That didn't age well.

The defendants have won rulings in their favor, including a watershed moment this past week when the judge in the Kraft case prohibited prosecutors from using secretly recorded sex videos.

“This case has been bungled from the beginning, in every way,” said Joseph Tacopina, a former New York City prosecutor who recently filed a federal class-action lawsuit claiming cops violated constitutional privacy rights by using covert cameras in a Jupiter spa.

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/palm-beach/fl-ne-cb-robert-kraft-spa-cases-failings-20190518-gqduneepjvcq3lykburpemy35a-story.html

Balls.

https://www.sunnyskyz.com/good-news/3318/Teenage-Crane-Operator-Rescues-14-People-From-Burning-Building

San Fran's mayor looks to be a rising star in the Democrat party. One to keep an eye on.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/san-franciscos-mayor-shows-the-country-what-a-real-attack-on-the-free-press-looks-like

They say the worst day fishing beats the best day working. You sure?

From the New York Times, a first-hand account of why Congress has a 77% disapproval rating and yet a 90% re-election rate.

Monopolies don’t restrict competition with noticeable barriers because that’s how they get caught. Instead, they hide 1,000 bear traps in the grass, rendering a successful challenge too unlikely for competitors to bother. [...] ...these anti-competitive tactics explain the disconnect between our opinion of Congress and our behavior at the polls. We re-elect incumbents not because we approve of them, but because they have no serious competition.

We re-elect incumbents not because we approve of them, but because they have no serious competition.

I suspect that if you poll the congressional districts population, they think their congresscritter is OK. Maybe not the best and brightest, but brings home adequate amounts of pork and isn't dumb as a post.

It's just the other 534 aholes that spoil things. And incumbency is a great advantage in being re-elected.

Don't ask questions if you won't like the answers.

https://twitter.com/TuttleSinger/status/1128739808178843649

Good thing Weinstein isn't physically ill.

https://posttenuretourettes.wordpress.com/2019/05/19/harvards/

An Uber for service personnel caught behind the lines?

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a27508870/air-taxi-air-force/

Every sushi plate has a history

https://twitter.com/DrewCoffman/status/1129209278114422784

A classic underdog story, for your Memorial Day week.

Don't ask questions if you won't like the answers.
______________________________________

Um, that was just a handful of people. Not to mention that there was a certain focus on adoption. Very few single women - or even teens - who give birth to unplanned babies WANT to choose adoption.

From a 2008 review of the movie "Juno":

"...Just to bring the whole reproductive carnival full circle, Florida's 'Choose Life' license plates, of which more than 40,000 have been sold, have raised more than $4 million for low-income single moms. But there's a catch: only women who choose adoption qualify. A woman who wants to keep her baby can just go starve in hell. Since only a handful of women want to give away their babies--even among pregnant women who plan on adoption, 35 percent change their mind once the baby is born--the money is just sitting there. Maybe someone, someday will make a movie about that."

Looks like the only people defending this are Uber/Lyft drivers. Quelle surprise.

https://twitter.com/KimZetter/status/1130555777385525249

I think this happened to me at LAX last week… But of course, users will always say that. What we need is metrics of the market prices, preferably as graphics with geographic notation, preferably with real-time updates.

Ride sharing has been an enormous, life-changing blessing my life in these years when I desperately needed it. But this is the month where we've seen there are some problems to be ironed out.

For example— Who's actually going to PAY for this?

Swear to God, I didn't see that Six had posted that same story three hours earlier.

Teaser photographs like this are another reason Quillette seems destined for a fall. The appeal is too finely honed— She's got a handsomely suspicious side-eye, two of the most beautiful legs I've ever seen, and she's a two-fisted coffee drinker: My curiosity is overdetermined.

Darth— What's the "age well" part?

Also, that Tuttle woman is a foaming idiot.

Lenona, this is a despicable line:

A woman who wants to keep her baby can just go starve in hell.

...If I'm tracking your meaning, and I'm probably not.

5 Years After Stroke Left Texas Teacher Paralyzed, He’s Running His First 5K

The Similarities Between Declining Rome and the Modern US

More tech tyranny.

She had two abortions. Here is why she supports Alabama's pro-life law.

CD— Thanks for that Kaiser link.

A link on that page reports that Al Junior has another DUI.

Nearly forty years ago I worked a TV crew that did behind-the-scenes coverage of his rookie orientation at the IMS. I was only a couple of years older and felt something terribly close to envy: His debut at the race was, um, auspicious.

(The ten minutes before that memorable line from Posey are tense. I got to spend an afternoon chauferring Sam around central Indiana that week, and it was fun to pick his brain.)

Indiana seemed to be a place that promised the world to young men my age, but the price was unfathomable. There was this kid singer from nearby Gary....

Crid, how many men do you know who WANT to marry an unwed mother? Especially a teen mother? Men know perfectly well that it's often a short path to the horrors of divorce court when they marry a woman with children or a woman who's just too young.

Yes, there ARE teens who get pregnant on purpose without even expecting a marriage proposal, as WaPo journalist Leon Dash wrote in his book "When Children Want Children." But, as he acknowledged, there's nothing simple about solving that problem. There's also nothing simple about solving the problem of contraceptive failure when certain methods are too expensive or hazardous for certain women to use, so one can't just tell every woman to use two or three contraceptives every time.

It's also been said that if any group really removed the stigma from being an unwed mother, it was the anti-abortion crowd, when you think about it. After all, once Roe vs. Wade passed, women and girls weren't about to tolerate being forced to choose adoption anymore, since that typically IS a lifelong trauma.

If you were trying to say that women should save sex for marriage, I'd say that genie left the bottle long ago. Besides, it's not as though "nice" married men never suddenly abandon their wives when the wife gets pregnant and changes her mind about not having children. (Even a man who says HE wants children may well change his mind and disappear after a few years of having babies; it happened all the time, before the Pill. As if men were somehow incapable of looking at families with small children BEFORE they started looking for a wife.)

And we've all heard of the line "I'll marry you if you get pregnant." The younger and lonelier a girl is, the more likely she is to fall for that - or believe, at least, that he'll SUPPORT the baby, even if he doesn't marry her. Desperate loneliness is hardly an easy problem to solve either, when you're young enough to have trouble understanding that just because a boy wants to have sex with you doesn't mean he likes you in any way. (Even Clark Gable, who could have anyone he wanted, was known to sleep with an unattractive woman because "well, she's there.")

Listen, Lenona, I adore you. But the patches of text you post are dense and often ironic and it's impossible to tell which side of the argument you're taking.

I hate it when contemporary people, in this hour when more opportunity for achievemeny.t is available than ever before, start asking where to find the free candy.

When young single mothers ask that question, I think about their children, who'll never be given the chance to see how corrupt the question is... Their minds will be built from idiocy

Crid, that's a great story. Yeah, it's a shame about Little Al. Alcoholism is a bitch. (And the whole Unser family is a bit daft anyhow.)

Crid, I still can't figure out whether or not you meant that girls should save sex for marriage - or try to marry some other man after giving birth. As I said, there are plenty of problems with those choices. One problem I didn't mention is that EITHER sex or abstinence (when you're young) can brainwash you into believing that you've found long-term love when you haven't. So, marrying before age 21 and repenting at leisure is hardly the best way to avoid becoming an abandoned mother. (Who waits to have sex for that long? People who do are suspected of being asexual - or very unpopular.)

And maybe parents would take their sons' careless behavior more seriously (and start warning them harder about responsibility) if the government cracked down harder on young fathers, married or not, who abandon the young mothers. Then maybe we'd have fewer out-of-wedlock pregnancies.

Finally, relatively few parents ENCOURAGE their kids to become lazy non-taxpayers, if that's what you were talking about.

> I still can't figure out whether
> or not you meant that girls should
> save sex for marriage - or try to
> marry some other man after giving
> birth. As I said, there are plenty
> of problems with those choices.

Well, that's hardly the full rainbow of genuine options, right?

Besides, I wasn't really talking about that sort of thing.

The vibe from reading/powerscanning your comment was that there are women who seem to think the two most urgent duties are as follows:

1. Get pregnant. Somehow.


2. Discuss, shamelessly, the fastest/most rhetorically defensible method of extracting charitable sustenance from the surrounding community.

Any fascination with the topic (or even mere engagement with it), any eagerness to chew on the matter, will be taken by such amoral rodents as encouragement.

I hate that.

Bottom line is, I hope we can agree on the following points:

1. It's wrong for a husband to abandon his wife and kids just because he's sick of the responsibility, can't keep a job, and probably only had children to please his parents - or had them by accident.

2. It's just as wrong for a man to abandon his out-of-wedlock children, even if he never planned on having children with any woman. From a child's perspective, what difference does it make if the father was married or not?

3. It's just as wrong for society to kick children to the curb when the father is unwilling to support them - or IS willing, but he needs help. Poverty breeds crime, after all. (The late NYU journalism professor Ellen Willis said in 1985 that, with regard to unwed fathers, "yes, it's unfair that (other men) can say 'tough luck, buddy, but it's not my problem.'" So she likely meant that poor unwed fathers should get help from the state.)

Aside from those points, if it's foolish to argue that there are any simple solutions to poverty, it's just as foolish to argue that there are any simple solutions to fatherlessness. I don't pretend to understand why women in the upper half of society sometimes choose to become single mothers even before they get pregnant (two dear, highly educated teacher-friends of mine did just that, but they live with the fathers). But, the authors of "Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage"(2005) said in the book that POOR women often do that because there aren't enough non-criminal men to marry and the women figure it's better to be a mother on welfare than never to be a mother.

Also, I don't see how we can complain about welfare mothers while complaining about the overall low American birth rate. Well-off women who don't want more children Will Not Have Them, period.

What's more, when it comes to truly unplanned pregnancies, better birth control programs for adults and teens DO seem to be working - see Colorado and Delaware. More on that here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/opinion/what-states-can-do-on-birth-control.html?_r=0

But am I supposed to believe that any of the 20 or more states hoping to outlaw abortion plan to implement programs like that? Fat chance.

1. Ok.

2. Sure.

3. Lenona, they're not my kids to kick, whether to the curb or anywhere else.

Listen— By dint of the very biology, women will, at the drop of a hat, affirm "But I *LOVE* mah kids!!!" …No matter how competent or incompetent they are at parenthood.

But one thing I've noticed which women do for the kids when they love them very deeply is that they give their kids loving fathers. There are really no exceptions. Sometimes terrible shit happens after that, death and mental illness and other tragedies and on and on.

But when mothers are casual about that selection, or desperate to seek external support without even taking a shot (or making sacrifices) in that regard, they seem to be affirming —in the most public manner imaginable— that they themselves don't regard their kids as a good investment.

> [T]he women figure it's better
> to be a mother on welfare than
> never to be a mother.

They are wrong.

…We would agree, I'm certain.

They are wrong.
___________________________

Better for their Own Happiness, that is. The more poor you are, male or female, the more likely you are to think of yourself as worthless and a waste of space if you don't even breed. (Leon Dash spelled that out in his book I mentioned above.)

More later...

I think you know that the idea is that it's uncivilized to LET other people's kids suffer when they didn't ask to be born.

Again, maybe we wouldn't have that problem so often if parents of teen sons took unwed fatherhood more seriously - and really TALKED to them about it.

> I think you know that the idea
> is that it's uncivilized to LET
> other people's kids suffer when
> they didn't ask to be born

I don't understand why you capitalized LET. We're each & all born naked and screaming... Each of our lives is a climb out of adversity. And without exception, all kids are other people's kids: There is literally no boundary to the scope of the responsibility you'd ascribe to me. (And I didn't "know that the idea" was going in that direction; I wouldn't presume.)

Most importantly, when you say "we," you mean action through government.

Now, you could of course convene a like-minded group in your area called The Entirely Voluntary Alliance of Similarly-Concerned Individuals of My General Background, Economic Capacity and Grooming Patterns in My Neighborhood or Region. Every Tuesday evening, you could sit down with the EVASCIMGBECGPiMNoR in a church basement, write personal checks, and figure out how to intrude upon/assist the lives of those who can't help themselves.

But you want to use the irresistible power of government to force me to take part in ten thousand clumsy programs which will bring little or no benefit, which will be imposed upon your targets whether they want them or not, and which will displace the sincere, effective efforts of enterprises like the EVASCIMGBECGPiMNoR and the Catholic church.

Lenona, you are dreaming of the authority to tell others how to live. "TALKED about it" has a similarly smothering tinge.

This is not wordplay. With foaming idiots like AOC and Bernie ascendant in our culture, we should all watch our language very carefully.




I think genuine assistance to others is deeply personal and almost silent.

From Wendy Kaminer:

"People think I'm conservative because there are messages about self-reliance in my work, and I value self-reliance, but I don't expect it of children."

She also said:

"When a Harvard student claims she's oppressed because she's a woman, you know you've just stepped through the looking glass."