44-page document on harassment and sexual misconduct, Claremont's sexual consent rules resemble nothing so much as a multi-
lawyer-drafted contract for the sale and delivery of widgets, complete with definitions, the obligations of all (as opposed to both) parties, and the preconditions for default.
"Effective consent consists of an affirmative, conscious decision by each participant to engage in mutually agreed upon (and the conditions of) sexual activity," the authorities declare awkwardly. The policy goes on to elaborate at great length upon each of the "essential elements of Consent:" "Informed and reciprocal," "Freely and actively given," "Mutually understandable," "Not indefinite," "Not unlimited."
"All parties must demonstrate a clear and mutual understanding of the nature and scope of the act to which they are consenting" -- think: signing a mortgage -- "and a willingness to do the same thing, at the same time, in the same way," declare Claremont's sex bureaucrats. Never mind that sex is the realm of the irrational and inarticulate, fraught with ambivalence, fear, longing and shame. Doing something that you are not certain about does not make it rape, it makes it sex.
As I've been saying recently, women now no longer demand to be treated like men's equals but like eggshells. More from Heather:
Females are now considered so helpless and passive that they should not even be assumed to have the strength or capacity to say "no." "Withdrawal of Consent can be an expressed 'no' or can be based on an outward demonstration that conveys that an individual is hesitant, confused, uncertain, or is no longer a mutual participant," announce Claremont's sexocrats.Good luck litigating that clause in a campus sex tribunal. The female can allege that the male should have known that she was confused because of what she didn't do. The male will respond that he didn't notice any particular nonactivity on her part. Resolving this evidentiary dispute would not be helped by bedside cameras -- the logical next step in campus rape hysteria. Pressure sensors would be needed as well to detect asymmetries in touch.
With or without cameras, adjudicating college sex in the neo-Victorian era requires a degree of prurience that should be repugnant to any self-respecting university. A campus sex investigator named Djuna Perkins described the nauseating enterprise to National Public Radio in June: "It will sometimes boil down to details like who turned who around, or [whether] she lifted up her body so [another student] could pull down her pants."
Rather than shrinking from this Peeping Tom role, college administrators are enthusiastically drafting new sex rules that require even more minute analysis of drunken couplings. Harvard, also assuming that delicate co-eds cannot summon the will to say no, now allows females unfettered discretion after the fact to allege that they were sexually assaulted by conduct they silently regarded as undesirable.
One Good Thing That's Come Out Of The Charlie Hebdo Horror
I see people suddenly awakening and standing up to Islam's calls (and some of its followers' answers) to slaughter unbelievers and turn the world Islamic and unfree.
Rotterdam's Muslim-born mayor is the latest and one of the more vocal, announcing on TV to Muslims the terms for living in the West. (He joins Egyptian President Sisi.)
From Sara Malm at the Daily Mail:
'It is incomprehensible that you can turn against freedom,' Mayor Aboutaleb told Dutch current affairs program Nieuwsuur (Newshour).'But if you don't like freedom, for heaven's sake pack your bags and leave.
'If you do not like it here because some humorists you don't like are making a newspaper, may I then say you can f*** off.
I appreciate what he said and his courage in saying it (which, let's point out, is not something that would be said about people making brash remarks to Jews or Christians). However, the reality is that Islam is a totalitarian movement masquerading as a religion.
And I will emphasize that not all Muslims practice it that way. In fact, probably most don't. But because Islam is a religion with 1.6 billion adherents worldwide, even a small percentage who engage in terrorism can transform the world we live in and how comfortably or fearfully we live in it.
Yawnies
Wake-me links.
Proudly Posting Charlie Hebdo Cover (Out Of "Sensitivity" About Civil Liberties)
About CNN and the NYT not posting the Charlie Hebdo cover, Instapundit blogs, "that's not how we roll here at Instapundit."
Well, that's not how we roll here at AdviceGoddess.com, either.
While CNN cites "sensitivity about Muslim audiences," we've got a "sensitivity" to the need to maintain free speech.
We do that by exercising it. Please remember to exercise -- share the cover widely! -- today!
Do Not Mention The Twin Elephants In The Room, Misogynist!
@MeanCharlotte (best name on Twitter) aka Charlotte Allen blogs about a Golden Globes awards moment:
Jeremy Renner slammed as sexist for noticing Jennifer Lopez's dress revealed half her boobs
When the envelope-ripping moment came up, Lopez asked Renner if he wanted her to do it because "I have the nails."
Renner noted, "You have the globes, too."
Feminists got their granny panties all in a bunch on Twitter. For example:
Jeremy Renner wins best supporting creep #GoldenGlobes
Charlotte:
Renner seemed to have forgotten one of the cardinal rules of feminism:Women get to wear as revealing clothes as they want to-but men are never, ever supposed to notice.
All The Fragile Little Ladies: Student Journalists Against Free Speech
A tweet from Christina Hoff Sommers:
@CHSommers
The closing of the student journalist mind.This U Chicago bunch wants censorship & safe spaces where no one offended. http://chicagomaroon.com/2015/01/09/land-of-the-free/
An excerpt from the editorial at the link, in The Chicago Maroon, the student newspaper of The University of Chicago:
We agree with this central idea--that the University must protect open discourse. However, this report lacks clarity on what constitutes "effective and responsible" discourse. The University needs to clearly differentiate hate speech and offensive speech. Hate speech is defined as "speech that offends, threatens, or insults groups, based on race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, or other traits," according to the American Bar Association. The report's failure to clearly define hate speech implies that all speech short of unlawful harassment is acceptable, no matter how vile or cruel. While it is important for students to challenge each other's opinions, this should not come at the expense of students' mental well-being or safety.
My reply, upon going to the link:
@amyalkon
.@CHSommers If your "mental well-being" is hurt by freedom of expression, you belong in an institution, and not one of "higher learning."
A tweet from Winnetou (@gily_gily07) in reply:
@gily_gily07
@Jesse_Robles @amyalkon What about holocaust deniers and anti Semites? Should they too have "freedom of expression" ?
My reply:
@amyalkon
@droopyfoopy @gily_gily07 @Jesse_Robles Absofuckinglutely.
The idiocy is thinking we are "protected" by speech that is disallowed. What this does is remove the ideas from debate, which allows them to fester instead of being argued against.
Also, who gets to be the arbiter of what's ugly? Today's ugly is my speech -- tomorrow's ugly is yours.
We are edging closer and closer -- at least culturally -- to totalitarianism. And no, I don't think that's overblown. We're on the outskirts right now, but our civil liberties are continually being eroded on many fronts.
First Class Travel For HHS Execs (Taxpayer Dollars Always Spend More Easily)
Luke Rosiak writes at the WashEx:
Helping America's poor, aged and sick is the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' reason for being, but hundreds of its top officials are traveling in style and luxury at taxpayer expense.Records obtained by the Washington Examiner under the Freedom of Information Act show that HHS executives spent $31 million taking 7,000 first class and business class flights between 2009 and 2013, including 253 trips for which a one-way ticket cost more than $15,000.
Half the records listed the price of a coach ticket for comparison. For that portion alone, the upgrade boosted the cost by almost $14 million, from $4.9 million to $18.5 million.
Federal employees are allowed to fly business or first class if the flight is longer than 14 hours, but only 1,400 of the 7,000 flights met that description.
For the vast majority of the flights -- 5,100 -- the government executives upgraded because they claimed they had a medical disability that necessitated it.
Others cited "exceptional security circumstances," that no coach tickets were available, that a non-federal source was footing the bill, that first or business class was "required because of agency mission."
Agency mission to bend the taxpayer over?
Inside The Jihad Siege At The Paris Kosher Supermarket
At Breitbart, Pamela Geller writes [autoplay video at link]:
The plan unfolded swiftly. Joseph recounted: "Someone who had been close to one of the people who died told me that when the terrorist came in, he asked for the store to be closed. He immediately shot two people - some tell me he shot three - and asked the woman at the register to go out and close the curtains at the storefront. And she did. But unfortunately someone came to the door and said, 'Listen, I forgot my challah.' And she told him, please get out. But he said, 'Please, I beg you, it's shabbat, I forgot my challah, please help me.' And when the terrorist heard him, he said, 'Bring him in.' And as soon he came in Coulibaly shot him in the head."...Inside, Coulibaly began conversing with the hostages. "It was very weird," said Joseph. "He came in and he asked everyone, what's your name, what do you do for a living, what's your religion. He had disgust for Jews. He insulted everyone and then he hit them. Women, too. One source told me that he took a Jewish woman by the hair and started moving her around with the hair, calling her a dog. He threw her on the ground. The four dead bodies were right there on the floor. One person inside the store left me a message crying, he said, 'That poor, poor man dead on the floor with his challah.'"
Coulibaly, according to Joseph, "wanted to blow the place up. He was ready to die. That was clear from what everybody told me. They told me about the fear they had when they saw him and starting to pray, to pray as Muslims do before they blow themselves up."
He was heavily armed, with two 9 mm pistols, a grenade, dynamite sticks, and more. Says Joseph, "So he was ready to blow the place up. He told them they were all going to die. They were getting to a point where he was becoming more insane and was starting to scream and insult them, saying, 'You dirty Jews, you oppress us. I will go to heaven.' He was starting to scream and insult everyone, saying, 'We will take over France and we will put the flag of jihad over the Élysée Palace.; And he was going more and more crazy."
As the police started their offensive, Joseph said, Coulibaly "was checking everything. Somebody was calling him and giving him all the information that was happening in the hideout of the Kouachi brothers. He was using the supermarket phone, and he didn't hang up the phone properly, so the cops were listening in on all of his conversations. So the cops realized that he was praying and getting ready to die, so they said, 'we gotta go in now.'"
Rooster
Linky-doodle-do!
We Need To Change How We Look At, Talk About, Depression
I sometimes say to people who sneer at taking medication to alleviate mental problems (like I take Adderall for my ADHD): "If you had a disease, and a drug would make it better, surely you'd take it; you wouldn't say, 'I'll just pull myself up by my bootstraps!'"
Similarly, Gayle Forman writes at the Guardian about depression, starting with two examples:
In the first, a 17-year-old with leukemia has to miss several weeks of school.In the second, a 17-year-old with depression has to miss several weeks of school.
Are you more sympathetic to one than the other? Does one have a real disease, the other, something else - something which, though not quite hysteria, is not quite life-threatening either?
Does it matter that both conditions are disorders, both thought to be caused by something gone haywire on a genetic or biochemical level - leukaemia when blood cells acquire mutations; depression when neurotransmitters are out of balance - as well as environmental factors? Does it matter that both are quite treatable - the five-year survival rate for childhood leukaemia is 85% - and both are potentially lethal? The overwhelming majority of people who take their own lives - 90% or more - have a mental disorder at the time of their deaths, the most common being depression.
Does it matter? Perhaps it should.
In the last few decades, depression has shed some of its stigma. People now talk more openly about it; they are more apt to seek treatment for it. And yet, there is still something to it that causes its sufferers to feel differently about their condition - a mental illness - than they might if they were sick with something more obvious - a physical ailment.
Even that term - mental illness, or mental disorder as it's commonly called - suggests an element of control that sufferers often don't have. Because if it's a mental illness, then it's in your head, right? We control our minds all the time - deciding not to call up an ex, deciding to skip a late-night party because there's work tomorrow - so can't depressed people, just, sort of, get over it?
Sometimes they can. More often they can't. And here's where calling depression a mental illness muddies the water because depression operates much like a physical illness, which is something most of us understand we cannot control. Many of depression's symptoms - exhaustion, insomnia, nausea, headaches, weight loss, weight gain - are physical ailments.
Researchers have shown the link between depression and a lack of neurotransmitters like serotonin, which is responsible for feelings of wellbeing. New research suggests other causes, like one study that looked at a link between inflammation and depression, suggesting that depression might be a response to an infection of some sort.
And yet, it's still thought of as something lesser, a weakness.
via @JonRottenberg, who appeared on my radio show to talk about depression and his excellent, science-based and myth-busting book, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic
Hitchens On "Mayor Bloomberg's Nanny State" (And Nannying In General)
Via David Boaz at Cato. It's from a seminar in New York (and here's a link to him talking at it):
I often take the train from Washington, D.C., to New York and back. A few years ago they put the smoking car on the end of the train so nonsmokers wouldn't have to go through it to get to other parts of the train. And then the day came when they said, "We're taking that car off the train altogether." And I thought, "Now we've crossed a small but important line." It's the difference between protecting nonsmokers and state-sponsored behavior modification for smokers.And I thought there was insufficient alarm at the ease with which that was done. Because state behavior modification, no matter what its object, should be viewed skeptically at the very least. There's serious danger in the imposition of uniformity--the suggestion that one size must fit all.
When the complete ban on smoking in all public places was enacted in California, I called up the assemblyman who wrote the legislation and I said: "I've just discovered that bars are not going to be able to turn themselves into a club for the evening and charge a buck for admission for people who want to have a cigarette. You won't be able to have a private club. You won't even be able to have a smoke-easy, if you will, in California."
And he said, "That's right."
I said, "Well, how can you possibly justify that?"
And he said, "Well, it's to protect the staff. It's labor protection legislation. We don't want someone who doesn't want to smoke, who doesn't like it, having to work in a smoky bar."
And I said, "You don't think that if there were bars that allowed it and bars that forbade it, that, sooner or later people would apply for the jobs they preferred, and it would sort of shake out?"
He replied, "No. We could not make that assumption."
So we have to postulate the existence, if you will, of a nonexistent person in a nonexistent dilemma: the person who can find only one job, and that job is as barkeep in a smoking bar. This person must be held to exist, though he or she is notional. But everyone who actually does exist must act as if this person is real.
There used to be areas, like the West Village in New York or North Beach in San Francisco, that are now dull and boring and have to be policed. And I think that's a terrible loss. I write better when I have a cigarette and a drink. I'm more fun to be with--other people seem less boring. The life of bohemia, of the small cafe and the little bar that never quite closes, is essential to cultural production. It may seem like a small thing. It doesn't add very much to the GNP. But if you take it away, you may not know what you've lost until it's too late.
But suppose all this was really a good idea--people might live longer. Suppose all that was really true. There would still be the question of enforcement, that awkward little bit that comes between your conception of utopia and your arrival there. The enforcement bit. You could appoint regulators and inspectors to enforce the law. It would take quite a lot of them, but you could do it. There are such people. I know about them because they've come after me.
My editor, Graydon Carter, the splendid editor of Vanity Fair, and I were having a cigarette in his office. And someone on our staff--it's not very nice to think about it--was kind enough to drop a dime on us. And round the guys came. "You're busted!" These people are paid by the city, which evidently has no better use for its police.
I think that's bad enough. But then Graydon went on holiday, and I went back to Washington. And his office was empty. But they came round again and they issued him another ticket because he had on his desk an object that could have been used as an ashtray. In his absence. With no one smoking. But there are officials who have time enough to come round and do that.
The worst part is that the staff has to become the enforcers. The waitresses have to become the enforcers. The maitre d' has to become the enforcer. He has to act as the mayor's representative. Because it's he who is going to be fined, not you. If you break the law in his bar, he is going to have to pay.
So everyone is made into a snitch. Everyone is made into an enforcer. And everyone is working for the government. And all of this in the name of our health.
Now, I was very depressed by the way that this argument was conducted. There were people who stuck up for the idea that maybe there should be a bit of smoking allowed here and there. But they all said it was a matter of the revenue of the bars and the restaurants. That was the way the New York Times phrased it.
In no forum did I read: "Well, is there a question of liberty involved here at all? Is there a matter of freedom? Is there a matter of taste? Is there a matter of the relationship of citizens to one another?"
And something about it made me worry and makes me worry still. The old slogan of the anarchist left used to be that the problem is not those who have the will to command. They will always be there, and we feel we understand where the authoritarians come from. The problem is the will to obey. The problem is the people who want to be pushed around, the people who want to be taken care of, the people who want to be a part of it all, the people who want to be working for a big protective brother.
Via a Walter Olson post at Overlawyered on prohibition. Olson writes:
Prohibition ... was important in eroding constitutional protections against various law-enforcement tools, especially search and seizure, the law being inherently aimed at contraband goods.The role of exorbitant cigarette taxes in contributing to New York's giant black market in cigarettes came to wider public notice following the police custody death of Eric Garner on Staten Island. ... The New York Post reported that Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered the city law department to refrain from filing an intended press release over a would-be landmark suit filed over untaxed cigarettes the week of the Garner grand jury decision, because it interfered with City Hall's efforts to downplay the role of the tobacco black market.
I absolutely hate breathing cigarette smoke, but why should that stop someone from opening a business where cigarette smoking is allowed?
People who do not want to breathe smoke -- like me -- should find work elsewhere.
All jobs are not open to me (or any of us). For example, because I get motion sick, I cannot become a flight attendant. (Should they keep the plane on the tarmac so I can have the job?)
To be a truly free society (which we are anything but), we have to let grown adults be free to make their own choices.
Why Didn't Obama Go To Paris?
It was no error.
Roger Simon writes at PJMedia:
A liberal friend emailed me that it was admittedly a "political mistake." "Political," yes, but "mistake"? I doubt the decision was made innocently or even faintly by mistake. Obama is a man known for his political expediency more than anything, indeed above anything, and also for being a constant campaigner. It was obvious that going to Paris would have been good public relations and that therefore not attending was a deliberate choice.There had to have been a reason for his non-attendance and the bizarre dissing of this event by his administration. I believe it stems from this: There are two words our president seems constitutionally unable to put together -- "Islamic" and "terrorism." For Obama (and, as a sideshow, the zany Howard Dean), these terms are mutually exclusive, an oxymoron. Appearing in Paris, Obama might be put in the unusual position of having to link them, our complaisant press rarely having the nerve to ask such an impertinent question. Holder, in a television interview from Paris (I think it was CNN -- there have been so many), danced around the question, hemming and hawing as if he couldn't quite make out what was being said or had been asked an embarrassing question about IRS emails.
Obama's shrinkage was shrinkier in the face of the statement by French Prime Minister Valls, declaring Saturday that France was at war with radical Islam. Via The NYT's Dan Bliefsky and Maia de la Baume:
"It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity," Mr. Valls said during a speech in Évry, south of Paris.
Mais, oui! Or, in English: Fuck, yeah!
From Timothy Sandefur, what Obama should have said in Paris, had he gone.
Linker
Is quinker.
Tonight's "Science News You Can Use" Radio, 7-8pm PT: Amy Alkon & Dr. Jennifer Verdolin On How Friendships Can Enhance Who You Are And How You Live
Tonight, we start with the evolutionary origins of friendship -- "Let's pair up so we won't get eaten!" -- and then go on to explain some unexpected findings about friendship, along with how to be a friend, how to win friends, how to end friendships that are toxic or have run their course...and much more.
About the show: This is a very special every-other-Sunday-night show with science-based advice columnist and author Amy Alkon and animal behaviorist and author Dr. Jennifer Verdolin laying out science news you can use to solve your relationship problems or just improve your relationships and have a better life.
(And yes, I will still be doing shows on the best behavioral science books on weeks in between.)
Listen at this link at showtime (7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET), or get the podcast here afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2015/01/12/amy-alkon-dr-verdolin-how-friendships-can-enhance-who-you-are-how-you-live
And don't forget to buy our science-based, fun, funny, and illuminating books -- support our show while entertaining yourself and learning a thing or two to improve your life.
Amy's new book is "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck."
Jennifer's is "Wild Connection: What Animal Courtship and Mating Tell Us about Human Relationships."
No, There Is No Ban On Pix Of Mohammed In The Quran; However...
However, there is a ban on pictures in general, in the hadiths, the words and deeds of Mohammed (who Muslims are supposed to emulate).
From Answering Islam:
While some Muslims were outraged by a magazine printing cartoon pictures of Muhammad, we have to step back and calmly ask, are pictures of Muhammad really forbidden in Islam? - the answer might surprise you.Numerous passages in the Qur'an prohibit idolatry, and worshipping statues or pictures, but there is not even single verse in the Qur'an that explicitly or implicitly says not to have any pictures of Muhammad. This bears repeating: There is not a single verse in the Qur'an that prohibits making or having pictures of Muhammad or people or animals or trees. In fact, there are some verses in the Qur'an which mention images in a positive context and which therefore presuppose that some statues or images were approved by God, see the article Muhammad and Images.
However, the vast majority of Muslims are Sunni Muslims, who regard six authorized collections of hadiths as the highest written authority in Islam after the Qur'an. The hadiths are records, often very detailed, of what Muhammad taught and did. We give multiple quotations to show that these teachings are not confined to just one writer/collector, but are spread throughout the different hadith collections.
Where multiple trustworthy hadiths agree, Sunni Muslims will take this as binding. In other words, people today are kicked out of Islam, or even killed based on the hadiths.
Pictures of Muhammad are "not exactly" forbidden in the hadiths either. The hadiths do not single out Muhammad's picture. Rather, in the hadith we find the prohibition of all pictures of people or animals, which would include pictures from a camera.
For example, Sahih Muslim vol.3 no.5268 (p.1160) says, "Ibn 'Umar reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) having said: Those who paint pictures would be punished on the Day of Resurrection and it would be said to them: Breathe soul into what you have created.2519"
Notice that the prohibition was not just against idolators who made pictures, or even Muslims who made pictures for other reasons, but for anyone who made pictures.
Sahih Muslim vol.3 no.5271 (p.1161) gives a little more detail: "This hadith has been reported on the authority of Abu Mu'awiya though another chain of transmitters (and the words are): 'Verily the most grievously tormented people amongst the denizens [inhabitants] of Hell on the Day of Resurrection would be the painters of pictures.2520..."
"Narrated 'Aisha: Allah's Apostle said, 'The painter of these pictures will be punished on the Day of Resurrection, and it will be said to them, Make alive what you have created.'" Bukhari vol.9 book 93 no.646 p.487. no.647 p.487 is the same except it is narrated by Ibn 'Umar.
No pictures of people or animals according to Bukhari vol.4 book 54 no.447-450 p.297-299.
Conclusion: It is clear that the hadiths prohibit pictures of animals or people, especially in homes. There is no focus on pictures of Muhammad per se. All pictures of people and animals are forbidden. It is a completely general prohibition.
Ron Paul On How Far We've Fallen
Ron Paul writes:
Warfare/Welfare State Requires Police ControlAs the size of government grew and cracks in the system became readily apparent, a federal police force was needed to regulate our lives and the economy, as well as to protect us from ourselves and make sure the redistribution of a shrinking economic pie was "fair" to all. Central economic planning requires an economic police force to monitor every transaction of all Americans. Special interests were quick to get governments to regulate everything we put in our bodies: food, medications, and even politically correct ideas. IRS employees soon needed to carry guns to maximize revenue collections.
The global commitment to perpetual war, though present for decades, exploded in size and scope after 9/11. If there weren't enough economic reasons to monitor everything we did, fanatics used the excuse of national security to condition the American people to accept total surveillance of all by the NSA, the TSA, FISA courts, the CIA, and the FBI. The people even became sympathetic to our government's policy of torture.
To keep the people obedient to statism that originated at the federal level of government, control of education was required. It is now recognized that central control of education has actually ruined education, while costs have skyrocketed. National control of medical care has brought a similar result. This has meant more money for bureaucrats, as well as drug, insurance, and health management companies, and less money for medical care. Constantly more police are required to run our lives at greater costs while providing less benefit. "Nationalizing" both medical care and education has provided a great incentive to increase the policing powers of the federal government.
The predictable poverty that results from such a terrible system is now upon us and is a strong motivation for the militarization of local police as part of the expansion of the national police state. Temporary and perceived benefits of government overreach and expanded policing powers end up becoming the real problem. By the time it is understood that these "benefits" are artificial, government power and special interests have gained control of a system designed to serve them and not the people the programs were purported to help.
...Before we can actually restore our liberties, we most likely will have to become a lot less free and much poorer. This is sad since correct and workable answers are available to us if only the people understood them and demanded liberty and honesty, rather than being dependent on excessive government power and believing the false promises of politicians.
An "Update From Paris: This Jew is Still Here, and She is Not Leaving"
Being the annoying person that I am, I bothered Claire Berlinski on Twitter to put the contents of her tweets into a piece longer than 140 character -- and she did.
About the claim by Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, that "EVERY JEW I KNOW HAS LEFT PARIS," Berlinski writes -- from Paris -- on Ricochet:
I have not left. And I will not. And neither will my father. That is at least two of us. And I know many more.It is true that in the end, the Nazis managed to drive my family out of France. But not before my grandfather killed thousands of them. If these eighth-rate savages think they'll succeed in getting my family out of France twice, they will discover that I am my grandfather's granddaughter.
I've been told today that "the odds are against me." By well-meaning people, I'm sure. First, they are not. That's absurd. What happened was a horror, and it is by no means over, but if these people think they can win against a determined modern nation-state-once it's woken up-they are even more out of their minds than it seems. Yes, it's a war-and that was only the opening shot. But they are not the Nazis. They're just dumb thugs with a taste for blood-and while France may be quite a sane place overall, God help them if they push the Germans so far that they find out what real Nazis are like.
And if you want to talk about odds, I'll tell you about odds: In my grandfather's regiment of 1,250 men, only 250 survived. So don't tell me about the odds: It just makes you sound like a hysteric with no sense of history or proportion.
And while we're at it: Let's remember who won that war.
I am Jewish. I am in France. And I am not leaving-not because of a handful of terrorist swine, and not even if there's an army of them. This family of Jews will not be driven out of Europe twice. And as far as I'm concerned, the response a Jew should have to this outrage is the one we should have had before-when up against a far more fearsome enemy. We may die, but we'll die fighting, and you'll be amazed how many of you we take down with us.
So let me speak personally now to anyone who thinks he'll get me out of here: We will always have Paris. I will always have Paris. As will all the people who belong here. You, however, will die.
I love seeing this -- this trend of people emerging from the ranks of the too afraid and/or the too comfortable to get off the couch, which describes the approach by many to our freedoms and their being jeopardized (by government, by TSA thugs, by cops, and by Muslims acting out the Quran's commands to slaughter the infidel and install The New Caliphate).
Oswald
Link Harvey, that is.
Lapland
The look of "When are you going to quit writing and play fetch with a squeaky toy?" on the face of Aida, my wee Chinese Crested.
She listens to me but uses Gregg as a giant couch and dog toy and knows that when he tells her to do something that she can do exactly the opposite. (Man as dog mush.)
"Government Built It!" (One Of The Places We, In The USA, Are In Danger Of Being Slaughtered By Jihadists)
That place is the long line we stand in to have our civil liberties and genitals violated by the TSA, of course. Everybody in that line is a sitting duck. (As a terrorist, why try to bring a bomb on a plane when you can simply bring machine guns in the front door of an airport?)
Al Jazeera Ugly Comes Out In Leaked Emails, Revealing Fury Over Global Support For Charlie Hebdo
Brendan Bordelon writes at NRO:
As journalists worldwide reacted with universal revulsion at the massacre of some of their own by Islamic jihadists in Paris, Al Jazeera English editor and executive producer Salah-Aldeen Khadr sent out a staff-wide email....Below was a list of "suggestions" for how anchors and correspondents at the Qatar-based news outlet should cover Wednesday's slaughter at the Charlie Hebdo office (the full emails can be found below).
Khadr urged his employees to ask if this was "really an attack on 'free speech,'" discuss whether "I am Charlie" is an "alienating slogan," caution viewers against "making this a free speech aka 'European Values' under attack binary [sic]," and portray the attack as "a clash of extremist fringes."
"Defending freedom of expression in the face of oppression is one thing; insisting on the right to be obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile," Khadr wrote.
No, what's "infantile" -- and barbaric and backward -- is a religion that insists on the death of anyone who mocks its looting, murdering, raping "prophet."
Here's his entire disgusting email, revealing that the guy is a propagandist for Islam:
FULL LEAKED EMAIL EXCHANGE:
Executive producer Salah-Aldeen Khadr:Thursday, January 08, 2015
Subject: AJ coverage of events in ParisDear Editorial colleagues,
Please accept this note in the spirit it is intended - to make our coverage the best that it can be .... We are Al Jazeera!!!!
My suggestion is that we question and raise the following points in our coverage - studio/anchors/guests/correspondents:
•This was a targeted attack, not a broad attack on the french population a la Twin towers or 7/7 style. So who was this attack against? The whole of France/EU society? Or specifically this magazine. The difference lies in how this is reported not in how terrible the act is obviously - murder is murder either way... but poses a narrower question of the "why"? attack on french society and values? Only if you consider CH's racist caricatures to be the best of European intellectual production (total whitewash on that at the moment)
•Was this really an attack on "Free speech"? Who is attacking free speech here exactly? Does an attack by 2-3 guys on a controversial magazine equate to a civilizational attack on European values..? Really?
•"I am Charlie" as an alienating slogan - with us or against us type of statement - one can be anti-CH's racism and ALSO against murdering people(!) (obvious I know but worth stating)
•Also worth stating that we still don't know much about the motivations of the attackers outside of the few words overheard on the video. Yes, clearly it was a "punishment" for the cartoons, but it didn't take them 8/9 years to prep this attack (2006 was Danish/CH publication) - this is perhaps a response to something more immediate...French action against ISIL...? Mali? Libya? CH just the target ie focus of the attack..?
•Danger in making this a free speech aka "European Values" under attack binary is that it once again constructs European identity in opposition to Islam (sacred depictions) and cements the notion of a European identity under threat from an Islamic retrograde culture of which the attackers are merely the violent tip of the iceberg (see the seeping of Far Right discourse into french normalcy with Houellebecque's novel for example)
•The key is to look at the biographies of these guys - contrary to conventional wisdom, they were radicalised by images of Abu Ghraib not by images of the Prophet Mohammed
•You don't actually stick it to the terrorists by insulting the majority of Muslims by reproducing more cartoons - you actually entrench the very animosity and divisions these guys seek to sow.
This is a clash of extremist fringes...
I suggest a re-read of the Time magazine article back from 2011 and I have selected the most poignant/important excerpt....
http://world.time.com/2011/11/02/firebombed-french-paper-a-victim-of-islamistsor-its-own-obnoxious-islamophobia/?iid=gs-article-mostpop1http://world.time.com/2011/11/02/firebombed-french-paper-a-victim-of-islamistsor-its-own-obnoxious-islamophobia/?iid=gs-article-mostpop1
•It's unclear what the objectives of the caricatures were other than to offend Muslims--and provoke hysteria among extremists.
Defending freedom of expression in the face of oppression is one thing; insisting on the right to be obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile. Baiting extremists isn't bravely defiant when your manner of doing so is more significant in offending millions of moderate people as well. And within a climate where violent response--however illegitimate--is a real risk, taking a goading stand on a principle virtually no one contests is worse than pointless: it's pointlessly all about you.
Kind regards
Salah-Aldeen Khadr
Executive Producer
Al Jazeera English
I particularly liked the Ross Douhat quote sent in reply by correspondent Tom Ackerman:
U.S.-based correspondent Tom Ackerman:Friday, January 9, 2015
Subject: RE: AJ coverage of events in ParisIf a large enough group of someone is willing to kill you for saying something, then it's something that almost certainly needs to be said, because otherwise the violent have veto power over liberal civilization, and when that scenario obtains it isn't really a liberal civilization any more....liberalism doesn't depend on everyone offending everyone else all the time, and it's okay to prefer a society where offense for its own sake is limited rather than pervasive. But when offenses are policed by murder, that's when we need more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.
-Ross Douthat in the NY Times
Other leaked emails at the link.
via @claireberlinski
Presbyterians On The Rampage Again
This time with a mass slaughter in Baga, Nigeria.
From the BBC:
Bodies lay strewn on the streets of a key north-eastern Nigerian town following an assault by militant Islamists, officials have told the BBC.The Boko Haram group attacked Baga town on Wednesday, after over-running a military base there on Saturday, they said.
Almost the entire town had been torched and the militants were now raiding nearby areas, they added.
Boko Haram launched a military campaign in 2009 to create an Islamic state.
...Musa Alhaji Bukar, a senior government official in the area, said that fleeing residents told him that Baga, which had a population of about 10,000, was now "virtually non-existent".
...Those who fled reported that they had been unable to bury the dead, and corpses littered the town's streets, he said.
Boko Haram was now in control of Baga and 16 neighbouring towns after the military retreated, Mr Bukar said.
While he raised fears that some 2,000 had been killed in the raids, other reports put the number in the hundreds.
And in France, taking over where Hitler left off, "France's Jews Flee As Rioters Burn Paris Shops, Attack Synagogue," by HuffPo UK's Jessica Elgot.
Lippy
Talkbacky links.
They Don't Say Whether He's Presbyterian
From Blazing Cat Fur, "Minnesotan Believes In Beheading For Allah #CharlieHebdo."
Won't You Be My Nanny State?
Via Overlawyered, an elderly Citi Bike rider is blaming his injuries in a crash on the city for not making helmets mandatory for the NYC bike-sharing program.
Rebecca Harshbarger writes for the New York Post:
Ronald Corwin, a 74-year-old Connecticut man, says he lost his sense of taste and smell in the 2013 Manhattan crash, when he hit a concrete wheel stop on the East Side and landed on his head. He wasn't wearing a helmet at the time -- but says the city is at fault for not making him wear one.Mayor Bloomberg opposed 2012 legislation that would have made helmets mandatory and said pedaling without a helmet is safer than walking or driving.
The city comptroller had urged the city to support the legislation, noting that cyclists are not wearing helmets in 97 percent of crashes.
I biked all over New York City, and wore a helmet, even without the mayor or anybody making me. Why? Because, being over 4 years old, I recognize that heads smash like cantaloupes on pavement.
At a certain point in life, you need to be your own mommy.
If you can't be responsible for yourself at 74, you shouldn't be out riding a bike on the streets of New York; you should be in a nice facility where kind nursies will come around to help you fasten your diaper in the morning.
Tanya Cohen Resurfaces With Her Special Brand Of "Human Rights" Crazy
Yes, our lady in Stalinism dressed up as benevolence is back! Once again at Thought Catalog with her special selection of "Tape your mouth shut or we'll throw you in prison for 25 years":
Human rights activists - including the United Nations and human rights groups all over the world - not only believe that hate speech should be outlawed, but that so should cultural appropriation and other forms of speech which violate basic human rights (in the case of cultural appropriation, the right of cultures to retain ownership of their culture and to ensure that their culture is not misused).
Let's take a look at that. My friend Richard, who is in the music biz and really knows music, told me that American music is special -- it comes out of "the Jews and the blues." ("The Jews" are people like Gershwin, Lerner and Loew, etc.)
Under Tanya's edict, of course, we'd all be sitting in silence, because "cultures" ... "retain ownership" of their culture, blah blah blah. Or as somebody being a little stuffy once lectured us in Paris when we were about to taste each other's appetizers, "En France, we do not meex ze meat and ze fish."
More from our leftist genius:
Those who oppose human rights legislation fail to consider the serious harm that can be caused by hate speech. This is John Stuart Mill's classical liberal "harm principle", which establishes that conduct can be outlawed when it causes a great deal of harm to others.
The harm that is greatest is in countries where people are made to shut up or go to jail.
As I mentioned before, only if ugly ideas are allowed out of people's computers and pieholes can we see them and hear them and challenge them.
For a little sense at Thought Catalog, thankfully, there's Joshua Goldberg, who notes that "'human rights' is a sham":
Nearly every single attempt to limit freedom of speech in modern times has been championed under the guise of "human rights." ... And yes, "human rights" activists have even proposed state surveillance and "tolerance camps" for people found guilty of thought crimes. The authoritarianism of the "human rights" lobby is made even more disturbing when one considers that "human rights" activists consistently invent new "rights", which include everything from the "right" to free Internet access to the very dangerous "right to be forgotten."...Whereas natural rights stood for freedom from government interference in people's lives, "human rights" stands for government control of every single aspect of people's lives. Not only that, however, but "human rights" activists have also been some of the loudest champions for war in our time. "Human rights activists" were among the most outspoken proponents of waging war on Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - a war which has had devastating effects not only for Libya, but also for Mali.
...On top of that, "human rights" activists are the driving force behind "international law" and other forms of imperialism which aim to erode the national sovereignty of countries and subject them to the "civilizing" influence of Western "human rights" activists ("human rights" can very much be seen as the new "white man's burden"). "Human rights" activists are far more dangerous than traditional authoritarians and warmongers because they wrap themselves up in a cloak of benevolence and do-goodery. After all, who is going to come out against "human rights"? Anyone who did so would be instantly labeled as an evil fascist dictator (despite the self-proclaimed "human rights activists" actually being far closer to such a thing).
...Do not be fooled by the insidious trickery of the "human rights" lobby. These people do not want to defend your rights, but to take them away and turn them into commodities to be given out by a "gracious" Big Brother government whenever convenient. They are not only tyrants, but the most dangerous form of tyrants: tyrants who sincerely believe that they should rule over others for the good of the people that they're ruling over. Like the disgusting and wretched parasites who run the bloodsucking UN, "human rights activists" are little more than dictators imbued with an extreme sense of egoism and self-righteousness. These people are a menace to freedom and civil liberties and should be treated as exactly what they are: ruthless autocrats dressed up as kindly humanitarians. "Human rights" is the new totalitarianism.
via @TimCushing
The Worst Things In Life Are Free: Obama's Community College Plan
What you get free, you tend not to value or not to value as highly as something you paid for or had to work for.
This is one reason Obama's proposal for two "free" years of community college is a bad idea.
The other reason is that it is not "free" in the slightest. It's theft -- it's paid for by people who are not the ones getting the education.
Reuters has the story:
Under the proposal, students who attend at least half-time, maintain a 2.5 GPA while in college, and make steady progress toward completing their programs would have their tuition eliminated.
"Eliminated"? I just love those terms.
The lingo of somebody who's had it all handed to him on a platter and has no problem sending "other people" the bill.
Of course, the president doesn't think to solve the real problem that is making education so expensive -- all the gazillions in federal money thrown at students that has served to raise tuition, make administrators into highly paid royalty, and cause colleges to draw students by building gyms that put luxury resorts in Gstaad to shame.
Linksalot
Day and knight.
Charlie Hebdo: Some Truths That Ought To Be Self-Evident (But Aren't)
Some wise thoughts from Nick Cohen in the Spectator/UK:
•A religion is not a race. Sometimes, not always, it is a system of violent beliefs that claims the right to subjugate others - most notably its 'own' coerced adherents.•Criticism of religion - including bawdy irreverent criticism- is a defence against oppressive power.
•It is not 'Islamophobic' to satirise radical Islamists and their beliefs - the main targets of radical Islamists include other Muslims as well as Christians, Jews, Yazidis and secularists.
•Even if in your confused liberal mind you think that it is, no one has the right to stop satire or criticism because they are offended.
•If they claim that right, they are the most deserving targets of satire and criticism imaginable.
•And if you do not then satirise and criticise them because you are frightened of ending up like Charlie Hebdo's dead journalists, or of taking a whipping in a PC backlash, how can you in conscience satirise left or right wing politicians you despise, or the evangelical Christians, Jewish fundamentalists, Catholic reactionaries, Russian orthodox Putinists you deplore?
•Are you not saying, if only when you are by yourself and think no one is listening: 'I will only take on targets that won't kill me, but steer clear of those who just might?'
And I bring you...my late doggie Lucy, as Mohammed; my "Draw Mohammed Day" cartoon, as a girl who does not draw. (Blog item on that here.)
What have you done -- really done -- to support free speech today?
By the way, I loved this post by free speech defender Marc Randazza.
UPDATE: A quote from the late Charlie Hebdo editor, via Rich Lowry at Politico:
A year after the firebombing of Charlie Hebdo's offices in 2011, the publication's editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, said in an interview, "I am not afraid of retaliation. I have no kids, no wife, no car, no credit. It perhaps sounds a bit pompous, but I prefer to die standing than live on my knees."
Bypassing College
I once heard an ivy-educated financier friend tell his son, who was having a hard time in school, "You know, not everyone has to go to college."
I wanted to run over and hug him, but I contained myself.
James R. Hagerty writes in the WSJ about Justin Friend, who's now working as a welder. The headline bills his welding job as a $140K-a-year deal, but the guy's working 72-hour weeks, so that seems a bit of a fibby.
HOUSTON-- Justin Friend 's parents have doctoral degrees and have worked as university lecturers and researchers. So Mr. Friend might have been expected to head for a university after graduating from high school in Bryan, Texas, five years ago.Instead, he attended Texas State Technical College in Waco, and received a two-year degree in welding. In 2013, his first full year as a welder, his income was about $130,000, more than triple the average annual wages for welders in the U.S. In 2014, Mr. Friend's income rose to about $140,000.
That has allowed the 24-year-old to buy a $53,000 Ford F-250 pickup truck, invest in mutual funds and dabble in his hobbies, such as making jet engines, including one he attached to a golf cart.
"Not everybody needs a four-year college degree," said Kathryn Vaughan, his mother, a retired biology lecturer who spent part of her career at Texas A&M University.
...Mr. Friend, who is single, typically works 72 hours a week, usually including at least one day of the weekend, often on an overnight shift. His base pay is more than $25 an hour, up from about $22 when he started in 2012. He gets overtime after 40 hours a week. Pay is doubled on Sundays and tripled on holidays. He receives health insurance, a 401k retirement plan and paid vacation.
...The long hours mean "it's hard to have a life," Mr. Friend said. Eventually, he said he may pursue an advanced degree in metallurgy and research welding materials and techniques. For now, he's building up his savings.
Inky
Dark blue links.
Jeenz!
Deal Of The Day at Amazon
And totally unrelated, this seems smart for anybody who runs or bikes after dark: Reflective Running Vest Harness
To buy other stuff I don't list here, Search Amazon
Thank you so much to all who shop through my links!
Religion Of Peace-Driven Slaughter At The French Version Of "The Onion" ("Charlie Hebdo")
I am horrified at the slaughter of 12 at Charlie Hebdo, the Paris-based satirical magazine that stood up for free speech by publishing the Mohammed cartoons. Ten of those assassinated were staffers; the other two were police officers (there for press day at the magazine).
I am grateful to all of those at Charlie Hebdo who repeatedly risked their lives for free speech and Enlightenment values, and who had their lives stolen from them thanks to a poisonous ideology that demands the death of anyone who even makes the smallest criticism of it or Mohammed. Such an ideology has no place in the modern world -- but is practiced by many. Many Muslims do not even know or understand the horrible behavior it commands -- but far too many do.
How can I say such a thing?
Well, until I started reading the Quran and Hadith and reading commentary about Islam right after 9/11, I was a typical Westerner and a typical American -- believing (and wanting to believe) that Islam was just another religion. (Kind of like an ice cream flavor -- being chocolate to Judaism's strawberry and Christianity's vanilla.)
My reading showed me otherwise. Here's a page from the excellent and informative site, thereligionofpeace.com, which I like because it answers questions about Islam with commentary and relevant passages from the Quran.
Here, for example, is the question, "Does Islam teach that those who 'insult' the religion or its founder should be put to death?"
The answer:
Under Sharia, those who insult Muhammad or Allah are to be executed. So are those who desecrate the Qur'an or commit other acts of blasphemy. This tradition began with Muhammad, as recorded in the Hadith and by his biographers. There is also a Quranic basis for it.
This particular Q & A also references the difference between the Medina and Mecca parts of the Quran. (The earlier Mecca half of the Quran is the time when Mohammed -- a looting, raping, mass murderer -- did not have much power, so there's some nice interfaith-y language. After Mohammed gained power -- the Mecca Quran -- the language changed, and, in fact, per Islam, abrogates (nullifies) the earlier, more peaceful part of the Quran.
So when people point to earlier, more peaceful passages that conflict with the later "go kill the infidel" passages, it's as if they are broken items returned to the store -- they are no longer functional or able to be used for guidance. The later passages, demanding the death or conversion of non-Muslims take over.
As explained at thereligionofpeace.com:
One of the tricks that Muslim apologists play to obscure the fact that Islam prescribes death for detractors is to quote Qur'an (3:186). This is an earlier verse following a defeat in battle - when Muhammad's forces were relatively weak. Though encouraging Muslims to endure insults at the time, the text goes on to say that if Muslims are patient, then a "grievous penalty" will befall those who mock them. Indeed, the people to whom this verse specifically referred, were put to death by Muhammad just a few short years later.
Muhammad executed his critics as quickly as he could obtain the power to do so. His biographers list numerous citizens who were murdered merely for mockery or criticism, particularly poets - the media artists of the time. One was a mother of five, who had her child pulled from her breast before she was run through with a sword. See Muhammad's Dead Poets Society for more information.
When author Salman Rushdie published "The Satanic Verses," a 1988 novel deemed offensive to Muhammad, the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a death sentence that was supported by a majority of Muslims.
More here, at Answering Islam, by James M. Arlandson:
An authoritarian ruler must get a grip. The first policy that he imposes on his people shuts down free speech that expresses dissent and criticism, especially if the speech questions the leader. He takes any questioning of his opinions and decisions as a personal insult of him, the head of state, and therefore a threat to his society.Muhammad laid down severe restrictions on such free speech. He assassinated many who insulted him. In the Quran, he promises death and eternal damnation if anyone deviates in words and action from Allah and his messenger. In the hadith (Muhammad's words and deeds outside of the Quran), we read that he kills dissenters and insulters. Later legal rulings, rooted in the Quran and hadith, follow his lead and decree that hard-hitting speech must be stifled. Indeed, the dissenters must die, if they cross the line.
More from Arlandson on the slaughter of satirical poets in the early days of Islam.
Daniel Greenfield at FrontPage on the courage of those at Charlie Hebdo: "Charlie Hebdo has More Guts than Entire American Media Combined."
And I know -- if you're like me, you want to believe differently about Islam. But the reality is, it is a totalitarian system masquerading as a religion and a danger to civil liberties, free societies, and the peaceful continuation of life for those who are not Muslim (and certainly those who oppose it).
Please share widely the caricatures from Charlie Hebdo so we all support and share the risks from free speech in the face of Islam. 
I suggest the Twitter hashtag: #WeAreAllCharlieHebdo
More On The Absolute Bullshit Security At Airports
Joe Sharkey writes at The New York Times about the pathetic "security" where there's nobody watching (where there's no "theater" like there is at the TSA); and that's behind the scenes at the airports, where the baggage handlers and others work.
As I've said, vis a vis thefts from baggage by baggage handlers at JFK and countless other airports, if you can take something out, you can put something in:
"The current state of background investigations for airport employees is really a glaring vulnerability," said Sean M. Bigley, a lawyer who specializes in security clearances and investigations. "Most people are under the erroneous impression that someone with an access badge to a secure area to an airport has undergone an extensive background investigation. That is not the case."Mr. Bigley suggested that workers in secure areas -- from burger-flippers at a McDonald's in a terminal to ramp agents with direct access to airplanes -- undergo the same kinds of background checks, depending on job category, as federal employees.
And everyday vigilance clearly must improve. Take the Delta baggage handler charged with bringing guns into a secure area of the Atlanta airport and passing them to the man accused of being the smuggler, who had already cleared checkpoint security and could easily carry the weapons in his backpack onto airplanes. On numerous occasions that coincided with known dates of gun-smuggling, that employee (since fired by Delta) was in restricted airport areas even on his days off, according to an affidavit.
Kirby Delauter! Kirby Delauter! Kirby Delauter! Kirby Delauter!
That's the name of the elected official in Maryland who has yet to hear of that thingie we who have at least a fourth-grade education call "The First Amendment."
This bright lad (who looks to be at least 40) "wrote on social media that he plans to sue The Frederick News-Post if his name or any reference to him appears in print without his permission," per a Paige Jones story in the News-Post:
In a Facebook status posted Saturday, Delauter said he was upset with reporter Bethany Rodgers for "an unauthorized use of my name and my reference in her article" published Jan. 3 about his and Councilman Billy Shreve's concerns over County Council parking spaces."So let me be clear............do not contact me and do not use my name or reference me in an unauthorized form in the future," Delauter, R-District 5, said in a Facebook status update.
Bethany pitched in with a little remedial constitutional education for Kirby Delauter! Kirby Delauter! Kirby Delauter! Kirby Delauter! -- within Jones's story:
"First of all, there is no requirement to get a person's authorization in order to mention them in the paper, particularly if that person is an elected official," Rodgers wrote in a comment below the original post. "It is not just our right but our responsibility to report on people like you, who occupy positions of trust in our government, and I make no apologies for doing that."Delauter said he would pursue legal action if his name or reference were published again.
"Use my name again unauthorized and you'll be paying for an Attorney," Delauter wrote. "Your rights stop where mine start."
The citizens who elected Kirby Delauter! Kirby Delauter! Kirby Delauter! Kirby Delauter! should see if there are measures to swiftly remove him.
via @dangillmor
Why Islam Remains Medieval
Nicolai Sennels writes at 10news.dk:
One main factor is that while all other religions allow their followers to interpret their holy scriptures, thereby making them relatively adaptable to secular law, human rights and individual needs, Islam categorizes Muslims who do not take the Quran literally as apostates. And according to Islamic law, the sharia, apostasy is to be punished with death. The sharia thus makes it impossible for Islamic societies ever to develop into modern, humanistic civilisations.
Links And Has-Beens
Or franks and beans. You choose.
What If Your Body Fits The "Unrealistic" Body Image?
There's this assumption that a model is "too skinny" -- if she is thin like I was as a teen.
Aren't we being all "hate speech"-y to women who are thin by suggesting that it's horrible to have a very thin woman in an ad?
The speech police -- advertising regulators in the UK -- have told Urban Outfitters to remove an ad with a model who, per the WaPo's Lindsay Bever, has an "inner thigh gap" promoting an image that is "irresponsible and harmful."
I looked at the supposedly horribly unrealistic ad and saw a body like mine. And frankly, I don't see the "thigh gap." I have thighs and a butt, and though she's thin, she seems to have them, too. 
Frankly, she mainly seems to have a thigh gap because she's standing with her legs apart.
Also, the thought and picture police can mandate away, but the fact remains that underwear sells when it is modeled on women who do not have the body of a 45-year-old housewife whose saggy ab skin reflects the four children she's had and whose big gut and thighs reflect how she can't stay out of the Coke, fries, and Sun Chips.
Bever writes:
Urban Outfitters uses a number of thin models in its online ads both on its U.K. and U.S. sites.But Lynn Grefe, president of the National Eating Disorders Association in the United States, told USA Today it's not "normal" to encourage such unattainable body shapes.
"People come in different shapes and sizes," she said. "These images fuel the fire of eating disorders and poor self body image and advertisers should have to take more responsibility."
There actually isn't good evidence that seeing the pictures of thin women cause eating disorders. Evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad writes about this in his excellent book, The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption.
As Grefe notes, "people come in all shapes and sizes." Right, they do. So, what's wrong with seeing a woman of my thinness as a teen? (Oh, it's not permitted by the PC.)
We have an explosion of obesity and a way for almost all (but the few with hormone disorders or psychiatric medication issues) to change that: eating low-carb and high-fat diets. In fact, I would venture that it's the lack of satiety of the high-carb, low-fat diet and the pull of carbs that causes many to binge.
As Gary Taubes once pointed out to me, you can't binge on a stack of bun-less hamburgers. Your body stops you when you've had enough.
By the way, there's research that finds that the body type that men in a culture prefer relates to how much food is available. Where food is plentiful, like in our culture, where you can't fall out of a car without ending up in a 7-Eleven parking lot, thin is in. In cultures where food is scarce, they fatten the ladies up, because fat is hot.
Clearly, the answer to body image problems is locking up all the grocery stores, hiding all the livestock (and pets, for the desperate), and making everybody eat bark.
Problem solved!
We've Come Full Circle: Self-Proclaimed "Human Rights Activist" Demands End To Free Speech -- Of Pretty Much All Kinds
Tanya Cohen writes at the "Thought Catalog" that it's time to get tough on "hate speech" in America.
What is "hate speech"? Well, according to the details of Cohen's lengthy piece, just about anything beyond "have a nice day."
Cohen starts out with this:
The recent controversy at the University of Iowa - in which an "artist" (supposedly an "anti-racist" one) put up an "art exhibit" which resembles a KKK member covered in newspaper clippings about racial violence - is a perfect example of why we need to implement real legislation against hate speech in the United States. The year is 2015 and all other countries have laws against hate speech along with laws against other forms of speech which violate basic human rights. As a matter of fact, international human rights law MANDATES laws against hate speech. Protecting vulnerable minorities from hate speech is one of the most basic and fundamental of human rights obligations, and all human rights organizations worldwide have emphasized this. But the United States refuses to protect even the most basic of human rights, firmly establishing itself as a pariah state that falls far behind the rest of the world in terms of protecting fundamental human rights and democratic freedoms.
The answer to speech you don't like is more speech.
Or...your speech may become the disliked and then criminalized speech -- in the sick, totalitarian environment you set up.
And I'm against the concept of "hate crimes," too. If you're dead, you're dead. Murder is not a crime of love, for whatever reason you commit it.
And I love this nittwittery from Cohen:
Bigotry has no place in a free society.
Bigotry will have a place in every society because it's part of human nature. Where we go wrong is in forcing it underground instead of letting people voice their ugliness so we can challenge it.
But this woman has has a vision of life that she seems to come to via some cross of Walt Disney and Joseph Stalin. Check out the first number in her manifesto for a more beautiful and less free world:
Speech which offends, insults, demeans, threatens, disrespects, discriminates against, and/or incites hatred or violence against a person or a group of people based on their race, gender, age, ethnicity, color, nationality, religion, sexual orientation or sexual activity, gender identity or gender expression, disability, language, language ability, ideology or opinion, social class, occupation, appearance (height, weight, hair color, etc.), mental capacity, and/or any other comparable distinction.
Yes, so those kids who teased me about my red hair would all be put in prison.
More:
Insulting, disrespectful, and/or offensive speech in general and speech that violates the dignity of people. This would include, for example, jokes about tragedies along with insults and derogatory/disrespectful comments about any person, group, place, or thing.
All of the comedy world is now in jail.
More:
Speech that disparages the memory of deceased persons.
I'm in jail. Also on the above two.
And then there's this:
Speech that objectifies women and/or reduces them to their sexual dimension, such as pornography and catcalling.
But what if women want to make pornography? What if they like being "objectified." I do.
More:
Speech that voices approval of oppressive, anti-freedom, anti-democratic, and/or totalitarian ideologies. This would include, for example, speech that opposes a woman's right to have an abortion and speech that approves of Israeli apartheid in Palestine.
I'm in jail some more. But, for any who missed it, irony alert: Calling the situation in Israel "Israeli apartheid" is okey dokey! The opinion of Christians, however, who oppose choice on abortion...
How can this woman be so dim? I guess the love of totalitarianism does something to the vision.
Ban everybody else's views and you'll eventually have yours banned, too.
Unless you can follow up our jail sentences with executions.
(Wait -- don't want to give her any ideas...)
And basically, the upshot of her piece -- not just that, in her world, you have a right to remain silent, but you'd better do it and keep your eyes closed lest you look at somebody the wrong way and commit a capital crime.
I guess I need to follow up with what led me here, a tweet by Adam Kissel. I had to look, because surely he was exaggerating wildly. He was not:
@AdamKissel
.@xTanyaCohenx You are the greatest threat to free speech I have ever seen in my life, with the exception of North Korean dictators.
Also, perhaps a minor point -- she's beyond long-winded and a fucking bore. (Visit me in prison, will you? Please bring a cake, a file, and a plate of bacon.)
A Stop To Courthouse Weddings? A Good Start
Interesting idea in a reason blog item by Scott Shackford. Unfortunately, the blog post comes out a story of clerks in 14 Florida counties wanting to discriminate against gay couples wanting to marry (though not being able to under the law).
I agree with what Scott writes about the "mistaken belief that the government has any sort of stake in determining the nature of relationships among consenting adults":
Florida has even managed to add some extra rent-seeking in its process of acknowledging marriages. Their marriage licenses come with a three-day delay before taking effect, unless couples are willing to take a four-hour premarital course from an approved counselor. Those folks can get married the same day. One county clerk told the Tampa Bay Times she would be waiving the course for the first round of ceremonies tomorrow. Maybe she should just waive it forever and recognize the government has no place ordering people to seek training in how to be a married couple.Obviously this decision does nothing about the actual problem of so many government policies and benefit structures inappropriately tied to marital status. But getting government functionaries out of the business of literally performing wedding ceremonies is a right move for the wrong reasons. I acknowledge that gay people getting married inside of (or in front of) courthouses makes for lovely, photogenic moments in a movement where the government has long served as a barrier or a threat. I'd much rather see us move to the place where we're the ones telling the government about our relationships (should we choose to do so) and away from a place where we're begging the government to allow it.
Linknog
Put all your eggs in this basket.
"Microaggressions" And The New Meaning Of Trauma
This guy, Chris Hernandez, writes about trauma a man he met in the Marines encountered -- trauma because he was in a horrible helicopter crash, was horribly burned, and witnessed his friends screaming and dying. Hernandez also describes trauma he personally has experienced as a police officer:
I remember the shock I felt when I walked up to a car after a seemingly minor accident and saw a two year old's head lying on the floorboard. I stood helplessly outside a burning house as a ninety-two year old woman died inside, while her son screamed hysterically beside me. For years after my time as a soldier in Iraq I'd have a startle response if I unexpectedly saw a flash, like from a camera, in my peripheral vision (it reminded me of flashes from roadside bombs). Soldiers near me were shot, burned or killed by weather in Afghanistan.My childhood wasn't rosy either; early one morning when I was eight I heard pounding on our kitchen door, then was terrified to see a family member stumble into the house covered in blood after being attacked by a neighbor. Even today, after thirty-five years, I still sometimes tense up when I hear a knock at the door. When I was ten, my eleven year old best friend committed suicide because of a minor sibling dispute. He wrote a note, left a will, snuck his father's pistol from a drawer and shot himself. I was severely affected by his death, and ten years later got a copy of his suicide note from the city morgue. After I read it, I finally felt that I could heal from that horrible event.
And then he discovers the new meaning of trauma:
Trauma now seems to be pretty much anything that bothers anyone, in any way, ever. And the worst "trauma" seems to come not from horrible brushes with death like I described above; instead, they're the result of racism and discrimination.Over the last year I've heard references to "Microagressions" and "Trigger Warnings". Trigger Warnings tell trauma victims that certain material may "contain disturbing themes that may trigger traumatic memories for sufferers"; it's a way for them to continue avoiding what bothers them, rather than facing it (and the memories that get triggered often seem to be about discrimination, rather than mortal danger). Microaggressions are minor, seemingly innocuous statements that are actually stereotype-reinforcing trauma, even if the person making the statement meant nothing negative.
And he echoes my conclusion in a previous blog post:
If your psyche is so fragile you fall apart when someone inadvertently reminds you of "trauma", especially if that trauma consisted of you overreacting to a self-interpreted racial slur, you need therapy. You belong on a psychiatrist's couch, not in college dictating what the rest of society can't do, say or think.
And he goes one better:
Fuck your trauma.Yes, fuck your trauma. My sympathy for your suffering, whether that suffering was real or imaginary, ended when you demanded I change my life to avoid bringing up your bad memories. You don't seem to have figured this out, but there is no "I must never be reminded of a negative experience" expectation in any culture anywhere on earth.
...Oh, I should add: fuck my trauma too. I must be old-fashioned, but I always thought coming to terms with pain was part of growing up. I've never expected anyone to not knock on my door because it reminds me of that terrifying morning decades ago. I've never blown up at anyone for startling me with a camera flash (I've never even mentioned it to anyone who did). I've never expected anyone to not talk about Iraq or Afghanistan around me, even though some memories still hurt. I don't need trigger warnings because a book might remind me of a murder victim I've seen.
And before anyone says it; being Hispanic doesn't make me any more sympathetic to people who experience nonexistent, discriminatory "trauma". Discrimination didn't break me (or my parents, or grandparents). I've been discriminated against by whites for being Hispanic. I've been threatened by blacks for being white. I've been insulted by Hispanics for not being Hispanic enough. Big deal. None of that stopped me from doing anything I wanted to do. It wasn't "trauma". It was life.
Generations of Americans experienced actual trauma. Our greatest generation survived the Depression, then fought the worst war in humanity's history, then built the United States into the most successful nation that has ever existed. They didn't accomplish any of that by being crystal eggshells that would shatter at the slightest provocation, they didn't demand society change to protect their tender feelings. They simply dealt with the hardships of their past and moved on. Even my great uncle, the Korea Marine, never expected us to tiptoe around him. He wouldn't talk about his experience, but he didn't order us not to.
Women Who Want Male Feminist Wussyfriends Instead Of Boyfriends And/Or Husbands
Lisa Bonos writes in the WaPo about what makes a feminist man. Here's a bit of it:
"If you're a woman who wants a man to grab you and kiss you because that's what sweeps you off your feet, realistically, a feminist man is not going to do that," says Rita Goodroe, a 38-year-old life coach in Northern Virginia who works mostly with singles. "He's going to ask for permission."
Bonos follows it up with this:
I'd rather have permission than confusion.
Perhaps a too-wild guess, but might it be possible that she comes from the overparented generations?
These generations had much or much of everything done for them and they aren't used to (and often strongly dislike) the rough edges of life that many of us (who had parents the way parents used to be) have no problem managing.
Of course, I'm not saying that I want some rape-minded stranger to hold me down in an alley. But I can't think of sex that's less sexy than sex that's all talky with "May I have permission to lick your clitoris now?"
Just loved this guy from the WaPo comments:
The Parson
So brave. When I hear a noise downstairs, I wake up my feminist girlfriend so she can go down and investigate.
If it's frightening, then I sometimes cry while she holds me, just like I do after our pegging sessions.
Whoever monitors the comments at WaPo apparently isn't cool enough to know what "pegging" means.
Yodel
Alpenlinks.
Last Radio Replay Tonight -- New Live Shows Starting Next Sunday
Advice Goddess Radio, Tonite, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Adam Lee Alter on the hidden influences shaping our thoughts, beliefs, actions.
Catch it at 7pm PT and 10pm ET or afterward in podcast -- each at this link:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2015/01/05/dr-adam-alter-the-hidden-influences-shaping-our-thoughts-beliefs-actions
I did reruns over the holidays but next week I'll have live shows again and some very exciting guests. Will work out who's on what date this coming week and have the news very soon.
Scary Read On Ransomware: "How My Mom Got Hacked"
Alina Simone writes in The New York Times:
MY mother received the ransom note on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. It popped up on her computer screen soon after she'd discovered that all of her files had been locked. "Your files are encrypted," it announced. "To get the key to decrypt files you have to pay 500 USD." If my mother failed to pay within a week, the price would go up to $1,000. After that, her decryption key would be destroyed and any chance of accessing the 5,726 files on her PC -- all of her data -- would be lost forever.Sincerely, CryptoWall.
CryptoWall 2.0 is the latest immunoresistant strain of a larger body of viruses known as ransomware. The virus is thought to infiltrate your computer when you click on a legitimate-looking attachment or through existing malware lurking on your hard drive, and once unleashed it instantly encrypts all your files, barring access to a single photo or tax receipt.
Everyone has the same questions when they first hear about CryptoWall:
Is there any other way to get rid of it besides paying the ransom? No -- it appears to be technologically impossible for anyone to decrypt your files once CryptoWall 2.0 has locked them. (My mother had several I.T. professionals try.)
But should you really be handing money over to a bunch of criminals? According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership between the F.B.I. and the National White Collar Crime Center, this answer is also no. "Ransomware messages are an attempt to extort money," one public service announcement helpfully explains. "If you have received a ransomware message do not follow payment instructions and file a complaint." Right. But that won't get you your files back. Which is why the Sheriff's Office of Dickson County, Tenn., recently paid a CryptoWall ransom to unlock 72,000 autopsy reports, witness statements, crime scene photographs and other documents.
Interesting bit at the end how she was able to plead to them about the snowstorm getting in the way of getting the money, and talk them down from the higher price. Interesting and sickening, but what's interesting is that even criminals have a reputation to maintain.
From the comments on NYT.com:
Joe S, Philadelphia
Haven't checked this version of Crypto yet, but on prior version, I was able to find an encryption key that someone who actually paid for it posted. It didn't remove Crypto but it did shut it down long enough for me to attack it with two or three "free" anti malware programs. So far this persons computer is still fine. Worth a try, perhaps, if you get hit.
I Like This Definition Of Equality
Cathy Young, in TIME:
Equality should not mean that men and women must be identical in everything--it should mean treating people as individuals regardless of their gender.
The Omission Of Saudi Arabia And Pakistan From TSA's List Of Countries Triggering Special Screening Says All About Its Pretense Of Security
Former TSA worker Jason Edward Harrington, writes in Politico/The Week:
In private, most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency's day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds.Until 2010 (just after the TSA standard operating procedure manual was accidentally leaked to the public), all TSA officers worked with a secret list that many of us taped to the back of our TSA badges for easy reference: the Selectee Passport List. It consisted of 12 nations that automatically triggered enhanced passenger screening. The training department drilled us on the selectee countries so regularly that I had memorized them, like a little poem:
Syria, Algeria, Afghanistan
Iraq, Iran, Yemen
and Cuba,
Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan
People's Republic of North KoreaPeople holding passports from the selectee countries were automatically pulled aside for full-body pat downs and had their luggage examined with a fine-toothed comb. The selectee list was purely political, of course, with diplomacy playing its role as always: There was no Saudi Arabia or Pakistan on a list of states historically known to harbor, aid, and abet terrorists. Besides, my co-workers at the airport didn't know Algeria from a medical condition, we rarely came across Cubanos, and no one's ever seen a North Korean passport that didn't include the words "Kim Jong."
How Moderate Are "Moderate" Muslims?
Speaker at a Moderate Muslim Peace Conference points out that Islam itself demands death penalty for gays and apostates, and that this is not an extreme view.
He asks: How many of you believe the punishment (death, stoning) in the Quran "is the best punishment ever possible for humankind and that is what we should apply in the world?"
Watch all the hands raise. Watch them raise again when they affirm that they are not extremists.
This is why Islam -- the ideology of Islam -- is a danger to the maintenance of free societies and civil liberties (and life itself).
Reformation runs contrary to Islam. The Quran, for example, is said to be the word of Allah and unquestionable. And Muslims are slaughtered by other Muslims for questioning it or for leaving Islam.
But Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi made an extraordinary speech on New Year's Day, calling for a reformation of Islam and an end to Islam's commands that Muslims convert or kill the infidel. Via Roger L. Simon and Raymond Ibrahim (who translated):
Corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It's antagonizing the entire world!Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world's inhabitants--that is 7 billion--so that they themselves may live? Impossible!
I am saying these words here at Al Azhar, before this assembly of scholars and ulema--Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I'm talking about now.
All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.
I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move... because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost--and it is being lost by our own hands.
I truly appreciate the guy's saying this -- and his courage in doing so -- but I predict that the man's tenure on this planet will not be long.
And that's the awful thing about Islam. It is the one major religion in modern times that demands primitive savagery from its followers -- many of whom actually follow its call.
Oopsy
Linksy daisy.
Washington State's Paranoid Idiocy About "Advertising" Marijuana For Sale
Darren Smith guest-blogs at Turley about the ridiculousness of The Washington State Liquor Control Board (LCB) in crafting administrative rules surrounding pot sales "that border on absurdity."
I would say they don't just border on it. Here's just a bit from their set of restrictions on advertising:
The WAC prohibits a licensee from placing and maintaining advertising "[w]ithin one thousand feet of the perimeter of a school grounds, playground, recreation center or facility, child care center, public park, library, or a game arcade..." However, the LCB went to a new limit of what it considers to be "placing."Moving vehicles apparently now fall within this definition of placement at a location. The LCB states that vans and delivery vehicles having a retailer's logo or other form of advertisement cannot travel as described within the 1000 foot limit of these areas where children frequent. Mobile advertisement signs fall into the same category somehow. So if a retailer has a store having only one roadway is out of luck if that street has a bus stop with a shelter.
Because of this restriction, if the retailer wished to have a delivery truck or vinyl advertisement on the side of their van, it would have to drive a rather circuitous route, avoiding all prohibited places such as schools, parks, bus stops, pinball arcades, etc.
We used to have a great business here that sold pot. Unlike the assholishly run bar near my house (from which I could hear music through the open front of the bar booming in my pillow a block away), they were great neighbors: quiet, neighborly, causing no problems for the neighborhood, and not bringing in the sort of loud, thuggish, pee-on-neighbors-cars-and-fences customers the bar does.
However, they were made to move by a similar law. Why? Because blocks away from the bar, there's some youth facility I never see youth going into. (Perhaps this is a timing thing -- I'm not roaming the streets when school lets out.)
The thing is, there's a liquor store one short block from the youth center, and anybody can enter it. The pot store had a guard at the front to keep out all the people the law said they had to. What, would kids get corrupted simply by walking by, while all the bars and the liquor store on our street somehow don't have this magical effect?
How It Was Before Feminists Shoved The World's Head Up Its Ass
A tweet:
@NYDNHammond
Watching a Hepburn-O'Toole movie, counting the failures to obtain affirmative consent.
My reply:
@amyalkon
Any guy who tried to obtain "affirmative consent" from me was dismissed.
"It Isn't You That's On Trial; It's Your Stuff"
Worthwhile video by John Oliver on the awful, police-perpetrated crime of civil asset forfeiture:
Linkatonic
Catatonic with links.
A Big Eary Deal
$5 albums at Amazon
Also: New Year/New You
And today's deal -- 46 percent off ASICS Women's GEL-Noosa Tri 8 Running Shoe
In case you want something not listed above, search Amy's Amazon here.
Thank you all who shop through my links. Truly appreciated.
Chicago Cracks Down On Unlicensed Eating
Via @againstcronycap, Illinois Policy has a story on how Chicago regulators are cracking down on "underground dining" -- people who charge willing others to dine in their home.
According to Thrillist, the city of Chicago issued a citation to Julia Pham, who ran Relish Underground Dining from her apartment in Lincoln Square, forcing her to shut down. Pham, according to the profile, is "a 20-something, self-taught chef who got her start in her aunt's kitchen at Ba Le," a popular Vietnamese restaurant with locations in Uptown and the Loop. She sees her project as a way to take a more creative approach to cooking, learning about food and sharing her food with guests....Cities should value experiments of this sort because of their potential to lead to successful new businesses down the line. Thrillist notes that 42 Grams, a Chicago restaurant that was just awarded two Michelin stars, got its start as an underground restaurant. In this regard, underground restaurants are no different from small businesses that start off in a garage, a parent's basement or at home. A thriving entrepreneurial culture depends on the ability to experiment and take risks without begging for permission from the government. An experiment can then grow into a new business that makes all of us better off. But that can't happen if local government decides to focus its efforts on shutting them down.
Sharansky On The Double Standard For Israel On Norms Of War
Natan Sharansky, former deputy prime minister of Israel, writes in the WaPo:
While Israelis have developed missile shields to protect children, Hamas has been using children as shields to protect missiles. This perverse strategy is the brainchild of a society that hails death. For Hamas, using living shields serves the double function of increasing the number of martyrs and galvanizing a free world that values life to pressure Israel to stop fighting.The sad irony, then, is that while the world can do so little to stop the terror in Syria or Sudan, it can do a lot to press Israel to stop defending itself. We ask ourselves, is this hypocrisy? Is this a betrayal by the free world whose values we are defending? And in response, Israel hears from the international community, "Of course you are judged differently. You insist that you are part of the free world, so we hold you to a higher standard than neighboring countries, where wanton destruction of human life is the norm."
...Let me be clear. I believe that it was the free world's obligation to fight against the Milosevic regime, which carried out ethnic cleansing in the heart of Europe. I believe it is the obligation of the United States and free countries to lead an uncompromising struggle against terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. But the obligation of the IDF to protect Israeli citizens from thousands of missiles and from underground terrorist infiltrations is just as sacred. In view of the developing global war between the free world and terror, it is time that leading military experts from Israel, the United States, Britain and other countries, along with international lawyers and politicians, compare their experiences and agree about the standards according to which the free world can defend itself.
But once these standards are accepted, they should be applied to every free country. Otherwise, stop calling it a higher standard and call it by its real name: a double standard.
Orange
Orange You Going To Post A Link Here?
The Power Of Gratuitous Kindness
I write in the end of "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," in the chapter "Trickle-Down Humanity," about how it's actually in our self interest to do kind acts for others.
Research by positive psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky suggests that being gen- erous to others is one of the main ways (along with expressing gratitude) that we can increase our happiness. Showing another person a little generosity of spirit is also likely to put them in the spirit to "pay it forward" to people they encounter . . . and so on, and so on. The way I see it, a bare minimum of one kind act a day should be our self-imposed cover charge for living in this world. We get the society we create--or the society we let happen to us.
Sometimes, you can make a difference in a person's life with an act of kindness -- sometimes, you can make an enormous difference. The most powerful kind acts are those we do for strangers, and the most powerful of those are those we do anonymously.
There's a beautiful and very moving piece, "The Power of Gratuitous Kindness," by Wendy McElroy, about a kindness done for her after she became homeless as a teenager in the wake of her father's death and her mother's becoming angry, violent, and unstable. An excerpt:
A steady, growing conflict with my mother erupted in violence over the holiday season. Without burdening the account with detail, I will simply say it became safer for me to sleep on the streets than in my own bed.Only, one of the problems with this solution was that I lived in Ottawa, Canada where temperatures in December and January average between 13 to 19 degrees Fahrenheit.
The days were safer than the nights. The downtown public library was huge and open during the day; there was always a corner in a reading room or the stacks where I could disappear behind a book. I was able to wash up quickly in the women's restroom.
At night, I took shelter in a nearby church that did not lock its large wooden front door. I would watch from across the street until no one had gone in or out for 20 minutes or so. Then I would steal inside and stretch out on the last pew, as far away from the center aisle as possible.
I was always cold and always afraid. In the church, I was terrified that someone would find me sleeping on the pew and literally throw me out into the freezing cold. Every night I fell asleep fully clothed but still shivering in a cramped, curled position. Every morning I woke up and fled before anyone entered and found me.
At least that was what I thought. But I was wrong.
One morning I woke up and I wasn't cold. During the night, someone had pulled a blanket over me. I would have been weak with gratitude if that person had simply ignored my existence and let me use the church for a few more nights. As it was, he or she chose to make me warm without demanding an explanation or anything in return.
I had stopped expecting kindness from the people who were supposed to love me; now, I received it from a stranger.
...The store owner helped me gain confidence in myself but the stranger in a church helped me believe in other people again.
Harvard Guilty Of Giving The Accused Too Many Due Process Rights
Under the Obama admin's interpretation of Title IX, this must stop, writes Ashe Schow at the Wash Ex:
OCR [the Department of Ed's Office for Civil Rights] found that Harvard Law was not adjudicating sexual harassment and sexual assault claims in a "prompt and equitable" fashion."In one instance, the Law School took over a year to make its final determination and the complainant was not allowed to participate in this extended appeal process, which ultimately resulted in the reversal of the initial decision to dismiss the accused student and dismissal of the complainant's complaint," the OCR announcement said.
Basically, a student appealed Harvard Law's "guilty" decision and won -- and under the current climate of how sexual assault must be handled (i.e., accused must be found guilty) this was wrong.
So now, Harvard Law must adopt new policies, including lowering the burden of proof to "preponderance of the evidence," meaning faculty members only have to be 50.01 percent sure an accuser is telling the truth in order to convict the accused student and ruin his or her life.
Harvard Law must also reopen all sexual harassment accusations filed during the 2012-13 and 2013-14 school years to "carefully scrutinize whether the Law School investigated the complaints consistent with Title IX and provide any additional remedies necessary for the complainants." This means that students who may have been acquitted will now be retried under new policies designed to find them guilty. In a criminal court, we would call this "double jeopardy."
Yes, we've now come to the point where it's an offense to be too careful about preserving people's civil liberties.
Eat The Poor: Taking Away Driver's Licenses For Offenses That Have Nothing To Do With How Well Someone Drives
Brian Doherty writes in reason that petty offenses like a shoplifting charge or unpaid parking tickets are being used to suspend people's driver's licenses. Predictably, people need to drive to get to work and to make their lives work (without a mule or taking often-inadequate public transportation:
Most people, for understandable reasons having to do with their livelihoods and lives, don't always respect such suspensions, leaving them open to further fines and even arrests. These are among the most common ways America's working and poor classes interact with the government: as a source of unreasonable restrictions on movement in the name of mulcting them of more cash.
Happy Link Year
Be audacious.
