Audiobook Of "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" Is Today's Amazon Daily Audible Deal -- 79% Off!
Only $2.95 today (list price, $13.99). You save $11.04! Here's a link to it. (Print edition here.)
And to know a little about the absolutely fabulous and sexy voice Brilliance Audio has reading it (taking into account my requests), here's a bit from my recent post about voice actor Carrington MacDuffie. (She lives in Texas and also sings.)
If You Have A Toddler And You're Carrying A Gun In Your Purse, You Should Engage In Your Own Gun Control -- Buying A "Smart" Weapon
Law prof Jonathan Turley, who refers to himself as "an experienced gun owner," blogs about the tragic story (WaPo link here) about the Idaho woman who was killed by her toddler in a horrible accident, after he pulled her gun from her purse and fired it:
The gun was in the Christmas gift that Rutledge had received from her husband: a purse with a special pocket for a concealed weapon.I do not believe (as some have suggested) that this tragedy is an indictment of gun ownership or even the expansion of concealed weapons permits. In Idaho, more than 85,000 people -- 7 percent of the state population -- are licensed to carry concealed weapons.
What I do believe that the tragedy shows is the still rudimentary state of firearm technology. We have previously discussed how the introduction of "smart guns" could eventually lead to product liability claims in cases of accidental discharges, particularly involving children. One of the most disturbing aspect of this accident is the ease with which a round can be discharged by a toddler. It is not clear if the safety was on the weapon, though as an experienced gun owner I assume that Rutledge had the safety on. However, it is not difficult for a child to switch of a safety. Many new guns will still not discharge without being held by the owner due to an activating ring or other recognition factor.
As noted earlier, there is a chance that "dumb" guns will be viewed as defective. At one time, seat belts and air bags were viewed as extravagances. Personalized guns, or smart guns, can use RFID chips or other proximity devices as well as fingerprint recognition or magnetic rings. Magnetic ring guns are already available. There are even new designs that would allow biometric sensors in the grip and trigger known as (DGR) Dynamic Grip Recognition, which the New Jersey Institute of Technology says can distinguish an owner with 90% accuracy.
No, I am not for the state forcing this on people. I am, however, for people who, say, have children, taking this precaution as part of being good and cafeful parents. If anything good comes of this tragedy, it could be news about and attention paid to these "smart guns."
Why Is It The Govt's Business If I Want To Buy Raw Milk And Someone With A Cow Or Goat Wants To Sell It To Me?
Kenric Ward writes at Watchdog.org about an amendment about to be debated by the Virginia General Assembly guaranteeing the right to buy homegrown and raised food items at Virginia farms:
According to the amendment: "The people shall have the right to acquire for their own consumption farm-produced food directly at the farm with agreement from the farmer who produced it.""Right now, you have right to purchase food of your choice - but regulations prevent the right (of farmers) to sell them. This amendment gives consumers standing in court," says Lois Smith, president of the Virginia Independent Consumers and Farmers Association.
...Christine Solem of Charlottesville says Virginia would be the first state to pass such a constitutional amendment.
"This is a fundamental right," she told Watchdog in an interview. "It's not a health issue -- it's a matter of personal liberty."
Solem, who used to raise goats for goat milk, cites the example of raw milk, whose sale is prohibited in Virginia but allowed in 29 other states.
Only through "herd-sharing" contracts -- in which a "share" of a dairy cow is purchased -- can a person legally buy raw milk in Virginia.
"They're essentially paying the farmer to milk the cow," says Matthew French, a free-range farmer in Bland, Va.
Solem notes that VICFA's measure precludes Internet purchases or sales at farmers markets. The amendment covers only farm-based transactions with individuals.
Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface Farms in Swoope, Va., sees the constitutional amendment "as remediation for a centuries-old oversight to a fundamental human right that the framers of the original Bill of Rights could not have foreseen. They could not have imagined that a day would come when it would be illegal for someone to sell a glass of raw milk to a neighbor."
via @reasonpolicy
Crimes Against The Bureaucracy
John Stossel writes at reason about ignorance on display at the NYT (and business as usual in government):
I've learned to expect economic cluelessness from the Times, but what was different for me last week was that I was on vacation, and my hotel produced a short version of the Times every day called the TimesFax. It gave me a new reason to laugh--and scream.I flipped to a Fax page and read, "Firing of VA Clinic Chief Is Upheld." A judge ruled that Sharon Helman, director of the Veterans Affairs health care system in Phoenix, "could be fired for accepting more than $13,000 in airline tickets and other gifts."
What? Taking gifts is the scandal? She's not fired because of her falsified waiting lists for treatment? Because thousands of veterans at her facilities were cruelly lied to and then denied medical care? No, "the department had not provided sufficient evidence to justify firing Ms. Helman for the manipulation of waiting lists."
At least the Times got the bureaucracy's rules correct. If you work for government, no matter how incompetent you are--even if you do cruel, selfish things that may have killed people--you can't get fired unless an "administrative judge" rules that all arcane civil service due process protections have been honored. You can only be fired if you step outside the bureaucracy's rules and happen to get caught, say, taking obvious bribes like eight-night stays at Disneyland from a company that wants to do business with your agency.
Nowhere does the Times article address the elephant in the room: No organization can do anything efficiently, or even reasonably, unless workers can be fired. Government workers' special "protections" are a reason taxes are high, bridges fall down, public schools decay, the CDC loses Ebola samples, and so on.
But Times writers constantly call for more government, "job protections," etc. Few of them have ever run a business or invented something new themselves. If they had, they might understand this obvious cause of government failure. But they don't. They are oblivious.
Itchy
Your linky or Calamine?
Awful Juxtaposition: "Happy Honda Days" And Air Asia News
The terrible news that bodies are being found in the waters, accompanied by video of the grief-stricken survivors, played right after one of those cloyingly annoying "Happy Honda" commercials. (Incidentally, in general, these make Gregg want to call Honda and tell them he'll never buy one of their cars.)
Check out the caption: 
And yes, I know companies don't intentionally go for placement like this, but I think the world of "automate everything" and nobody's in charge but the computer sometimes could use some human vetting.
Mothers Of Accused College Rapists Fight Back
Well, they're trying, anyway.
A bunch of moms whose sons have been accused of rape on campus get together on Skype once a week to chat about it, and one of them started the group Families Advocating for Campus Equality that pushes for universities to get out of the business of adjudicating sexual assault cases.
The reality is, they're pretty powerless in the face of Obama administration requirements that campuses try -- well, let's be honest, men -- in kangaroo courts. In Josh Strange's case, a librarian headed up the committee.
Nicole Grether and Christof Putzel write at Al Jazeera:
Allison Strange wants those cases to be left to the criminal justice system, and she says you only need to look at her son's case to understand why:Josh Strange had dreamed of attending Auburn since he was 12. Toward the end of his freshman year in 2011, he pledged a fraternity and began dating a young woman he'd met through mutual friends. After a month, they changed their Facebook statuses to "in a relationship."
Then, on June 29, 2011, they went back to his apartment after a night of heavy drinking. Strange said that a little while after going to sleep, the couple woke up and started having sex.
"My girlfriend had woken up, and she initiated everything," he said. "We started having sex that night and all of a sudden, about midway through, she just loses it."
Strange's girlfriend called the police, who detained him for questioning. She said Strange had forced himself on her. He said that she initiated the sex. His accuser didn't press charges. In fact, he said she returned to his apartment the next morning to apologize for the misunderstanding.
"I was just confused," he said. "She looked at me and said, 'Well, it was nothing, you know, I freaked out. I'm sorry.' She said [it was] a misunderstanding. I don't really know what she meant by that, but she just kept apologizing and apologizing."
The couple continued to date and sleep together for another six weeks. Then, their relationship started to fall apart. On Labor Day Weekend of 2011, a month after they cut off communication, Strange was again arrested at his home. He said she made a second false charge of dating violence, accusing him of slapping her in the face with a set of keys in a parking lot of a frozen yogurt shop back in September.
He flatly denies the charge, and said witnesses confirmed that he was 15 miles away from where the incident allegedly took place. This time, however, the accuser did press charges for misdemeanor simple assault, as well as for the earlier alleged incident: felony forcible sodomy.
Strange was cleared of all criminal charges, but a campus kangaroo court decided to expel him.
The university denied America Tonight's request for an interview, but provided a statement: "As you are doubtless aware, federal requirement from the U.S. Dept. of Education mandate that all public universities follow a process that differs from the judicial and law enforcement systems in many ways. Those requirements are very clear and come with severe penalties for noncompliance. We at Auburn take these requirements very seriously and that is reflected in our Code of Student Discipline."Colleges that don't comply with Title IX risk losing their federal funding. And while no school has ever faced that penalty, critics caution that the current administration's more active tack in investigating schools are rushing some to hasty judgments. The recent trend of "yes means yes" or "affirmative consent" policies have further fanned the fears. These conduct codes put more of the burden on the accused to prove that the other person consented, as opposed to making alleged victims prove that they were forced.
"Many legal scholars are actually talking about how there's now a presumption of guilt against the boy who's been accused of sexual assault," Rosenberg said. "...They don't get the due process rights that many Americans would expect to have occur."
His mother said:
"How in the world can we be in a situation where someone's words - without any evidence, without any witnesses, without anything - how in the world can someone's life be turned upside down, or basically ruined?"
via @instapundit
The "Do Something! Anything!" Credo
People are calling for a nationwide boycott of Chipotle Mexican Grill.
The story, via Owen Darcy at The Blaze:
A spokesperson for Chipotle said that nine officers were trying to order food at a location in Brooklyn when an employee put his hands in the air.The gesture appeared to be in reference to the "hands up don't shoot" motion made by Ferguson protesters upset over the shooting death of Michael Brown.
The officers immediately left, according to WPIX, and some have since called for a boycott of the national chain.
On Monday, the CEO released a statement apologizing for the incident.
"An employee put his hands in the air."
That's right -- one guy employed by Chipotle.
Not because his boss told him he had to -- or anybody told him to do it.
Because he felt like it.
This is not cause to boycott an entire restaurant chain -- that is, unless you simply want to take action, and never mind whether it's justified.
More and more, you see that motivation -- or other equally bullshit motivations, like the people in Ferguson "protesting" police actions (that is, looting the businesses of people who had not a thing to do with the police or the policing).
Clunky
Clumsy links.
The Valuing Of Time
A Seneca quote I'm mindful of in an unbylined Economist piece on "time poverty":
Writing in the first century, Seneca was startled by how little people seemed to value their lives as they were living them--how busy, terribly busy, everyone seemed to be, mortal in their fears, immortal in their desires and wasteful of their time. He noticed how even wealthy people hustled their lives along, ruing their fortune, anticipating a time in the future when they would rest. "People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy," he observed in "On the Shortness of Life", perhaps the very first time-management self-help book. Time on Earth may be uncertain and fleeting, but nearly everyone has enough of it to take some deep breaths, think deep thoughts and smell some roses, deeply. "Life is long if you know how to use it," he counselled.
What I've done is figured out ways I can be as efficient as possible with my writing, and some of these ways are counter-intuitive, like taking out time for a walk. (Clears my mind, allows diffuse-mode [background] processing to talk over, and gives me exercise.)
via @KayHymowitz
Obama Administration: "No Unapproved Joy For You!"
When I've had frozen yogurt, which can actually be good if you buy it somewhere where they haven't sucked all the fat out, one of the things I love is to get sprinkles on top.
Do they have trans fats? Sure. But I am not eating sprinkles by the pound -- no one is. It is up to the individual to engage in judicious consumption of sprinkles -- but not on the Obama planet.
No, next year, the FDA is set to finalize a new regulation to eradicate even trace amounts of trans fats in foods. And for more on that, and a trip down memory lane, Mike Flynn writes at Breitbart:
A small amount of trans fats appear naturally in many foods. The new FDA rule would allow these, but broaden its regulatory dragnet to prohibit the very small amounts of artificial trans fats used to prolong the shelf life of many frozen foods, baked goods and, yes, sprinkles.At this juncture, it bears repeating that a large reason trans fats used to be so prevalent in our diets was due to the activism of the food nannies at Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). The left-wing food scolds, most famous for its reports on "calorie bomb" food entrees, pushed restaurants and food companies to switch to trans fats in the 1980s and 1990s.
As research mounted that trans fats were possibly unhealthy, CSPI dismissed these concerns as "rumors." Trans fats, the group concluded, "seem relatively innocent." The groups nutrition director even concluded, "The bottom line, trans...schmans." The group has since completely reversed their views and today raises millions of dollars to agitate for bans of the very products they once promoted.
This Christmas, don't pass up those holiday cookies or cupcakes with the festive sprinkles. They may soon be a distant memory we have to explain to our grandchildren.
The Death Doula: Proposing An Assisted Suicide Assistant
Nora Zamichow and Dr. Ken Murray write in the LA Times that it is time to rethink what we think of as the Hippocratic oath -- "Do no harm" -- when it comes to terminally ill patients who want to end their lives:
Let's agree that by doing no intentional harm, we expect doctors to respect an individual's desire to live. But what if that individual, like Brittany Maynard, has a terminal disease that doctors predict will result in a painful death? Which causes more harm: forcing the terminally ill to suffer and live or allowing them to die without pain?Most Americans support the idea of allowing terminally ill patients to end their lives, according to two recent polls. And physician-assisted suicide is legal in several states.
...What if we created another class of medical professionals known as death doulas, who could fill a gap between treatment doctors and hospice workers?
During childbirth, some women engage a doula to act as their advocate, ensuring that, as much as possible, the woman's wishes are followed. Such a position could also be created to oversee the end of life for the terminally ill.
Most of us know how easy it is to lose one's footing stepping in a hospital. Sometimes, it's because of unforeseen medical events. Other times, it may be a disagreement on how to proceed in a complicated case. A death doula's job would include ensuring, to the extent possible, that a patient's stated desires are obeyed.
And if we are squeamish about doctors "violating" their ethics and prescribing lethal medication for the terminally ill who request it, we could shift this responsibility to licensed doulas, after physicians certify they can no longer help the patient.
Lucy
Ricky-ticky links.
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Said like Charo would say it.
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Why Pay For Leg Room When You Can Whine That The Airline Should Give It To You Free?
A special snowflake going by only "M.R." writes in The Economist's "Gulliver" column of his "modest proposal" that airlines engage in what he calls "equitable treatment" for the tall passenger.
The guy's a Brit -- his excuse for passive-aggressively hoping a flight attendant will notice his legs in the aisle and give him something for nothing. Oh, and the guy clearly hasn't flown since the 90s (or has been in a coma every time), per his comment that commercial flights are "rarely fully booked."
In 2012, Gulliver posed the question of how airlines should accommodate large travellers of a different dimension--lateral rather than longitudinal. Obese passengers, too, struggle to fit into their seats (albeit perhaps as a consequence of their own lifestyle habits, rather than their genetic make-up). Thus Air Canada has a policy of giving XL-sized travellers a complimentary second seat. Commercial flights are rarely fully booked, so in practice this simply means shuffling around some passengers. Most international carriers have adopted similar codes--unwritten or otherwise. They recognise that discreet intervention at the check-in desk can defuse an embarrassing situation, which might otherwise snowball into a discrimination lawsuit.I reckon this civility should be extended to the taller passenger--say, anyone above 6'2"-whose handicap would be mitigated by either a vacant neighbouring seat or an emergency-exit seat. The passenger would merely then enjoy the same proportional seat dimensions as his fellow travellers. No special privilege would be afforded on a comparative scale, therefore no ancillary surcharge need be levied.
The incontrovertible fairness of this approach struck me as I boarded my Wizz Air flight to Sibiu. But, being British, I was wholly unable to vocalise my feelings.
Pussy.
He continues:
Instead, I slung my legs into the aisle and prayed for a cabin crew member to take pity. Periodic, wistful glances at a nearby emergency-exit seat removed any ambiguity from the scene. It was a strategy that had worked handsomely on a recent jaunt to Cape Town with Virgin Atlantic, whose kind staff waived a heftier £40 charge by moving me to the bulkhead. But Wizz Air's attendants would not be swayed. No mercy was extended, even after my knees inadvertently downed a rambunctious toddler who was terrorising the cabin. (I will maintain that it was inadvertent.) I resolved, in that moment, to pen this modest proposal.
As I tweeted (to @BruceRayton, who, presumably being tall, tweeted about the piece, "Sensible proposal, but I would say that, wouldn't I?"):
@amyalkon
.@BruceRayton @thomroulet @TheEconomist "Commercial flights are rarely fully booked." (Last flight in the 90s?) Want space? Pay, don't mooch
My follow-up tweet:
@amyalkon
.@BruceRayton @thomroulet @TheEconomist I need space to write on plane, so I pay for economy plus. I don't expect special snowflake seating
Discover capitalism. Also, avoid aligning yourself with satirist Swift ("modest proposal") in columns in which you are merely whining that you should get something for nothing.
Scissors, Paper, Rock: 2014 Version
Cory Doctorow writes at WIRED (in a story about how restrictions on technology actually expose us to greater harm):
I recently exchanged words in an airport lounge with a late arrival who wanted to use the sole electrical plug, which I had beat him to, fair and square. "I need to charge my laptop," I said. "I need to charge my leg," he said, rolling up his pants to show me his robotic prosthesis. I surrendered the plug.
The point of the piece:
The only way to sustain HAL9000.exe and its brethren--the programs that today keep you from installing non-App Store apps on your iPhone and tomorrow will try to stop you from printing gun.stl on your 3-D printer--is to design the computer to hide them from you. And that creates vulnerabilities that make your computer susceptible to malicious hacking. Consider what happened in 2005, when Sony BMG started selling CDs laden with the notorious Sony rootkit, software designed to covertly prevent people from copying music files. Once you put one of Sony BMG's discs into your computer's CD drive, it would change your OS so that files beginning with $sys$ were invisible to the system. The CD then installed spyware that watched for attempts to rip any music CD and silently blocked them. Of course, virus writers quickly understood that millions of PCs were now blind to any file that began with $sys$ and changed the names of their viruses accordingly, putting legions of computers at risk.Code always has flaws, and those flaws are easy for bad guys to find. But if your computer has deliberately been designed with a blind spot, the bad guys will use it to evade detection by you and your antivirus software. That's why a 3-D printer with anti-gun-printing code isn't a 3-D printer that won't print guns--the bad guys will quickly find a way around that. It's a 3-D printer that is vulnerable to hacking by malware creeps who can use your printer's "security" against you: from bricking your printer to screwing up your prints to introducing subtle structural flaws to simply hijacking the operating system and using it to stage attacks on your whole network.
...But if the world's governments continue to insist that wiretapping capacity must be built into every computer; if the state of California continues to insist that cell phones have kill switches allowing remote instructions to be executed on your phone that you can't countermand or even know about; if the entertainment industry continues to insist that the general-purpose computer must be neutered so you can't use it to watch TV the wrong way; if the World Wide Web Consortium continues to infect the core standards of the web itself to allow remote control over your computer against your wishes--then we are in deep, deep trouble.
The Internet isn't just the world's most perfect video-on-demand service. It's not simply a better way to get pornography. It's not merely a tool for planning terrorist attacks. Those are only use cases for the net; what the net is, is the nervous system of the 21st century. It's time we started acting like it.
Movie Worth Watching
Hilarious comedic martial arts movie, directed, co-written, and co-produced by Stephen Chow, who's also the lead: Kung Fu Hustle
Trailer doesn't do it justice.
My favorite character is the landlady -- watch for her (curlers and cigarette perpetually hanging out of her mouth).
Monkey
Linkie with a few fleas.
The Slippery Slope Of Affirmative Consent: Perhaps Coming To Sex Lives Off Campus, Too
Hans Bader writes at Liberty Unyielding that affirmative consent activists seek to expand government meddling in sex from college campuses into your private life:
So it is with fanatical "Only Yes Means Yes" activists. Earlier this year, they succeeded in convincing California's legislature to pass a law requiring an "agreement" showing "affirmative consent" for sex on college campuses -- and not just for sex, but also for a potentially much broader, undefined category of sexual "activity" among college students. (Even though it's hard to imagine anyone in the real world who would actually want their lover to ask them "may I touch your breast" and "may I massage your clitoris" before doing so, especially if their lover already knows from experience that this sort of thing would be welcome.)
Now, they are back, seeking even more power over people's private lives. Activists quoted in the Huffington Post now want to extend this "affirmative consent" ideology, and its pinched, misleading definition of "consent," beyond college into K-12 schools, and beyond sexual activity to non-sexual touching and unwanted remarks, to teach people the sinister evil of things like "unsolicited hugs." (My wife and daughter hug me without asking for permission, and sometimes it's a surprise -- a pleasant surprise, even if I never "agreed" to it.). Once busybodies start meddling in your personal life, it's hard for them to stop.The meddling won't stop at the schoolhouse gate, and will eventually reach into your private life, too. As lawyer Scott Greenfield notes, progressive law professors have submitted a controversial proposal to the American Law Institute that the Model Penal Code be radically changed to require affirmative "consent" throughout society, for both "sexual intercourse" and a broader range of "sexual contact."
On page 69 of their draft, they explicitly admit that this affirmative "consent" requirement would classify as sexual assault even many "passionately wanted" instances of sex (presumably because of the technicality that such mutually-wanted sexual intercourse is welcomed after -- not affirmatively consented to before -- the sex is initiated.)
Perversely, they justify this massive invasion of people's sex lives as supposedly protecting people's sexual "autonomy" from potentially unwanted sex, even though their proposal goes well beyond banning unwanted sex, to banning sex that was in fact "passionately wanted" although not agreed to in advance. See Model Penal Code: Sexual Assault and Related Offenses, Tentative Draft No. 1 at pg. 69 (April 30, 2014).
I've copied that draft from Scott's site:
Someone was kind enough to provide me with a copy of the current draft of the ALI Model Penal Code for sexual assault and rape. Surprise, affirmative consent is in there:4. Criminal liability in the absence of affirmative consent. Section 213.4 addresses the much-debated situation involving neither express protests nor affirmative permission --a situation, for example, in which one party proceeds to commit an act of sexual penetration while the other party remains silent and passive. Section 213.4 endorses the position that an affirmative expression of consent, either by words or conduct, is always an appropriate prerequisite to sexual intercourse, and that the failure to obtain such consent should be punishable under Article 213. As originally presented to the Advisers, to the Members Consultative Group, and to the Council, the draft treated that offense as a felony of the fourth degree. Subsequent reflection, in light of the numerous comments received on this issue, has led to modification of that judgment. The current draft maintains the view that such misconduct should be considered a serious offense, but in light of the existing ambiguity of social norms in this regard and the extremely serious consequences invariably associated with any conviction for a felony sexual offense, the current draft takes the position that the offense is appropriately graded as a misdemeanor.Boom. Bear in mind, this is a draft.
Keep in mind what this would do. There surely would be the rare woman in a relationship who gets caught up in the "You didn't ask for consent" the morning after. But this will surely be used as a way to get revenge upon men -- revenge that very possibly includes jail time.
And as former Democratic operative Ezra Klein puts it at Vox (and he thinks it's a fab thing that it's passed for college students in California, signed into law by the awful Jerry Brown), it will throw...
...everyday sexual practice into doubt and [create] a haze of fear and confusion over what counts as consent.
Ezra continues:
Men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter. ... To work, "Yes Means Yes" needs to create a world where men are afraid.
As I've said before, men on campus, who have had their due process removed and, on top of that who have Affirmative Consent stuck on them, should never date college women. They should band together and time-share an escort.
And if this law now in draft form ever passes, that's what all men should do -- all who value their freedom.
Yes, this, on the verge of 2015, is what our country has come to -- wussified by feminists into a place where men who would never come close to being rapists under any reasonable standard will live in fear that they will lose their freedom for engaging in normal sex acts in dating and relationships. Or, very possibly, even for giving a sad friend a hug, should she decide to turn vengeful on them.
A Politically Incorrect Look At Who Caused The Ferguson Riots. (Yes, LBJ)
David Malone writes at Classical Liberal Musings:
I've tried to come up with a philosophical and psychological reason why a large group, most of whom are members of the same community, would choose to desecrate that community in response to what they perceive is an injustice against one of their own....The vast majority of these feral youths could care less about justice for Michael Brown, or for that matter, for Michael Brown himself or his grieving family. It is my inclination to believe that these young men (and women) are taking advantage of a terrible situation. They have seen a way to exact revenge on the vile system that Al Sharpton and his ilk have been telling them about. But what they are too ignorant to understand, is that men like Sharpton and many before him are the ones culpable for their plight. They don't believe it possible for blacks and whites to ever coexist in the same country. That slavery never truly ended and the country is still filled with white taskmasters, keeping them forever circumscribed in their impoverished state.
This all began in 1964. Lyndon Johnson, who himself was a racist of the first order, declared war on poverty, and as with any war, it was to be funded with taxpayers money.
...So to expound on Woodrow Wilson's Progressivism and FDR's Second Bill of Rights, and created what he called the Great Society. The wildly utopian expectations (and experimental recklessness in social programs) brought modern liberalism into a crisis and dramatically expanded the administrative state, with all its cost and regulatory reach.
The programs greatly disincentivized work and incentivized slothfulness. But the worst consequences were from the Aid To Families With Dependent Children program. This program began to dismantle the two parent family. In the fifties, although blacks were still struggling for equal opportunities and were on the low-end of the economic ladder, the black family was for the most part strong and stable. Two parent families were the rule, not the exception. They attended church together, had strong moral values, and did not comprise a majority of the prison population. Compare that to the present state of the black community after 50 years of Liberal Socialism. Our prisons are disproportionately black, unwed mothers and single parent families are the rule, black youths without a strong male role model other than rap stars and sports figures, roam the streets and are drawn into a culture of drugs and crime.
Today, about 72%, almost three-fourths, of black children are born out-of-wedlock, and I believe the primary reason stems from the programs initiated from Johnson's "Great Society." And these ills have been expounded on greatly since then.
So that is the rather long answer to the question of the mentality of those burning and looting private businesses and other private property in their own neighborhoods. These people are restless from the monotony that comes from having no daily purpose. Some of these kids and young adults are 3rd or 4th generation welfare recipients who are firmly ensconced in the system the Liberals so cleverly devised. They have no positive male role models. Sadly, they are victims of social experiments that turned out badly. And you can bet that the left-wing, race-baiting Sharpton's of the country want to keep them that way.
via @Mark_J_Perry
Happy Link Year
And an old one filled with linkygood times.
Deelz!
Year-end deals at Amazon
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Thanks so much to all who shop through my links!
Don't Assume The Worst About The Homeless -- Or Anyone
Prankster Josh Paler Lin gives a homeless man $100, secretly follows him, and watches him buy and give out food for others.
If you have lost your job or know someone who has, consider that it's never too late to learn to code, and lead them to "Hour of Code," written about here at Inc. by @RealEvilHRLady Suzanne Lucas.
Mark J. Perry Fact-Checks The Campus Sexual Assault Math
One in five? That's the number of women who are supposedly sexually assaulted on campus.
University of Michigan econ and finance prof Perry writes at AEI:
OK, let's do some math using crime data from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor for 2012:1. Number of female UM students: Approximately 21,000
2. Expected number of sexual assaults if one-in-five women is sexually assaulted in college: 4,200
3. Actual number of reported sexual assaults at UM in 2012: 34
4. Chances of a female UM student being sexually assaulted each year: 1-in-618.
4. Chances over four years that a student will be assaulted while attending college: 4-in-618 or 1-in-155.
Suddenly, it's safe to send your daughter to the University of Michigan again -- though, not your son, who, under the Obama mandate for campus kangaroo courts in sexual assault accusations, has lost his right to due process.
"Rape Culture"? More like "Remove Men's Rights Culture."
Hillarycare: Worse Than Obamacare
New York Post op-ed by Betsy McCaughey:
Clinton ducks questions about her views on health reform. But the plan she proposed in 1993, as first lady, raises concerns.That proposal was even more coercive than ObamaCare. She put price controls on doctors and limits on how much health care the nation could consume annually and how much you could buy for your own family -- even if you paid for it yourself.
True, that was 20 years ago. But it's an important window into her thinking.
...Clinton wouldn't take "no" for an answer. If you failed to enroll or the plan you chose was oversubscribed, government would assign you one (Health Security Act of 1993, pp. 144, 146; the text is available online).
As for people not paying their premiums, Hillary told a House hearing back then that an equivalent amount would "be deducted from their wages or obtained through tax deductions in some other way."
...Government officials would put price controls on what doctors charge, barring them from charging more or accepting payments directly from patients (pp. 236-237). Why would anyone want to pay a doctor directly? Privacy for one thing. Access, for another.
Access would have been a problem. Her plan limited what you would be allowed to pay for insurance. That limits how much money is in the pot to take care of you when you're sick. It turns insurers into rationers.
Princeton Prof. Paul Starr (Hillary's Jonathan Gruber) said it would force doctors and hospitals "to manage under constraint." Under HillaryCare, government could outlaw any plan that cost 20 percent above the average plan.
McCaughey ends with "Hillary may have discarded some of her radical ideas."
Sure, but it does say a good bit about where she's really coming from, if she had her druthers.
Islam's Encouragement Of Sex Slavery
From thereligionofpeace.com (with Quranic support and support from hadiths at the link):
Muslims are encouraged to live in the way of Muhammad, who was a slave owner and trader. He captured slaves in battle. He had sex with his slaves. And he instructed his men to do the same. The Qur'an actually devotes more verses to making sure that Muslim men know they can keep women as sex slaves (4) than it does to telling them to pray five times a day (0)....Slavery is deeply embedded in Islamic law and tradition. Although a slave-owner is cautioned against treating slaves harshly, basic human rights are not obliged. The very fact that only non-Muslims may be taken as slaves is evidence of Islam's supremacist doctrine.
...Most telling, perhaps, is that slavery is still practiced in the Sudan, Niger, Mauritania and a few other corners of the Muslim world - and you won't see any of those Muslim apologists (who shamelessly repeat the lie that Islam abolished slavery) doing or saying anything about it!
In fact, a fatwa was recently issued from a mainstream Islamic source reminding Muslim males of their divine right to rape female slaves and "discipline" resisters in "whatever manner he thinks is appropriate". Not one peep of protest from Islamic apologists was recorded. In 2013, the same site prominently proclaimed that "there is no dispute (among the scholars) that it is permissible to take concubines and to have intercourse with one's slave woman, because Allah says so."
In 2011, what passes for a women's rights activist in Kuwait suggested that Russian women be taken captive in battle and turned into sex slaves in order to keep Muslim husbands from committing adultery. (Other calls for turning non-Muslim women into sex slaves can be found here).
After the Islamic State kidnapped and pressed into slavery thousands of Yazidi women and children in 2014, the caliphate issued an FAQ of sorts on slavery which included rules on sexually molesting children: It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn't reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse; however, if she is not fit for intercourse, then it is enough to enjoy her without intercourse. The best that "mainstream" apologists could muster in response was a letter appealing to "the reality of contemporary times", meaning that Islam has no fixed moral position on the rape of woman and children.
Since Muhammad was a slave owner and slavery is permitted by the Qur'an, the Muslim world has never apologized for this dehumanizing practice. Even Muslims in the West will often try to justify slavery under Islam, since it is a part of the Qur'an.
The Islamic State's sex slavery from the Clarion Project:
Earlier this month the Islamic State published its sharia-law approved rules for how to treat slaves. These rules are not an aberration and are not an innovation. Rather, they are merely enacting long-held legalist understandings of slavery similarly practiced in other places by other Islamists under sharia law.The rules, translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), deal mainly with the subject of female slaves and the laws pertaining to raping them. The document was issued as a pamphlet entitled Su'al wa-Jawab fi al-Sabi wa-Riqab ("Questions and Answers on Taking Captives and Slaves").
See MEMRI's translation of the document.
Linky Way
Next to the Milky one.
Oops...I Think I Forgot To Join The "War On Christmas"
If I'm pretty sure you're Christian, I will say "Merry Christmas!" -- just as if I'm pretty sure it's your birthday, I'll manage to squeeze out "Happy Birthday"...yes, even though I'm a godless harlot.
And no, in case you were wondering, there's no actual "War On Christmas." It just gives Bill O'Reilly something to talk about on slow news days.
Sydney Coffee Shop Siege Question: Where Was The Sniper?
I was wandering around the Internet on Wednesday and saw a guy ask a question I'd wondered about -- why did no sniper take out the Sydney terrorist who took over the coffee shop?
Alex Webley suspects that the hostages died "needlessly," and that those in command were at fault:
So why?We, the humble public, knew that there was only one terrorist. We also knew that he was clearly visible to the camera crews because we could see the evidence.
sniper sightThe terrorist should have been shot in the head by a suitably qualified sniper.
Think about it...if the camera crews were getting good views, then so could a sniper.
He talked to a British guy who he says has held various positions in their armed forces -- from paratrooper to Special Forces. According to Webley, the guy said:
The Martin Place terrorist should have been shot in the head by a suitably qualified sniper.
He continues:
Two people (hostages) therefore died unnecessarily.Other hostages and their loved ones endured suffering longer than they need have.
Police officers who later stormed the cafe were put in danger needlessly.
Australia lost a golden opportunity to show the world that it is serious about dealing with terrorists.
Who Is Killing Young Black Men?
Heather Mac Donald has the stats at City Journal:
Police killings of blacks are an extremely rare feature of black life and are a minute fraction of black homicide deaths. The police could end all killings of civilians tomorrow and it would have no effect on the black homicide risk, which comes overwhelmingly from other blacks. In 2013, there were 6,261 black homicide victims in the U.S.--almost all killed by black civilians--resulting in a death risk in inner cities that is ten times higher for blacks than for whites. None of those killings triggered mass protests; they are deemed normal and beneath notice. The police, by contrast, according to published reports, kill roughly 200 blacks a year, most of them armed and dangerous, out of about 40 million police-civilian contacts a year. Blacks are in fact killed by police at a lower rate than their threat to officers would predict. In 2013, blacks made up 42 percent of all cop killers whose race was known, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation's population. The percentage of black suspects killed by the police nationally is 29 percent lower than the percentage of blacks mortally threatening them.
Linkle Bells
Arf, arf, arf...arf, arf, arf...
Gregg played that for my wee Chinese Crested doggie, Aida, who showed interest only in her kibble.
Govt Licensing Requirements: How To Sneak More Govt Into Paid Childcare
This is a great way to take away an important source of income from poor women, who can't work a 9-5 job and care for their children, but can take care of their children and take some money for caring for others' in their home.
Timothy R. Carney writes at the Wash Ex that the Obama admin is pushing for more guidelines in who gets grants for childcare, but that this, per AEI research fellow Katherine Stevens, is likely a sneaky way to make childcare more regulated. The sort of rules they're going for?
These aren't rules governing basic health and safety standards, like drinking water, cleanliness or broken glass. Some are micromanaging: "cot placement" for daycare. Others are about requiring credentialing -- such as requiring preschool teachers to have bachelor's degrees....Excessive regulation of daycare and preschool mostly hurts the poor and working class. For one thing, it makes daycare rarer and more expensive.
Some on the Left will respond and say, "well, let's just subsidize them more." That doesn't address the other problem: curbing work opportunities for women.
More importantly, unnecessary regulation and credentialing requirements take away from many women the best way they could make money: at-home daycare.
via @instapundit
The Palestinians Don't Want A Two-State Solution
At least officially speaking, they want all of Israel and all of the Jews dead, per this lovely hadith and per the Hamas Charter.
Jeff Robbins writes in the Boston Globe about a "very good question" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
At a panel on the Mideast conflict two years ago, then-Representative Barney Frank asked the late Leonard Fein, a left-leaning critic of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, why it was that if the Palestinians truly desired a two-state solution, they had continued to reject Israeli offers of a Palestinian state in return for peace. "That," replied Fein, "is a very good question."With the Palestinians' decision to enlist the United Nations to impose terms on the Israelis despite objections by the United States, the question remains not only a very good one, but the proverbial elephant in the room. Why, indeed, is it that the Palestinians rejected Israel's offer for an independent Palestinian state comprised of virtually all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and a capital in East Jerusalem in 2000, in 2001, and then again in 2008? After all, acceptance of any of those peace deals would have resulted not just in an end to the settlement construction that the Palestinians assert is the obstacle to peace, but the evacuation of tens of thousands of Israelis from the West Bank. What inference is a reasonable person to draw from that rejection?
...The answer to the "very good question" posed by Frank, and the reasonable inference to be drawn from the history of Palestinian rejectionism, is not a particularly happy one. It is that Israel's proposals for an independent Palestinian state have come with a condition that the Palestinian leadership has regarded as a deal-breaker: a permanent end of the conflict, and a commitment to accept Israel's existence. By contrast, the Security Council end-game sought by the Palestinians is an end-run around any such condition; it would impose on the Palestinians no obligation to end the dispute.
This is not by chance. As Abbas knows, the Palestinian street opposes any end of conflict with Israel that fails to bring about its disappearance.
How Completely Stupid Is The TSA?
Complete dumbassery in what is and isn't banned, via "The TSA's 12 Banned Items of Christmas," via Reason TV:
Slinky
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Voice Actor Carrington MacDuffie As The Voice Of "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck"
My first feeling, not surprisingly, was joy when my literary agent told she'd gotten an offer from Brilliance for the rights to publish my St. Martin's Press book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," as an audiobook. (Buy the audio book atAmazon; at B&N.)
My eventual feeling was terror -- thinking of all the cutesy pie-voiced female narrators out there. If there is anything my humor is not, it is not cute.
But I worked with Brilliance to give them ideas of what was important to me, and they came up with one voice actor -- Carrington MacDuffie -- who actually exceeded my hopes. (And I hear with some frequency that people really love her narration.)
As I wrote to Adrienne, who produced for Brilliance:
Thank you so much for the wonderful choice of Carrington MacDuffie. Exactly, exactly right in timbre and in the way she isn't cutesy. Also a voice I could listen to for hours, and I'm sure others feel the same. Very, very grateful!
Carrington and I have been following each other on Twitter and had a great phone conversation the other day. She is really interesting and also writes and performs music and is a babe. We hope to do a video of the two of us talking about the stuff of creative careers when she's in LA. At my request, she wrote a paragraph about her voice work and her voice work on my book specifically:
As a voice actor, you get cast according to the kinds of tone and timbre and emotional color you naturally express: quirky, serious, textured, melancholy, childlike, etc. My voice runs the range from mature, wise, authoritative, serious, to warm and kind, to sultry, to earnest, to imperious, to educated and classy, to dry and ironic. (That doesn't include character work, which encompasses a wider range and greater extremes.) Dry and ironic are why I was cast to narrate Amy Alkon's wonderfully wry and humorously barbed but still serious book. Tone is ever important in a narration job like this, where the author's voice and attitude are so strong, and her intent so energetically unalloyed. It's a matter of getting your mind inside the author's intent, and using the parts of your voice that match the personality revealed in her writing. With a book like this, it's a blast.
Here's a sample of Carrington MacDuffie reading from my book:
This morning, putting this YouTube clip into the piece, I was once again filled with gratitude for how Carrington does not cutesy-read. I was reminded of how Elmore Leonard would talk about how only Barry Sonnenfeld got his dialogue right -- in "Get Shorty." The characters read the lines straight. They don't mug to the camera after each line. They don't know they're funny. Which is what makes it funny.
And the face behind the voice:
More about her at her site, CarringtonMacDuffie.com, where there's a very sexy shot of her in cowboy hat.
A Comatose Congress Is The Best Congress
Glenn Reynolds writes in USA Today about the mistaken belief that Congress is doing a good thing by passing a whole bunch of laws:
A recent article in The Hill described the now-adjourned 113th Congress as "historically unproductive," observing that "few Congresses have sent less bills to a president in 20 years."This, I'm afraid, reflects a common journalistic belief that when legislatures are passing legislation, they're producing something valuable. But while it's true that when oil wells produce oil, or gold mines gold or automobile factories cars, those entities are being productive, it's not so clear that every time a legislature passes a law it's producing something of value. In fact, there's good reason to suspect just the opposite.
When Congress passes a law, it is pretty much always either limiting someone's freedom or spending taxpayer money. Sometimes those are good things: The civil rights laws of the 1960s took away the freedom to engage in racial discrimination, and the spending of World War II and the Cold War defeated the evils of Nazism and Communism.
But most congressional action doesn't rise to that level, and much of it -- things like pork-barrel projects or bills that protect special interests from competition -- is a net loss. Even worse, once legislation is enacted, it becomes very difficult to repeal.
He argues for creating "a legislative body that can only repeal laws":
Nobody in Congress gets much in the way of votes by repealing laws. All the institutional pressures point the other way.So in a third house of Congress -- let's call it the House of Repeal -- the only thing that the elected legislators would have the power to do would be to repeal laws, meaning that for them, all the votes, campaign contributions, media exposure and opportunities for hearings would revolve around paring back the federal behemoth. It's an extension of James Madison's principle (or, possibly, Alexander Hamilton's) enunciated in Federalist No. 51 that, since politicians are always ambitious, in a free society "ambition must be made to counteract ambition."
Though the details, as with all constitutional provisions, matter a lot, the key virtue of a House of Repeal goes beyond the details: The point of its existence would be to give someone in the federal government an incentive to give us less law rather than more.
"Homeland" Watchers
What the hell was with the "Homeland" finale? "Hi, I'm CIA director, and here's a container of lasagna."
Gregg and I watched it last night on Showtime on Demand and were dumbfounded.
All I'll say here in this post (in case someone has yet to watch) is that above.
Hint: Comments are likely to be filled with spoilers.
Breaching The Security Puppet Show Takes Only An IQ Over The School Speed Limit
We see evidence of this over and over again -- last with baggage handlers at JFK stealing from people's bags. (Elementary logic moment: If you can remove stuff, you can put stuff in.)
The latest is example is a bit of gun smuggling. An Atlanta baggage handler apparently helped another man smuggle guns on a flight, using a "buddy pass."
From WSBTV:
According the complaint, Harvey, the employee, bypassed TSA security and brought the smuggler the guns.The FBI believes a total of 18 guns bypassed security and ended up on a carryon baggage aboard a Delta Airlines flight to New York.
The complaint alleges that the undercover officer was supplied a total of 129 guns, including and AK 47 and an AR 15.
It is not yet clear if all those guns were also smuggled onto a flight.
The breach is one of the biggest security breaches in recent years, according to affidavit details.
One of the biggest they've discovered.
While some lady is busy checking your labia for explosives in a ridiculous pretense of security that's actually just a jobs program for unskilled workers, a way to accustom us to having our bodies and constitutional rights violated, and a nice source of big bucks for all the people and companies in the lobbying chain.
Lumpy
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Some Comcast-Using Animals Are More Equal Than Others
Daniel Halper writes at The Weekly Standard [with annoying autoplay]:
Having a problem with your Comcast cable? No problem--that is if you fall into the following categories: "congressional staffers, journalists, and other influential Washingtonians." Just talk to a Comcast lobbyist.In a lengthy piece on how NBC's David Gregroy was fired, the Washingtonian reveals the cable company's way of "sucking up to Washington."
Comcast also had an even more personal way of sucking up to Washington. Its government-affairs team carried around "We'll make it right" cards stamped with "priority assistance" codes for fast-tracking help and handed them out to congressional staffers, journalists, and other influential Washingtonians who complained about their service.
Comcast counters that every Comcast employee receives these cards to give out.
via @againstcronycap
Which Women Are More Likely To Be Raped And The Myth That Rape Is About Violence
It isn't the women on campus who are most likely to be raped. Callie Marie Rennison, co-director of University of Colorado's Criminology and Criminal Justice Research Initiative, writes in The New York Times that there is a relationship between financial and social disadvantage and sexual victimization:
Young women who don't go to college are more likely to be raped. Lynn A. Addington at American University and I recently published a study based on the Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey data from 1995 to 2011. We found that the estimated rate of sexual assault and rape of female college students, ages 18 to 24, was 6.1 per 1,000 students. This is nothing to be proud of, but it is significantly lower than the rate experienced by women that age who don't attend college -- eight per 1,000. In other words, these women are victims of sexual violence at a rate around 30 percent greater than their more educated counterparts.The focus on sexual violence against some of our most privileged young people has distracted us from the victimization of those enjoying less social and economic advantage.
...Women in the lowest income bracket, with annual household incomes of less than $7,500, are sexually victimized at 3.7 times the rate of women with household incomes of $35,000 to $49,999, and at about six times the rate of women in the highest income bracket (households earning $75,000 or more annually). Homeownership is another example of how economic advantage serves to protect women from sexual violence. Woman living in rented properties are sexually victimized at 3.2 times the rate of women living in homes that they or a family member own.
...Women at the margins are the ones who bear the brunt of the harshest realities, including sexual violence, and they do so with the least resources. Am I saying that we should ignore sexual violence against the wealthy and educated? Of course not. Nor is it wrong to pay special attention to college-age women: The one risk factor that remains consistent whether women are advantaged or disadvantaged is age, and women ages 16 to 20 are sexually victimized at the highest rates.
But we cannot let attention to a particular group, or the suggestion of an epidemic where one does not exist, distract us from the pressing needs of others.
Rape, as Thornhill and Palmer note, is not a crime of violence but a crime of sex -- which is why it is mostly done to young, fertile women.
As I wrote in one of my previous blog posts:
The Evolutionary Basis For Rape
Using scientific methodology and reason, Thornhill and Palmer show (in well-documented detail) that there's an evolutionary basis for rape; that rape is a sexual act -- most likely an evolutionary adaptation that originated as a way for men to spread their genes.Thus, although rape can be violent, this doesn't mean a man's motivation to rape is violence. Thornhill and Palmer note that "rapists rarely engage in gratuitous violence, defined as expending energy beyond what is required to subdue or control the victim and inflicting injuries that reduce the victim's chance of surviving to become pregnant or that heighten the risk of eventual injury to the rapist from enraged relatives of the victim (all ultimate costs of rape)."
Thornhill and Palmer explain that there's a difference between "instrumental force, (the force actually needed to complete the rape, and possibly to influence the victim not to resist, not to call for help, and/or not to report the rape) and excessive force (which might be a motivating end in itself). Only excessive force is a possible indication of violent motivation. Use of forceful tactics to reach a desired experience does not imply that the tactics are goals in themselves (unless...one is willing to argue that a man's giving money to a prostitute in exchange for sex is evidence that the man's behavior is motivated by a desire to give away money). Here again the crucial distinction between goals and tactics is blurred when rape is referred to as an act of violence."
Thornhill and Palmer understand what they're up against -- years of ingrained feminist propaganda that "the patriarchy," violent TV shows, and nasty old American culture are to blame. "Debates about what causes rape have been evaluated not on the basis of logic and evidence," they observe, "But on the basis of how the different positions might influence people to behave." What the propaganda purveyers don't understand is key: It's the actual truth about why some men rape that will have the greatest influence on whether or not they do, and on whether or not women can avoid being raped (and feeling stigmatized if they are).
Elon Musk's Hyperloop From LA To SF -- And Beyond
While government champions the "high speed" train up and down California that won't actually be high in anything but continuing cost overrun, actual transportation innovation comes out of people in private business.
David R. Baker writes at SFGate:
Elon Musk's proposed "hyperloop" system for whisking travelers between San Francisco and Los Angeles inside elevated tubes is technically feasible and should be expanded into a nationwide network, even though it would cost more per mile than initially thought. That's the conclusion of an unusual startup company formed to pursue the idea, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies. The startup, really a collection of unpaid volunteers with day jobs at some of Silicon Valley's biggest companies, will release an update on its efforts Friday.So far, the group has found no reason the hyperloop wouldn't work. As envisioned by Musk, the serial entrepreneur behind Tesla Motors and SpaceX, the system would ferry passengers inside capsules hurtling through sealed tubes at more than 760 mph. Musk pitched the idea last year as an alternative to California's planned high-speed rail system, which he said would look like Amtrak in comparison.
"We can say that it's completely feasible," said Dirk Ahlborn, CEO of Hyperloop Transportation. "We know we can build it."
The company on Friday will release an interim feasibility study that fleshes out and refines Musk's idea. Although Musk suggested the hyperloop could be built for $6 billion -- far less than the high-speed rail system's current $68 billion price tag -- Ahlborn and his colleagues say the price would be more like $7 billion to $16 billion for the San Francisco-Los Angeles route.
Still, they argue that the hyperloop shouldn't be confined to a single route. They suggest building a nationwide network, one that could revolutionize long-distance travel. The system would be fast enough and cheap enough, with tickets costing $20 to $30, that users could live in one metropolitan area and work in another, even if it's hundreds of miles away.
"It's not really so much about the technology at this point," Ahlborn said. "It's more about how would we integrate the hyperloop into our daily lives."
Snippy
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Co-Ed Combat
This woman really aced the grenade toss exercise. (In the spirit of putting it all out there: In ability to throw, I suck slightly more than she does.)
Wayne State law prof Kingsley Browne on co-ed combat -- why it will mean more dead men.
To Be A Woman Under Islam
Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels writes at 10NewsDK of the impact of Islam on women in Muslim societies:
The constant threat of being disowned by their family, having their few privileges revoked, being locked up, beaten or even killed, prevents these Muslim girls and women from challenging the limitations set by Islamic Sharia Law and its male proponents. The condescending verses in the Islamic scriptures function the same way, as negative psychological propaganda about the enemy that is indoctrinated into a country's soldiers during war: it demonizes the opponent and removes empathy that would otherwise stop one from harming it.The vast majority of the 700 million Muslim girls and women worldwide live without basic human rights, such as the freedom to chose their own sexual partners, their clothes, their life style and of course their religion. ... Regular, and often very bloody, examples makes sure that only the bravest and desperate women try to escape or break the rules.
On top of the threats from their own family and the horrible scare examples, come the stories about what happens to "bad girls" when they die.
The Qur'an's descriptions of the Hells, and Muslim families' tales about what strange men will do to loose women, form, for those who have been psychologically indoctrinated with the validity of such tales since they were born, an effective mental barrier, prompting even Muslim women who are more free to claim that they wear their veil and invisible chains voluntarily.
Related: Life for women in Iran.
E-Z Pass Is E-Z Spy
With technology comes so many more ways to identify you as a wrongdoer or lawbreaker.
E-Z Pass is keeping an electronic eye on speeders, reports Larry Copeland in USA Today:
Several states, including New York, Maryland and Pennsylvania, say they monitor speeds through the fast pass toll lanes and will suspend your E-Z Pass for multiple speeding violations.In all, five of the 15 E-Z Pass states have some kind of rules on the books for breaking the speed limit in the convenience lanes.
"You can lose your E-Z Pass privileges if you speed through E-Z Pass lanes," says Dan Weiller, director of communications for the New York State Thruway Authority. "You get a couple of warnings. We don't have the power to give a ticket, but we do have to power to revoke your E-Z Pass, which we will."
He and tolling officials in several other states say the issue is the safety of human toll collectors. "At most toll barriers, we have a mix of E-Z Pass lanes and standard toll lanes," Weiller says.
On Maryland toll roads, drivers' speed is monitored in the free-flowing toll lanes, which have a 30 mph speed limit, says Becky Freeberger, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Transportation Authority. "If we clock you at 12 mph more than that, we will send you a warning, saying slow down," she says. "It's not a ticket." If a driver gets a second such notice within six months, their E-Z Pass account can be suspended for up to 60 days.
The issue here is not about what E-Z pass wants and whether it's a good thing; it's about privacy being yanked from us without our notice, as is increasingly happening.
Via Jay J. Hector
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Clooney's Right
Clooney told Deadline Hollywood:
Forget the hacking part of it. You have someone threaten to blow up buildings, and all of a sudden everybody has to bow down. Sony didn't pull the movie because they were scared; they pulled the movie because all the theaters said they were not going to run it. And they said they were not going to run it because they talked to their lawyers and those lawyers said if somebody dies in one of these, then you're going to be responsible.We have a new paradigm, a new reality, and we're going to have to come to real terms with it all the way down the line. This was a dumb comedy that was about to come out. With the First Amendment, you're never protecting Jefferson; it's usually protecting some guy who's burning a flag or doing something stupid. This is a silly comedy, but the truth is, what it now says about us is a whole lot. We have a responsibility to stand up against this. That's not just Sony, but all of us, including my good friends in the press who have the responsibility to be asking themselves: What was important? What was the important story to be covering here? The hacking is terrible because of the damage they did to all those people. Their medical records, that is a horrible thing, their Social Security numbers. Then, to turn around and threaten to blow people up and kill people, and just by that threat alone we change what we do for a living, that's the actual definition of terrorism.
Nobody took a stand. Here's the petition Hollywood wouldn't sign:
On November 24 of this year, Sony Pictures was notified that it was the victim of a cyber attack, the effects of which is the most chilling and devastating of any cyber attack in the history of our country. Personal information including Social Security numbers, email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers and the full texts of emails of tens of thousands of Sony employees was leaked online in an effort to scare and terrorize these workers. The hackers have made both demands and threats. The demand that Sony halt the release of its upcoming comedy The Interview, a satirical film about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Their threats vary from personal--you better behave wisely--to threatening physical harm--not only you but your family is in danger. North Korea has not claimed credit for the attack but has praised the act, calling it a righteous deed and promising merciless measures if the film is released. Meanwhile the hackers insist in their statement that what they've done so far is only a small part of our further plan. This is not just an attack on Sony. It involves every studio, every network, every business and every individual in this country. That is why we fully support Sony's decision not to submit to these hackers' demands. We know that to give in to these criminals now will open the door for any group that would threaten freedom of expression, privacy and personal liberty. We hope these hackers are brought to justice but until they are, we will not stand in fear. We will stand together.
Unmask The High-Placed Bumbler In The CIA
Please, somebody who knows who this chickie is, name names. Give it to some blogger on a slip of paper and get this information out there.
Jane Mayer writes in The New Yorker:
A single senior officer, who is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.--a woman who he does not name--appears to have been a source of years' worth of terrible judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable. Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that "she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done."
Instead, however, she has been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently working as the head of the C.I.A.'s global-jihad unit.
Government -- fail your way to the top, with tragic consequences, and stay there.
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Don't forget to pick up my book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," for all the wonderful people and all the assholes in your life!
The Case Against Boycotting Soda Stream At Harvard
Alan Dershowitz has a well-argued piece in the Harvard Crimson on Harvard University Dining Services' decision to boycott SodaStream products.
But first, the background, from a story by Marie A. Klein and Theodore R. Delwiche in the Crimson:
Harvard University Dining Services had suspended purchases of soda water machines from an Israeli company associated with an international settlement dispute, University President Drew G. Faust has requested an investigation into the decision, according to Provost Alan M. Garber '76.Last spring, HUDS stopped purchasing SodaStream water machines following complaints from members of the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee and the Harvard Islamic Society, who raised concerns to administrators that the appliances could offend Palestinian students. The company's main factory is currently located in the West Bank, a site of conflict over land ownership between Israel and Palestine. The company recently announced plans to move the factory to another location.
An excerpt from Dershowitz's piece, which has many other good points:
The students who sought the boycott of SodaStream invoked human rights. But it is they who are causing the firing of more than 500 Palestinian workers who would like to continue to earn a living at SodaStream. As a result of misguided boycotts, such as the one unilaterally adopted by the Harvard University Dining Services, SodaStream has been forced to move its factory to an area in Israel where few, if any, Arabs can be employed. This is not a victory for human rights. It is a victory for human wrongs.I have no doubt that some students and other members of the Harvard community may be offended by the presence of SodaStream machines. Let them show their displeasure by not using the machines instead of preventing others who are not offended from obtaining their health benefits. Many students are also offended by their removal. Why should the views of the former prevail over those of the latter? I'm sure that some students are offended by any products made in Israel, just as some are offended by products made in Arab or Muslim countries that oppress gays, Christians and women. Why should the Harvard University Dining Service--or a few handfuls of students-- get to decide whose feelings of being offended count and whose don't?
In addition to the substantive error made by HUDS, there is also an important issue of process. What right does a Harvard University entity have to join the boycott movement against Israel without full and open discussion by the entire university community, including students, faculty, alumni and administration? Even the president and provost were unaware of this divisive decision until they read about it in the Crimson. As Provost Alan M. Garber '76 wrote, "Harvard University's procurement decisions should not and will not be driven by individuals' views of highly contested matters of political controversy."
Were those who made the boycott decision even aware of the arguments on the other side, such as those listed above? The decision of the HUDS must be rescinded immediately and a process should be instituted for discussing this issue openly with all points of view and all members of the university community represented. The end result should be freedom of choice: those who disapprove of SodaStream should be free to drink Pepsi. But those who don't disapprove should be free to drink SodaStream.
Republican Crony Capitalists In Utah Go After Insurance Startup
The notion that the Republicans are the party of free enterprise is a pantload. They just tend to be more so than the Democrats -- and as long as nobody well-established and well-funded is complaining about some upstart disrupting how things have been done.
Patrick Gleason writes at Forbes about Zenefits, a SF-based startup launched in 2013:
As TechCrunch describes it, Zenefits helps businesses by providing "a cloud-based dashboard to HR departments designed to help small businesses manage hiring, termination and all the benefits and payroll details necessary in-between those events." Zenefits also connects companies with health insurance providers.This cutting edge startup has experienced great success early on in large part because, as the aforementioned TechCrunch article points out, Zenefits "makes it just that much easier to manage the insurance piece once a business has authorized the company as its broker. And, as a result, more traditional insurance brokers are finding it difficult to compete with the company's business model."
Utah's traditional insurance brokerage community is none too pleased about having to compete with Zenefits. On November 20, Utah Insurance Commissioner Todd Kiser sent a letter to Zenefits, informing the company that it is violating Utah inducement and rebating laws because it offers its software for free. Kiser said the company should be assessed $5,000 for each violation and twice the profit generated per violation. Because of this, Zenefits would currently be on the hook for at $97,000 penalty.
Kiser told Zenefits that it could come into compliance with state law by raising prices and ceasing to advertise. Zenefits does not charge businesses for their software, but they generate a profit from commission paid by the insurance providers with which they connect their clients. Zenefits understandably does not wish to go along with Kiser's orders. It's worth noting that Commissioner Kiser was an insurance broker for 25 years prior to being elected to the state legislature. Kiser's dictate, at the expense of small businesses, will protect brick-and-mortar brokerages like the one he used to run. He even said, in his own words, "the ease of using Zenefits" is part of the reason why he went after them.
So in Utah, it's apparently a bad thing for a new company to make it easier for employers to operate their business. That's an odd approach and one that won't help the state market itself to companies looking to move to and create jobs in Utah. It's also at odds with Utah Gov. Gary Herbert's stated commitment to foster and support tech innovation in the state.
AEI's Mark J. Perry writes:
It's classic government-enforced protectionism that protects existing, incumbent high-cost industries from the competition of efficient, low-cost startup rivals. And it's also a classic case of "regulatory capture" defined here as:The process by which regulatory agencies eventually come to be dominated by the very industries they were charged with regulating. Regulatory capture happens when a regulatory agency, formed to act in the public's interest, eventually acts in ways that benefit the industry it is supposed to be regulating, rather than the public.This is a perfect opportunity to invoke the timeless wisdom of French economist Frederic Bastiat, who wrote this in 1850 four days before his death:
Treat all economic questions from the viewpoint of the consumer, for the interests of the consumer are the interests of the human race.Regrettably, Utah Insurance Commissioner Kiser has ruled against the interests of the human race and the citizens and businesses of Utah in favor of an entrenched special interest group, to the great overall detriment of his state. Hopefully, Governor Herbert will side with the public interest and with Bastiat.
via @againstcronycap
Science Is Beautiful
"Maybe for once I'll be able to put change in a pop machine and get the pop out of it. Simple things that people never think of," says shoulder-level amputee Les Baugh, who lost his arms in a freak electrical accident.
Baugh gets new arms -- wirelessly integrated into his body and totally controlled by his own brain -- created aby a team at John Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory:
via @GuyKawasaki
Revolutionizing Blood Testing
Ken Auletta writes in The New Yorker about Elizabeth Holmes, a woman who's well on her way to "disrupting" medical testing with a cheaper, easier, less needle-scary blood test that will be available at Walgreen's and requires just a finger-prick:
When your physician wants to check some aspect of your health, such as your cholesterol or glucose levels, or look for indications of kidney or liver problems, a blood test is often required. This typically involves a long needle and several blood-filled vials, which are sent to a lab for analysis. Altogether, diagnostic lab testing, including testing done by the two dominant lab companies, Quest and Laboratory Corporation of America, generates seventy-five billion dollars a year in revenue.Holmes told the audience that blood testing can be done more quickly, conveniently, and inexpensively, and that lives can be saved as a consequence. She was wearing her daily uniform--a black suit and a black cotton turtleneck, reminiscent of Steve Jobs--and had pinned her hair into an unruly bun. As she spoke, she paced slowly, her eyes rarely blinking, her hands clasped at her waist. Holmes started Theranos in 2003, when she was nineteen; she dropped out of Stanford the following year. Since then, she told the audience, the company has developed blood tests that can help detect dozens of medical conditions, from high cholesterol to cancer, based on a drop or two of blood drawn with a pinprick from your finger. Theranos is working to make its testing available to several hospital systems and is in advanced discussions with the Cleveland Clinic. It has also opened centers in forty-one Walgreens pharmacies, with plans to open thousands more. If you show the pharmacist your I.D., your insurance card, and a doctor's note, you can have your blood drawn right there. (The sample is then sent to a Theranos lab.) From that one sample, Holmes said, several tests can be run--all less expensive than standard blood tests, sometimes as much as ninety per cent below the rates that Medicare sets. A typical lab test for cholesterol can cost fifty dollars or more; the Theranos test at Walgreens costs two dollars and ninety-nine cents.
...Holmes thinks that getting a blood test should instead be a "wonderful" experience, and the aim of Theranos is to lower the barriers. She told the crowd that between forty and sixty per cent of people who are ordered by their doctor to get a blood test do not. Diabetes, sexually transmitted diseases, and other common medical conditions could be diagnosed and treated earlier if the tests were less onerous and more accessible, she said. "We see a world in which no one ever has to say, 'If only I'd known sooner.' A world in which no one ever has to say goodbye too soon."
This is the innovation that America and what's left of capitalism makes possible -- that is impossible in places like France.
Of course, our government likes to step in and see that it's impossible here. As Auletta writes:
Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration barred 23andme from disseminating some information out of concern that consumers might misunderstand or misuse it.
Do we really think someone who finds out they have a disease via a company like this is going to get up on the kitchen table and perform surgery on themselves?
We need to protect ourselves from a government that sees its job as protecting us from innovation and change. (Surely with a little help in the form of fuckloads of cash from its K Street status quo-maintaining friends.)
via KateC
Miffy
Snottylinks.
Random Questions Blog Item
Mine for today:
What's the attraction to "red velvet" baked goods? (They're the color of an ugly scarf & kind of taste like one, too.)
Feel free to answer and/or post your own.
#illridewithyou Story Mostly Made Up
#iliedtoselfaggrandise? #iliedtogetattention?
This was the story of a woman who supposedly offered to protect a woman in a hijab on public transit in Australia. Bullshit, apparently.
University lecturer Rachael Jacobs says she did see a woman on the train remove a scarf from her head, but...
Brighette Ryan reports in The Australian:
Rachael Jacobs has admitted that she "editorialised'' parts of her story."Confession time. In my Facebook status, I editorialised. She wasn't sitting next to me. She was a bit away, towards the other end of the carriage," she wrote.
Detailing her thought process, Ms Jacobs now says she wondered if she even needed to help."She might not even be Muslim or she could have just been warm!," she wrote.
The hashtag continues to divide people on social media, with some lauding it as Australia's way of combating Islamophobia.
Others say it detracts from the real tragedy of two people being murdered at Martin Place.
Gregg and I discussed this in the car on the way home from doing some shopping. The problem isn't individual Muslims but Islam, which calls for the death or conversion of the infidel, the death of apostates, the death of gays, and the installation of The New Caliphate across the globe. The terrorist attacks and murders of individuals across the globe who are Christian and other religions than Islam are a reflection of that command.
More from Breitbart's James Delingpole, dissecting what happened:
As ever, the bleeding hearts are missing the point. No one is arguing that there should be any kind of repercussions against Muslims. What we're saying is that behind Australia's national outbreak of mawkish special pleading and ecumenical outreach lurks yet another dodgy campaign by the inevitable lefty activists to hijack the news agenda for their dubious political ends.As Devine notes, the woman who started the campaign by parading her own virtue in that initial tweet was Rachael Jacobs a Green party candidate from Brisbane who - as Jacobs herself admitted in a piece for Fairfax media (c'mon Gina? What are you waiting for? Buy up the rest of the operation. Then feed it to the sharks) may not have witnessed quite the scene of oppressed Muslim victimhood she imagined she had.
Elsewhere, we learn that the person who turned Jacobs's initial, self-serving Tweet into a viral sensation was yet another left-leaning activist (H/T to regular reader rightrightright). Her name is Tessa Kum and here (didn't I predict this was how the ABC would respond?) is how she was celebrated in an ABC interview.
Inspired by other acts of generosity that she'd read about on social media, Tessa Kum invited anyone wearing religious attire who was afraid for their safety to ride alongside her on public transport.
...But as investigative blogger Steve Sailer has discovered, Ms Kum is a little more complicated than that. Unless she is someone entirely different from the person called Tessa Kum who wrote this blog, she appears to have hate issues of her own so serious it's about time someone started a hashtag campaign to try to deal with them.
Here is our Tessa in cheery form:
I'm learning about hate because I am coming to hate you, white person. You have all the control, all the power, all the privilege, and there is nothing holding you accountable. I hate the double standards and hypocrisy you display, the rank dishonesty of your conduct. I hate that you can harm us, when we cannot harm you. I hate that you have actually impacted on careers, multiple and not even directly, with your hypocrisy. I hate that you're so dominant in the publishing industry there's very few venues I'd consider safe to even submit to now. I hate what you have done to PoC I don't know. I hate what you have done to PoC I do know. I hate what you have done to me, and I was not involved.So, not a neutral party motivated solely by love of her fellow human beings, then. But an anti-white racist motivated by, er, now what was that word beginning with "h" again?
If only Katrina Dawson and Tori Johnson had had time to read Tessa Kum's screed. Then maybe they would have had the opportunity before they died to check their privilege and realise that basically - at least in the opinions of a certain kind of crusading Social Justice Warrior - they had it coming...
Muslims are actually not the ones in danger. It is largely others being persecuted by Muslims -- and slaughtered -- as Islam commands. For example, from RSN:
Thousands of Buddhist teachers and Children in Thailand have been slaughtered by Muslims in the past ten years. Will you ride with them?Scores of Catholics in The Philippines have been killed by Muslims in the past few years. Will you ride with them?
Thousands of Hindu girls have been kidnapped, raped, forcibly converted to Islam and forcibly married in recent years. Will you ride with them?
More Christians were slaughtered in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world for the past two years. Will you ride with them?
Christians are being systematically forcibly converted to Islam or killed or persecuted in Kenya and Somalia and Ethiopia. Will you ride with them?
Sura 9:5 from the article:
009.005: But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, an seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful.
And from Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels at 10newsdk:
What should worry us is that the share of Muslims taking the Quran literally is not a tiny minority, but a vast majority: 75 percent of Muslims in Europe think that the Quran must be taken literally. Recent surveys suggest that the almost countless Muslim ghettos in the West are populated by tens thousands, if not houndreds thousands, of young men adhering to the Jihadi ideology: 80 percent of young Turks in Holland see "nothing wrong" in waging Jihad against non-Muslims. 27 percent of all young French and 14 percent of all young British - includeding most probably the vast majority of young Muslims in these two countries - sympathize with the genocidal terror organisation Islamic State, whose fighters are also committing attacks against civilians here in the West....The psychological problem within Islam
The problem with Islam and Muslim culture is that there are so many psychological factors pushing its followers towards a violent attitude against non-Muslims that a general violent clash is -- at least from a psychological perspective -- inevitable. With such strong pressure and such strong emotions within such a large group of people -- all pitched against us -- we are facing the perfect storm, and I see no possibilities of turning it around. For people to change, they have to want it, to be allowed to change, and to be able to change -- and only a tiny minority of Muslims have such lucky conditions.
As I've written here before, there are many Muslims who either have no idea what is in the Quran -- what it commands of them -- and many who do not practice actual Islam but a watered-down version. But Islam itself is a dangerous, death-promoting totalitarian system masquerading as a religion.
For a short and very interesting e-book that explains why through detailing Mohammed's history and Islams, pick up Howard Bloom's The Mohammed Code
And from The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg in 2011, the real deal on who's a victim of "hate crimes":
When you dive into the FBI statistics on hate crimes, you discover something very interesting, something CAIR didn't mention, and something Potok didn't report: According to the FBI, only 13.2 percent of religiously-motivated hate attacks in America were directed against Muslims. Jews, however, were on the receiving end of 65.4 percent of all religion-based attacks: the FBI reports 887 hate crimes against Jews, as opposed to 160 against Muslims.
Anybody see the hashtag #illridewithChaim? Me, neither. (Of course, it wouldn't be multi-culti and PC to want to protect a white Jewish person from violence.)
How About You Let Us Decide Which Products Are Too Offensive To Buy, US Government?
"Comfyballs" boxers have been nanny-stated away by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Laser
Lightylinks.
"Those Kinds Of Things Happen In Life..."
That's Michelle Obama retelling a story of her trip to Target with a racism angle.
Yes, "those kinds of things" happen to me, too -- people in stores asking me to reach things off high shelves. Because they assume I'm "the help"? No, because they're short and I'm tall.
Sometimes I voluntarily reach for things for people, like when I saw an old lady looking for hair dye. The box she wanted was way down on the very bottom of the shelf. Yes, that time I just bent down without even being asked. Because she's old and I'm young, and I bend better.
I know, I know...self-inflicted racism!
You Can Get Into The US, Even If You're Banned, If You're Rich Enough To Pay The Entry Fee
Entry fee? That's what it amounted to in this Ecuadorian woman's situation. She was banned after committing visa fraud. But the Obama admin saw that the ban didn't stick.
Frances Robles writes in The New York Times, in a piece headlined "Ecuador Family Wins Favors After Donations to Democrats":
MIAMI -- The Obama administration overturned a ban preventing a wealthy, politically connected Ecuadorean woman from entering the United States after her family gave tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic campaigns, according to finance records and government officials.The woman, EstefanÃa IsaÃas, had been barred from coming to the United States after being caught fraudulently obtaining visas for her maids. But the ban was lifted at the request of the State Department under former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton so that Ms. IsaÃas could work for an Obama fund-raiser with close ties to the administration.
It was one of several favorable decisions the Obama administration made in recent years involving the IsaÃas family, which the government of Ecuador accuses of buying protection from Washington and living comfortably in Miami off the profits of a looted bank in Ecuador.
The family, which has been investigated by federal law enforcement agencies on suspicion of money laundering and immigration fraud, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to American political campaigns in recent years. During that time, it has repeatedly received favorable treatment from the highest levels of the American government, including from New Jersey's senior senator and the State Department.
The Obama administration has allowed the family's patriarchs, Roberto and William IsaÃas, to remain in the United States, refusing to extradite them to Ecuador. The two brothers were sentenced in absentia in 2012 to eight years in prison, accused of running their bank into the ground and then presenting false balance sheets to profit from bailout funds. In a highly politicized case, Ecuador says the fraud cost the country $400 million.
People on the left like to believe the Democrats are the party of the people. Don't kid yourself. They're the party of the rich people, just like the Republicans.
Got cash?
Best Twitter Profile Line
It's from Mike @Monteiro:
"This is a personal account and does not reflect the opinions of my boss, who is an asshole."
What's Next, Leaving Med Students Unprepared to Administer A Rape Kit Because The Subject Might Be "Triggering"?
Robby Soave writes at reason that professors are holding back from teaching rape law lest the delicate flowers in college these days find the subject "triggering":
Victims of sexual assault deserve competent legal representation; the legal system needs prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges who have vigorously studied the nuances of rape adjudication. Social progress on all these fronts will be rolled back if law professors stop educating students about rape. That would be a travesty of justice.It's time to admit that appeasing students' seemingly unlimited senses of personal victimhood entitlement, unenlightened views about public discourse, and thinly-veiled laziness is not merely wrong, but actively dangerous. Colleges are supposed to prepare young people to succeed in the real world; they do students no favors by infantilizing them. But worse than that, by bending over backwards to satisfy the illiberal mob, colleges are doling out diplomas to people who are prepared for neither real life nor their eventual professions. Should medical colleges abdicate their responsibility to instruct students on how to administer a rape kit to a victim, or ask a victim difficult questions about her trauma, because that discussion is triggering to some of the students?
It would be better for professors to instruct students on how to confront their uncomfortable emotions and grow beyond them, but alas, that seems less and less common.
RELATED: A University of Michigan student who dared mock trigger warnings lost his position at the student newspaper, The Michigan Daily, after another student was offended by a piece he wrote for the conservative paper, The Michigan Review. Soave writes:
Last week, he became the victim of what The College Fix has described as a "hate crime." The doorway of his apartment was vandalized in the middle of the night; the perpetrators pelted the door with eggs and scribbled notes like "shut the fuck up" and "everyone hates you you violent prick." They left copies of the offending column and a print-out picture of Satan....The column that caused such a controversy, "Do the Left Thing," was published in The Review last month. It's a first-person narrative in which Mahmood pretends to be a left-handed person who is offended by the institutional patriarchy of right-handedness.
Best of all, Soave reports that the geniuses who attacked him "wore hoods and baggy clothing to disguise themselves; less brilliantly, they changed in full view of the apartment complex's security camera. They appear to be women of unclear ages."
RELATED: Jeannie Suk in The New Yorker.
Winky
Linky with an eyepatch.
Where Is Al Sharpton?
Black lives seem to matter less to many when they are taken by black people. A 15-year-oldboy was one of three dead and 32 wounded in weekend shootings, writes Ethel C. Fenig at American Thinker. Yet no one is marching in protest, and Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are not appearing on CNN to demand change:
All of the dead were black people, whose lives certainly must have mattered, as were a large majority of the seriously wounded who are now having trouble breathing, even though their alleged black killers didn't think so. But the protesters and the Al Sharptons and the Jesse Jacksons ignored these incidents and similar ones all across the country in their ignorance.The 15-year-old boy in the Chicago incident, a few days shy of his 16th birthday, was walking with his identical twin brother to a school basketball game when they were confronted by other black male teens with a gun. When informed of her son's fate the grief stricken boys' mother collapsed at the scene of the crime; the boy's twin is understandably deeply shaken. The funeral will take place on what would have been the victim's birthday; the surviving twin will pass his birthday at his brother's funeral.
Very helpfully, some students at Mt. Holyoke are insisting that black on black crime is a myth. I'm sure the 15-year-old's mother and twin brother will find that very comforting.
So Much Theory Called Feminist Is Just "Unmitigated Rubbish"
From 2010, philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards, who actually happens to be a defender of feminism, gave a lecture, saying that much of what passes for feminist theory in academic circles is "unmitigated rubbish." Via SecularNewsDaily:
Modern feminism in academic circles has ... taken to extremes the idea of the sexes having different interests, to the extent of developing a "feminist" critique of nearly every academic discipline. Radcliffe Richards gave examples of radical theorists rejecting concepts such as truth and reason as "phallocentric", producing what she termed 'unmitigated rubbish' in the process, emanating from self-contained Women's Studies departments. This kind of "feminism" is a misnomer still leaning heavily on ideas that were in vogue in the 1970s, Janet argued. The tone and content of these "feminist" critiques is irrationalist, and 'if feminism is supposed to be a movement for justice for women' then it cannot afford to reject truth and science as 'masculine' concepts in the process, a tactic which in fact keeps many women on the margins of academia just as powerfully as any patriarchal system.I do not want women going to Women's Studies departments and learning this stuff and thinking it's a good way of getting women emancipated. ... I regard this as a terrible perpetuation of the subordination of women. It's just carrying on patriarchal man's job for him.
Janet went on to criticise the assumption that equality of outcome (such as equal pay or equal representation in all professions) was the necessary consequence of removing systematic discrimination. Unequal outcomes might be the result of the environment or might be intrinsic; evolution makes it overwhelmingly likely that there would be differences between the sexes; different reproductive roles necessitated different reproductive tactics.
Many feminists (and much of the left) had, however, taken strong objection to Darwinian studies of how such differences might have worked out over evolutionary time. Far from being a rational pursuit of removing discriminatory obstacles to individual development, such feminism had embraced an anti-scientific ideology. Feminism, Janet argued, should rightly be concerned with systematic inequality, but cannot rationally presuppose equality of outcome.
Goober
Peanutty links.
Social Security Sins Of The Father (And Mother): Govt Goes After Their Offspring For The Money
The government knows no bounds when it comes to unfairness. It's been coming after children of people who were overpaid Social Security benefits, reports Marc Fisher in the WaPo. One of the people in the story was a 1-year-old infant at the time her mother was allegedly overpaid benefits:
The Social Security Administration, which announced in April that it would stop trying to collect debts from the children of people who were allegedly overpaid benefits decades ago, has continued to demand such payments and now defends that practice in court documents.After The Washington Post reported in April that the Treasury Department had confiscated $75 million in tax refunds due to about 400,000 Americans whose ancestors owed money to Social Security, the agency's acting commissioner, Carolyn Colvin, said efforts to collect on those old debts would cease immediately.
But although some people whose refunds were seized were reimbursed in recent months, some of those same taxpayers have since received new demands from Social Security, asserting that the debts remain and seeking repayment.
In March, the U.S. government intercepted Mary Grice's tax refunds from both the IRS and the state of Maryland. It turned out that after Grice's father died in 1960, when she was 4, her mother got survivor benefits to help feed and clothe her five children. Social Security says it overpaid someone in the Grice family -- it's not sure who -- in 1977. With Grice's mother long since dead, the government came after Mary to pay the debt.
The Takoma Park woman, now 58, filed suit against Social Security, challenging the government's right to take her money without notice to satisfy her mother's debt. After The Post wrote about her case, the government returned Grice's tax refunds to her. But in August, she received a new bill from Social Security, seeking the same $2,997 that the agency had refunded to her four months earlier.
"DID YOU FORGET?" the letter said, demanding that Grice "send us the full payment right away."
The four other plaintiffs who have joined Grice in her federal lawsuit have also received letters explaining that although the government returned their confiscated tax refunds after Colvin said such collections would cease, "this refund does not eliminate your overpayment."
The children of payees they're dinging never received the benefit of this money. Again, it went to their parents.
How sick is this?
Despite the announced freeze, Social Security has continued to press Jessica Vela of San Diego for $16,888 that the government claims she owes for overpayments made to her mother in child support benefits when Vela was 1. Vela's mother is still alive, and Social Security first tried to collect from her, but the mother fought the government in court and won. That's when Social Security turned to the daughter....Now 24 and a Navy veteran whose husband remains on active duty, Vela was a month away from delivering her second child in April when her income tax refund of $5,996.87 was seized by the Treasury Department this spring.
"They took our entire refund without prior notification by mail, carrier pigeon, smoke signal, anything," she said. "We were hoping to buy a crib and everything else we needed for the baby with that money."
Vela has repeatedly contacted Social Security to appeal the seizure, and she said that some Social Security employees at the offices she has visited told her that she was in the right, but in October she received a letter telling her that the agency would not review her case again.
Women With Dyed Pits And That Magical Feminist World Where No One Will Ever Judge You
There's a WaPo article by Peter Holley about the ridiculous mini-trend of women going bushy in their armpits and then having the hair dyed. He's quoting Roxie Hunt, the Seattle hairdresser said to have started the trend:
The movement, Hunt said, is as much about embracing personal freedom as it is about aesthetic experimentation."It's a celebration of our right to make conscious choices about our bodies," Hunt said. "I would hope that in the next few years we can normalize the concept and female body hair and change the dialogue about what this country considers naturally beautiful."
In her "Free Your Pits Manifesto," which you can read here, Hunt writes:
Whether you shave or not, women should be allowed to make decisions about their bodies without judgement from others. And, women making these decisions about their bodies should not be something exploited by the media. What we need is encouragement, not judgment. We greatly appreciate this opportunity to discuss how important it is to be true to yourself and to love your body, but we also recognize that women making conscious decisions about themselves should not in any way be shocking. We aim to normalize the concept of body hair on women and help others embrace their own if they so choose.
Regarding Hunt's childish view, typical of feminism and feminists, that nobody should "judge" you, we all judge people unless we're brain dead.
The world does not exist to encourage you.
PS Women -- and men -- have been shaving and epilating since about 7,000 BC. As I wrote in my column "When Harry Met Hairy":
It's great when your girlfriend reminds you of somebody exotic out of the movies -- when that somebody is Mila Kunis or Eva Mendes, not Chewbacca.
From that column, the history of hair removal -- male and female:
Archeological evidence (including hair-scraping stones and an impressive set of Bronze Age tweezers) suggests that women -- and often men -- have been shaving, depilating, and yanking out body hair since at least 7,000 B.C. In the early 1500s, Michelangelo sculpted David (who would have been a hairy Middle Eastern dude, looking more Borat than baby's bottom), making him look like he was too busy spending three weeks at the waxer to slay Goliath. And these days, male bodybuilders also remove their body hair, lest their admirers have to peer through the hair sweater to find the pecs and abs.
The Quran Calls For Violence Against The Infidel -- And Muslims In Australia Answered That Call
UPDATE: Michael Totten on The Sydney Gunman's Failed Message.
The jihadist invasion at a Lindt café in Australia is Muslims behaving as the Quran commands to behave -- waging jihad against the unbelievers (of Allah). It also calls for them to slaughter the unbelievers. Let's hope that doesn't happen.
From thereligionofpeace.com:
The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding. Muslims who do not join the fight are called 'hypocrites' and warned that Allah will send them to Hell if they do not join the slaughter.Unlike nearly all of the Old Testament verses of violence, the verses of violence in the Quran are mostly open-ended, meaning that they are not restrained by the historical context of the surrounding text. They are part of the eternal, unchanging word of Allah, and just as relevant or subjective as anything else in the Quran.
The context of violent passages is more ambiguous than might be expected of a perfect book from a loving God, however this can work both ways. Most of today's Muslims exercise a personal choice to interpret their holy book's call to arms according to their own moral preconceptions about justifiable violence. Apologists cater to their preferences with tenuous arguments that gloss over historical fact and generally do not stand up to scrutiny. Still, it is important to note that the problem is not bad people, but bad ideology.
Unfortunately, there are very few verses of tolerance and peace to abrogate or even balance out the many that call for nonbelievers to be fought and subdued until they either accept humiliation, convert to Islam, or are killed. Muhammad's own martial legacy - and that of his companions - along with the remarkable stress on violence found in the Quran have produced a trail of blood and tears across world history.
...The strangest and most untrue thing that can be said about Islam is that it is a Religion of Peace. If every standard by which the West is judged and condemned (slavery, imperialism, intolerance, misogyny, sexual repression, warfare...) were applied equally to Islam, the verdict would be devastating. Islam never gives up what it conquers, be it religion, culture, language or life. Neither does it make apologies or any real effort at moral progress. It is the least open to dialogue and the most self-absorbed. It is convinced of its own perfection, yet brutally shuns self-examination and represses criticism.
This is what makes the Quran's verses of violence so dangerous. They are given the weight of divine command. While Muslim terrorists take them as literally as anything else in their holy book, and understand that Islam is incomplete without Jihad, moderates offer little to contradict them - outside of opinion. Indeed, what do they have? Speaking of peace and love may win over the ignorant, but when every twelfth verse of Islam's holiest book either speaks to Allah's hatred for non-Muslims or calls for their death, forced conversion, or subjugation, it's little wonder that sympathy for terrorism runs as deeply as it does in the broader community - even if most Muslims personally prefer not to interpret their religion in this way.
Although scholars like Ibn Khaldun, one of Islam's most respected philosophers, understood that "the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force", many other Muslims are either unaware or willfully ignorant of the Quran's near absence of verses that preach universal non-violence. Their understanding of Islam comes from what they are taught by others. In the West, it is typical for believers to think that their religion must be like Christianity - preaching the New Testament virtues of peace, love, and tolerance - because Muslims are taught that Islam is supposed to be superior in every way. They are somewhat surprised and embarrassed to learn that the evidence of the Quran and the bloody history of Islam are very much in contradiction to this.
Others simply accept the violence. In 1991, a Palestinian couple in America was convicted of stabbing their daughter to death for being too Westernized. A family friend came to their defense, excoriating the jury for not understanding the "culture", claiming that the father was merely following "the religion" and saying that the couple had to "discipline their daughter or lose respect." (source). In 2011, unrepentant Palestinian terrorists, responsible for the brutal murders of civilians, women and children explicitly in the name of Allah were treated to a luxurious "holy pilgrimage" to Mecca by the Saudi king - without a single Muslim voice raised in protest.
For their part, Western liberals would do well not to sacrifice critical thinking to the god of political correctness, or look for reasons to bring other religion down to the level of Islam merely to avoid the existential truth that this it is both different and dangerous.
There are just too many Muslims who take the Quran literally... and too many others who couldn't care less about the violence done in the name of Islam.
Europe is already in deep doodoo, reports Pravda:
President of the Institute of the Middle East, Evgeniy Satanovskiy told Pravda.Ru what jihadists wanted in Germany and what threats they posed to this country."In Germany there are thousands of jihadists, according to German Police hundreds of them are prone to organizing terrorist attacks. This is a very high threat level. And German Islamic communities, as a matter of fact, like Islamic communities around all Western Europe, are literally occupied by jihadists, and under complete inaction of the politically correct western political elite they have already trained the second or third generation of radical Islamists, a considerable part of whom now went to fight in Syria or Iraq or joined different divisions of al-Qaeda," Satanovskiy pointed out.
Back to the Australia situation: Great news -- three hostages were able to escape, police confirmed Sunday night. Via FoxNews.
UPDATE, as of 10:21 pm PT, two more hostages have gone free. Seems they're women. As of yet unsure as to whether they escaped or were let out, but I'm guessing they escaped.
Lumpy
Bumpy links.
Smartwrist
Deep-discounted at Amazon -- normally $129, now $69 -- not sure for how long. (Saw it tweeted as a "Gold Box" deal.) It's the UP 24 by Jawbone - Bluetooth Enabled - Small - Retail Packaging - Red
Big Democratic Donors Don't Talk So Pretty When They Think They Won't Be Heard
The Sony email scandal, and everything that's been revealed.
Advice Goddess Free Swim
It's Saturday night, and I'm sleepy. You pick the topics. I'll post more on Sunday morning.
P.S. One link per comment or my spam filter will eat your post.
What About Women Who Want To Pursue Painting Or Spend More Time Making Love To Their Husband?
A tweet about France's supposedly superior policies for moms -- which privilege people who make that choice over others and then send the bill to those mysterious folks called "other people." 
No, you really cannot have it all, nor should you be able to.
Choices in life are tradeoffs. With each choice you make you are forgoing another choice. France makes "magical" things happen -- no forgoing. You can have two children and work 20 percent less at your job and still make the same money.
As Crid has pointed out here, there's a piper to pay. France does not pay the full cost of their defense, putting only 2.1 percent of their GDP into it and having us as a backstop. Ted Galen Carpenter and Marian L. Tupy at Cato:
America's already huge defense budget continues to grow. Counting the costs of the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. spends nearly as much on the military as the rest of the world combined. This year, defense spending will be roughly five percent of America's almost $15 trillion GDP.
We also pay for France's rock-bottom drug costs with higher drug prices in our country. (Sure, big pharma is into big profits, but research does cost a few shekels, too.)
About the "Waah, mothers should have it all" argument, Claire Cain Miller and Liz Alderman write in The New York Times:
Since Kerry Devine, 32, and her friends began having children, she has noticed a stark difference between her female friends in Auburn, Wash., where she lives, and those in England and Cyprus, where she grew up. In the United States, they almost all stopped working outside the home, at least until their children were in school. Yet, she says, she can't think of a friend in Europe who left work after her children were born.Ms. Devine quit her job after she had her first child, a girl, four years ago, because she thought 12 weeks of maternity leave was too short. "I just didn't want to leave her in day care or pay for the expenses of it," she said. When she gave birth to twin boys this year, a return to work -- she had been a property manager for apartment buildings -- looked even less plausible.
...Like every mother in France, Delphine Dubost, a public-school teacher in Paris, was required to take a month and a half off before the births of her children. She was also able to take two and a half months of maternity leave afterward, all while receiving her full paycheck. After her second child, the law permitted her to work 80 percent of full time without a salary cut. She enrolled her children in France's state-run day care system where, for about $740 a month, children receive organic meals and even diapers. "It was great," she said. "You can keep working, but can also spend time with your children."
The employment decline in the United States is especially striking, because it has long preferred flexible labor markets -- rather than extensive benefits, like those in Europe -- in the name of job growth. Europe's long list of regulations and benefits, including family leave policies, still seem to be exacting a cost on the Continent's economies. But it's now clear the American approach has its costs, too: The free market leaves many families, particularly many women, struggling to find a solution that combines work and home life.
And here we see the socialist fantasy: Other people will pay for your choices, and the money will come from...oh, there's that money tree over there...just go pluck some dollars. They'll magically grow back!
From the NYT's comments:
Robert Daniels, West Palm Beach, FL
I fail to see how an individual's decision to have a child is the responsibility of the company's to grant them benefits that wouldn't be afforded to their single working counterpart. I'm sure 90% of the American work force would jump at a chance to take a year paid leave of absence or the right to work at home (even though statistics support lower productivity from work at home employees). If a family chooses to have a child then they should be prepared econmically for said decision, not the company.
Another sensible sort:
Jess, New York
This article neglects several key issues in the working/nonworking parent debate. First, is the long summer break and relatively short school day, put our children behind many children around the world in school as well as being extraordinarily burdensome to families with parents employed outside the home. Extending time in school would help parents at all levels of the socioeconomic ladder as well as improving education. Our summer break stems from our agrarian past and serves no useful purpose today. Children start each school year having to review much of what they learned in the prior year. Also, even for older children, summer jobs are very difficult to find and putting the time to productive use is challenging.A second critical issue for people to consider is that is is a long life. Even if one wanted to dedicate time to childrearing until the teenage years, this still leaves many years to fill economic, social and emotional needs through work. Active parenting is a relatively short part of a working life that spans from the twenties to the seventies. In our child centric society childrearing can be all consuming. I would suggest, however, given the duration of the time after children, it is worth preparing for the next stage. Stay current on industry trends, document volunteer experiences in terms of skills applied, take free classes, start a small business or nonprofit, do whatever you can to enhance your value to your next employer.
And here's a woman who understands and accepts the tradeoffs -- and doesn't expect other people to pay the price of hers:
kkm, Ithaca, NY
Interestingly, this article does not consider value apart from money. It's a lot of work to raise children well; our culture tells us this can be done on a part time basis, or even just an hour or two a day. To run a home, to make meals, to have time and focus for the people around you takes time. At a professional job, we are expected to work far over 40 hours per week, we are lucky to be able to take a vacation. I had expected to go back to work after my son was born, but the idea of putting my 10 week old in someone else's arms and walking away devastated me. I decided to stay home with him and later my other children were born.I changed from identifying myself as a research biologist to a mother. A full time mother; that is my job now. Financially things are tight. No exotic vacations for us-- not even disney world! Clothes are hand-me-downs, and Salvation Army, and yard sales. -- But I have time for camping with my family, birthday parties, making dinner, working in the garden, reading to my children. --I volunteer in the community in a number of ways.
I would resent being away from my children and family. My work at home is valuable, to me, to my family, and to society. I ask that such article such as this one would at least in a sentence or two, address that value.
When Rape Is On the Agenda, Use Of Logic Is Woman-Hate
Freddie deBoer challenges the lack of logic at The Week, in "What progressives don't want to talk about in the Rolling Stone scandal":
The social risks of being seen to express skepticism towards any given accusation of rape are now so powerful that many people avoid even the suggestion of doubt. Those who are willing to question individual accusations, like Cathy Young, are subject to repeated and vociferous criticism. In such an environment, it's no wonder Erdely felt little urge to interview the alleged assailants. To do so in our media culture was to invite risk and little reward.But as the ensuing days have proved, there is considerable danger in applying this standard to journalism, and not merely for the accused. Ultimately, refusing to subject accusations of rape to rigorous review hurts accusers, by failing to build the strongest case on their behalf, and other victims, by producing ambient skepticism in the culture.
Take, for example, the accusation against musician Conor Oberst that emerged last year, which was later entirely recanted by his accuser. These accusations emerged piecemeal, first from comments on the website xoJane and later in an essay published on that site, from an initially pseudonymous accuser. This would seem to be a situation where care and skepticism are warranted; internet comments are, famously, the Wild West, largely unregulated spaces where people can say anything and usually do. It's easy to imagine someone making an accusation in such a space and having the story spiral out of control -- which is exactly what happened in this instance.
But prior to Oberst's exoneration, skepticism about that accusation was met with anger. Jezebel's Tracie Egan Morrissey, for example, asked, "Why would she want to hurt Oberst? And why would someone lie about being sexually assaulted? What could be gained from that? Nothing, really." This attitude presumes a rational mindset; Oberst's accuser later explained that she was driven to lie in part by grief over a sick child. Regardless, those who had reacted angrily to doubts about Oberst's guilt were left to retract their previous support, and in so doing, gave space to those who would deny rape writ large. Going to bat for every accusation, no matter how credible the evidence or circumstance, only plays into the hands of denialism when accusations are revealed to be false.
The insistence that every rape accusation must be presumed to be true inevitably means that the credibility of those opposing rape will always be bound up with the least credible accusation. This, perversely, makes it harder for those people to speak out against rape, not easier. The notion that rape victims should be believed by default seems humane and understandable. But in practice it leads to a condition where all rape accusations must be true for any individual standard to be taken seriously. That's an impossible standard, one no crime should ever have to meet.
As I wrote just a few days ago:
The same goes for "sexual harassment," and that's in quotes because the subject of that witch hunt, Bora Zivkovic, did nothing that met the legal standard for sexual harassment. It was sexual harassment simply because the women who accused him said it was.And numerous reputable science writers -- males, too, like David Dobbs -- piled right on.
There are so many parallels to the Rolling Stone story. Nobody reported the other side of the story. The women were just believed. And questioning them was heresy and made you almost "as bad" as Bora. Yet, science writers take pride in their supposed skepticism. ("Supposed" is exactly right.)
It's time somebody reported that story. David Carr? Brendan O'Neill? Cathy Young? Katie Roiphe?
An injustice has been done to Bora and it's time somebody righted it by putting out a full set of facts -- including the other side.
(Good analysis of the whole Bora situation here, at nikitab.)
Lynx
Furry links with very sharp teeth.
"You A Dumb Bitch," The Cop Tells Her
She a smart bitch, it turns out. The daughter of a cop, who knows her rights. And the video on her phone, apparently erased by somebody in the police department, was -- oopsy! -- still on the cloud.
Via Scott Greenfield, Ian Duncan reports in the Balt Sun:
In the early hours of a Sunday morning in March, Kianga Mwamba said, she was on the way home from a family gathering and about to stop to pick up some food for her children at the all-night restaurant Valentino's.But as she got near, she stopped to record a group of police arresting a man across the street.
Mwamba, 36, flicked on the video recorder on her cell phone, telling officers she was allowed to record. But the situation quickly devolved into Mwamba's being hauled from her Toyota, tasered and charged with assaulting two police officers.
"I'm in shock for real, like are they really doing this to me," Mwamba said as she recalled the arrest in an interview this fall.
Kianga Mwamba, 36, was accused of assaulting police officers after she videotaped an arrest. The charges were later dropped and she is suing the police department, alleging that officers tried to delete the tape from her phone.
And when Mwamba was bailed out of jail that Monday morning, she said the video she made appeared to have been deleted from her phone. It was only when she checked another app that backed up her images and videos to the cloud that she found she still had a copy, she said.
Prosecutors dropped all the charges against Mwamba in September, concluding that there was insufficient evidence to move forward, and last week she filed a $7 million lawsuit against a number of officers she says were involved in her arrest and what she says was an attempt by police to destroy the footage.
...Mwamba's video does not capture the entire scene, and after she stopped her car and began filming an officer told her keep moving once a stoplight turned green.
"All right, I'll park, I'll park," Mwamba tells the officers.
Multiple officers can be heard telling Mwamba to get out of the street but as she tries to pull over, Mwamba says she cannot get out of the road because there are officers blocking the way.
"How can I pull my car over right here when the police is right here?" Mwamba says, according to the video.
Then, a minute and 23 seconds after Mwamba began filming, things appear to start spiraling out of control. The video does not show what happened but shouting and the sound of banging can be heard outside the car and Mwamba says, "Why would you do that?"
Officer Stephanie Uruchima wrote in a report that Mwamba had accelerated and hit Officer Kari Larson in the legs, knocking her back. Mwamba denies that she tried to hit Larson.
Uruchima then described an orderly process of trying to remove Mwamba from the car, but on the video it appears as though officers rush forward and they can be heard using a Taser, which has a distinctive clicking sound.
Read the details in the complaint (from the suit filed).
Law prof Turley blogs:
Despite consistent rulings upholding the right of citizens to film police in public, these abuses continue....The March 30th encounter is now the subject of a lawsuit against the Baltimore City Police Department, a department that has been the subject of repeated and ongoing claims of police abuse.
In the complaint ... Mwamba says that she was told to move her car but could not because there were police officers around it and then without warning she was dragged from the car and tased. She said that when she asked for her inhaler, officers laughed at her.
Ugly. To protect (themselves) and serve (themselves).
The Ugliness Of What Police Unions Stand Up For
Here's one example -- from a letter from a police union. WaPo's Sarah Larimer included this in a piece, "Police union: Miami chief's statements on Eric Garner's death 'do not reflect the views' of local officers."
The chief felt something indictment-worthy had gone on. The money shot from the police union's letter:
"Tackling Mr. Garner may have also caused him to not be able to breathe," the letter reads. "We also feel that Mr. Garner was not placed in a chokehold. The fact that he states eleven times that he can't breathe proves he was actually breathing."
Land Of The Wussies (Reporting The "Papercuts Of Oppression")
Princeton students have set up -- yes! -- a micro-aggression reporting service!
Via @AdamKissel, Katherine Timpf writes at NRO:
Princeton University students recently launched "Tiger Microaggressions," a service that takes other students' reports of microaggressions and publishes them on its Facebook page -- so that no one has to "carry the burden alone to call out " offenses against political correctness."If you witness a microaggression and would like us to put it on blast, submit your experience," encourages the page, which, by the way, also refers to microaggressions as "papercuts of oppression," which are "so small but slice deep."
...According to the operators, "microaggressions are all around us" and anything can be a microaggression because "there are no objective definitions to words and phrases."
"The perspective and lived experiences of each individual contextualizes the world around them and thus places a particular meaning in words based on their distinct subjectivity," they explain. "What counts as harmless banter to some may be emotionally triggering to others."
How lovely that college students, ripped away from their helicopter parents, are able to continue the culture of coddling even while away at an Ivy League university.
Licky
Linky (with a little tongue).
Turning Elderly People Into Storable Office Supplies
Important piece to read if you have an elderly relative in a nursing home -- on how the real drug problem in nursing homes is overmedication. Ina Jaffe writes at NPR:
It's one of the worst fears we have for our parents or for ourselves: that we, or they, will end up in a nursing home, drugged into a stupor. And that fear is not entirely unreasonable. Almost 300,000 nursing home residents are currently receiving antipsychotic drugs, usually to suppress the anxiety or aggression that can go with Alzheimer's disease and other dementia.Antipsychotics, however, are approved mainly to treat serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. When it comes to dementia patients, the drugs have a black box warning, saying that they can increase the risk for heart failure, infections and death.
None of this was on Marie Sherman's mind when her family decided that her mother, 73-year-old Beatrice DeLeon, would be better off in a nursing facility near her home in Sonora, Calif. It wasn't because of her Alzheimer's disease, explains Sherman -- it was because her mother had had some falls.
She was given medication to quiet her down, with the nursing home staff saying she was agitated. The effects were ugly:
The DeLeon's daughter, Marie Sherman, says that when her mother wasn't "lost" she was "out of her skin.""I mean, she was calling for help," Sherman says. "She was praying, 'Our Father, who art in heaven, please, please help me. Please, take me, please, get me out!' "
It turned out Beatrice DeLeon was given Risperdal and Seroquel, which are approved to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. But professor Bradley Williams, who teaches pharmacy and gerontology at the University of Southern California, says antipsychotics should only be used as a last resort, and just for a month or so, before gradually being eliminated.
...Antipsychotic drugs change behaviors, Williams says. "They blunt behaviors. They can cause sedation. It increases their risk for falls." And in the vast majority of cases, the drugs aren't necessary. "If you want to get to the very basic bottom line," he says, "why should someone pay for something that's not needed?"
But residents or their guardians may not know that the drug is not needed. And they're rarely told about the serious risks, says attorney Jody Moore, who specializes in elder law. She has sued nursing homes in California for failing to get informed consent when they use antipsychotic drugs, as required by law.
"We learned that the families really weren't told anything other than, 'The doctor has ordered this medication for you; please come sign a form,' " says Moore. "And families did."
Terrible stuff. If you have an elderly relative in a nursing home, find out all the drugs they're being given and run them through Uncle Google and/or get an opinion about them from your primary care physician or a doctor you know. Make sure your loved ones aren't being behaviorally warehoused -- that the drugs they are taking are for their benefit and not that of an overworked (or just lazy) nursing home staff.
via @medskep
Rape: It Only Matters When It Happens To Women
Michael Brendan Dougherty writes in The Week about the "rape culture" that everyone ignores -- the prison system that all but encourages sexual assaults:
Statistics on rape are notoriously unreliable. In or out of prison, victims often fear reporting on their assailants. And so the above statistics are likely to underestimate the problem. But we do know that once you include the prison population, men are raped more often in the United States than women.In prison, men may become the victim of repeated gang rapes. Prisoners can be locked into cells with the men who prey on them. Some live under the constant threat of sexual assault for decades. Their efforts to report their rape are ignored or even punished, both by prison personnel and an inmate culture that destroys "snitches." The threat of rape is so pervasive it causes some inmates to "consent" to sex with certain prisoners or officers as a way of avoiding rape by others.
Acceptance of prison rape is a stinking corruption. No conception of justice can include plunging criminals into an anarchic world of sexual terror. And obviously it thwarts any possibility of a rehabilitative justice that aims to restore criminals to lawful society. Inmates are not improved or better integrated into society through physical and psychological torture.
...The first step to reform is simply acknowledging the humanity of our prisoners. Part of that involves reconciling our concepts of retribution and rehabilitation. After all, making sure that an appropriate punishment is inflicted on a convicted criminal (and no more than that) is a way of taking the original crime and the original victim seriously, too.
The Wage Gap Is Really A Life-Choice Gap
Ashe Schow writes at the WashEx:
Despite continued claims from the White House and media that women earning less than men is solely or entirely due to discrimination, a new Bureau of Labor Statistics report puts that explanation to rest.The report, released this week, found that women on average made 82.1 cents to the dollar that men earned. At first glance, this 17.9-cent gap still seems high, even though it's lower than the oft-cited 23-cent figure.
But dig deeper, and one will find that the gap is nearly entirely due to the choices women make in their personal lives. Mark J. Perry, an American Enterprise Scholar, made an incredibly handy chart comparing women's earnings to men...
...Single women with no children earned 96.1 percent of what men with similar characteristics earned -- and that doesn't even begin to factor in career and education choices. As Perry noted, marriage and children have -- in terms of earnings -- a negative impact for women.
"Therefore, BLS data show that marriage has a significant and negative effect on women's earnings relative to men's, but we can realistically assume that marriage is a voluntary lifestyle decision, and it's that personal choice, not necessarily labor market discrimination, that contributes to much of the gender wage gap for married workers," Perry wrote.
Another significant factor contributing to the wage gap is the number of hours worked. Married women working full-time and having children under the age of 18 earned only 78.9 percent of what married men with children earned. But there is no evidence this is due to discrimination -- the difference was that men were more likely than women to work 40-plus and 60-plus hour work weeks, contributing to higher earnings.
The money quote: "Single women with no children earned 96.1 percent of what men with similar characteristics earned -- and that doesn't even begin to factor in career and education choices."
"Shut Up" Rules Are In Effect
More and more, there are chills placed on speech in our society by those who are offended by someone else's message.
That's sounds like what happened here -- in a situation in New Mexico that led to a teacher resigning.
From KOAT's Alana Grimstead, a creative writing teacher left her job after student wrote about Jesus and pot rather than loaves and fishes and some other student went home with her panties in twist:
"I love teaching," said creative writing teacher Katrina Guarascio. "I'm not there to judge them. I'm there to encourage them."Guarascio said her creative writing class is a safe place for students to find their voices.
The assignment was to take a fairy tale or legend and rewrite it in modern times. One student changed the biblical story about Jesus handing out bread and fish to the poor to Jesus handing out marijuana to the sick.
"I don't take any personal offense. It's not written for me. It's written for them. It's how they can express themselves," said Guarascio.
But according to the teacher, during peer review, one of the other students got highly offended by the story and told her parents. And then the teacher was put on administrative leave while the district investigated.
Guarascio said she felt targeted, harassed and forced to resign.
Actually, it is a teacher's job to judge them -- another bit of Jell-O-headed thinking that's all too common these days. But it isn't her job or anyone else's to sand down anything and everything that might be "uncomfortable" for another person.
via @mpetrie98
Gobi
Deserted links.
12 Days Of Deals
At Amazon
Thanks to all of you who are purchasing things through my links. Much appreciated!
PS Somebody bought the new go-in-your-ear Bose QuietComfort 20i Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones
I have the big cans by Bose -- Bose QuietComfort 15 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones
Oh, and don't forget, as long as you're making it quiet enough to read, pick up a copy of my book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck"!
The Underparented Child Flies Again: Stop 'Go-Right-Ahead' Parenting
It's my latest "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck"-related New York Observer column, which comes out of a flight Gregg and I took to Detroit. Not being able to sleep on the plane, I ended up getting motion-sick and staying motion-sick all weekend.
An excerpt from the piece, which goes on to explain ways parents can teach their kids empathy:
I'll take snakes on a plane. Snakes are quiet.Last Saturday, I woke up at 4 a.m. to fly to an event across the country. "I'll sleep on the plane," I told myself. And no, I wasn't being naive.
I came prepared: I had my "asshole-canceling headphones" (big Bose over-the-ear "cans"), industrial-grade earplugs to wear underneath, and an iPhone with selections of white noise.
The cute blonde 3-year-old seated in front of me wasn't a screamer. She was a talker -- in a tone and volume appropriate for auditioning for the lead in "Annie."
I figured she would quiet down after takeoff. She did not. And, sadly, even $300 worth of Bose technology was no match for this kid's pipes. After about 20 sleep-free, "SUN'LL COME OUT TOMORROW!!" minutes into the flight, I leaned forward and whispered to the child's mother, "Excuse me, could you please ask your little girl to be a little quieter?"
"No," the woman said.
No?
No?! (CONT'D AT THE LINK...)
Please click on the link, read the rest of the piece, and please share on Facebook and Twitter. (It really helps me if you do! My pay is tied to social media shares.)
Valorizing Victims: A Victim Culture Gone Mad
Lizzie Crocker writes at The Daily Beast about "What the U-VA Rape Case Tells Us About a Victim Culture Gone Mad":
We live in a culture that valorizes victims--where to question one woman's claims of sexual abuse is to be a "rape apologist," someone who effectively dismisses heinous crime under any and all circumstances. If Jackie is lying, she will likely--and sadly--suffer for it. And she has already put herself in an unenviable position by reaffirming her version of events as described to Rolling Stone in a subsequent interview with The Washington Post. "What bothers me is that so many people act like it didn't happen," she said. "It's my life. I have had to live with the fact that it happened every day for the last two years."The problem with valorizing the victim, as a "victim culture" does, is that anything that runs contrary to the victim's narrative is cast as an attack on that person.
Question them, and you are colluding in exacerbating the awful effects of their trauma. Question their actions or motives and you are "victim shaming" and "victim blaming."
..."Playing the victim" used to be a term of scorn, now it's a daily modus operandi to score any number of political and cultural points.
Question those taking on the mantle of victimhood and you are immediately cast as some kind of aggressive, unfeeling oppressor. The sad consequence of a culture of victimhood is that it obscures real victims and obscures the genuinely felt experiences of those victims, whatever they have endured.
Broken Windows And Broken Police Forces
Broken Windows theory comes out of a James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling article in The Atlantic from March of 1982. In a nutshell:
Second, at the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones....Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.
Or consider a pavement. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of refuse from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars.
Ken White at Popehat lays the two side by side:
If tolerating broken windows leads to more broken windows and escalating crime, what impact does tolerating police misconduct have?Under the Broken Windows Theory, what impact could it have but to signal to all police that scorn for rights, unjustified violence, and discrimination are acceptable norms? Under Broken Windows Theory, what could be the result but more scorn, more violence, and more discrimination?
Apparently we've decided that we won't tolerate broken windows any more. But we haven't found the fortitude to do something about broken people. To put it plainly: just as neighborhood thugs could once break windows with impunity, police officers can generally kill with impunity.
The Real-Life Consequences Of Obamacare
For some -- like Rep. Cynthia Lummis' husband -- it's the screwups of the signup process for Obamacare that may have made them go without the care they needed.
I'm among those who can no longer afford the healthcare I was advised by doctors to have, thanks to a now-sizable deductible. (I'm hoping I'll be okay -- as opposed to using modern medicine to see that I am. And this after decades of having affordable care -- until the "Affordable" Care Act.)
Miffy
Snittylinks.
Can A Wife With Dementia Say Yes To Sex With Her Husband?
Wedding photo of Donna Lou Young and Henry V. Rayons from 2007:
Bryan Gruley writes at Bloomberg of a husband who's been charged with felony rape:
More than 350 people attended the wedding reception of Donna Lou Young and Henry V. Rayhons in Duncan, Iowa, on Dec. 15, 2007. Family and friends ate pork roast and danced polkas to celebrate the union of a widow and a widower, both in their 70s, who had found unexpected love after the deaths of their long-time spouses.For the next six-and-a-half years, Henry and Donna Rayhons were inseparable. She sat near him in the state House chamber while he worked as a Republican legislator. He helped with her beekeeping. She rode alongside him in a combine as he harvested corn and soybeans on his 700 acres in northern Iowa. They sang in the choir at Sunday Mass.
"We just loved being together," Henry Rayhons says.
Today, he's awaiting trial on a felony charge that he raped Donna at a nursing home where she was living. The Iowa Attorney General's office says Rayhons had intercourse with his wife when she lacked the mental capacity to consent because she had Alzheimer's. She died on Aug. 8, four days short of her 79th birthday, of complications from the disease. One week later, Rayhons, 78, was arrested. He pleaded not guilty.
To convict Rayhons, prosecutors must first convince a jury that a sex act occurred in his wife's room at the Concord Care Center in Garner, Iowa, on May 23. If prosecutors prove that, his guilt or innocence will turn on whether Donna wanted sex or not, and whether her dementia prevented her from making that judgment and communicating her wishes.
The State of Iowa vs. Henry Rayhons offers a rare look into a complex and thinly explored dilemma that will arise with increasing frequency as the 65-and-over population expands and the number of people with dementia grows. It suggests how ill-equipped nursing homes and law enforcement agencies are to deal with the nuances of dementia, especially when sex is involved. The combination of sex and dementia also puts enormous strains on family relationships, which turned out to be a critical element in the Rayhons case. His four children are supporting him. Two of Donna's three daughters played a role in Rayhons' investigation. Through their attorney, Philip Garland, the two declined to be interviewed for this story.
Sexual assault laws years ago recognized that a spouse cannot force himself or herself upon the other. Dementia confuses the issue. People with dementia can lose past inhibitions about sex and become aggressive about seeking it. They might be unable to balance a checkbook while they're perfectly capable of deciding whether they desire a partner's affections.
Experts in geriatrics say that intimacy -- from a hug to a massage to intercourse -- can make dementia sufferers feel less lonely and even prolong their lives. Love complicates things further.
By many accounts, Henry and Donna Rayhons were deeply in love. Both their families embraced their marriage. The case has produced no evidence thus far that the couple's love faded, that Donna failed to recognize her husband or that she asked that he not touch her, said Rayhons' son Dale Rayhons, a paramedic and the family's unofficial spokesman.
Why Are The Anti-Vaxxers Still Allowing Their Children In Cars?
In the wake of measles making a "terrifying comeback" in the US, due to parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, Joy Pullman notes at The Federalist:
[Parents] do all sorts of things with their children that have far greater risks of injury and death than vaccinations. Take driving the kids around in a car. Car crashes are the leading cause of death for children ages 2-14. Yet there are no campaigns to "Stop driving your kids to death!" or anything even remotely related. Despite our increasing culture of parent alarmism and ineffective hyperprotection, no one questions automobiles and their clear and present -danger to human life. If the vaccine-frightened truly care so much about the real but tiny risk of vaccine side-effects, consistency demands that they also stop driving cars, sending their children to school, hiring babysitters, and all other activities with higher risks.Parents do all sorts of things with their children that have far greater risks of injury and death than vaccinations.
I also think parents have an ethical duty to vaccinate to provide the herd immunity people too weak for vaccinations desperately need. If an elderly person or child with leukemia gets measles, it's deadly.When the topic comes up among my mommy friends, I provide the information that helped change my mind and try to tread carefully, but ultimately advocate for vaccination. One of our friends doesn't do the hepatitis B shots because she lives in a rural area and her child will not be attending daycare and will probably homeschool. Hep B is a group sort of disease, and typically not deadly with treatment. Fine. I'm way more pushy about shots like MMR, whooping cough, polio, and other deadly possible contagions. I always think that if my baby were to get a disease like this before his scheduled vaccination for it because of ill-informed people, I would be horrifically angry at them. You can be as stupid as you want with yourself, but if your stupidity threatens my child's life, I will hunt you down. (Of course, this is hyperbole, but I do feel this way inside.)
I also view it as horrifically irresponsible for celebrities to get on the anti-vaccine train. The anti-vaccine movement is essentially based on fear, not evidence. Every parent should read the evidence before making a decision that is more likely to hurt his child and others rather than protect lives.
via @davidharsanyi
The "Cult Of Credulity" In The Wake Of Rape (Or Sexual Harassment Accusations)
Brendan O'Neill puts it perfectly in reason:
We now live in an increasingly Salem-like culture, in which people are called to suspend skepticism in relation to all allegations of rape, to say "I believe" the minute anyone claims to have been raped, and to be openly and proudly credulous in response to reports of rape. This cult of credulity, this constant chanting of "I believe!" has warped the public debate about rape and sexual assault. It has now reached its nadir in the shocking suspension of skepticism at Rolling Stone in response to a fabricated horror story.If Erdely nodded along to Jackie's story while robotically thinking "I believe," she isn't alone. Automatically and uncritically believing allegations of rape is all the rage today. Where for most of the Age of Enlightenment it was considered civilized to believe that those accused of a crime were innocent until proven guilty, now it appears the way to show that you are a good and caring person is to do pretty much the opposite. You should believe instantly the alleged victim's every word, and by extension to believe instantly that the accused is guilty as hell.
The same goes for "sexual harassment," and that's in quotes because the subject of that witch hunt, Bora Zivkovic, did nothing that met the legal standard for sexual harassment. It was sexual harassment simply because the women who accused him said it was.
And numerous reputable science writers -- males, too, like David Dobbs -- piled right on.
There are so many parallels to the Rolling Stone story. Nobody reported the other side of the story. The women were just believed. And questioning them was heresy and made you almost "as bad" as Bora. Yet, science writers take pride in their supposed skepticism. ("Supposed" is exactly right.)
It's time somebody reported that story. David Carr? Brendan O'Neill? Cathy Young? Katie Roiphe?
An injustice has been done to Bora and it's time somebody righted it by putting out a full set of facts -- including the other side.
(Good analysis of the whole Bora situation here, at nikitab.)
Gumby
Rubberylinks.
Fight The...Fashion Police?
Idiots in New York stage a protest...at...Macy's? 
Who lost out? Any employees who work on commission.
Yeah, that'll teach those cops!
via @EdDriscoll
So What If A Few Men's Lives Are Ruined
Zerlina Maxwell, in the WaPo, takes that stance regarding rape cases -- basically, believe the victim, no matter what:
We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist. Even if Jackie fabricated her account, U-Va. should have taken her word for it during the period while they endeavored to prove or disprove the accusation. This is not a legal argument about what standards we should use in the courts; it's a moral one, about what happens outside the legal system.The accused would have a rough period. He might be suspended from his job; friends might defriend him on Facebook. In the case of Bill Cosby, we might have to stop watching his shows, consuming his books or buying tickets to his traveling stand-up routine. But false accusations are exceedingly rare, and errors can be undone by an investigation that clears the accused, especially if it is done quickly.
The cost of disbelieving women, on the other hand, is far steeper. It signals that that women don't matter and that they are disposable -- not only to frat boys and Bill Cosby, but to us.
...The time we spend picking apart a traumatized survivor's narration on the hunt for discrepancies is time that should be spent punishing serial rapists.
The new feminism: Men are disposable, if it happens to help women.
(This is not equality; this is thuggery with a sad face drawn on it.)
Twerpy
Wee little linky links.
The Green Is Greener
Green Monday deals at Amazon
No word on whether there will be a beige Wednesday or a thinly-striped Thursday.
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE, Tonight, 7-8 pm PT: Dr. Todd Kashdan On The Upside Of "Dark Side" Emotions
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
This is a show on how the negative can be positive -- on how we actually need the emotions that make us uncomfortable. They make us whole, balancing the "positive" emotions.
Dr. Todd Kashdan will lay out the science on how anger, anxiety, and other "negative" feelings can actually be motivating, illuminating, and helpful -- giving us our best shot at success and fulfillment.
Dr. Kashdan's myth-busting book he'll be discussing, co-authored with Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener, is The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self--Not Just Your "Good" Self--Drives Success and Fulfillment.
Listen to the show at this link at showtime or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/12/08/dr-todd-kashdan-the-upside-of-your-dark-side-why-embrace-negative-emotions
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!).
Orders help support my writing and all the work I do to put out this show and are much-appreciated! (Also, 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.")
The Man/Woman Divide: Risk And The South Pole
This pretty much lays it out.
More here.
I do know one woman who went to the South Pole, but they had desks there by then.
Related: It makes evolutionary sense that men are the big risk takers of the species. (It seems to be about getting the girl.)
Jackie's Friend Disputes Her Account Of The Alleged Gang Rape
T. Rees Shapiro and Nick Anderson write in the WaPo "about the Rolling Stone account of a gang rape at a campus fraternity house that unraveled into a journalistic debacle Friday":
The Rolling Stone account said that Jackie summoned three friends to help her after she was brutally raped at the Phi Kappa Psi house on Sept. 28, 2012. The article said that Jackie was bleeding and was wearing a blood-spattered dress and that she met her friends in the shadow of the looming fraternity house. It also claims that Jackie's friends persuaded her not to report the attack for fear of it harming their social lives, a critical part in the article."It was not anything like what happened that night," said the friend, who is identified in the story as "Cindy" and spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of the subject. "That night was not very significant. I remember it, but it was not very dramatic."
She said the students met Jackie near the U-Va. dorms, more than a mile from the campus fraternities.
"Cindy" said that Jackie appeared distraught that night but was not hurt physically and was not bleeding. The student said Jackie made no claims of a gang rape and did not identify the fraternity where she said she had partied. "Cindy" said Jackie told one of the friends there that a group of men had forced her to perform oral sex.
The student said there was never any discussion among Jackie and the group involving how their reputations or social status might be affected by seeking help.
The student said that when she read the Rolling Stone account, she felt betrayed. "It's completely false," she said, noting that she was not contacted or interviewed by a Rolling Stone reporter.
Jackie, in several recent interviews with The Post, stood by her account that she was gang raped at Phi Kappa Psi after she attended a party there with a date. Her version of events during those interviews was substantially similar to the Rolling Stone account.
Tweetback
Saw this:
@AmandaMarcotte
What I don't get is if rape apologists are so sure rapes are hoaxes, why oppose investigating them and getting out that fact?
Tweeted back:
@amyalkon
.@AmandaMarcotte Rapes absolutely should be investigated - by the police, not by a college student in flip-flops who's late to poli-sci
Got Yo-Yo? Yo-Yo Ma, Thomas Jefferson, and Jonathan Haidt
This is an absolutely beautiful, inspiring, elevating album by Yo-Yo Ma that can move me to the verge of tears: Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone
A companion purchase? My book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," in which I write about Jefferson's concept of moral "elevation," whose ideas on this I found through researcher Jonathan Haidt.
Elevation is closely related to awe. According to Haidt (2003), "Elevation is elicited by acts of virtue or moral beauty; it causes warm, open feelings in the chest; and it motivates people to behave more virtuously themselves.
More from Haidt here. In the book, I reference Haidt and Sara Algoe's research that found that people who even just hear about others kind and generous acts are motivated to act kindly and generously themselves.
Drinks
Wet links.
Israel And "Palestine": "Imagine If Staten Island Had A Charter Calling For The Murder Of Everyone In Manhattan"
That was a tweet I sent after seeing the photo below.
Let's get a little real about the reason for "Palestinian Children Under Brutal Occupation." The Druze live quite peacefully in Israeli, as do Arabs (like Christian Arabs) who don't demand (and try to carry out) the death of Jews -- as the Quran and the Hamas Charter demand.
Meanwhile:
Israel Continues Caring For Gaza Patients: While Hamas attacks from Gaza put half of Israel under threat, Palestinian Arabs and Gaza residents continue to receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals.
And:
Israel Hospitals Took Care of Nearly 220,000 PA Arabs in 2012
And:
Israeli Hospitals Taking Syrian Wounded
Yes, what terrible people those Israelis are, not wanting to be slaughtered in their beds by Muslims whose religion demands that, but yet caring for these same people in their hospitals.
Hens Lay; People Lie Like Crazy
That's a little play on the grammar bit to help people remember when to use lay or lie, but there's been a spate of lying that's come to the fore on the Interwebs.
On Jezebel, there's this Anna Merlin blog item: Rolling Stone Partially Retracts UVA Story Over 'Discrepancies':
Rolling Stone's managing editor Will Dana has issued a statement announcing that they have found "discrepancies" in the account of Jackie, the UVA student who was allegedly gang-raped at a frat party two years ago. Dana adds: "We have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced." At the same time, the Washington Post reports that the fraternity in question, Phi Kappa Psi, are planning to release a statement rebutting key parts of Jackie's account....It means, of course, that when I dismissed Richard Bradley and Robby Soave's doubts about the story and called them "idiots" for picking apart Jackie's account, I was dead fucking wrong, and for that I sincerely apologize. It means that my conviction that Sabrina Rubin Erdely had fact-checked her story in ways that were not visible to the public was also wrong. It's bad, bad, bad all around.
The LA Times wins the Credulity In Lieu Of Journalism award for giving a platform to "Cecily Kellogg ... The Great White Story Changer."
As Wendy MacCall put it in the LA Times' comment section:
Cecily Kellogg is a liar. She is making up the story as she goes along. She's written many versions of her story over the years and it changes every time. She's a well-known hashtagavist. She is someone who jumps on bandwagons to up her online profile, but doesn't actually do anything for these causes beyond making it about her. Give her a Google and you'll see what I mean.
Not surprisingly, it seems Lena Dunham may have lied as well.
The Annoying Pretense That People Are Meaner And Less Civil To President Obama And His Family
For years, Democrats said the ugliest things about George Bush and Timothy Egan was...in a Rip Van Winkle-like coma?
Well, he's awakened, just in time to declare that it's been some sort of special mean season on the Obamas. Egan writes in The New York Times:
We know President Obama wants a lasting deal on immigration, something to make taxes fairer, a little help from a caveman Congress on climate change. If he's lucky, he might get some of the above. But one thing his worst opponents have never given him, and probably never will, is respect. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.From the day he took office, his legitimacy has been challenged, his American birth has been suspect, and he's been personally insulted, lectured, yelled at and disrespected in public, by public figures, in a way that few if any American presidents have ever faced.
The latest example of this may seem a trifle -- the crude comments of a Republican congressional staffer, Elizabeth Lauten, about the first family. She resigned after making fun of Sasha and Malia Obama last month. And while Lauten certainly proved her shortcomings as a communications director, making the story about her instead of some platitudinous deed of her boss, Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, her swift resignation was seen as validation for the last line of civility still standing in uncivilized Washington.
It's nasty to attack kids.
The first lady cannot go on vacation without the Drudge Report hyping elaborate travel bills, playing to race insinuations. But when the family of Sarah Palin was involved in a beer-fueled, fist-flying brawl in Alaska this year, conservative media did not call them out for bad white family values, or failures as role models.
Sarah Palin is some lady who ran for VP and lost. As for the bar brawl; it seems Americans are more interested in the Kardashians.
The First Lady's travel bills are being paid by the American taxpayer.
Personally, I was no fan of George Bush and criticized him a-plenty. If anything -- perhaps because I've grown up a little and thought a lot about this while writing a book on manners -- I've been reserved in criticizing Obama.
The reality is, a lot of this is about people trying to aggrandize themselves on social media.
And really, I am truly tired of people demonizing the other side. Gregg and I went the other night to a talk on the failings of the Supreme Court by UC Irvine law dean Erwin Chemerinsky. A guy Gregg knows, knowing I'm libertarian, sneered that he's a big lefty. Well, yes, and I didn't agree with every word he said, but I did agree with most of it -- or at least find it exciting and illuminating.
It seems to me that this disparaging of the other side -- as if they have nothing whatsoever of value to say -- comes out of fear and an ensuing need to separate oneself. If you aren't afraid, you can listen and set aside what you don't agree with and maybe learn something -- which I sure did, listening to Chemerinsky.
Dinkylinks
Wee, wee, wee, all the way home.
Mark Wahlberg Pines For Celebrity "Justice" (No, He Shouldn't Be Pardoned)
Right-on Mark Ambinder column in The Week on Wahlberg's petition for a pardon from the state of Massachusetts. The background:
In April,1988, Mark Wahlberg, 16, set upon a Vietnamese immigrant named Thanh Lam, and, with a wooden stick, beat him so severely that Lam fell to the ground, unconscious. Later that night, according to contemporaneous accounts, Wahlberg found another Asian man, Hoa Trinh, and, calling him a "gook" and "slant-eye," smashed in the face.Trinh lost sight in his right eye.
Wahlberg was arrested, convicted, and spent 45 days in jail...
Ambinder continues:
His pardon application includes the following ambition: "My hope is that, if I receive a pardon, troubled youths will see this as an inspiration and motivation that they too can turn their lives around."Interesting logic. It works better, though, with this rewrite: "My hope is that, by not seeking a pardon, troubled youths will know that their actions have repercussions, even if they later become wealthy celebrities. Although this wonderful country provides plenty of opportunity for them to turn their lives around, they can never use their renown to erase the indelible consequences of their decisions."
The "Security" Joke That Is The TSA
A bunch of JFK baggage handlers were "charged with stealing electronics, jewelry and other items worth more than $20,000 from checked luggage, Queens prosecutors said Wednesday." (Per a Newsday report by Gary Dymski.)
If people can take stuff out of luggage, they can put stuff into luggage. Oh, but we're so much safer because a high school dropout who finally got her GED is putting her latex-gloved paws up around your underwire.
Obamacare Passage: Politics Over Functional Legislation
Remember how they had to pass it to figure out what was in it? Seems a number of legislators realized what was in it but passed it anyway. They're now beginning to admit that.
Like Senator Charles Schumer, retiring Senator Tom Harken (who helped write the law) has admitted what crap legislation Obamacare was and is. Jonathan Turley, who spoke about it on Capital Hill before its passage, notes the same, blogging:
Harkin's criticism was a bit different from Schumer, who indicated that he would have preferred not to have passed health care in the first term at all. Harkin told The Hill newspaper that ObamaCare that the leadership and White House blew it when they had the majority and should have gone all the way to guarantee funding and a more logical structure to the program: "We had the power to do it in a way that would have simplified healthcare, made it more efficient and made it less costly and we didn't do it. So I look back and say we should have either done it the correct way or not done anything at all."I spoke on Capitol Hill before the passage of the ACA and remarked that the legislation was in the worst condition that I had seen in 30 years in terms of a major piece of legislation. As someone who supports national health care, it was very disappointing, if not alarming, to see the condition of the law. The few sections that I reviewed read like a first draft from a LA's computer. Democratic staffers told me later that they agreed and that the legislation was not ready. However, with the death of Kennedy (and the replacement by Brown), the Democratic leadership and the White House decided to push through the poorly crafted law on a muscle vote -- which led to a number of Democrats being defeated on the marginal vote. The result is that the ACA has been a continual struggle as hundreds of serious drafting errors and flaws have had to be addressed.
Harkin is the retiring chairman of the Senate health panel and helped write the law.
Well, gee, Senator, thank you so much for your honesty -- years too late.
I've paid for my own healthcare for decades, through an HMO. My care was affordable for all those decades. Not Cadillac care, but good care, and sometimes wonderful care (my Kaiser psychiatrist, who really knows his stuff). But now, because Obamacare not only made the cost go up but imposed a huge deductible, I can no longer afford to get the care I need (like the breast MRIs a Kaiser surgeon ordered me to have every two years), since I'd have to pay hundreds of dollars for procedures or tests beyond the price I'm already paying monthly.
I'm still working to rework how I earn a living -- and to do speaking engagements -- and my radio show will soon start carrying ads, but right now, I just have to hope my health is all hunky dory, and I'm resorting to writing to researchers to beg to be a test subject for my increasingly serious motion-sickness issues. (I can get a wee bit carsick from short trips when I'm behind the wheel, and worse on longer trips. We have to be in Pasadena soon, just across town, and I'm going to wear a Scopolamine patch to get there.)
Christopher Walken As Mary Poppins Has Competition
That Walken/Poppins idea was tweeted by @TobyHerman. And this horror show below came via @MattWelch:
Dachslinks
Long, low-riding houndy things.
Where The Wild Things Are
Gratuitous dog shot. Yes, I know, that's what Facebook is for, but I thought I'd post the little minx/Sphinx here, too.
Aida, my Chinese Crested, stands, uh, sits, guard in Rancho Mirage.
I'm writing my column in a chair next to hers.
Brain Death Sometimes Occurs Among The Still-Living And Ambulatory
A small tale of an idiot cyclist and an idiot pedestrian who were lucky to not end the day in hospital beds.
Last night, after dark, I was driving from Venice to Santa Monica to meet a friend for a drink and two people got lucky I'm not one of those people who looks down to text behind the wheel.
The first was a guy on a bike -- all in black -- on a dark street by Gold's Gym. He was coming fast, and had it in his mind that traffic rules (like the stop sign he should have stopped at) are not for bikes. Luckily, I'm terrified that I'll hit someone, and I'm always on asshole watch while driving, and this saved his life.
The next lady, Yoga Dimwit, was apparently coming from a yoga studio after I crossed Rose Ave. That part of the street has no lights. She was all in black and did not look as she crossed the street.
Some tiny bit of her clothing or yoga mat was orange, and I saw her just in time and slammed on the brakes.
I opened the passenger window and yelled to her that she was an idiot and then was on my way...but heart-pounding and upset.
Even if people behave like idiots, I don't want to hurt anyone with my car.
It's just that I could use maybe the tiniest bit of cooperation in my wanting to not do that from the people I'm trying to not hit.
Government All Up In My Boobs
Why is it that if there's a government regulation, it's bound to be stupid?
It's so often the case.
I went to get my boobs stuck in a giant waffle iron yesterday, also known as getting a mammogram.
After the mammographer finished, I asked how long it would take to get the results.
She said the government allows Kaiser 30 days.
ME: Well, okay, but it probably doesn't take that long.
The government allows Kaiser 30 days.
ME: Alright, well do they call me or something if there's something wrong?
No, they send you a letter.
ME: A letter? As in, in the mail?
Yes.
ME: Oh, okay. And they probably email you, too, so I can check it on Kaiser's website.
No, just a letter in the mail.
ME: Well, I don't pick up the mail that often, and what if the letter gets lost in the mail?
The government says we have to send a letter. Because not everybody has email.
Asinine. I'll be calling to find out the deal sometime next week. Rather than driving out every day to Santa Monica for the next 30 days, all nervous, to see if I got a letter.
Selfish, Entitled Anti-Vaxxers, Putting Everybody At Risk
Dr. Nina Shapiro has a blog item up about when patients lie. A mom brought in a coughing infant. Severely coughing. Shapiro asked the mother whether the other children in the family had been vaccinated. The mother said they had:
Most of us who've been in practice awhile can distinguish a croup kid from a tracheitis kid from across the street. But this sounded different. Not something I hear every day or even every year. The child seemed to be in agony from the cough, but there was no structural problem. Her exam was normal. I mentioned possible etiologies of the cough to her mom, including several viruses and bacteria. I asked her if her five older children (ages 18 months and up) had had their immunizations, and she assured me that they had. I suggested she go see her pediatrician, who would be able to check for certain viruses or a lung problem, and told mom I'd call her pediatrician to let her know that mom and baby were on their way.
"She lied to you," her pediatrician said. "Nobody in that family has received one vaccine." She lied. Lied? This baby could have had pertussis, better known as whooping cough. My waiting room is filled with patients with weakened immune systems, other newborns too young to be immunized, and elderly cancer patients. If one ever wondered how epidemics start, we had just seen our cute little bundle of typhoid Mary, just west of tinseltown. We are currently living through a whooping cough epidemic, and babies are dying unnecessarily in front of our eyes. And this mom needed to lie about her child's immune status? Parts of Los Angeles have immunization rates lower than those of South Sudan, so one would think that this mom would feel utterly comfortable, and perhaps even proud, that her children were not tainted with Big Pharma-driven, toxin-laden vaccines.
Thankfully it turned out not to be pertussis, but a treatable, short-lived viral illness.
...Which is like saying, "How lucky all those cancer patients and all were that they weren't taken out by one selfish idiot mom."
Donkey
Linkass.
Just Choking!
If you plan to choke a man to death in New York, you'd best get employment as a police officer first.
UPDATE: Moving Harry Siegel New York Daily News column on Garner's cop-caused death:
As he lay dying, he was treated like a piece of meat. By Pantaleo. By the other cops on the scene. Even by the medical technicians.Had Garner been treated with basic human dignity after he was violently, and needlessly, taken down, he might not be dead.
I'm no lawyer, but this is section 125.15 of New York's penal code: "A person is guilty of manslaughter in the second degree when: 1. He recklessly causes the death of another person."
So I'm stunned, and saddened, by a Staten Island grand jury's decision to level no charges against Pantaleo.
Anyone unsure why so many people of color are upset with the police, and suspicious of the American justice system, put your politics down, open your eyes and watch the videos.
There's more to be said on another day about broken-windows policing. Garner was known to cops for selling loose cigarettes, though he wasn't doing that when he was arrested and killed.
And some important points from law prof Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit:
(1) His initial crime: Selling "looseys" -- individual cigarettes -- in violation of NYC tax law. When you pass a law, however trivial, you are providing an opportunity for police to use lethal force. That's why I favor fewer laws, not more.(2) I saw someone on Twitter saying that if you expect a Staten Island grand jury to indict a cop, then you don't know Staten Island. That may be the case, but it shouldn't be. If police can't be accountable for their use of force, then we shouldn't have police. Fire 'em all and privatize. We're not supposed to have titles of nobility in this country.
Finally, there's this tweet, also via @instapundit:
@charlescwcooke
Government is simply a word for the things we decide to do together. Like choke men to death over rules governing the sale of cigarettes.
How To Buy An Ambassadorship From The Obama Administration
Diplomats do actual work; their job involves more than standing around and looking like attractive Obama administration donors.
Yet, that's who two rather important ambassadorships have gone to very recently. Per Jonathan Turley:
...the controversial nomination of major donor Noah Mamet to the top post in Argentina despite the fact that he had never been in the country and does not speak Spanish. You may recall that Argentina is in the midst of serious economic and political upheaval and that a rift is growing between our two countries. It might be a good time to send a trained expert who can speak the language. President Obama sent a bundler instead.
Joseph Perticone writes at IJReview about soap opera producer Colleen Bradley Bell as ambassador to Hungary:
While Bell was not the only political donor to be appointed for an ambassadorship on Tuesday, her appointment is perhaps most controversial because of the current situation in the Eastern European country.ABC News [note: assholish autoplay] reports that Sen. John McCain spoke out against the decision for this exact reason:
"'I am not against political appointees ... I understand how the game is played, but here we are, a nation [Hungary] that is on the verge of ceding its sovereignty to a neo-fascist dictator getting in bed with Vladimir Putin and we're going to send the producer of 'The Bold and The Beautiful' as the ambassador,' McCain continued. 'I urge my colleagues to put a stop to this foolishness. I urge a no vote.'In addition to Bell's "qualifications" as producer of The Bold and The Beautiful, she also donated nearly $800,000 to Barack Obama, with a whopping $2.1 million bundle geared toward his re-election.
When ABC's Jon Karl asked why a daytime soap opera producer was chosen to be an ambassador to Hungary, Ernest said:
"Ambassador Bell has the president's confidence that she will do an excellent job representing the U.S. and maintaining the important relationship the U.S. has with the government and the people of Hungary."Karl followed up by asking:
"But where does the president get that confidence from? I mean, in her confirmation hearing she couldn't even name a single strategic interest the U.S. had with Hungary?"
Turley continues:
More than 40 percent of Obama's second-term picks for diplomatic posts have reportedly been political nominees. Yet, there is virtually no serious coverage in the mainstream media despite past disasters with donors made diplomats.Ethical relativists of course shrug and just say that people are naive in objecting to such practices. However, this is in my view an easy test for any administrative committed to good government. Years ago, I was at a dinner with an extremely wealth Democratic donor was talking about how easy it is to get one of these posts if you give enough money to the President's campaign and how he passed the position to his wife who is delighted to now be called "Ambassador."
In response to criticism by Senator McCain (particularly to giving away a post like Hungary to a donor), the White House responded that President Obama does not take such nominations "lightly." No one of course would think that . . . each of these nominees gave at least $500,000 or more.
Perticone:
In total this year, President Obama has granted ambassadorships to over a dozen politically connected donors, more than any other president.
George Bush had a 36 percent rate, compared with Clinton's 29 percent rate of appointees who weren't career diplomats.
And shame on the legislative sleazebags who voted these people in.
Letters Home From Camp Jihada
Hello, Muddah; hello, Faddah; not having such a good time with Allah...
Lucy Draper writes at Newsweek that the terrorist lifestyle isn't all it's cracked up to be:
New letters, leaked to the French newspaper Le Figaro, have revealed that some ISIS volunteers are regretting their decision to travel to Iraq and Syria to become jihadi fighters after finding themselves stuck with the more mundane tasks involved in running the apparatus of the Islamic State.One messages reveals that the author is unhappy with the duties he's been given, saying: "I'm sick of it. They make me do the washing-up," whilst another complains of the technological difficulties he has has had to face: "I'm fed up to the back teeth. My iPod no longer works out here. I have got to come home."
That's A Star Fleet "Fuck You, TSA Thuggo"
Via @TedFrank, Daniel Knauf writes:
So I'm standing in the bullshit "security theater" line at LAX (does anybody else think the dumbest, most dangerous place an asshole terrorist would try anything is a commercial flight full of people like me who are just itching to legally kick anyone to death who tries anything?) behind the incredibly beautiful Nichelle Nichols, who played Ulhura on the original Star Trek. At 81, she's still as gracious, classy and lovely as ever.Unfortunately, as is the case for many people her age, she has some mobility problems and was seated in a wheelchair as we approached the metal detector. With some difficulty, she got out of the chair to go through the machine, and the TSA Officer waiting on the other side ordered her to take off her shoes. (Who the fuck designed the TSA uniforms? Idi-fucking-Amin? God, they're embarrassing. With all the epaulets and ribbons and that horrible blue, they look like a bunch of deposed third-world eleventy-star generals. But I digress...)
So when this officious prick asked the Single-Woman-on-Earth-Least-Likely-to-Be-a-Terrorist to remove her shoes, despite her clearly limited mobility, I said (very loudly), "Sir! That woman is a Star Fleet Communications Officer! She is WAY above your pay-grade! How DARE you ask her to remove her shoes?!"
At this, all the other people waiting in line cheered and applauded, and the dick-wad was shamed into waving her through.
It was an awesome moment, and I won't soon forget the expression of pure bliss on Miss Nichols' face as she soaked up all that love, attention and support from her fans in line--which were pretty much EVERYBODY in line.
Diorky
Designer linky minus a few social graces.
Clearly, The DMV Paperwork Was Beyond You
Pin-rant from Monday night: 
"Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" at Amazon. At Barnes and Noble.
The Land Of The Free To Be Sniveling Victims Of Department Store Credit Card Pitches
Not long ago, we Americans prided ourselves on being pioneering individualists. Now college students are whimpering about micro-aggressions and trigger warnings and shoppers are sniveling about being "bullied."
Bullied? Yes. That's how they report feeling when a department store clerk asks them if they'd like to open a store credit card account in order to get some percentage of savings on their purchase.
As Ed Morrissey puts it at Hot Air:
Heaven help these wilting lilies if they ever have to buy a car or a house rather than a blender or a sweater. The cash-wrap pitch is hardly a replay of Glengarry Glen Ross, anyway. The stores pitch their cards in order to build customer loyalty, but they don't want people walking away from their already-selected purchases either. I've been on the receiving end of these so-called "bullying" tactics for years without having some part-timer twist my arm into opening new lines of credit.The source of this survey provides the context. Credit.com is a credit-management service that caters to those who feel as though they are not in control of their own finances. That's a legitimate industry that helps a lot of people, but it's also in their interest to paint consumers as victims of cashiers with daydreams of pin money dancing in their heads. Their business is helping people find control of their credit, so highlighting a sense of victimhood plays to their own sales pitches.
...Save the whining about being "bullied" for those who are truly victims, rather than claim that status because you lacked the fortitude to withstand a silly sales pitch at the register.
Are you a grownup? Don't want a credit card? Say no.
Can't say no? Don't leave the house without your state-appointed aide from "The Home."
Average Sucks; Beauty Sells
Charlotte Allen blogs at about the "average Barbie" that people crowed about a while back.
It comes down to this, Charlotte's headline says:
Forget the acne: "Average Barbie" manufacturer glams up the product to actually sell dolls.
Love her photo caption (especially "manjaw") -- "Lammily the prototype: meh hair, manjaw, ugly swimsuit."
Predictably, in hopes of turning a profit, they've since glammed the doll up. In Charlotte's words:
I guess Lammily's designer realized that he actually had to sell dolls to little girls instead of making feminists feel better.
RELATED: My Psych Today piece on the realities of beauty that made feminists grab flaming pitchforks and chase me all over the Internet:
If you're a woman who wants to land a man, there's this notion that you should be able to go around looking like Ernest Borgnine: If you're "beautiful on the inside," that's all that should count. Right. And I should have a flying car and a mansion in Bel Air with servants and a moat.Welcome to Uglytopia--the world reimagined as a place where it's the content of a woman's character, not her pushup bra, that puts her on the cover of Maxim. It just doesn't seem fair to us that some people come into life with certain advantages--whether it's a movie star chin or a multimillion-dollar shipbuilding inheritance. Maybe we need affirmative action for ugly people; make George Clooney rotate in some homely women between all his gorgeous girlfriends. While we wish things were different, we'd best accept the ugly reality: No man will turn his head to ogle a woman because she looks like the type to buy a turkey sandwich for a homeless man or read to the blind.
Dorky
Linky minus a few social graces.
"Bring Back Phone Booths and Other Ways to Battle Rude Cell Phone Yappers"
That's the headline on my latest New York Observer column -- just posted online. An excerpt:
It always seemed so glamorous in old movies when the restaurant's maitre d' would rush over to, say, Cary Grant's table with a telephone on a long cord. Then again, Grant would answer it in his patented classyguy patois -- not take over the restaurant, shouting, "HELLO? HELLO?! ANYBODY THERE?" because Irene Dunne had butt-dialed him.These days, however, cellboors everywhere are doing unarmed takeovers of the restaurant environment with their hee-hawing into their phones -- effectively privatizing a shared space and hijacking the attention of everybody around them. It doesn't help that a decade after cellphones showed up on everybody from the CEO to the wino on the grate, many people still speak into theirs in the voice white men in cowboy movies used to talk to the Indians. However, what few realize is that even a cellphone call made in a quiet voice is rude -- if unintentionally -- because it is invasive to the brains of those in earshot of the person making it.
A growing body of research suggests that a conversation that bystanders hear only one side of, such as a cellphone call, is disturbing to the brain in a way a two-sided conversation is not. Apparently, your brain tries to figure out the side of the conversation that you are not able to hear. (Your brain does this automatically; it isn't something you can just decide not to do.)... (CONT'D AT THE LINK...)
PS It really helps if people share this on social media, and I hope you will!
Don't Be One Of This Holiday's Many RSVP Delinquents
People hosting parties need to know how much food and drink to buy.
Also, it feels really bad when you announce that you're giving a party and the response is like one of those shots in a Western of the deserted town with the tumbleweed blowing down the street.
From my book, Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" -- at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or at the fabulous independent bookstore near you.
The "Affordable" Care Act Will Now Make Your Food Less Affordable
Your food will be less affordable and you'll have less choice thanks to the Obamacare regulation mandating calorie counts be posted (at chain restaurants, bakeries, cafeterias, coffee shops, convenience stores, delis, food service facilities in entertainment venues, takeout places like pizzerias, and in grocery stores, retail sweet shops, and superstores).
This is very important to do because so many people are under the impression that chocolate covered pretzels are made of kale and have only 2 calories each. This is obviously why they buy them or that Supersized Slurpee -- because they are too stupid to understand that these items are junk food.
Julie Gonlock writes at NRO that this Obamacare calorie-labeling mandate is costly and does not improve our health:
The modern supermarket is truly amazing. These stores stock just about everything: food of every variety, some hardware items, cleaning supplies, shampoos and soaps, cards and office supplies. As a mom of three young kids, I appreciate that I can often buy everything on my long list in just one stop. Many people appreciate the ready-to-eat section of the supermarket because they enjoy the convenience of grabbing a rotisserie chicken or a prepared meal that can be warmed up and eaten at home, thereby avoiding the extra cost of being served in a restaurant.Yet, this is exactly the part of the store that will be most affected by the new FDA regulations, despite the very real (and quite obvious) differences between it and a restaurant. The most obvious difference is that supermarket ready-to-eat counters don't have menus, because their offerings change day to day.
I know this firsthand because I once worked in the deli of a supermarket. When the deli manager (let's call her Marge) needed to fill the display case with a few more items, she would send me to the produce section, where the produce manager would give me a variety of very ripe fruits and vegetables -- things that could no longer be sold as such, but were still perfectly fine for use chopped in a salad of some sort.
Marge and I would then put together some salads and other items that would be sold in single-serving containers. There were no recipes for these things. We just knew how to throw a few items together and make something that tasted good. It was a win for the store because it led to less waste and less monetary loss. It was also a win for the customers who liked these seasonal items, which also tended to be healthy.
Enter the menu-labeling regulations, and this perfect little ecosystem goes straight to hell.
First, the regulation will kill innovation. Since Marge doesn't know how many calories are in each serving of her thrown-together salads, she'll be forced to stop making them. Her boss certainly isn't going to spend money getting each of those creations analyzed for their calories, fat, salt, and sugar (and with sugar, one would need to know what percentage occurs naturally and what percentage is added) because Marge might not have those exact ingredients available to her next week, meaning she would be making all new salads.
So, because of this law, Marge will stop making her impromptu salads. She'll be required to follow a set recipe so that the store can post exact and accurate information about calories, fat, sugar, and salt. Never mind that this will mean fewer choices for shoppers (especially fewer vegetable and fruit choices) and more wasted produce. The government thinks Marge and her staff are better off sticking to salads that can be clearly labeled. And apparently it thinks you'll be better off, too.
Of course, these regulations capture more than just the salads and the many other items sold in the deli. The bakery would also be affected. So much for that specialty cake you wanted to order for little Timmy's birthday party. You'll have to choose from these four appropriately labeled cakes.
Food writers, most of whom will cheer for these regulations, often preach about going back to a simpler time when good people cooked with love for their customers. Yet, they don't seem to recognize that that's exactly what Marge (and many just like her) was doing before the FDA got in there and messed it all up.
Most depressingly, study after study shows that these new regulations will do next to nothing in terms of encouraging Americans to cut calories and eat healthier.
I like what a commenter, Palamas, said at NRO:
When was the Constitution changed to give you a right to know how many calories there are in the handmade salad you are thinking of ordering?
via @walterolson
KYHWWB: Keeping Your Hands Warm While Black
This is now considered reason for the cops to stop a man -- being black and having his hands in his pockets in freezing weather.
Daniel Politi writes at Slate that a Pontiac, Michigan man, Brandon McKean, was stopped by the police for just this reason:
"You were walking by ... you were making people nervous," the white police officer answers when McKean asks him why he was stopped."By walking by?" an incredulous McKean asks.
"Yes, they said you had your hands in your pockets," answers the officer, who also begins to record the encounter with his phone.
"Wow, walking by having your hands in your pockets makes people nervous to call the police when it's snowing outside?"
"Yeah," the officer says calmly.
Then the officer keeps going, as if he's still suspicious of something: "What are you up to today?" McKean is clearly fed up: "Walking, with my hands in my pockets." Then the officer wonders: "Is it an inconvenience talking to me right now?"
"Hell yes," answers McKean, noting "the whole police situation going on across the country." But the officer defends his actions: "We do have a lot of robberies, so I'm just checking on you."
Linkfetti
Throw it all in here.
Cyber Monday Deals Week Is Here
At Amazon
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And don't forget to buy my book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," for all the naughty and nice people in your life! Only about $11 with Amazon's discount!
