Welcome To The All-Seeing State: License Plate Readers To Help Cops Impound Cars Of Those With Unpaid Property Taxes
The problem with technology is that people tend think having it should mean using it.
As I explain in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," we're such tech-thrilled chimps in the face of electronic bells and whistles that our eagerness to push all the buttons bypasses our need to consider whether the particular technology serves us or, maybe, will degrade how we live (like by yanking away our privacy).
Well, welcome to Newport News, Virginia, where cops will use a license plate reader to nab and impound vehicles owned by people with unpaid property taxes. Theresa Clift writes for the Daily Press:
NEWPORT NEWS, Virginia -- Delinquent taxpayers in Newport News could have their vehicles impounded if new cameras snap a photo of their license plates around town.In an attempt to claim the nearly $4 million in delinquent personal property taxes owed, the city will soon begin using license plate scanners to find vehicles on which more than $200 in personal property taxes are owed.
The cameras will be mounted to the backs of six sheriff's department cruisers to automatically read license plate numbers. Those numbers will be cross-searched with a database updated daily of all the license plates in the city with more than $200 in personal property taxes owed, Treasurer Marty Eubank said.
If a match is found, an alarm will sound, and the deputy will call the Treasurer's office to verify that the payment has not been made. If the owner is present, they can pay on the spot, Eubank said. If not, a sticker will be placed on the car telling the owner they have three business days to pay or set up a reasonable payment plan before the vehicle is towed and impounded.
The city will hold the vehicle for 30 days, sometimes longer on a case-by-case basis, before auctioning it off as "a last resort," Eubank said.
A Man With A Truck And A Plan
A five-step plan to restore constitutional government. (Any suggested additions?)
Dogma-Style: Why The Rolling Stone Gang-Rape Story Will Never Be Deemed A Hoax
Ashe Schow writes at WashEx about the brutal gang rape of Jackie, reported in Rolling Stone, that it now seems clear did not occur:
Activists have clung to the idea that something probably did happen to make a young woman tell a tale of a brutal gang rape and become a campus activist to keep the hoax claims isolated to a small subset....The faint possibility that Jackie may have suffered some other horrific event is not the reason this story will not be labeled a hoax by activists or most in the mainstream media.
No, the reason it will not be labeled a hoax comes from an anonymous McGill University student, using the pseudonym Aurora Dagny, who wrote last year that dogmatism is in part to blame for activists' refusal to accept evidence contrary to their worldview.
"One way to define the difference between a regular belief and a sacred belief is that people who hold sacred beliefs think it is morally wrong for anyone to question those beliefs," Dagny wrote. "If someone does question those beliefs, they're not just being stupid or even depraved, they're actively doing violence. They might as well be kicking a puppy. When people hold sacred beliefs, there is no disagreement without animosity."
Because the activists behind the Rolling Stone story hold a "sacred belief" that thousands, perhaps even millions, of college students are sexually assaulted each year, any evidence to the contrary is seen as detrimental to the cause.
This sort of "sacred belief" religiosity enters many areas, including science. That's what caused supposed lofty skeptics (including "elite" science writers) to believe unquestioningly that Bora Zivkovic was guilty of "sexual harassment," when his behavior in no way met the legal or even reasonable standards for it.
Linkosaur
Prelinkstoric.
Your Monday Night Funny
Trevor Noah on traffic lights in the UK vs. Africa:
via @iowahawkblog
Stupid, Unsustainable Government Spending
The Heritage Foundation's Ed Feulner at The Daily Signal lays out the case of a family, with a $52K income that spends $61K every year -- and is already $311K in debt:
Would you say they have a problem?I wish I could say this family was made up. Actually, this particular household isn't real. But the "family" in this scenario is the federal government, and the amounts at stake are in the billions, not the thousands. The ratio of overspending, however, is accurate. So is the fact that the money they're being so careless with is our tax dollars.
Ever wonder how a dollar of federal spending breaks down? Do you know what amount goes where? With tax season in full swing and Congress trying to agree on a new budget, it's a good question to ask. You can find the answer, at least in broad strokes, in a new chart from The Heritage Foundation's 2015 Federal Budget in Pictures.
Spending on K-12 education takes 1 cent of each dollar. Transportation: 3 cents. National defense: 17 cents. "Income security," a term that encompasses such things as tax credits for the poor and welfare programs: 19 cents. Net interest on the national debt: 7 cents.
But the big players are Social Security (24.3 cents) and spending on Medicaid, Medicare and other health care programs (26.3 cents). Such entitlements, which are beyond the normal budget process, take up more than half of every dollar the federal government spends. And they're growing at an unsustainable rate.
Restaurant Owner IHOPS Out Of The Biz Because Of Obamacare
Robert Bluey writes at The Daily Signal of a longtime IHOP owner, Scott Womack, who sold his 16 restaurants and nixed plans for expansion because the "Affordable" Care Act made continuing to do business unaffordable:
"You have to fund your development through your profits," Womack said during my 2011 visit to Terre Haute. "And if you have no profits, you're not building restaurants."During his testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, Womack said those plans were now in jeopardy--and with it hundreds of jobs, not just at his restaurants but also in industries such as construction and manufacturing that would support his expansion.
"Let me state this bluntly," Womack told lawmakers, "this law will cost my company more money than we make."
The cost of Obamacare's mandates--Womack estimated it would be $7,000 to provide health care coverage for each full-time employee--left him with few options: cut costs, eliminate staff, reduce hours or convert workers to part-time status.
Womack, a 30-year restaurant veteran, faced unique challenges in the industry, where profit margins ranged from 5 percent to 7 percent. Restaurants already produce the lowest revenue per employee, meaning there was a high labor cost associated with implementing the new law.
Four Years Later
Facing the prospect of Obamacare's employer mandate on Jan. 1, 2015, Womack opted to sell his 16 IHOP restaurants last year to Romulus Restaurant Group. (The company, which operates 74 restaurants in nine states, didn't get back to me but Womack believes everyone who worked at his restaurants remains employed.)
I've long been against employer-provided healthcare. It's idiocy. Leave a job and start another with a different health care company and you lose your doctors and the continuity of your care.
I've paid for my own care every month since my 20s. That's how it should be for everyone -- especially in a day and age where people leave jobs with some frequency and many people don't have jobs and are just hired guns.
via @reasonpolicy
TSA Dumbassery: To Try To Spot Stressed-Out People In A Stressful Environment
Yaël Ossowski writes for Watchdog.org of the idiocy that is the TSA's behavioral "detection" program, in which the geniuses try to spot those rare stressed-out people at airports, where so many people are just slow-drawling, "What's that? I'm about to miss my plane? I'm cool, bro."
A Congressional Budget Office report from 2010 uncovered the program's "staffing levels" were the only performance metric to be found. According to the TSA, hiring of more behavior detection experts was the only way to "gauge how fast the program is growing."Though the program was set up to deter terrorists, the program has no way to measuring whether it's even come close to that goal.
Also found in the report is the revelation that most of the techniques employed by TSA agents for behavior detection are the work of Paul Ekman, professor of psychology at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco, one of the world's foremost experts on facial expressions.
Ekman says it "was not clear" whether this program could even be "used effectively in an airport environment," a place where individuals are routinely stressed and under pressure.
But despite this criticism, the TSA is relentless in defending the program and claiming it has been effective at deterring terrorists.
"Terrorists have used a variety of items and ways to attempt to inflict harm to aircraft -- everything from shoes to liquids -- but consistent across all methods of attack is the malicious intent of the actor," Feinstein told Watchdog.org.
"Looking for suspicious behavior is a common sense approach used by law enforcement and security personnel across the country and the world, that focuses on those behavioral indicators, rather than items, and when used in combination with other security layers helps mitigate a variety of threats."
I love the commenter "Uncle Bob" from the Watchdog site:
Uncle Bob
So a bunch of ignorant jack-holes that barely passed high school are now behavioral experts?
UPDATED: Here's an easy-to-read list from a leaked doc with all the things they look for. If you don't fit at least a few of them, you aren't human and breathing.
Here's one: "Wearing improper attire for location." I wear evening gown skirts as daywear. Eek! I must be heading off (with my bag full of bacon) to marry an ISIS fighter -- right after I bring down the plane with my thoughts.
Twinkie
Hostessylinks.
Tweet-hee
From Brian David Earp: Every woman's magazine.
Unstylish Dissent: Why Feminists Diss Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia, raised Muslim, genitally mutilated and told she would marry a relative of her father's choosing, ran off to freedom in the Netherlands.
She's a critic of religion -- just the wrong one for feminists to get on board with her, as she criticizes Islam and calls for its reformation. Eek! So un-PC!
Rich Lowry explains the problem in the New York Post:
If Hirsi Ali had had a strict Baptist upbringing and left to tell the story of its hypocrisies and closed-mindedness, she would be celebrated in such precincts as Brandeis, without anyone uttering a peep of protest.This is the "Book of Mormon" effect -- no one cares about offending the inoffensive. It's only debate over a religion that is home to dangerous fanatics that must be carefully policed.
Even people not otherwise known for their solicitude for religious sensibilities are uncomfortable with her criticisms of Islam.
In his interview with her this week, "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart worried that "people single out Islam," when Christianity underwent its own difficult reconciliation with modernity.
True enough, but the horrific intra-Christian bloodletting of the Thirty Years' War was 400 years ago.
If Islam is on the same trajectory, it is badly trailing the pace. Hirsi Ali's prescriptions are hardly unassailable. Her notion of religious reform bears an atheistic stamp.
If change in Islam depends on getting Muslims to admit that Muhammad was not The Prophet, as she writes in "Heretic," the cause is indeed hopeless. The ummah is not going to dissolve itself into a gooey Unitarian Universalism.
...Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not just a heretic; she also is a believer. She has more confidence in Western civilization and its values than people who have never had to live outside it, or face down the enemies who want to destroy it.
If she doesn't get the recognition she deserves, so much the worse for her detractors.
Minky
Furrylinks.
Sometimes "Racial Profiling" Is Just Traffic Violation Profiling
It's easy to go all "J'accuse!" on the cops -- especially because there is quite a bit of racial profiling that goes on. But the video in this case told the story -- that actress Taraji Henson's son was stopped for a reason, and it wasn't the color of his skin but the color of his driving.
Veronica Rocha writes for the LA Times:
"Empire" actress Taraji P. Henson apologized for alleging that Glendale police racially profiled her son during a traffic stop after a video obtained by the Los Angeles Times cast doubt about whether police had improperly targeted him.Just hours after a 40-minute video showing an encounter between Glendale police and Henson's son went viral, the "Empire" actress apologized for accusing officers of racial profiling.
"I would like to publicly apologize to the officer and the Glendale Police Department," she said in an Instagram message with the hashtag #TurningANegativeIntoAPositive #LoveTarajiPHenson. "A mother's job is not easy and neither is a police officer's. Sometimes as humans we overreact without gathering all the facts. As a mother in this case, I overreacted and for that I apologize. Thank you to that officer for being kind to my son."
Her son ran a crosswalk as someone was crossing -- illegal under California traffic laws.
His race was not apparent in the video as he was driving.The officer, still behind the 20-year-old, speeds up and initiates a traffic stop.
In the video, the officer approaches Henson's son's Honda and tells him he was stopped for driving through a lighted crosswalk while someone was walking in it. The youth tells the officer he was headed to a friend's home in Calabasas.
...Then the officer asked whether he had anything illegal in his car, and the young man responded that he had marijuana in his backpack, according to the video. He told the officer he has a state-issued medical marijuana license but couldn't find it.
"I appreciate you being honest with me about the weed. I do appreciate that because I do smell weed," the officer said.
During the lengthy traffic stop shown on the video, Johnson was searched and told the officer he had Ritalin, a prescription drug used to treat hyperactivity, in his car. He admitted he didn't have a prescription and that he had gotten the pill from a friend.
"You know you're not supposed to have that, right?" the officer told him.
Johnson then consented and allowed the officer to search his car. At that point, the officer was joined by two other officers and a police cadet.
And if anything, the police officer bent over backwards to not throw the book at him.
via @VPostrel
Handi Wipe: The Hillary E-mail Erasure, Perfectly Put
A tweet by Ken White:
@Popehat
I ask you, who among us hasn't wiped a server clean after its contents were requested by subpoena?
Correction: Ken White said the tweet was actually from Patrick Non-White, also a Popehat blogger.
Boil
Bubblylinks. (For a good time...cauldron.)
"Zero Tolerance" Is The First Step To The Total Pussification Of America
That sort of thinking -- which isn't thinking at all but a nonthink combo platter of fear, stupidity, and fear of litigation in action -- leads to the thinking that this sort of thing just below is necessary. (Helicopter parenting becoming "normal" parenting is surely a factor, too.)
And the news inspiring this blog post? Parents of kids at a school in Pennsylvania must sign a permission slip for their kids to eat an Oreo after it's used in a science experiment.
I Like A Tough, Armed Broad In Pearls And Fur
A tweet:
The Microagressed In The Workplace
Ashe Schow wonders at Wash Ex what will happen when all of these "delicate snowflakes" -- these students fresh out of the campus land of social justice, trigger warnings, and microagressions enter the work world:
The most recent incident of hurt feelings comes from the National Union of Students Women's conference in England. It was illustrative of the kind of accommodations being demanded by young people who probably won't be able to operate in such a cruel world. On Tuesday, the NUS Twitter account tweeted that some at the conference "are requesting that we move to jazz hands rather than clapping, as it's triggering anxiety. Please be mindful!"At long last -- someone is speaking out against the menacing, sexist, patriarchal gesture of putting one's palms together as a sign of approval.
You may recall "jazz hands" from the Occupy Wall Street movement's leech-ins. Except there, the gesture was called "up twinkles" if you approved of something and "down twinkles" if you did not. I give the NUS conference some serious down twinkles (and a frowny emoji) for their stunt.
If clapping creates anxiety for you, you are too fragile to enter any workplace. Perhaps we can find you a nice sunny room where they'll let you knit and color before they give you your meds.
Schow writes:
Granted, this is (I sincerely hope) a minority of college students. And it seems mostly limited to women, especially those involved in campus sexual assault advocacy.But this far-too-vocal minority is turning colleges into pre-schools. ... At some point these students -- who are all survivors of something, whether it be an actual crime, a regretted sexual encounter or crude YouTube video or something uttered in a law class -- are going to enter the real world.
If college is supposed to prepare students for the real world, what world are these students being prepared for?
I'd be afraid to hire anyone who takes any serious part in this stuff. (Bad enough when you sense that they've not only read Foucault from cover to cover, but bought in.)
Goober
Linkpeas.
Meet Mr. Or Ms. Texthole: "Life Must Stop So I Can Text Someone!"
I came to an intersection this morning just as this really old man got there.
Seeing his advanced age and having gotten used to these jerks who meander across the street while texting, I expected a wait similar to that of the Israelis when they were on hold to get into The Promised Land.
I expected wrong.
The guy -- probably in his late eighties -- actually scampered (yes, scampered) across the street.
Because he was so old and because he was wearing a jaunty hat, the way he scampered was actually the cutest thing to see.
He first looked my way -- saw there was a car waiting to turn -- and, surely because of that, hurried across the intersection.
About twenty minutes later, I arrived at the coffeeshop, where people were impeded from getting to the water and coffee fixings by some 40-something buttmunch texting into his phone. And not just for a second. For a couple of minutes.
Consider the message being sent in each case:
Old man:
Other people are important!
40-something butt-munch:
Other people don't exist.
Thanks, I'll take the old dude.
For science-based advice (served up with bitey humor) on how to avoid being a buttmunch, please order my book, "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" (around $11 at Amazon). (Also at Barnes & Noble.)
Illegal For Thee But Not For Me! Wheee! The Benefits Of A Job As A Govt Thug
The notion that one can acdt with impunity is so often the province of government functionaries and enforcers, as in the case of DEA agents who had sex parties with prostitutes.
Now, I'm of the mind that it's your body, and you should be able to rent it if you want to. However, as long as it's illegal for the rest of us to rent bodies for sex...
John Bresnahan and Lauren French write at Politico that DEA agents had sex parties with prostitutes, according to a watchdog:
Agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration reportedly had "sex parties" with prostitutes hired by drug cartels in Colombia, according to a new inspector general report released by the Justice Department on Thursday.In addition, Colombian police officers allegedly provided "protection for the DEA agents' weapons and property during the parties," the report states. Ten DEA agents later admitted attending the parties, and some of the agents received suspensions of between two to 10 days.
"Suspensions..."? Don't the rest of us get jail time or at least a fine and a nasty plea bargain, maybe to clean up trash on the highway, for this sort of thing?
The stunning allegations are part of an investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general into claims of sexual harassment and misconduct within DEA, FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the U.S. Marshals Service. The IG's office found that DEA did not fully comply with its probe.Moreover,the report states that DEA, ATF and the Marshals Service repeatedly failed to report all risky or improper sexual behavior to security personnel at those agencies.
The report covers the period from 2009 to 2012, although some of the incidents occurred long before that.
Other allegations in the report:
* A deputy U.S. Marshal "entered into a romantic relationship" with a fugitive's spouse and would not break off the relationship for more than a year, even after being told by supervisors to end it;* An ATF "Director of Industry Operations" had "solicited consensual sex with anonymous partners and modified a hotel room door to facilitate sexual play." The ATF employee even disabled a hotel's fire detection system, and when caught by the hotel, said he had done it before;
* "For over 3 years, an ATF Program Manager failed to report allegations that two training instructors were having consensual sex with their students. According to the incident report, the Program Manager learned the same instructors had engaged in substantially the same activities 3 years earlier but had merely counseled the training instructors without reporting the alleged activities" to the Internal Affairs Division.
Wrong for thee...not for meee! Megalomania complete with a juicy government pension.
via @palafo
It's Your Womb; You Should Be Able To Rent It Out If You Want
Paid surrogacy is illegal and considered a form of child trafficking in Oklahoma. Michigan women who try to rent out their wombs face five years in jail and a potential $50K in fines.
But why in the world should the government have a say in whether you rent out your womb?
Nick Gillespie and Joshua Swain write at reason:
Gestational surrogacy contracts are also against the law in New York, but State Senator Brad Hoylman (D-27th Senate Dist.) introduced a bill last year that would change that. And he has first hand experience with the issue. Hoylman and his husband had to go to California to find a surrogate to carry their daughter Silvia, who's now four."If the [bill] passes, we'll have surrogates who could actually engage with intended parents and egg donors," says Hoylman.
"We don't want to turn baby making into a commercial industry," says Jennifer Lahl, president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture.
Why not? What business is it of yours if consenting adults wish to engage in an exchange of money for a women to provide something very precious to a couple who likely cannot have a child of their own?
Doggie
Arfylinks.
Trendy Salad Problem
They feel they need to put something in that should rightfully be classified as a sprig of a bush, not food.
There's No Hair There
Michelle Obama, sans explanation, seems to go bad to the bald on Jeopardy.
Turns out it's actually just a bun.
Personally, I liked this tweet from the first (TheHill.com) link:
@k___watson
My dad just said Michelle Obama is bald because she doesn't eat 😂😂
via Drudge
Sometimes Speech Is Uncomfortable, Racist, Or Icky: Allow All Speech Or None On License Plates
The state of Texas refused to issue one of their specialty license plates to the Sons of Confederate Veterans because it would show the group's logo, which includes the Confederate Battle Flag.
On Monday, the Supreme Court heard arguments about this.
The LA Times editorial board gets it right:
Our view is that once a state decides to turn license plates into metallic bumper stickers reflecting various drivers' views about everything from abortion to the environment, it can't pick and choose which viewpoints will be allowed.If the [Supreme Court] decides that specialty license plates are "public forums" in which the government may not discriminate, there could be a proliferation of ugly messages...
-
But we also acknowledge that if the court decides that specialty license plates are "public forums" in which the government may not discriminate, there could be a proliferation of ugly messages and symbols on them (including, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested, a swastika). But the same is true when the government opens a public park or a public meeting to a variety of speakers....At Monday's argument, the lawyer for Texas warned that if specialty license plates were treated as a public forum, the state would have to permit pro-Nazi or pro-Al Qaeda messages simply because it offered a license plate that said "Fight Terrorism." To which Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. replied, "Well, but there is an easy answer to that, which is they don't have to get in the business of selling space on their license plates to begin with."
I also think that if the state allows you to put "MOM111" on your plate, you should also be allowed to put on "BLOWME111" or the racist, sexist, or sexual language of your choice.
Again, the solution to speech people find creepy or too sexual isn't censorship; it's the state no longer selling the ability to put a message on your plate for pay.
Whoops, there go all those dollars.
Disgusting Thumbs Up By Fed Judge To Cops' Home-Invasion Violation Of Third Amendment
The Third is one we don't hear a lot about -- it's the one that says soldiers can't take over your home -- "quarter" in it -- without your consent. But who are "soldiers" today? Ilya Somin at Volokh/Wapo makes the point:
When the Amendment was enacted in 1791, there were virtually no professional police of the sort we have today. The distinction between military and law enforcement officials was far less clear than in the world of 2015. Moreover, many parts of the Bill of Rights were in part of inspired by abuses committed by British troops attempting to enforce various unpopular laws enacted by Parliament.A second complicating factor is the increasing militarization of police forces in many parts of the country, which has resulted in cops using weapons and tactics normally associated with military forces. If a state or local government decides to quarter a SWAT team in a private home, it is not clear whether that is meaningfully different from placing a National Guard unit there.
This is why federal district court Judge Andrew Gordon was wrong in dismissing the claim against Henderson and Las Vegas, Nevada police officers by Anthony, Linda, and Michael Mitchell. These cops forcibly took over the Mitchells' home for nine hours so they could gain a "tactical advantage" against suspected criminals living near them.
What was done to the Mitchells is truly disgusting -- via another blog post by Somin:
Henderson [Nevada] police arrested a family for refusing to let officers use their homes as lookouts for a domestic violence investigation of their neighbors, the family claims in court.
The officers sound truly abusive. See their court papers here.
Somin adds in the more recent post:
The issue of how long the soldiers (or militarized police) have to stay in a private home before their occupation of it qualifies as "quartering" is also a tough question. Without actually resolving the issue, Judge Gordon suspects that a 9 to 24 hour period is too short. I am not convinced. It seems to me that spending one night in the house does qualify as quartering, albeit for only a brief period. Just as the First Amendment covers even brief restrictions on freedom of speech and the Fifth Amendment requires compensation for the taking of even small amounts of private property, so the Third Amendment forbids even brief involuntary quartering of troops in private homes....Finally, although his ruling dismissed the Mitchells' Third Amendment argument, Judge Gordon did allow many of their other claims to go forward, including causes of action under the First and Fourth Amendments, and violations of federal and state statutory law. The first part of the judge's opinion is a harrowing summary of the plaintiffs' description of what the officers did to them. If the Mitchells' story is true (the police obviously have their own version of events), it is clear that the officers engaged in illegal and deeply troubling abuses of power against innocent civilians - regardless of whether their actions violated the Third Amendment or not.
A comment from commenter "Unusual Suspect" at the WaPo:
Why all this talk about "nine hours"?? This time period was established after the fact. Once they entered, no one had any idea of how much time would pass with them still there. The homeowners had no idea how long this would go on, consequently, they were forced to make other accommodations based on not knowing. The judge's reference to the time period indicates that he has lost sight of the plight of average Americans when it comes to dealing with constitutional rights violations by law enforcement.
What's scary is that, more and more, crimes by cops -- like this home invasion and the theft without proof of guilt that is "asset forfeiture" -- are being perpetrated on citizens, and without deep pockets or the Institute for Justice taking your case, you're very likely screwed.
A question I'm increasingly asking myself and other people: Is this the America we want to be living in?
via Jay J. Hector
Office Of Civil Rights Should Be Retitled The Office Of Kafkaesque Rights
Hans Bader writes at CEI of all the ways the OCR is pushing colleges to remove due process -- mainly from men on campus, since they are largely the ones accused of sexual assault or harassment. One way the OCR does this is through the "massive financial risk colleges face if they do not swiftly expel accused students":
Thanks partly to OCR stacking the deck, it can be much cheaper for a college to expel a possibly innocent student than to find him not guilty. Even before OCR's recent rules changes, colleges had massive incentives to suspend or expel students who might be guilty of sexual assault or harassment.For example, last year, the University of Connecticut settled a Title IX lawsuit by paying $900,000 to a student who alleged sexual assault. In 2009, the University of Arizona paid $850,000. In 2007, the University of Colorado paid $2.5 million. A jury awarded $1 million against the Pine Plains school district to a racial harassment plaintiff. And if students win their Title IX lawsuit, the school also has to pay their attorney's fees, under a pro-plaintiff rule known as the Christiansburg Garment rule.
Colleges' financial risks are multiplied by the fact that in addition to being sued by students, OCR can cut off all their federal funds and student financial aid. OCR doesn't view itself as being bound by a court's earlier ruling rejecting a student's harassment lawsuit, and it argues that the standard of culpability is less in an administrative investigation.
Moreover, although OCR is not likely to cut off a typical college's federal funds, since a college will do whatever it takes to appease OCR and prevent that from happening, that doesn't mean a college will not experience massive costs. When OCR investigates a college, it has to devote a small army of employees to cooperate with its investigation.
Here's where it goes especially Kafka:
Moreover, even when no court would award damages, OCR will. It has recently given itself the power to award monetary damages against colleges, even in situations where the Supreme Court's Davis decision says damages would be inappropriate under the Constitution's spending clause. To resolve a recent OCR investigation, Tufts had to pay a complainant "monetary compensation," even though OCR never specifically found that she was sexually assaulted, because OCR ruled that Tufts had wrongly allowed the accused to submit the complainant's private medical records to show that the complainant had lied and that the accused thus was innocent.In its April 29, 2014 harassment guidance, OCR generally imposes liability on institutions even if they do correctly discipline those they discover have engaged in sexual harassment, if they do not also "remedy its effects," and "prevent its recurrence." Even punishing the harasser "likely will not be sufficient," OCR said. What does OCR mean by "remedy"? In its 2013 retaliation guidance, it suggests money, saying that "OCR will determine which remedies, including monetary relief, are appropriate based on the facts presented in each specific case."
So in addition to being sued by complainants, colleges may also be forced to pay money by OCR.
And that's just the beginning.
Loops
Linkmeknots.
One More Reason To Love Candace Bergen: Her Attitude On Being Fat
(Which I, by the way, do not share in the least.)
I have a friend who's a fabulous guy -- a brilliant and hilariously un-PC anthropologist who knows history like it happened in his head. He's an enormous guy -- and I mean that both in the physical and general sense.
A few ev psych conferences ago, he made it no secret that he'd had his stomach stapled -- which I am pretty sure he did more for health than vanity -- so a number of us were a little worried when he was still putting down rather huge plates of food.
I don't think anyone expressed this verbally, but he knew. He looked over his food to us at table with him, acknowledged the procedure he'd had done, and said, "But I'm a glutton. I love to eat!"
I just loved the way he put that. No apologies, no weaseling, no attempts to justify.
I was reminded of that by the way Candace Bergan talked about her current shape. I have to say, I found Bergen one of the coolest, nicest, genuinely interesting and interested people I've encountered in Hollywood or anywhere, talked about her current shape. Columnist Susannah Breslin and appeared together on a show she did to talk about us about sex, and then I appeared on Bergen's later show. She sent Breslin and I signed Mary Ellen Mark photo books to thank us. Classy lady.
Anyway, via ET here's Bergen on her 30-pound weight gain:
"Let me just come right out and say it: I am fat," she writes, as the Today show reported on Monday, previewing their interview with her on April 7. "I live to eat. None of this 'eat to live' stuff for me.""I am a champion eater," she jokes. "No carb is safe -- no fat, either."
...Bergen says she is now totally comfortable in her own skin.
"At a recent dinner party I shared bread and olive oil, followed by chocolate ice cream with my husband," she recalls. "A woman near me looked at me, appalled, and I thought, 'I don't care.'"
Though I sure don't think the way she does on this -- and eating low-carb/high-fat, I don't put on weight like carb-eaters do -- I love and respect the way she is just "Here I am. I'm cool with it."
This is the essence of what is described in Joan Didion's 1961 Vogue essay, "On Self-Respect." An excerpt:
Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samarra and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbable candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: "I hate careless people," she told Nick Carraway. "It takes two to make an accident."Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work--say it is screenwriting--in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.
In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.
A side note: The ET piece was reported by ET's Antoinette Bueno, who is apparently so clueless about film that she twice referred to Bergen's late husband, French film director Louis Malle, as "Louis Dalle."
Buy her book here: A Fine Romance
Actual Title Of Session At Academic Conference
Abortion, Guns, and Other Topics only Academics Could Make Boring.
via @kwcollins
Not Even Any Evidence Of A Party
Charlottesville cops say there was no evidence to support the UVA rape story in Rolling Stone, reports Sasha Goldstein in the NY Daily News:
The months-long investigation into the story told by "Jackie" about what she said was a September 2012 gang rape at the Phi Kappa Psi house could not be proven in any way, said police Chief Timothy Longo.The case has been "suspended," not closed, because something could have happened, Longo said.
"We certainly can't say something didn't happen ... but there's not evidence to support it," Longo told reporters at a Monday afternoon press conference.
...The night of the Sept. 28, 2012, reported gang rape, Jackie told friends she was to go to dinner and a frat event with a man named Haven Monahan. The phone number she used to text the man was actually a Google number and police have found no subscriber information for the line.
There is no evidence Monahan exists, Longo said.
Jackie also claimed there was a party at Phi Kappa Psi the night of the rape, but police found no evidence of a party. Instead, investigators discovered that the frat's sister sorority was having a formal that night, meaning it was likely there was no event at the frat so as not to "cannibalize" the sorority's guest list, Longo said.
"All I can tell you is that there is no substantive basis to conclude that what was reported in that article happened," he said.
NYT story here.
Loopy
Slurpeelinks.
When Ubering Becomes Moochering: The One-Way Uber Rider
More and more people are using Uber, and more and more people are trying to use it just one way...as in, they take Uber to a party or event and then go around trying to bum rides off people who drove.
Believe me, I understand the impulse to save $15 bucks or so -- or more -- and this is why I drive my very own motor vehicle, as opposed to taking Uber.
It's rude to impose on people like this. Other drivers may not want to go home when you do, andthey may feel they have to leave before they want to or stay longer just to accommodate you (not that they should or owe you that).
Also, if you smoke and then get in somebody's car and they're a nonsmoker, they're going to have to smell your yicky breath all the way to wherever. No, not the biggest deal in the world, but not everybody finds stale cigarette-infused air in a closed vehicle appealing.
So what is polite Ubering? If you took Uber to the party, the event, the meeting, expect to take it home!
And if you're a driver of your own car who's being mooched off, yes, you can say no. As a social lubricant, it may help you to offer an excuse: You have to make a stop on the way, etc. (Beats telling the likely truth: "I find you a cheap and presumptuous turd.")
No, I don't necessarily mind taking somebody home if it's on my way or not that far out of my way -- just not when they refuse to pull their transportational weight because they see moochertunities in those who feel uncomfortable turning them down.
For more on how to keep rude people from having their way with you, please consider ordering my new book, the science-based and funny "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" (around $11 at Amazon). (Also at Barnes & Noble.)
How Academia Has Gone All "Off With Her Head!"
At WhiteHotHarlots, a professor writes about how what I call "witch-hunt culture" has harmed teaching, and in turn, is causing students to get less of an education:
Saying anything that goes against liberal orthodoxy is now grounds for a firin'. Even if you make a reasonable and respectful case, if you so much as cause your liberal students a second of complication or doubt you face the risk of demonstrations, public call-outs, and severe professional consequences. My friends and colleagues might well agree that the student-teacher relationship ban is misguided, but they're not allowed to say as much in public.C-can you guys see the problem, here?
Personally, liberal students scare the shit out of me. I know how to get conservative students to question their beliefs and confront awful truths, and I know that, should one of these conservative students make a facebook page calling me a communist or else seek to formally protest my liberal lies, the university would have my back. I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican, so long as I did so respectfully, and so long as it happened in the course of legitimate classroom instruction.
The same cannot be said of liberal students. All it takes is one slip--not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery--and that's it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there's a twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance.
Is paranoid? Yes, of course. But paranoia isn't uncalled for within the current academic job climate. Jobs are really, really, really, really hard to get. And since no reasonable person wants to put their livelihood in danger, we reasonably do not take any risks vis-a-vis momentarily upsetting liberal students. And so we leave upsetting truths unspoken, uncomfortable texts unread.
Eek, Don't Compliment A Woman On Her Looks
Yawnies, a piece up at The Good Men Project, "7 Reasons You Should Compliment a Woman On Something Other Than Her Looks," that I was led to by a tweet.
Dr. Tee Williams and Joanna Schroeder write:
1. Complimenting a woman you've just met on something she's done or achieved shows her that you're about more than just physical appearance.
No it doesn't -- it just tells her you're clever enough to cut articles out of men's magazines or use the Internet.
Not only does this set you apart from all of the other "you've got a great smile" guys, but it actually shows a little bit about who you are as a person, too.
Yes, a person who reads...(see above).
I really didn't mean to blog this. The piece is just painfully multi-culti oversensitive pussy PC. Taking it apart is not just like shooting fish in a barrel; it's like dropping in plastic explosives.
The thing is, the title of the piece is wrong, at least in my case -- and probably that of other women who don't use the term "trigger warning" in great earnestness.
I blogged the thing because it made me think about how I LOVE getting compliments on my looks. Always have.
I assume people don't think I'm a dipshit. Because I'm (mostly) not.
But I just turned 51, and I was out of half 'n' half the other night, and I dragged my ass into 7-Eleven at 11 p.m., and...well, let's just say I'm going back there pronto if I'm feeling low about my looks.
I was the queen of the place. I was wearing my usual -- a floor-length eveningwear skirt I got off eBay for sixteen bucks, plus a hot pink jacket. And about 65 miles of tired from my deadline day.
The men there were mostly unwhite, down to the cashier, and boy were they ever (politely) verbally appreciative of my look.
So about complimenting a woman on her looks...especially if she's not 21 or 28...bring it on!
Marco!
Linko!
If You Are Traumatized, The Answer Is To Work On Fixing Yourself, Not To Turn College Into A Trauma Center
There's been an increasing push to toward unfree speech and keeping "scary" ideas off campus -- the antithesis of what this country was founded on and what college is supposed to be about.
Judith Shulevitz writes in The New York Times about students in college hiding from these "scary ideas," describing one of them set up at Brown University, in case rape victims found a debate between Wendy McElroy and Jessica Valenti too upsetting:
The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and "sexual assault peer educator" who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall -- it was packed -- but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. "I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs," Ms. Hall said.Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being "bombarded" by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material.
Some people trace safe spaces back to the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s, others to the gay and lesbian movement of the early 1990s. In most cases, safe spaces are innocuous gatherings of like-minded people who agree to refrain from ridicule, criticism or what they term microaggressions -- subtle displays of racial or sexual bias -- so that everyone can relax enough to explore the nuances of, say, a fluid gender identity. As long as all parties consent to such restrictions, these little islands of self-restraint seem like a perfectly fine idea.
I disagree on that. It turns us into a society of coddled babies. Or maybe keeps up the good work of helicopter parents. Shulevitz continues:
But the notion that ticklish conversations must be scrubbed clean of controversy has a way of leaking out and spreading. Once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that they should be made safer.
And this is the feeling and push on campus -- for an environment free of debate or discomfort...and pruned of too many people lacking in approved colors:
A year and a half ago, a Hampshire College student group disinvited an Afrofunk band that had been attacked on social media for having too many white musicians; the vitriolic discussion had made students feel "unsafe."
Shulevitz winds up with a Muslim student complaining during Charlie Hebdo journalist Zineb El Rhazoui's talk at the University of Chicago about the newspaper's disrespect for Muslims. The student expressed her dislike for the phrase "I am Charlie."
Ms. El Rhazoui replied, somewhat irritably, "Being Charlie Hebdo means to die because of a drawing," and not everyone has the guts to do that (although she didn't use the word guts). She lives under constant threat, Ms. El Rhazoui said. The student answered that she felt threatened, too.A few days later, a guest editorialist in the student newspaper took Ms. El Rhazoui to task. She had failed to ensure "that others felt safe enough to express dissenting opinions." Ms. El Rhazoui's "relative position of power," the writer continued, had granted her a "free pass to make condescending attacks on a member of the university." In a letter to the editor, the president and the vice president of the University of Chicago French Club, which had sponsored the talk, shot back, saying, "El Rhazoui is an immigrant, a woman, Arab, a human-rights activist who has known exile, and a journalist living in very real fear of death. She was invited to speak precisely because her right to do so is, quite literally, under threat."
You'd be hard-pressed to avoid the conclusion that the student and her defender had burrowed so deep inside their cocoons, were so overcome by their own fragility, that they couldn't see that it was Ms. El Rhazoui who was in need of a safer space.
There are institutions to help people who are so traumatized that they cannot hear a word, term, or idea, and they are not institutions of higher learning.
If you are too traumatized to function without deeming some thinking off limits, the answer is to work on fixing yourself, not to try to turn your college into a trauma center.
via KateC
Oberlin's College Ghetto Dorms
MIT prof, airplane pilot, entrepreneur, and software designer Phillip Greenspun went to visit Oberlin with a friend and the friend's son and was surprised to find an intentional on-campus ghetto:
I was also struck when the student guide told us about a dormitory with an African heritage theme and specializing in serving "soul food" (link). She also mentioned a "Third World House" where "people of color" and "of low socioeconomic status" could live (link). It seemed odd that a college administration could set up places like this. Suppose that the school put out a Web page saying that "70 percent of our students are white and from wealthy families. Despite their stacks of cashmere sweaters, they wouldn't feel comfortable living with anyone who was poor or black. So we'd appreciate it if students with darker skin or without a closet full of designer outfits would please move into Third World House or Soul Food Dorm." If it wouldn't be okay to do that, why is it okay to have the houses at all?
Science Nerdjoy: Video Of The Day
USC apparently has yet to hear of social media, because this video on researcher Emily Liman's page is not sharable.
I find her work on the mechanisms of taste fascinating, and she explains her work in a way it can be understood by the rest of us.
Scroll down at her page at USC for the two-minute video.
Twinkie
Linkie that lasts forever, give or take 10 years.
Deelz!
"Bring embroidery to life!" says the Amazon promo. A new sewing machine release, the Brother PE525 Embroidery Machine, is 45 percent off at Amazon -- normally $599; on sale for $329.99. On special sale ending June 1.
20 percent off outdoor and hiking shoes
25 percent off or more on Whitmor
Thieves With Badges And Mocking Patches: (Oh, Did You Think Govt Exists To Protect You?)
One of the incredible features of our Constitution is how it protects us from government. The "Separation of Powers" -- judicial, legislative, and executive -- is designed to work as a system of "check and balances" to guard against any one person or branch going overboard with power.
Sadly, I see more and more degrading of the protections against abuse in our society, and an especially shocking one is pictured in the form of a patch commemorating the DEA's "Asset Forfeiture" program.
"Asset forfeiture" is the an Orwellian term for "the government steals your shit and there's pretty much fuck all you can do about it." It was supposed to be a way of going after what the government deemed ill-gotten funds and property -- gotten with the sale of illegal drugs, for example.
It became a sick (and legal) way to steal from law-abiding citizens, who were not afforded "innocent till proven guilty" but instead needed to prove their money or property was NOT gotten through illegal means. Many couldn't afford lawyers and were simply screwed by the government.
Is this the country you thought you were living in? You want to be living in? Speak up. Write to your Senator, Congressman, the President. And give generously to the Institute for Justice, which works very hard to defend the victims of asset forfeiture and, in turn, to fight against its continued existence.
From Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) tweet about his WaPo story on the DEA's jacket patches, which he concedes "are often not produced in an official capacity, or with the knowledge or approval of an agency's higher-ups."
This particular patch came from Fred Repp's "Fred's Patch Corner." More about the patches in Raymond Sherrard's 2000 book, Encyclopedia of Federal Law Enforcement Patches
via @laRosalind
Hirsi Ali: "Islam Is Not A Religion Of Peace"
Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes in the WSJ about why Islam needs a reformation (which I believe is highly unlikely to happen, due to the failsafes built into the Quran: how it is said to be infallible and unquestionable, as it is the word of Allah):
In 2013, there were nearly 12,000 terrorist attacks world-wide. The lion's share were in Muslim-majority countries, and many of the others were carried out by Muslims. By far the most numerous victims of Muslim violence--including executions and lynchings not captured in these statistics--are Muslims themselves.Not all of this violence is explicitly motivated by religion, but a great deal of it is. I believe that it is foolish to insist, as Western leaders habitually do, that the violent acts committed in the name of Islam can somehow be divorced from the religion itself. For more than a decade, my message has been simple: Islam is not a religion of peace.
When I assert this, I do not mean that Islamic belief makes all Muslims violent. This is manifestly not the case: There are many millions of peaceful Muslims in the world. What I do say is that the call to violence and the justification for it are explicitly stated in the sacred texts of Islam. Moreover, this theologically sanctioned violence is there to be activated by any number of offenses, including but not limited to apostasy, adultery, blasphemy and even something as vague as threats to family honor or to the honor of Islam itself.
It is not just al Qaeda and Islamic State that show the violent face of Islamic faith and practice. It is Pakistan, where any statement critical of the Prophet or Islam is labeled as blasphemy and punishable by death. It is Saudi Arabia, where churches and synagogues are outlawed and where beheadings are a legitimate form of punishment. It is Iran, where stoning is an acceptable punishment and homosexuals are hanged for their "crime."
As I see it, the fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts. It simply will not do for Muslims to claim that their religion has been "hijacked" by extremists. The killers of Islamic State and Nigeria's Boko Haram cite the same religious texts that every other Muslim in the world considers sacrosanct.
She calls on those of us in the West to do what I have been doing since I started reading the Quran and other Islamic texts and Islamic commentary (just after 9/11): challenging and debating the "very substance of Islamic thought and practice" and holding Islam "accountable for the acts of its most violent adherents and to demand that it reform or disavow the key beliefs that are used to justify those acts."
That is absolutely what we need to do, from the top down, as in, no more wishful or "diplomatic" thinkers (like the President) pretending in their public speeches that Islam is "a religion of peace."
A little something to understand from her piece:
Any serious discussion of Islam must begin with its core creed, which is based on the Quran (the words said to have been revealed by the Angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad) and the hadith (the accompanying works that detail Muhammad's life and words). Despite some sectarian differences, this creed unites all Muslims. All, without exception, know by heart these words: "I bear witness that there is no God but Allah; and Muhammad is His messenger." This is the Shahada, the Muslim profession of faith.The Shahada might seem to be a declaration of belief no different from any other. But the reality is that the Shahada is both a religious and a political symbol.
In the early days of Islam, when Muhammad was going from door to door in Mecca trying to persuade the polytheists to abandon their idols of worship, he was inviting them to accept that there was no god but Allah and that he was Allah's messenger.
After 10 years of trying this kind of persuasion, however, he and his small band of believers went to Medina, and from that moment, Muhammad's mission took on a political dimension. Unbelievers were still invited to submit to Allah, but after Medina, they were attacked if they refused. If defeated, they were given the option to convert or to die. (Jews and Christians could retain their faith if they submitted to paying a special tax.)
She points out something few non-Muslims (and even probably few Muslims) know: about the Mecca and Medina halves of the Quran and how the looting, slaughtering, raping, enslaving psychopath Mohammed grew more vicious and horrible to non-Muslims as he gained power. What many non-Muslims and even many Muslims don't know is that the later, violence-demanding part of the Quran, the Medina Quran, abrogates (cancels out)the earlier, more interfaith'y sounding statements from before Mohammed got power.
Islam, as I've mentioned before, is actually a totalitarian system masquerading as a religion. And that is what we need to challenge. As do the "moderate Muslims" I hear so much about. You can't really blame them -- vis a vis the commands to slaughter detractors and such a Jesus-like "prophet" to emulate:
Muhammad executed his critics as quickly as he could obtain the power to do so. His biographers list numerous citizens who were murdered merely for mockery or criticism, particularly poets - the media artists of the time. One was a mother of five, who had her child pulled from her breast before she was run through with a sword.
And, happily, a number of modern Muslims are managing to keep up the Mohammed's great humanitarian work!
Tornado
Windylinks.
Multiple Layers Of Stupidity: TSA Clears Notorious Domestic Terrorist For Pre-Check
Per Keith Lang at The Hill, the TSA cleared a known domestic terrorist for Pre-Check expedited security. When a TSA worker recognized the name of the apparently notorious but unnamed domestic terrorist, this worker reported this to a supervisor -- who directed the known terrorist through the Pre-Check lane anyway.
Yes, we're so much safer!
Clearly, just as the TSA is pretend security, the Pre-Check program is merely a program to separate many travelers from their money -- the $85 fee non-frequent travelers must pay to be "vetted" by the TSA.
As Lisa Simeone puts it at TSA News Blog, "another passenger learns about the scam of Pre-Check the hard way." From a woman who identifies herself as Trish24, comment originally left [on TSA News Blog] last month, February 2, 2015:
"I may never fly again and I am serious thank you TSA. I was TSA prechecked but my hands got wanded and supposedly something showed up. My carryons were totally dumped out including my wallet I was taken to a room for full pat down..breast, groin they reached inside my pants...degrading, humiliating and frightening..I am a 63-year-old woman with high blood pressure, they are lucky I didn't stroke out! As I tried o repack my carryons and tuck in my shirt I heard the agents state that I was the fifth false positive that morning and they knew the wand was defective. Not going back to RSA Fort Meyers!"
College: Where Up Is Now Down And "Shut Up" Is The Status Quo
*The thing about this post is, even though it seems there are mitigating details that make the Buzzfeed story questionable, the reason the story seemed plausible is that speech is being shut down on campuses all over the country, to a horrifying degree.
Campus free speech defenders theFIRE.org are busier than ever.
UPDATE: Via Abersouth, Robby Soave writes at reason, under the headline, "Did a Student's Non-PC Views on Rape Statistics Get Him Banned from Class? Maybe, Maybe Not."
Soave reports that Savery, the professor, " is known for being an ardent defender of free speech, which makes his apparent decision to remove True from class all the more baffling."
Savery declined comment to BuzzFeed, but I was able to reach him via email. He confirmed that he was a "strong believer in the First Amendment," and maintained that the student's views were not the issue."He was not banned because of what he said but because of a series of disruptive behaviors," Savery told Reason.
I also reached True via email, and asked him whether he had been rowdy or disruptive in class. He responded by making a bizarre request. This was his email back to me:
Before I interview with you, you must agree to make "nigger" be the first word in your article.I declined this ultimatum, and he declined to answer my questions. Needless to say, I've grown a lot more skeptical of True's side of the story. If I find out anything more that backs up either person's assertions about what happened, I'll update this story.
My earlier blog post below:
Katie J.M. Baker writes at BuzzFeed that a student was -- yes -- banned from the discussion portion of his humanities class for engaging in what college used to be about: free inquiry:
Reed College, a small liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon, attracts students who want to speak their mind.But when Jeremiah True wouldn't stop talking about his controversial opinions on sexual assault in his required freshman humanities course, his professor banned him from the discussion segment of the class for the remainder of the semester.
Controversial because they don't toe the line of the bullshit rape stats, for one:
True said he sparred with classmates over discussion topics related to ancient Greece and Rome, such as the "patriarchal" belief that logic is more important than emotion and his analysis of Lucretia's rape. But it was his questioning of the widely shared and often debated statistic that 1 in 5 women in college are sexually assaulted -- it doesn't serve "actual rape victims" to "overinflate" numbers, he said -- and his rejection of the term "rape culture" that led to him being banned, he said."I am critical of the idea of a rape culture because it does not exist," he wrote in a lengthy email to Savery explaining his perspectives that he has also posted online. "We live in a society that hates rape, but also hasn't optimized the best way to handle rape. Changing the legal definition of rape is a slippery slope. If sexual assault becomes qualified as rape, what happens next? What else can we legally redefine to become rape? Why would we want to inflate the numbers of rape in our society?"
Rape culture does exist -- in Muslim majority countries. But complaining about that or even pointing it out wouldn't be multi-culti and PC.
As for the reality of campus rape stats, a better estimate comes from the DOJ, from this blog post:
Rather than one in five female college students becoming victims of sexual assault, the actual rate is 6.1 per 1,000 students, or 0.61 percent (instead of 1-in-5, the real number is 0.03-in-5). For non-students, the rate of sexual assault is 7.6 per 1,000 people.
So...he's being punished for giving his opinion and for being right.
If you're wrong but politically correct do you get an A and a cookie? Just like nursery school, which is what college is strongly starting to resemble.
Greg Lukianoff, of campus free speech defenders theFIRE.org, writes about the comfort problem at HuffPo:
Simply put, I believe that we can expect threats to freedom of speech to get worse as human beings are likely to expect not just greater physical comfort as time goes by, but greater "intellectual comfort" as well. That is, students increasingly not only feel that they have a "right not to be offended," but rather have something more akin to a "right to be confirmed," or at minimum, not disagreed with too harshly. This "expectation of confirmation," I conclude, is intellectually unhealthy and a major threat to freedom of speech, as you can't have serious discussions and at the same time have a blanket rule against saying anything that could make any listener uncomfortable. Important discussions are often inherently uncomfortable.
It's a facet of grownup discussions, too.
But a generation of grownups is not what we're raising.
Sorry, did I trigger you?
"Eek! Commies!": How America Became The World's Policeman
Wendy McElroy writes at the Daily Bell about how we came to be the cop of the globe, calling "The Truman Doctrine" "the official beginning of an aggressive 'peacetime' intervention" by America in other countries' affairs.
After WWII ... nations that went communist were viewed as a threat to domestic security in America.Announced on March 12, 1947 by President Harry Truman, the Truman Doctrine was a major play to entrench American interest into Third World nations and to prop up governments considered to be favorable to America. The doctrine pledged American assistance to any nation that resisted communism. The implication and the discussion that surrounded the doctrine pledged hostility toward any nation that embraced communism.
Even as the Truman Doctrine was announced, America was preparing to intervene in a foreign government to determine its political structure. Greece was being ripped apart by a civil war between communist rebels and a repressive right-wing government. The British had been supporting the government but asked America to assume the role. With funding from the Truman Doctrine and related measures, such as the Marshall Plan, the Greek government prevailed. As one of the first Cold War interventions into the internal politics of another nation, Greece set a pattern. In the name of containing communism, America propped up vicious governments and poured money into their coffers even though it had no compelling interest there.
As Crid has pointed out, Europeans and others save big on military costs because they know they can count on us. Enough of that, thanks.
P.S. Something tells me medical care in Europe will go up substantially if they aren't saving big by having the US subsidizing their defense and safety.
Monkey
Eeepylinks.
"Safe Space" For Black Students Means Keeping Out White Students?
We used to call this "segregation," and a bunch of people died and went to jail to fight it.
There was a "Black Lives Matter" assembly at Oak Park and River Forest high school in Illinois, and the nitwits who run the place thought it would be a good idea to have only black people present. They naturally gravitated to the Orwellian-sounding term of "affinity grouping" to justify this, as if anyone would be okay with it if there were a "white people only" "affinity grouping."
(Did these administrators forget about the overturning of "separate but equal"?)
Rebecca R. Bibbs reports for the Pioneer Press/Chi Trib:
Principal Nathaniel Rouse, the assembly's organizer, said he thought black students would speak more freely among members of their own race, a model known as affinity grouping....The fallout from the Black Lives Matter assembly spurred a three-hour discussion at OPRF's School Board meeting March 16 that included public comment from dozens of parents, students and teachers -- almost all of whom spoke out in support of Rouse and the assembly.
Each trustee of the Oak Park and River Forest High School District 200 Board supported the intent of the assembly, but several worried about potential legal consequences faced by the school.
School Board President John Phelan, a lawyer by trade, said he was concerned about a process that led to an event that could be considered separate but equal, a segregationist doctrine that was later deemed unconstitutional with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case.
...Superintendent Steven Isoye said he believed he was the only non-black person at the assembly.
"It was clear to me that Mr. Rouse was trying to build a space that was safe space for our black students," he said.
Guess what? Life is not a "safe space" where they segregate black people from the rest of us, and public school, as was determined in hard-fought battles of the civil rights movement, is no place for segregation.
Your Latte, Sir, And An End To Racism?
If you're racist, is that going to change in the slightest because a Starbucks barista writes "RACE TOGETHER" in black Sharpie or sticks a sticker with that phrase on your grande soy whatever?
People go to Starbucks for coffee, not a lecture in magic marker or stickers -- or worse (because Starbucks has also instructed baristas to discuss race relations with customers).
Tressie McMillan Cottom at Medium has similar thinking on the likely effectiveness of this campaign:
It takes a lot of training and a lot of institutional support to teach people things they would rather not hear. I wonder what kind of training and support the hourly wage baristas at Starbucks will get. There is no reporting yet on whether Starbucks issued a training module on "when the customer is always right and the customer wants to be right and racist"....It is unclear who Starbucks is aiming for with this campaign. If you are a colorblind ideologue, just mentioning race is racism. If you are racist, being confronted with "perspectives" on race will piss you off. If you know the difference between race and racism, race stickers will confuse you. If you would rather talk about your feelings about that thing that was about race that one time rather than talk about racism, you're really going to slow down the latte line.
I was on Michael Graham's Atlanta radio show yesterday, on NewsRadio 106.7FM. Before before the segment with me, he ran this hilarious spoof of the Starbucks campaign.
It occurs to me that this campaign should be called RACE AWAY FROM STARBUCKS.
Except, maybe not, if you see how this actually seems to be playing out, far away from fantasy leftyism at the top. As NYMag's Jessica Roy puts it:
Fascinating.It's almost as if these people have jobs that do not require them to educate wealthy customers -- and curious journalists -- about racial tensions in America.
A tweet:
Feminism's New Identity For Women: Either Potential Victim Or "Survivor"
Michelle Goldberg quotes Laura Kipnis at The Nation:
"It's the infantilization of women fused with identity politics, so that being vulnerable, a potential victim--or survivor, in the new parlance--becomes a form of identity," Kipnis told me. "I wrote a chapter on the politics of vulnerability in The Female Thing from 2006, and since then it strikes me that vulnerability has an ever more aggressive edge to it, which is part of what makes the sexual culture of the moment so incoherent."
I call it a way to gain unearned power, especially over men.
The subject of Goldberg's piece?
Last Monday, about thirty Northwestern anti-rape activists marched to their school's administrative center carrying mattresses and pillows. The event was a deliberate echo of the performance art project of Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz, who is lugging a mattress everywhere she goes on campus for a year to draw attention to the university's failure to expel her alleged rapist. At Northwestern, the target of the protest was not a person accused of assault, but the provocative feminist film professor Laura Kipnis. Her offense was penning a February essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, titled "Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe," which argues against her school's ban on sex between professors and students, and more broadly against the growing obsession with trauma and vulnerability among feminists on campus."If this is feminism, it's feminism hijacked by melodrama," she writes. "The melodramatic imagination's obsession with helpless victims and powerful predators is what's shaping the conversation of the moment, to the detriment of those whose interests are supposedly being protected, namely students. The result? Students' sense of vulnerability is skyrocketing."
Kipnis writes in her piece of the effects of all the "protection" of academia (like that of her film students who found certain films she showed too "triggering" to watch).
What do we expect will become of students, successfully cocooned from uncomfortable feelings, once they leave the sanctuary of academe for the boorish badlands of real life? What becomes of students so committed to their own vulnerability, conditioned to imagine they have no agency, and protected from unequal power arrangements in romantic life? I can't help asking, because there's a distressing little fact about the discomfort of vulnerability, which is that it's pretty much a daily experience in the world, and every sentient being has to learn how to somehow negotiate the consequences and fallout, or go through life flummoxed at every turn.
Sadly, some of what we can expect is more of the sort of injustice done to former Sci Am blogs editor Bora Zivkovic, who was ruined by a few women with little actual power and position who used the power of being female and the Internet's special power to spread a blogged "J'accuse!"
What they deemed "sexual harassment never met the standard for anything close, but never mind that. Pretty much everybody from a pool of supposedly "skeptical" science writers went with it, and a good man is out of a job and scorned by the science blogging society that he pretty much created.
Finkie
Rattylinks.
Seeking A "Mean People Suck!" Amendment To The First Amendment
Dumb Tanya Cohen has an idiotic piece up at Thought Catalog, "The First Amendment Should Never Protect Hatred," calling for "hate speech" laws in the United States...
One of the most admirable things about Europe is that most (if not all) of the right-wing rhetoric that you hear in the US is explicitly against the law there.
This is one of the terrible things about Europe and why the United States is the single best and freest country to live in.
And what's stupid and short-sighted about these calls for hate speech laws in the U.S. is that, well, as Nina Shea puts it at National Review, "Hate-Speech Laws Aren't the Answer to Islamic Extremism--They're Part of the Problem"
The subjective hate-speech laws were intended to placate those -- including Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, who in 1989 issued a fatwa against novelist Salman Rushdie -- who demand that Europe police its own citizens for conformity to Islamic blasphemy codes. European leaders insisted that this could be accomplished while somehow still upholding Western principles of free speech.These hate-speech laws have failed in both aims. Islamist extremism continues to grow in Europe, while speech critical of Islam is undertaken at ever greater personal risk, including risk of criminal prosecution. Some are so intimidated that they remain silent even when it is their duty to speak up. The gang rapes of 1,400 British girls in Rotherham by men of Pakistani origin went unreported for 16 years reportedly because officials were reluctant to say something critical of Muslims, who were the perpetrators in that case.
As I think Greg Lukianoff pointed out at a FIRE dinner I went to, who in their right mind thinks hiding what people truly believe is a healthy way to have a society work? The hatred is still there; it's just underground where it can't be debated.
The problem also becomes what is "hate speech"? Today, it's that evil "right-wing rhetoric." Tomorrow, it's Tanya Cohen who's too big a meanie to keep her freedom.
Tanya, if this sort of thing appeals, go live where speech is really unfree, like Saudi Arabia or Iran. Of course, where speech is unfree, women tend to be unfree as well. And speaking out against their lack of freedom tends to get a girl jailed. Oopsy!
If You're Driving A Car In LA, You're Part Of An "Ongoing Criminal Investigation"
Apparent LAPD rule: If you don't have probable cause, just make it up.
At BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow writes:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to figure out what the LAPD is doing with the mountains (and mountains) of license-plate data that they're harvesting in the city's streets without a warrant or judicial oversight. As part of the process, they've asked the LAPD for a week's worth of the data they're collecting, and in their reply brief, the LAPD argues that it can't turn over any license-plate data because all the license-plates they collect are part of an "ongoing investigation," because every car in Los Angeles is part of an ongoing criminal investigation, because some day, someone driving that car may commit a crime.As EFF's Jennifer Lynch says, "This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity."
Advice Goddess Free Swim
It's Tuesday night, and I'm sleepy. You pick the topics. I'll post more on Wednesday morning.
P.S. One link per comment or my spam filter will eat your post.
Airline Honesty
That would involve selling "economy plus" seats as "barely-" or "semi-civilized." From my book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck":
"You're White, And You Suck": (Have You Taken Your "White Privilege 101" Class Today?)
Trying to eliminate racism has given way to the institutionalized participation in it -- under the cover of multi-cultural hoohah.
John McWhorter writes at The Daily Beast about colleges and some of New York City's elite private schools giving "White Privilege lessons" to students. Seriously.
...Teaching them, for example, that when affluent white students talk about their expensive vacations this could be hurtful to students of color from humbler circumstances. ... White Privilege is suddenly a hot topic and cottage industries have sprung up around it.However, one can thoroughly understand how racism works and still ask just what this laser focus on "White Privilege" is meant to achieve.
"This is messy work, but these conversations are necessary," says Sandra Chapman, director of diversity and community at Little Red School House in New York City. OK--but why? Note that the answer cannot be, "So that whites will understand that they are the privileged ... etc." That makes as much sense as saying "Because!" So I'm going to dare to ask a simple question: What exactly are we trying to achieve with this particular lesson?
...I assume, for example, that the idea is not to teach white people that White Privilege means that black people are the only group of people in human history who cannot deal with obstacles and challenges. If the idea is that black people cannot solve their problems short of white people developing an exquisite sensitivity to how privileged they are, then we in the black community are being designated as disabled poster children.
...I went to a private school in the '70s with white kids happily talking about their vacations and lavish bar mitzvahs; some of them had VCRs before I even knew what one was. For what it's worth, I did not feel hurt that I didn't live on their scale. And in any case, what good would it have done to tell these white kids to not talk around black kids about their toys and trips? Wouldn't that have implied that kids like me were pathologically delicate, and wouldn't the next complaint have been that white kids were holding themselves back from the black kids, i.e. segregating themselves, ignorant of ... White Privilege?
I think he's right -- that black people are treated by the multi-culti activist world as if they are disabled poster children. I'm white and I find it insulting and feel bad for smart, talented black friends who have people wondering whether they deserve their position -- or got affirmative-actioned into it. I think I would be truly embarrassed to be treated this way if I were black -- to have everyone always walking on eggshells around me. Yeah, right. That's exactly the way to feel included.
via Old RPM Daddy
11-Year-Old Thrown Out Of School After Not-Pot Leaf Found In His Backpack
In more Drug War/zero sense idiocy, an 11-year-old boy was suspended from school for an entire year -- 364 days -- after being caught with a leaf that looked like marijuana but, when tested, turned out not to be. Dan Casey reports at Roanoke.com:
At first blush it sounds like an open-and-shut school disciplinary matter in a zero-tolerance age:Some schoolchildren claim another student bragged about having marijuana. They inform school administrators. An assistant principal finds a leaf and a lighter in the boy's knapsack. The student is suspended for a year. A sheriff's deputy files marijuana possession charges in juvenile court.
All of the above and more happened last September to the 11-year-old son of Bedford County residents Bruce and Linda Bays. He was a sixth-grader in the gifted-and-talented program at Bedford Middle School.
There was only one problem: Months after the fact, the couple learned the substance wasn't marijuana. A prosecutor dropped the juvenile court charge because the leaf had field-tested negative three times.
More from Casey: Some wisdom about teaching from Virginia Rep. Dave Brat
Their son remains out of school -- he's due to return Monday on strict probation. But in the meantime, the events of the past six months have wreaked havoc on the formerly happy-go-lucky boy's psyche. His parents say he's withdrawn socially, and is now under the care of a pediatric psychiatrist for panic attacks and depression.The couple -- both are schoolteachers -- have filed a federal lawsuit against Bedford County Schools and the Bedford County Sheriff's Office. It refers to their son only by the initials R.M.B.
It alleges Bedford Middle School Assistant Principal Brian Wilson and school operations chief Frederick "Mac" Duis violated his due process rights under the U.S. Constitution.
"Essentially they kicked him out of school for something they couldn't prove he did," said Roanoke attorney Melvin Williams, the Bays' lawyer.
In a case like this, there's a strong possibility that some other kid put the leaf in his backpack as a prank, and then tipped off the assistant zero tolerance nitwit.
Here's a smart, happy kid who's had his social environment yanked from him, now has a drug record, and is said to be seeing a shrink for panic attacks and depression.
Because there was a leaf in his backpack? And no, I don't care if the leaf were pot. I hope, someday soon, we'll look at the idea that the government can tell us what we can and cannot put into our bodies is ridiculous and a serious violation of our civil liberties.
Yo-Yo
Linkie-linkie.
Toss That Whine: Seneca On How To Overcome Growing Up With Sucky Parents
I just got this wonderful little book of three talks by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, On the Shortness of Life (Penguin Great Ideas)
The first 34 pages are his letter to his friend Paulinus about how life is not actually short; it just seems like it if you waste it. I just read this bit, which I think is helpful thinking for a lot of people who didn't have the rosiest childhood:
"We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us, that they were given to us by chance. But we can choose whose children we would like to be."
This Season's Ugly For The Sheep Who Follow Fashion
I march to my own fashion beat and pretty much always have. When I was about 12, liking ground-length skirts and not having one, I made a tiered skirt out of an old pink bedsheet.
These days, I wear evening dress skirts as daywear. I had just gotten to SPSP in Long Beach -- the big annual psych conference -- and another science journo I know came into the press room and exclaimed, "Why, you're wearing a ballgown."
Yep.
Well, I'm always a little amazed by people who feel compelled to follow whatever magazines or somebody or some collective of somebodies says is in style -- and never mind if it's ugly as fucking fuck. An example from some fashion magazine. And a link to more of this same ugly.
My take?
Socks in sandals are the short-sleeve leather jackets of foot fashion.
Eekers, huh?
Hadn't They Heard? There Was This Amendmenty Thing That Outlawed Slavery
California is pretty consistently beautiful and dumb.
California is in the process of developing a program that will force law students to do 50 hours of pro bono work to be admitted to the bar.
Now, I truly appreciate lawyers who do pro bono work. My very own alabaster ass was saved by one of them, Marc J. Randazza, after TSA worker Thedala Magee tried to yank $500,000 out of me in the wake of my being civilly disobedient and then writing about my experience and naming her name in the wake of it.
The thing is, the last person you want doing pro bono work for you is somebody who's forced into it. And got out of law school 20 minutes ago.
Randazza, on the other hand, is this passionate Italian who breathes fire (and pretty hilarious and cutting legal briefs) at violations of people's civil liberties. And he's smart enough to know who to hire, and to be all soccer coach to them until they're ready to do legal thingies on their own.
That's the guy you want.
The redwood-for-brains bar officials in California are somehow clooooo-less about this. Paul Caron explains at TaxProf:
Following New York's lead, bar officials in California are in the process of developing a pro bono program for law students who plan to practice in the state.Like the policy adopted by the New York Court of Appeals, which took effect Jan. 1, the California plan requires 50 pro bono hours. However, the New York requirement must be completed before applying for admission to the bar. In California, young lawyers would be allowed to perform the 50 hours of free legal work either before or after they are admitted.
The program, which must be approved by the (mostly) idiots California residents vote into legislative office and the California Supreme Court, can be seen in detail here, at the California Bar web page.
Unintended consequences: Shitty representation for poor people who will be unlikely to understand the difference between shitty representation and the sort of representation that will get them out of trouble, as much as that's possible.
via @instapundit
Muttley Crew
Doghairy links.
Tonight's "Science News You Can Use" Radio, 7-8pm PT: Amy Alkon & Dr. Jennifer Verdolin On Communicating To Keep, Find, Or Improve A Relationship
It's "Science News You Can Use" radio, with Amy Alkon and Dr. Jennifer Verdolin.
How you communicate can kill or save a relationship -- or help you get into a really great one.
But it's hard to know the nuances of communicating: When should you be honest? When should you be, um, less than honest?
There's a lot of advice out there on how to talk to people (and people you love) but on tonight's show we'll be turning to science to debunk myths and lay out tips on how you can communicate your way into a relationship or make the one you have more loving, fun, and successful.
About the show: This is a very special every-other-Sunday-night show with science-based advice columnist and author Amy Alkon and animal behaviorist and author Dr. Jennifer Verdolin laying out science news you can use to solve your relationship problems or just improve your relationships and have a better life.
(And yes, I will still be doing shows on the best behavioral science books on weeks in between.)
Listen at this link at showtime (7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET), or get the podcast here afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2015/03/16/amy-alkon-dr-verdolin-communicating-to-find-keep-or-improve-a-relationship
And don't forget to buy our science-based, fun, funny, and illuminating books -- support our show while entertaining yourself and learning a thing or two to improve your life.
Amy's book is "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck."
Jennifer's is "Wild Connection: What Animal Courtship and Mating Tell Us about Human Relationships."
Presidential Asshole Behavior
The President and First Lady took separate planes to Los Angeles -- yes, his and hers flights.
And as Greta Van Susteren put it, if other presidents and first ladies did this, they're jerks, too.
The President flew on a 747 (AF1) and the First Lady's plane was probably a 757. There is no reason the First Lady could not have flown on the 747. The 747 is a luxurious AF1!I want our President and First Lady to be safe and travel very well but this is just about the most selfish thing I have ever heard. They did not need to take TWO Planes. They both could have flown on AF1 and would have both been very comfortable. (And I want them comfortable!)
And why were they in California? President Obama did Jimmy Kimmel and a fundraiser and the FIrst Lady did Ellen Degeneres show. (Incidentally, when Presidents do television NEWS - we go to them and our news organizations pay the travel, not the other way around. Why are taxpayers paying for entertainment TV?)
Many Americans are struggling to get by and to pay taxes and THIS is what the President and First Lady do? Selfish!
Betsy Klein and Kevin Liptak report at CNN:
The taxpayer costs of private transportation can add up.A 2014 FOIA request to the Air Force from watchdog group Judicial Watch found that the cost per flying hour for Air Force One is $206,337. Cost per flying hour includes "fuel, flight consumables, depot level repairables, aircraft overhaul, and engine overhaul." At that rate, the President's flight to Los Angeles, which clocked in at just under five hours, cost over $1 million.
The First Lady's office would not provide specific details about the plane Mrs. Obama took to California. The Air Force lists the cost per flying hour for a C-32, which is frequently used for dignitary travel, at $28,834 in 2014, but notes that the costs for Presidential travel can be calculated differently.
"The lack of transparency on Presidential travel and the First Lady's travel makes it tough for taxpayers to determine whether specific trips are wasteful or completely necessary. If this was an unavoidable scheduling roadblock, or a choice made for convenience at taxpayer expense, is difficult to know, and makes all the difference," said National Taxpayer Union's Douglas Kellogg.
"In general, the cost of flying Air Force One has gone up significantly over the past decade, the President has a duty to taxpayers to make prudent travel decisions," Kellogg said.
Meanwhile, the EPA is all panic-stricken about the environment and targeting backyard burger and weenie roasts.
A Really Nice (F*cking) Thing To Wake Up To
Woke up to an absolutely lovely, perceptive review of my book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," by Etiquetteer.
An excerpt:
This colorful volume may be the perfect etiquette book for nerds, because Alkon refers frequently to scientific research that explains why humans behave the way they do, and the steps we need to take, individually and as a community, to live together harmoniously. For instance, everyone is irritated by intrusive cell phone conversations. Alkon tells her readers why, citing research from Cornell about "halfalogues." Turns out a different part of our brain gets engaged listening to someone on the phone; we're all trying to figure out what the other half of the conversation is, whether we want to or not! And this is only one example. Her "science-based theory that we're experiencing more rudeness than ever because we recently lost the constraints on our behavior that were in place for millions of years" is thoroughly researched and piquantly presented. Just for the term "inconsiderado" alone this book is worth reading....Etiquetteer will admit to smiling with delight reading Alkon's owning of the "etiquette aunties," a group into which Etiquetteer could likely be lumped: ". . . quite a bit of the the advice given by traditional etiquette aunties is rather arbitrary, which is why one etiquette auntie advises that a lady may apply lipstick at the dinner table and another considers it an act only somewhat less taboo than squatting and taking a pee in the rosebushes." Alkon may be the perfect etiquette auntie for the 21st century: less likely to be pouring tea for the D.A.R. at home, more likely to be in coffee shops politely letting the oblivious know that their headphones are leaking. Read this book.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Etiquetteer!
The Sick Joke That Due Process Has Become For Men On Campus
Ashe Schow writes at Wash Ex of feminist judge Nancy Gertner's rethinking of and misgivings about how sexual assault adjudication is playing out on campus.
What caused Gertner's shift?
It happened when her law firm took the case of a young man Gertner believed to be wrongly accused of rape even though a grand jury indicted him. In the case Gertner described, the man was accused 10 months after the encounter by a woman whose story constantly changed and was contradicted by witnesses.
She ended up being one of 28 Harvard law profs (current and former) to sign a letter against the school's new sexual assault policy, in which men's rights are yanked from them.
During a panel on Thursday, as Schow reports, Gertner came up with five problematic points for how sexual assault is now dealt with on campus. For example:
1. Investigating an accuser's claim is not victim-blamingContrary to what some of the loudest feminist voices of today are saying, questioning an accuser's account of sexual assault is not in itself victim-blaming.
"We've filled the airwaves with discussions that are more about sound bites than reality. So on the one hand it is right that we shouldn't be blaming the victim, on the other hand blaming the victim cannot mean you don't say she's lying," Gertner said. "Blaming the victim can't mean that there are inconsistencies in her account, [that] there are things that she is saying which are not true to the other witnesses."
"That's about process, not blaming the victim," she added.
...3. The alcohol element cannot be ignored
When we talk about alcohol on college campuses in regards to consent, it invariably comes down to the accuser (usually a woman) being absolved of responsibility to give (and take) consent and the accused (usually a man) still being responsible for obtaining consent as well as monitoring the accuser's alcohol intake.
"We have to deal with alcohol," Gertner said. "The Harvard policy treated...sex under impairment as rape. Not even incapacitation, but impairment. If she was drunk and impaired - not unconscious but impaired - it could be rape. But his impairment didn't count."
Gertner further explained that Harvard's policy allows "a woman who willingly gets drunk" to make an accusation because she's "not responsible for what happens." She also explained that these kinds of policies "take away a woman's agencies and responsibility."
Gertner said this, and no one in the audience made a sound. There was no indication that anyone was outraged by this (or anything Gertner said). Contrast that with the vilification that those who aren't described as feminists get.
Gertner's feminist credentials allowed her thoughts to be heard instead of jeered down.
Feminists and people on the left -- if they are truly for fairness (as they claim to be) and not just pushing ideology as a way to get unearned power over others -- need to speak up for civil liberties, including those of the people with penises.
Unless you are for the equal rights and fair treatment of all people, you really are not for equal rights but special rights for some. And excuse me, but wasn't that what you were all complaining about (about men) for all these years?
Bubbles
Linkie with a foam head.
Deal For The Tin Woodsman Or People Who Do Things Outdoors
50 percent off Patagonia shoes for men and women at Amazon
50 percent or more off men's sweaters!
Search Amy's Amazon
Thanks to all who buy from my links! All of your purchases are truly appreciated!
Hey, WeHo Lady, My Dog Wants Her Look Back
West Hollywood Whole Foods, photo by Gregg Sutter around 9:30 p.m. Friday night. 
My kitchen, shortly afterward. 
Was Jahi McMath's Case -- Leading To Her Brain Death -- Preventable?
Terrific piece at the Pacific Standard by medical bioethicist Alice Dreger and Helen Haskell.
Dreger and Haskell note that though the attention for Jahi McMath's case typically focuses on what happened after her catastrophic brain injury, the risky surgery that led up to it warrants as much attention:
Jahi McMath was 13 years old when she was brought to Children's Hospital Oakland in December 2013 for a surgery to treat sleep apnea, a problem likely exacerbated by Jahi being overweight. Instead of beginning with less invasive approaches, such as prescribing a CPAP machine to facilitate breathing while asleep, an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon named Frederick Rosen recommended taking out Jahi's tonsils, her adenoids, the soft palate of her mouth, and other nearby tissues.This was a very invasive surgery, and Jahi began bleeding from the surgical wounds immediately following the procedure. Over the next five hours, apparently neither Rosen nor any other physician came to check on her, despite her family and nurses reporting continual and substantial bleeding. Jahi finally bled so much that she went into cardiac arrest. This is when doctors finally arrived at the girl's bedside, according to the lawsuit. Following two and a half hours of attempted resuscitation in which two liters of blood were drawn from Jahi's lungs, she was ultimately declared brain dead.
The hospital then pushed the family hard for organ donation and disconnection from life support. In the media, supporters of the hospital championed organ donation as a way to make this a story of salvation following a tragic outcome. Resisting disconnecting Jahi, the family came off looking scientifically naïve and selfish. Lost in many accounts was the uncomfortable fact that the hospital and surgeon would have to pay much less if Jahi were legally dead, because the hospital could not be held responsible for years of support for a disabled person.
Yes, this is true about the cost, but keeping a brain dead person alive is not a reasonable or sensible choice.
Dreger and Haskell write about the procedure -- which also left 8-year-old Rebecca Jiminez brain dead:
Tonsillectomy has traditionally been done for recurrent throat infections, but the efficacy of the procedure for this purpose has been seriously questioned for decades. Today it is increasingly used to treat pediatric sleep apnea. But it is not a well-tested treatment for that purpose, and the much more radical surgery Rosen opted to do in Jahi's case appears to be an extraordinarily invasive approach.
They want to see families informed about the rate of adverse events of a procedure.
I actually think that this is not enough -- that they need to be informed of our cognitive bias to believe things will turn out okay for us, so they can truly comprehend the risk.
Dreger and Haskell wind up with this:
And when [families] are harmed, they should have the right to quickly get the truth about that harm. Families like the McMaths need to be treated with compassion and justice, not branded by hospital public relations offices as abusers of a system of which they are, in fact, the victims.
Dreger has a terrific new book out, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science
Background Checks Don't Equal Racism
If you're hiring somebody to deal with money your company's bringing in, do you maybe want to make sure they aren't a mini-Madoff?
Problem: The government, through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was deeming background checks racism.
The EEOC got another reminder from the court -- this time, a federal court of appeals -- that background checks are a necessary part of doing business.
Todd Lebowitz writes at The Hill:
In EEOC v Freeman, the commission once again relied on the statistical analysis of an industrial psychologist to try to prove that an event planning company discriminated against black male job applicants when it ran credit and criminal background checks. On Feb. 20, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the statistical case presented by the EEOC was "rife with analytical errors," "completely unreliable," and contained a "mind-boggling number of errors and unexplained discrepancies." The Fourth Circuit judges tossed the EEOC's case, just as the Sixth Circuit did in 2014, when the EEOC relied on the same expert whose report was rejected for containing the same types of fatal flaws.For years, the EEOC has doggedly pursued litigation against companies whose background check procedures it deemed too expansive and discriminatory. The EEOC's strategy relies on the observation that, under certain circumstances, the use of criminal background and credit checks as a pre-hiring screen tends to eliminate minority applicants in disproportionate numbers. The EEOC claims that this violates Title VII.
But wait a minute. Just because your arthritis got better doesn't mean it was because of the Cosmos Bag. Correlation and causation are not the same thing.
Statistical data show that a higher proportion of minorities have criminal records than non-minorities. The NAACP reports that African Americans and Hispanics makeup 58 percent of prisoners, despite making up only a quarter of the general population. There are undoubtedly a variety of factors that influence those numbers, but employers who perform routine background checks on prospective hires have no control over whom police arrest, governments prosecute, or juries convict. If there is injustice in the justice system, employers performing background checks are not the ones to blame.
The reason that criminal background checks reveal more convictions for minorities is because more minorities have been convicted, not because employers who run pre-hire background checks are engaging in unlawful discrimination.
via @overlawyered
Limpie
Linkie with a broken toe.
Bye-Bye, Seattle Diners And Other Affordable Restaurants!
As Against Crony Capitalism puts it about Seattle's approaching $15/hr minimum wage:
It's not like suddenly Seattle won't have any restaurants. It just won't have any restaurants at which people of modest means can eat. It also won't have as many mom and pop immigrant owned restaurants.
At ShiftWA, more on the story:
Restaurant owners, expecting to operate on thinner margins, have tried to adapt in several ways including "higher menu prices, cheaper, lower-quality ingredients, reduced opening times, and cutting work hours and firing workers," according to The Seattle Times and Seattle Eater magazine. As the Washington Policy Center points out, when these strategies are not enough, businesses close, "workers lose their jobs and the neighborhood loses a prized amenity."A spokesman for the Washington Restaurant Association told the Washington Policy Center, "Every [restaurant] operator I'm talking to is in panic mode, trying to figure out what the new world will look like... Seattle is the first city in this thing and everyone's watching, asking how is this going to change?" The Washington Policy Center,
"Seattle is rightly famous for great neighborhood restaurants. That won't change. What will change is that fewer people will be able to afford to dine out, and as a result there will be fewer great restaurants to enjoy. People probably won't notice when some restaurant workers lose their jobs, but as prices rise and some neighborhood businesses close, the quality of life in urban Seattle will become a little bit poorer."
University Of Michigan's "Who's More Oppressed? Olympics"
Loved this post by Suzy Lee Weiss at Minding The Campus (reprinted from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) about my alma mater, the University of Michigan, and their new sensitivity initiative, the "Inclusive Language Campaign":
In the liberal ghetto of Ann Arbor, several University of Michigan administrators recently gathered for a passionate brainstorm. The head of student affairs declared he was simply "going to die" if he heard about one more so-called micro-aggression on campus. When a colleague told him he was "acting crazy" for being so sensitive, he was shipped off to a mandatory session for freshmen where he learned about white privilege and determined that he would never say anything potentially controversial again. And with that, the Inclusive Language Campaign was born.Under this new initiative, which is all the rage at Michigan and some other universities, the quoted words used in the above paragraph are considered offensive. In addition to posters plastered around campus urging us to "Stop. Think." before we speak, my peers and I have been encouraged to sign an ambiguously written Inclusive Language Campaign pledge. We're all being drafted as thought police, charged with regulating the speech of our peers.
Sounds like a joke, right? If so, it's one that my school, a public university, has reportedly spent $16,000 on. Apparently that's the budget necessary to explain that words such as "jewed" and "gyped" are offensive. My grandmother could have told you that for free, saving Michigan thousands on the morally obvious.
But this politically correct campaign is about something bigger and more insidious than putting a few words on the dare-not-speak list.
Operating under ILC's logic, I am hostile for offering a cupcake to a diabetic without knowing of his condition, racist for suggesting we "work the kinks out" on a group project and generally insensitive for having an opinion on any subject that I have not directly experienced.
I guess I can't write that paper on Homer this weekend: I wasn't there to witness the violence of the Trojan War.
She points out that some animals are more oppressable than others:
One of my good friends found that his "Landscapes of Home" freshman seminar is actually an opportunity for his teacher to castigate him for being white, heterosexual and from Georgia.
Her solution is right out of "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" -- let's voluntarily decide to be nice to each other...but without duct-taping anybody's (really everybody's) mouth shut and without the Who's More Oppressed? Olympics.
Instead of pitting student groups against each other in a painful game of out-oppression -- who's had it worse, the black students or the transgender students? -- wouldn't it be better to drop the -isms and learn to simply be good to each other?...College students readying themselves for the real world have to learn that some people are bigots, that some people will hurt their feelings inadvertently and that understanding doesn't come from bureaucratic student-life committees or advisory boards led by self-righteous RAs. It comes from environments where opinions are valued beyond their adherence to a so-called progressive agenda.
I would call it the Don't Be an Idiot Campaign -- if only that word were still allowed.
My previous post on this -- and my comment:
If you are hurt by a person saying a word, tell them. Maybe they'll pull back; maybe they won't. But there will maybe be a discussion about it, and that's good. This is how we advance thought -- or rather, how we used to before students became baby kittens.I went to University of Michigan back in the 80s, back when students protested all over the place on campus -- and they weren't protesting against FREE SPEECH!
via Old R P M Daddy
Putting The Fiscal Responsibility Into The Baby-Making
I'm frequently shocked by people who have children despite not having the means to pay for them. And by "pay for them," I mean, like pay for them to go to the dentist and for all the other costs involved with kids.
I'm sort of amazed that they think they have a right to do this.
In a post at Thought Catalog, "7 Realizations That Convinced Me Not To Have Children," Lauren Rinere nails it:
Does a frank conversation about fiscal responsibility take some of the romance out of having a baby? Probably. But guess what? Too bad. We don't live in a world where it is acceptable -- or even remotely excusable -- to sacrifice the well-being of a child for the sake of your own emotional satisfaction. That is, contrary to popular opinion, not your right as a sexually functioning human being. The only reason biological parents don't have to match the endless standards and scrutiny as people wanting to adopt is that bureaucracy can't regulate basic reproductive capabilities. In other words, it isn't possible to stop people who are physically able from having kids. Human intelligence has evolved far too much to excuse treating fertility as an entitlement. It is a responsibility. You don't jump into a lake without first checking to see that the water is deep, and clear of rocks.
Muttley
Linkie with wet dog smell.
Idiocy In Action: Non-Muslims Donning Hijab To Support Religious Freedom
Islam is not a religion that stands for "religious freedom." In fact, it stands for quite the contrary, with Islam translating to "submission," and that's what all of us "dirty kuffars" are supposed to be made to do, per the Quran.
So it is the height of dim for Western women -- Australian women -- to don hijabs to "show support for Muslim women and religious freedom," as Natalie Whiting reports at ABC Australia:
Kate Leaney is a Christian woman who manages the Welcome Centre in Adelaide - a drop-in centre for refugees, asylum seekers and new arrivals.She decided to wear the hijab for a week in solidarity with her Muslim friends who were feeling threatened in the current climate of fear.
Why would people be afraid of Muslims? Perhaps because the religion demands that Muslims slaughter or convert of the infidel in exchange for 72 "houris" in Paradise (which are either virgins or yellow raisins -- there's been some dispute).
Now, of course, there are many peaceful Muslims. The problem isn't with the people but with the ideology. But the ideology causes many people to behave in ways antithetical to the values of a free, western society -- such as the commands to slaughter gays, stone adulteresses, and put to death anyone who decides to leave the religion or who even mocks Mohammed.
This is evil stuff and I'm afraid of anyone who believes in this stuff. This is a reasonable fear.
What I still don't understand is why there are no strong Muslim voices leading organizations to reform Islam. Then again, this would be somewhat of a death wish, so I guess I actually do understand that.
But the notion that it is "Islamophobia" to fear those who fervently believe in an ideology that calls for the death of others who don't conform to it, well, that's what's crazy.
Oh, and the truth is, it isn't Muslims who most likely to be attacked for their religion. It's Jews. (There are 10 times more "hate crimes" against Jews than against Muslims.)
No, Somebody Else's Home Is Not Your Castle
A judge orders a man to stop smoking inside his home -- because the smoke is going into somebody else's home. From Fox4:
The judge's temporary ruling came after the man's new neighbors filed a lawsuit that claimed smoke from his home found its way into their home through holes in a shared basement. The couple said they worried the smoke would not only harm them and their child, but their unborn baby as well, according to a report from WJLA."You want me to stop what I've been doing in my house, all my life," Edwin Gray said when asked about his reaction to the judge's ruling. He said his family has owned the home in northeast D.C. for 50 years.
..."Your home is no longer your castle," [WaPo columnist] Kass said.
No, your neighbors home is not your castle.
You should be able to do whatever you want in your home (assuming all are consenting adults and nobody's being murdered) -- as long as it does not leak out of your home and into those of your neighbors.
As I write in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," it's on you to install whatever you need so your neighbors are not: Breathing your cigarette smoking, smelling the farty-ass beans you're cooking, or hearing the thump of your stereo or the clippity-clop of your Shetland pony across the hardwood at 2 a.m.
More here.
And the video:
The potheads are a problem now, too.
Spiffy
Well-dusted links.
Nice When The Crime Report From France Is Just Somebody Stealing A Bunch Of Rocks
Sparkly rocks, that is.
Via Jay J. Hector, there was a jewel heist on the highway in France. Doesn't sound like anybody was hurt (the drivers were released unharmed). Angela Charlton reports for the AP:
About 15 armed assailants ambushed two vans carrying millions of euros worth of jewels on a French highway in the middle of the night Wednesday, forcing out their drivers and speeding off into the Burgundy countryside, according to police.
This sort of crime makes me think of Cary Grant instead of guys with guns slaughtering guys with pens for Allah, and I really appreciate that.
Boohoo, Why Are Older Men Looking at Women Half Their Age?
This is my latest New York Observer column -- responding to a columnist in The Guardian who whines that she can't be old, fat, and have short hair and still expect to attract a man.
An excerpt from my response:
In other words, sure, you can keep moaning about how unfair it is that men are focused on looks. You should find this about as successful a strategy for finding a romantic partner as it would be for a man to complain that women won't date him until he has a day job beyond lying on his parents' couch playing video games and complaining about how 'shallow' women are.Sure, there are guys out there who do this. But the main difference between men and women in dating that I see? More men seem to accept the harsh reality -- that they have to earn a living and be somebody to get the girl.
So, Stella, to answer the question you ask at the end of your piece:
"The question is, should I be prepared to change?"Yes, Stella -- into somebody who accepts reality and does her best to work within its constraints.
Or, to put it another way: The day men will no longer care about your looks is the day you'll have the hots for a very sweet 62-year-old barista.
Do read the whole thing at the link -- and please share from the Observer link with your social networks! (Helps me!) And for more science-based thinking on the realities of dating (among other issues) -- and how to make the best of them -- read "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck."
Ashton Kutcher Complains That The World Is Not Designed As One Big Parenting Help Site
The Wrap's Jordan Charlton writes about Kutcher's recent Facebook rant about the lack of baby-changing stations in men's bathrooms:
Ashton Kutcher is a new father to newborn Wyatt Isabelle, and recently faced a challenge with one the harsh realities of early parenting--diaper changing."There are NEVER diaper changing stations in mens public restrooms," Kutcher wrote on Facebook. "The first public men's room that I go into that has one gets a free shout out on my FB page! #BeTheChange"
Sometimes there are changing facilities in women's bathrooms but I don't notice them very often (perhaps because I am not going to "family-friendly" restaurants).
Facilities sometimes don't meet my needs, either, so I prepare to meet my own. What a concept!
You Can't Mock Terrorists At The University Of Minnesota
Yet another shocking and disgusting pushback against free speech on campus, this time at the University of Minnesota.
Allison Maass writes at CampusReform about the terrorist-mocking back cover of the Minnesota Republic magazine, deemed by a funding committee to show "an overt lack of sensitivity to the portrayal of members of the Arab world" that could "compromise the cultural harmony of the campus."
Oh, for fuck's sake.
Maass notes:
Our publication, derived from the University of Minnesota's Students for a Conservative Voice (SCV), allows students on campus to share their viewpoints no matter what--even if they are considered offensive.And no other publication on campus can say that.
...At SCV's budget presentation to the committee, we were asked about a back cover from an issue published in 2011 that pictured a man with a gun burning an issue of the Minnesota Republic with the words, "Terrorists hate the Minnesota Republic."
Other than the protection afforded by the First Amendment to print such things, the SSFC even has its own rule that protects students' rights to print content without hurting their request for funding.
"After assessing this information, the Student Service Fee Committee would like to emphasize for the group the significance of culturally sensitive discourse on a campus like the University of Minnesota, which prides itself on being home to a wide range of values and beliefs held by members that originate from countless cultures across the globe," the recommendation continued. "In the future, close attention may be paid to the content published by Students for a Conservative Voice to ensure that any material that is produced with student fee funds does not compromise the cultural harmony of the campus and to ensure that the material that is produced is not at odds with the criteria in place for receiving this funding."
I am shocked that not one person in the room during these deliberations questioned the committee's flagrant disregard for our right to free speech as it was questioning whether or not our publication disrupts the "cultural harmony" on U of M's campus.
It's clear that their statement is meant to scare students on campus from publishing or saying anything that the committee might not like.
Students should be encouraged to share their views at a public university, not threatened when they do so.
To show my opposition to religious thuggery and my support for free speech and other Western values, here's my late doglette Lucy dressed up as Mohammed for Draw Mohammed Day (I suck at drawing):
I keep trying to dress up Aida, my wee Chinese Crested, as Jihadi John, but she finds the disguise itchy and she refuses to carry the machete.
Schmoopy
Linkiewinkie.
Certain Rapes Lie Outside Feminist Outrage
Like that of a porn actress. A porn actress raped by men who are not white.
The brutal home invasion and violent gang rape of porn actress Cytherea was met with silence by feminists and the media, while they push a "rape culture" narrative portraying white men as "privileged" date rapists, reports Matt Forney at returnofkings.com.
If ever there was a story for feminists to get enraged about, this would be it. According to SJWs, America fosters a "rape culture," where sexual assault is trivialized and men are encouraged to feel "entitled" to womens' bodies. You can't get more entitled than a gang of ghetto thugs invading a woman's home and raping her at gunpoint.Yet feminists have been eerily silent on Cytherea. A casual Google search for "cytherea rape" shows that the only articles about the story are from news outlets, porn industry sites such as TRPWL, and the conservative site The Daily Caller. Searching Jezebel, one of the most popular feminist blogs in the world, for "cytherea" returns a grand total of zero results.
Forney's explanation for why the feminists are so hands-off? The rapists were three young black men:
The media is constantly on the lookout for what Tom Wolfe calls the "Great White Defendant," a criminal case featuring a white man who is utterly guilty of victimizing a woman or a racial minority.This desire to demonize white men drives not only popular rape hoaxes such as the Duke lacrosse case or the UVA rape story, but white-on-black crime stories such as the Trayvon Martin case and the Ferguson debacle.
Feminists are also ignoring Cytherea's rape because of the class factor. The rape stories that SJWs squirt tears over--such as UVA rape liar Jackie Coakley or "Mattress Girl" Emma Sulkowicz--involve upper-class white girls being purportedly brutalized by "entitled," "privileged" white men. Cytherea is a former porn star, and while there are "sex-positive" feminists out there, they've been eclipsed in power by neo-Puritans such as Anita Sarkeesian and Lindy West who wax poetic about "affirmative consent" and think that porn is a tool of the patriarchy.
Porn star Mercedes Carrera explains more about this in another post at returnofkings.com:
I believe the feminists that get media attention these days are the same ilk as the wealthy Victorian era suffragettes: wealthy white women whose panties are in a bunch over imagined slights and imagined injustices. They do not, and never have, spoken for women who are on the outside of their exclusive group. Sex workers, women of color, economically disadvantaged white women are not part of their platform. Those women who have to think about how they are going to eat or live are excluded from the conversation. Women who cannot afford $29.95 "This is what a feminist looks like" t-shirts made by female slave labor in Madagascar are excluded from the conversation.Additionally, because this was a random example of "rape culture" and the attackers were disadvantaged young black men (not wealthy white lacrosse players) it is too complex of a social issue for them to want to delve into. Issues of race, socioeconomics and rape cannot easily be deconstructed into the binary paradigms of "patriarchy" or "misogyny" so they'd rather ignore it altogether. Further, a sex worker is less "valuable" in their imaginary class system hierarchy than a "proper" wealthy feminist college student.
Bottom line: It cannot be politicized to fit their left marxist agenda. At the core, modern sex negative radical feminism is less about gender and more about the societal control of all groups that are not them.
The Next Time Somebody's Whining About How Hard We All Have It Now, Take A Wee Look Back
Megan McArdle writes at Cato about what's changed about standards of living:
Rare is the public policy panel where someone does not bring up the fading grandeur of America's middle class, and when they do, rare is the participant who does not sorrowfully nod and agree that yes, living standards are bad and getting worse, and today's children are the first generation in our nation's history that cannot expect to be better off than their parents....My grandfather worked as a grocery boy until he was 26 years old. He married my grandmother on Thanksgiving because that was the only day he could get off. Their honeymoon consisted of a weekend visiting relatives , during which they shared their nuptial bed with their host's toddler. They came home to a room in his parents' house--for which they paid monthly rent. Every time I hear that marriage is collapsing because the economy is so bad, I think of their story.
By the standards of today, my grandparents were living in wrenching poverty. Some of this, of course, involves technologies that didn't exist--as a young couple in the 1930s my grandparents had less access to health care than the most neglected homeless person in modern America, simply because most of the treatments we now have had not yet been invented. That is not the whole story, however. Many of the things we now have already existed; my grandparents simply couldn't afford them. With some exceptions, such as microwave ovens and computers, most of the modern miracles that transformed 20th century domestic life already existed in some form by 1939. But they were out of the financial reach of most people.
If America today discovered a young couple where the husband had to drop out of high school to help his father clean tons of unsold, rotted produce out of their farm's silos, and now worked a low-wage, low-skilled job, was living in a single room with no central heating and a single bathroom to share for two families, who had no refrigerator and scrubbed their clothes by hand in a washtub, who had serious conversations in low voices over whether they should replace or mend torn clothes, who had to share a single elderly vehicle or make the eight-mile walk to town ... that family would be the subject of a three-part Pulitzer prizewinning series on Poverty in America.
But in their time and place, my grandparents were a boring bourgeois couple, struggling to make ends meet as everyone did, but never missing a meal or a Sunday at church. They were excited about the indoor plumbing and electricity which had just been installed on his parents' farm, and they were not too young to marvel at their amazing good fortune in owning an automobile. In some sense they were incredibly deprived, but there are millions of people in America today who are incomparably better off materially, and yet whose lives strike us (and them) as somehow objectively more difficult.
She gives a number of examples of what's changed. For example:
Diet. We have a tendency to romanticize "the good old days" of fresh foods and home cooked meals. Yet when you look at what the majority of people were actually eating on an average day in 1930, it looks considerably less appealing: fresh vegetables in season, yes, but the rest of the year it was grain, milk, more grain, beans, and cuts of meat, like salt pork and calf's liver, that most Americans won't touch today. Bread and milk was an actual meal that many people ate for supper, and not because it was homey and charming, but because most people could not afford the rich diet of the modern American.Liberty. Life is a lot better than it was in 1930 if you're black. Or gay. Or a woman who wants to work outside the home. Or mentally ill. Or pregnant. Or cohabiting. Or accused of a crime. Many categories of people who previously suffered brutal punishment--legal or social--have had their lives immeasurably improved. Are we a perfectly equal and free society? No. But many groups of people have immensely more freedom and opportunity than they used to.
Sadly, this -- the area of our freedoms -- is an area where there's a big push to roll back the clock, especially against free speech, but also against probable cause-based policing.
These rollbacks are called for in the name of "comfort" and "safety," and I believe it's partly because our world is vastly more comfortable and safe than it's every been.
This is a wonderful, modern thing -- how safe and comfortable we are -- but it's also a dangerous thing, because it's turned a good many of us into big pussies who refuse to put up with the slightest bit of discomfort. (And, okay, so what if we have to turn into, oh, a bit of a police state in the service of that. Pass the remote?)
Winkie
One-eyed links.
Twick Or Tweet: College Woman Rape Stats
Loved this, via @CHSommers:
@SalonNotCom
According to a new report released by experts in feminist statistics and applied mathermatics, 6 out of every 5 women in college are raped
The reality is, college students are less likely to be raped than other women. From a 2011 post at The Federalist:
A new report on sexual assault released today by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) officially puts to bed the bogus statistic that one in five women on college campuses are victims of sexual assault. In fact, non-students are 25 percent more likely to be victims of sexual assault than students, according to the data. And the real number of assault victims is several orders of magnitude lower than one-in-five.The full study, which was published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a division within DOJ, found that rather than one in five female college students becoming victims of sexual assault, the actual rate is 6.1 per 1,000 students, or 0.61 percent (instead of 1-in-5, the real number is 0.03-in-5). For non-students, the rate of sexual assault is 7.6 per 1,000 people.
The higher rate of victimization among non-students is important due in large part to recent accusations that U.S. colleges and universities are hotbeds of so-called "rape culture," where sexual assault is endemic, and administrators and other students are happy to look the other way. The bogus "1 in 5″ statistic, which was the product of a highly suspect survey of only two universities and which paid respondents for their answers, has been repeatedly used as evidence of this pervasive rape culture on college campuses across the country.
Even more striking is that according to the BJS data, the likelihood of sexual assault has actually been trending downward across the board since 1997.
Thank The US Govt For Making Your PC More Hackable
Jim Finkle writes at Reuters:
Hundreds of millions of Windows PC users are vulnerable to attacks exploiting the recently uncovered "Freak" security vulnerability, which was initially believed to only threaten mobile devices and Mac computers, Microsoft Corp warned.News of the vulnerability surfaced on Tuesday when a group of nine security experts disclosed that ubiquitous Internet encryption technology could make devices running Apple Inc's iOS and Mac operating systems, along with Google Inc's Android browser vulnerable to cyberattacks.
Microsoft released a security advisory on Thursday warning customers that their PCs were also vulnerable to the "Freak" vulnerability.
The weakness could allow attacks on PCs that connect with Web servers configured to use encryption technology intentionally weakened to comply with U.S. government regulations banning exports of the strongest encryption.
Note that last bit:
encryption technology intentionally weakened to comply with U.S. government regulations banning exports of the strongest encryption.
Did you think government exists to protect you? (How cute.)
via @samizdatabot
Twitversation On International Day Of Infantilizing Women
That's "International Women's Day," and, as I wrote yesterday, no, I'm not for it, as it screams, "We're not equal."
I spotted this Twitter convo. First, Christina Dewing:
@CJ_Dewing
.@DrJenGunter if men had periods, tampons and pads would not only be tax-free, they would be paid for by the state.
And then, Dr. Jennifer Gunter, whom I follow and generally like and respect:
@DrJenGunter
I'd like male politicians who think taxing menstrual products is ok to bleed out their ass for 5 days/month then vote on it #IntlWomensDay
Are the ladies under the impression that money gets plucked off a big tree? My response:
@amyalkon
.@CJ_Dewing @DrJenGunter So you're libertarians, against big govt? Otherwise, how do you think all that socialized everything gets paid for?
Naturally, nobody responded to that.
Oh, and by the way, from the Wash Times:
Obamacare eventually will impose nearly two dozen new or higher taxes on the American public, according to Americans for Tax Reform, which calls the new rules that took effect Jan. 1 the "medicine cabinet tax." This penalty hits many everyday items in the ordinary household. Until now, Americans could use Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and Flexible Savings Accounts (FSAs) to pay, pretax, not just for major medical care and prescription drugs but also for nonprescription, over-the-counter medicines. Experts say such basic treatments save money in the long run by helping avoid expensive surgery and hospitalization down the road.Obamacare disallows this use of HSAs and FSAs. Basic aspirin, laxatives, antihistamines, decongestants, antacids: None of them will be covered by self-controlled, self-savings plans favored by millions of middle-class families. The problem is worse for FSAs because funds can't be carried from one year to the next, meaning any cash left at year's end is forfeited by the saver and taxed by the government. This will prove to be an expensive and unsuccessful remedy for the nation's health care woes. If people can't use these monies for off-the-shelf cold and flu treatments and will lose any balance that's left unused, there's a greater chance the sick will ask doctors for pricey prescription drugs even for minor ailments.
Litter
Linkie with cigarette butts and a Big Gulp cup.
Blow Me
My beloved blowdryer died, so I did what I always do when I need a new beauty appliance -- read for the best cheap version of the "best of" versions.
Remington Ac9096 Silk Ceramic Ionic AC Professional Hair Dryer
Remington seems to make good hair appliances. Last one I bought was this one -- Remington S8510DS Flat Iron, Frizz Therapy, 1 Inch
For those of you who want to buy things not linked here, Search Amy's Amazon
All of your purchases are much appreciated!
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE, Tonight, 7-8 pm PT: Dr. Gabriele Oettingen, Rethinking Positive Thinking
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
My guest tonight, NYU psychology professor Dr. Gabriele Oettingen, draws on more than 20 years of research on human motivation to show why conventional wisdom on "thinking positively" falls short. On tonight's show, she'll lay out her science-based method for achieving goals and explain why seeing the obstacles and not just the rainbows and pots of gold gives you your best chance for success.
Her book we'll be discussing is Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation.
Listen to the show at this link at showtime (Sunday, 7-8 pm PT) or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2015/03/09/dr-gabriele-oettingen-rethinking-positive-thinking
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.
Please consider ordering my new book, the science-based and funny "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," (only $9.48 at Amazon!).
Along with positive reviews in the WSJ and other publications, Library Journal gave the book a starred review: "Verdict: Solid psychology and a wealth of helpful knowledge and rapier wit fill these pages. Highly recommended."
Ick: It's "International Women's Day"
The existence of a special day for women (like for kindegarteners) screams "We're not equal." Thanks; I'll pass.
What Idiot Thinks We're Safer And Better Off Having No Idea What Other People Think?
Somebody said this at a recent dinner for FIRE that I went to. And they're right. As I put the same idea, "Why would anyone think we're safer if ugly views are shoved underground? They're still there. We just can't see or debate them."
A woman, Dinah Silverstein, presumably Jewish, blogs (idiotically) at the Times of Israel, using the (sadly) increasingly popular notion that shutting down speech keeps us safer, claiming, "America Desperately Needs a Hate Speech Law."
Hey, Dinah! Today others' speech is prosecuted; tomorrow yours is. Silverstein writes:
Freedom of speech is something that always has to be balanced against other peoples' human rights. America needs to take a human rights-based approach to freedom of speech, balancing freedom of speech against human dignity, civility, and respect, and the US needs to outlaw all ideas which have no place in a modern democracy with basic human rights. In Canada, each state has its own Human Rights Tribunal to prosecute people for hate speech and other human rights abuses. The US needs to set up similar Human Rights Tribunals in each state to prosecute people for hate speech on a state level, along with a federal American Human Rights Commission (like the federal Canadian Human Rights Commission) to prosecute people for hate speech on a federal level. If the US does indeed disapprove of hatred and bigotry, then it has absolutely no reason to allow the open expression of hatred and bigotry. Hate speech is not free speech, and it's time for America to finally recognize this. Freedom of speech should never be something that hurts people. Freedom of speech is a right that must be used responsibly, and hate speech is a clear abuse of that right. It's time for America to finally bring itself up to date on its international human rights obligations, and it can start doing that by finally passing a law against all forms of hate speech. This is something that human rights groups around the world have been telling America for decades.
So the hell what?
The First Amendment is the "Welcome, Assholes!" Amendment, and I love the fuck out of this country for having it. It's one of the things (along with our other rights and freedoms) that makes me feel great about being American; makes me feel there is no other country in the world I would rather be a citizen of.
And this from Silverstein is idiotically hilarious:
Human rights groups in America need to bring the fight for hate speech protections to the US, as America is the last advanced country in the world without any kind of legal protections against hate speech - and, by failing to protect against hate speech, the US is explicitly violating international human rights law. America will never be up to international human rights standards until it makes protecting the basic human dignity of its citizens a top priority.
It's your job to protect your dignity, not a thing to have a law about.
And didn't your mom lecture you against the "monkey-see/monkey-do" thing. As Mark Humphreys points out:
As of 2010, the UN "Human Rights" Council includes the "Not Free" countries of: Angola, Cameroon, Libya, the Maldives, China, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Cuba.
Yeah, let's be more like Saudi Arabia, where Coptic Christians are regularly killed but you'll go to jail or be killed for saying anything slightly critical against Mohammed or anybody in power.
On a side note, Antonin Pribetic fact-checks her ass:
@APribetic
@amyalkon @MoonMetropolis @TheFIREorg Bah! Misattributing the quote to Voltaire and omitting "falsely" in the Holmes quote in Schenck.
via @MoonMetropolis
Daylight Stupid Time
A tweet from Mike Primavera:
@primawesome
Don't forget to set your clocks on fire.
From Ben Yakas at Gothamist, 20 reasons why Daylight Savings Time needs to be put to death. A few:
•We're talking about a tradition that was started by Benjamin Franklin in 1784 because he was interested in conserving candles.•And that's only if you assume he was being serious. He's credited with coming up with the idea as a joke.
•The other man who is credited with the proposal is New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson in 1895--of course, the reason he was in favor of it was so he could study insects longer during daylight hours.
•DST was designed to give people more time in sunlight, and ostensibly to conserve energy--but many prominent studies have proven we get little if any benefits from the practice. A U.S. Department of Transportation study in the 1970s concluded that total electricity savings associated with daylight saving time amounted to about 1 percent in the spring and fall months--and that was offset by the increase in air-conditioner use.
•A more recent study in 2006 found similar results, which was noted by two academics wrote a NYT Op-Ed piece in 2008. They argued that not only is there little scientific proof that this reduces energy consumption--it's actually more wasteful than not. And super annoying, which we already knew.
•Chronobiologists agree as well: Bora Zivkovic wrote a fantastic essay in which he argues DST is basically destroying our brains: "Whether or not DST saves energy is the least of the reasons why it's a bad idea. Much more important are the health effects of sudden, hour-long shifts on our bodies and minds." The entire world is jet-lagged for several days after the changeover--in other words, if on March 9th there were an alien attack, or if the rats decided to mobilize their forces, we'd be seriously screwed.
Slinkie
Tight little dress links.
A Horrible Decision To Make
A father has to leave his dying son to try to save his daughter's life.
Moving reporting by Ann O'Neill from Boston on what the victims of the Boston bombing went through. An excerpt:
Boston (CNN)Bill Richard knew his son wasn't going to make it. But the father of three told his wife he couldn't stay by 8-year-old Martin's side.The boy's body was torn apart by an explosion near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. His skin had changed color. A crowd hovered over him, frantically trying to help, but he was dying.
Speaking from the witness stand at Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's trial on Thursday, Richard told jurors he was faced with a heartbreaking choice.
"I knew in my head that I needed to act quickly, or we might not only lose Martin," he said. "We might lose Jane, too."
Moments after the blast, Richard had stumbled toward Jane, his 7-year-old daughter. His pants and sneakers were torn apart. His legs felt like they were on fire. He could barely hear. And the air smelled "vile," he said, like gunpowder, sulfur and burned hair. But he soon realized the situation was much worse for his daughter.
"She tried to get up and she fell. That was when I noticed her leg," he said. "She didn't have it. It was blown off."
So Richard left one son to die near the marathon finish line, and shielded his other son's eyes from the carnage as they raced to the hospital, hoping that doctors could save his daughter's life.
"It was," Richard said Thursday, "the last time I saw my son alive -- barely."
Defense tries to stop testimony
Richard's description of the explosion's horrifying aftermath capped a day of dramatic testimony as survivors shared their stories in the second day of the high-profile trial.Tsarnaev's attorneys admit that he carried out the 2013 attacks, which killed three people and injured more than 260 others at the marathon. A fourth person, an MIT police officer, was ambushed and killed in his patrol car three days after the bombings as Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, allegedly ran from police.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed after a gunbattle with police. And now, his younger brother sits in court facing 30 federal charges related to the bombings. His attorneys say he was influenced by his slain brother to participate in the attacks.
They argued Thursday that now isn't the right time for jurors to hear the string of harrowing stories from survivors of the explosions, arguing that testimony should be part of a later phase of the trial, when jurors will decide what penalty Tsarnaev should face. But the judge sided with prosecutors, who argued the testimony was necessary to support their indictment.
On Thursday, jurors relived the moments after the marathon bombings through the eyes of some of the people most affected by the blasts.
Defense attorneys didn't ask them any questions.
"Influenced by his slain brother"? Sorry, but my sister "influenced" my taking niacinamide, but there's no way she's going to "influence" me to brutally murder one person -- or hundreds.
As Jerry Coyne writes:
By all accounts the Tsarnaev brothers were creditable students, good athletes, and seemingly nice people. That is, of course, until they fell into the grips of Islam. As Steve Weinberg says, "For good people to do evil things--that takes religion."
One religion out there calls for the death or conversion of "the infidel" (as well as the slaughter of gays, the stoning of women who are raped and people who are adulterous) and has followers in Muslim-majority countries taking meaningful steps to see that this actually happens.
Timothy R. Furnish writes at the History News Network on the ridiculous notion that the bombers "self-radicalized," as if the desire to blow up Boston citizens came out of nowhere. He also points out that the radicals in Islam are actually the vast majority of Muslims who do not follow the Quran's mandates to convert or kill. Yes, mandates:
A number of analysts and commentators have opined about the Tsarnaevs' "self-radicalizing." However, self-radicalization" is a fatuous concept. First, what does "radical" mean in this context? I would submit that it means to accept, internalize and, ultimately, act upon the belief that violence in the name of Islam is not only justified but mandated. This is not a "radical" concept in Islam, because the Qur'an itself clearly spells this out (Sura al-Tawbah [IX]:5; Sura Muhammad [XLVII]:3; Sura al-Baqarah [II]:191ff; etc.), Muhammad lived it, many hadiths reinforce it, and Islamic history is rife with jihad and conquest (Muhammad himself; the first four caliphs; the Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Almohads, Almoravids, Ottomans, Safavids, etc.).More than any other world religion Islam lionizes violence, even in the modern world -- a major reason why 31 of 51 transnational terrorist groups are Islamic. Indeed, it's probably more accurate to call Muslims who eschew violence "radical," since the ones who engage in it are, in a very real sense, simply fulfilling the Qur'anic rubrics literally.
Thus, no Muslim terrorist "radicalizes" himself but, rather -- as we see with Tamerlan Tsarnaev -- is more prone to engaging in terrorism and violence as he (or, less frequently, she) becomes more observant of traditional (in particular, Sunni) Islam and then falls under the influence of Internet teachers like Feiz Muhammad or Anwar al-Awlaki or their ilk, who encourage such pious young men to wage jihad fi sabil Allah.
But make no mistake: if the religion were as peaceful and opposed to violence as apologists and (most) analysts allege, then no amount of YouTube sermons or editions of AQ's "Inspire" magazine would have any effect, and would instead fall on deaf ears. And note: the Arabic name of this magazine is actually al-Malahim, which means not "inspire" but, rather, "slaughters, massacres, epic struggles" -- something one never hears explained on CNN or even FNC, much less by government analysts. And what struggle is more epic than an eschatological one?
Kid: Michelle Obama, You Ruined Taco Tuesday
The sad thing is, Michelle Obama knows nothing about dietary science, yet has led the charge -- based on dietary hearsay rather than dietary science -- to transform kids' school lunches to the low-fat, high carb crap that has obesified America over the past few decades.
From NOLA.com's Angela Thompson:
The new regulations took effect in 2012 with the goal of including more whole grains, vegetables and fruits in school meals while reducing fat and sodium.
As dietary researcher Dr. Jeff Volek agreed with me on my radio show -- it's practically criminal to feed growing children skim milk.
Elizabeth Harrington writes at the Free Beacon:
After a second grader complained to First Lady Michelle Obama that she "ruined" Taco Tuesday with her healthy lunch rules, Trip Klibert has accepted the White House's consolation: Bo and Sunny trading cards and a note from Mrs. Obama that said you'll get used to it.
Tacos aren't bad. The shell isn't good for you, but the stuff inside -- meat, cheese, sour cream, and tomatoes -- is great. Eat that without the shell, and you've got a very healthy lunch -- that is, if the meat is normal meat and not hamburger with all the fat sucked out of it.
And food without fat is food that leaves you hungry. Great for young bodies in their growth period and young minds needing enough fuel to pay attention in school.
Yes, thank Michelle Obama. An entirely unscientific science experiment on America's children!
Cuckoo
Cocoapuffy links.
Baby Fever -- Even In Some Women Who'd Never Wanted Children
I have never wanted children, and I love my life without them. When Gregg and I sometimes see kids in public, our feeling isn't "Aww, how cute," but "Phew -- did we ever dodge a bullet."
Apparently, with some women, this sort of feeling can be replaced with a feverish longing to have a baby.
According to a Finnish study by Anna Rotkirch in the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, it turns out that women who -- like me -- were sure they didn't want children, found themselves suddenly experiencing "baby fever": a deep, often physical longing to have a child. This longing, according to Rotkirch, happens especially in the early 20s and between 28 and 35 years of age.
BABY FEVER TRIGGERS AND CONSEQUENCESWhat fuelled the longing for a baby? According to my respondents, it may arise "out of nowhere" or be caused by a specific trigger. Obviously, some of the triggers mentioned may also be involved unconsciously in the former cases. For instance, the onset of unexpected longing with physical symptoms such as aching breasts and pinching womb may be due to an unnoticed pregnancy.
Age triggers. Most often, women referred to "nothing in particular" or to their age. Part of the age triggers appeared in the early twenties. One woman even deplored that the "fever" she had at 24 had now disappeared: "Actually I feel that my body told me about the right time to have children, and for rational reasons I did not listen to it. Now I regret that." (Born 1978, No. 89)
The second period of reported age triggers was between 28 and 35 years. In these cases, the woman sometimes became conscious of her physiologically limited time to bear children and then started planning and longing for motherhood (cf. HECKHAUSEN and WROSCH 2002). A few respondents mentioned that expert advice from doctors made them think about motherhood seriously for the first time in their lives. Another woman referred to her "biological clock":
I didn't have any baby fever although I was surrounded by cute toddlers all those years and I also had a husband. Then I turned 35 and it was like 'bling' - the biological clock or some other inner voice said 'it's now or never' and that was it.... I don't see it as baby fever because until then it was the thought of all that work and the fact that children are sweet but I don't need to have them myself... then that thought it changed as if by magic, and nine months later I was already pushing my firstborn in a carriage... (Born 1970, No. 58)
Rotkirch speculates on what's behind the baby fever:
Women ... connected the onset of "baby fever" to physical age (early teens, early twenties or late twenties-early thirties), to falling in love with a partner, or to witnessing pregnancies or babies of siblings and peers. Acute longing for a child often developed when child-bearing faced some obstacles. It influenced the reproductive, sexual and social behaviour of the person experiencing it.The texts analysed in this article described longing for a baby as an all-encompassing, overwhelming feeling. Some of the respondents had also felt specific physical and mental symptoms. "Baby fever" was metaphorically compared with natural forces and with bodily and sexual needs. The dramatic quality of these experiences should not be underestimated, especially as Finns usually display emotions with restraint.
The empirical evidence depicts a feeling of such frequency and strength, and often in opposition to prevailing social norms and expectations, that we may speculate it has evolved either as an adaptation, a by-product, or both. I suggest longing for babies could be evolutionarily explained in three ways. First, it is a by-product of the "need to nurture", as FOSTER (2000) among others has argued in a refined theorising of the "maternal instinct" of Havelock Ellis. Finding babies and child care attractive is a common, partly sex-dimorphic personality trait and triggered by previous experiences of caring.
Second, wanting babies may be a strategy in mate selection and courtship, as a way of testing and displaying parental commitment. As already WESTERMARCK (1891: 379) noted, fertility prospects were central to mating in pre-industrial societies. In my material, more or less realistic talk about future children often appeared in the beginning of love relations, even when the couple had no actual plans for children.
Third, especially the sudden onset of longing for babies may result from psychophysical changes that have evolved to trigger maternal attachment in women. These changes would be hormonally mediated and develop gradually, as the couple settles down and the woman grows older.
Have you or a woman you know insisted that you don't want children and then done a complete shift on that?
Litigious Dumbass Department
Jim Walsh writes at USA Today that an appellate court ruled that a man who stuck his face right over a plate of sizzling fajitas at Applebees to pray and then -- surprise! -- got some sizzle in his eye, should have known better:
Hiram Jimenez sought damages from Applebee's Neighborhood Grill and Bar after a March 2010 incident at the chain's restaurant on Burlington-Mount Holly Road. But an appellate panel said Applebee's can't be held responsible because the hot food posed an "open and obvious" danger.According to the ruling, Jimenez ordered fajitas that were placed in front of him in a "sizzling skillet." When he bowed his head "close to the table," the ruling says, Jimenez heard "a loud sizzling noise, followed by 'a pop noise' and then felt a burning sensation in his left eye and on his face."
In an incident report prepared for Appelebee's, Jimenez said he was burned on his face, neck and arms after "grease popped" on the fajitas.
His lawsuit said a waitress did not warn Jimenez that the dish was hot. It argued Jimenez suffered "serious and permanent" injuries "solely as a result of (Applebee's) negligence when he came in contact with a dangerous and hazardous condition, specifically, 'a plate of hot food'."
A trial judge dismissed the suit, finding Applebee's -- a California-based chain with more than 1,900 restaurants -- was not required to warn Jimenez "against a danger that is open and obvious."
As we used to say in junior high, "Duh-hay."
via @TedFrank
There *Is* Such A Thing As "Rape Culture"
No, not on our campuses in North America, where rape may happen to about 1 in 53 women, and when they happen, we are all (rightfully) horrified.
Rape culture exists in Muslim countries, where women are told they will be sexually assaulted if they don't go around with a black tablecloth over their head (or at least a headscarf) and "modest" clothing.
Here's how rape is handled in Saudi Arabia: With initial "lenient" sentences for the seven rapists and 200 lashes and a six-month prison term...for the victim!
At Breitbart, A.B. Sanderson writes:
According to Sharia Law, a Saudi Arabian woman must be accompanied by a male guardian at all times in public, something the 19 year old victim did not obey when she went to meet a friend, according to website Live Buddhism.While in a car with a student friend, retrieving a picture, two men got into the vehicle and drove them to a secluded area. She said she was raped there by seven men, three of whom also attacked her friend.
The Shi'ite Muslim woman had initially been sentenced to 90 lashes after being convicted of violating the Kingdom's religious diktats on segregation of the sexes, where woman are treated as second class citizens.
After the sentences were handed down following the rape in 2006, which included lenient custodial sentences for the men guilty of the violent crime, the woman's lawyer appealed to the Saudi General Court. But instead of choosing to overturn the punishments for being the victim of a crime, the court more than doubled her sentence.
...Saudi Arabia defended the controversial decision to punish the victim, saying that she was at fault for being out without a male friend...
Actually, "male friend" is probably incorrect. The male guardian would need to be a male relative.
So...where are all the feminists protesting this?
Oh, right -- at an anti-Israel rally.
Mink
Furrylinks.
Sunday Drivers Are Bad Enough
Sunday pilots?
Ugh.
At least this one crash-landed his antique plane on the Penmar golf course, not in some little girl's bedroom.
Being Catholic Is A Choice: Ben Carson's Dimwitted Comments On Gays
You can no more choose to be gay than my being straight is a choice. I'm attracted to men. I'm not attracted to women. I'm attracted to chocolate. I'm not attracted to celery. Is there a person here who thinks that they can simply decide to lust for a food they dislike and to start lusting for it?
Eric Bradner and Alexandra Jaffe write at CNN [annoying autoplay link]:
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson apologized for commenting Wednesday that prisoners' changes after they leave jail proves being gay is a choice, but said that the science is still murky on the issue.
The notion that people go into prison straight and "come out gay" is ludicrous.
And here's Slate's Mark Joseph Stern on how being gay is not a choice:
In study after study, biologists have found that homosexuality, at least in men, is clearly, undoubtedly, inarguably an inborn trait.
Of course, Carson's point of view is all about denying people rights:
He said it's possible to grant the legal rights that accompany marriage to same-sex couples -- or to any two people at all -- without applying the word "marriage" to their relationships."Why do gay people want to get married? Why do they say they want to get married? Because they want to have various rights -- property rights, visitation rights," he said. "Why can't any two human beings, I don't care what their sexual orientation is, why can't they have the legal right to do those things? That does not require changing the definition of marriage."
Yes, two consenting adults who wish to be married -- with all the state-granted rights and protections that come with -- should be allowed to be married.
I Love When Protesters Are Too Stupid To Get A Quote That Actually Supports Their Point
Milo Yiannopoulos tweeted about AEI scholar and feminism critic Christina Hoff Sommers' talk at UCLA yesterday. (The readable version of the quote is below):
@Nero The UCLA students stupidly protesting @CHSommers' talk need remedial classes... in typography
Sommers showed us the above photo she took of one of the protest signs yesterday at a dinner she and I and few other friends went to for campus free speech defenders theFIRE.org (a tiny organization getting way too much work these days -- just as the giant ACLU is slacking off on defending violations of free speech).
And since you can't see the type -- black on black plays badly! -- here it is. In a Reddit AMA, Christina Hoff Sommers wrote:
"Unfortunately, the crime of domestic violence is poorly understood and the issue has been used by gender zealots to depict the average man as a predator."
You've gotta love when protesters, meaning to show what a horrible person somebody is, makes the person sound quite reasonable and like they have a good point.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong Here?
Those who can't, um, slaughter, teach.
From The Daily Caller, guess who's now a DOJ contractor, hired to teach Muslims who are in federal prison:
An Egyptian-born imam who in 2007 said that Somali-born activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali should receive the death penalty for her criticism of Islam is now a Department of Justice contractor hired to teach classes to Muslims who are in federal prison.According to federal spending records, Fouad ElBayly, the imam at Islamic Center of Johnstown in Pennsylvania, was contracted by the DOJ's Bureau of Prisons beginning last year to teach the classes to Muslim inmates at Cumberland Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Md.
The records show that ElBayly has two contracts worth $12,900 to teach the classes and to provide the inmates "leadership and guidance." One of the contracts is dated Feb. 20, 2014, and the other is dated Dec. 8, 2014.
Guidance in what?
via @GadSaad
Gumby
Bendylinks.
The State, All Up In Everyone's Business
Typesetters lost their job with the advent of digital -- just as horseshoers were out of work when people started driving automobiles. The answer wasn't to tell digital to go away or command people to keep driving their horse and buggy rigs.
But Manhattan nitwit Borough President Gale Brewer somehow thinks pols have the right to tell tour bus companies in New York City how their tours can be narrated.
In the NY Post, Jennifer Fermino reports that Brewer is considering legislation that would make it illegal to replace human tour guides with audio recordings:
The effort to keep it real comes in response to a union contract dispute between Gray Line and the guides on its double-decker buses, which could lead to about 150 human guides being replaced with recorded tours.
Outside of overstepping, the woman doesn't think: What of the voiceover actors like my friend Carrington MacDuffie, who will be denied work?
Boohoo, The Poor, Impoverished LA Teachers
From UnionWatch, Ed Ring reports about the looming LA school teachers' strike:
LAUSD teachers are threatening to strike because they only make - using real world equivalents - $97,041 in direct pay, plus $21,045 in employer paid benefits. The average full-time LAUSD teacher earns total compensation worth $118,086 per year. Throw onto direct pay the 5% offer from the district, worth another $4,852 per year, and you have a total average teacher compensation proposed to go up to $122,938 per year.
Excuse me, but in the real world, making $122K is cause for celebration, not angry protests.
via @reasonpolicy
It's Now Deemed "Neglect" To Let Your Kids Walk To The Library Or The Park
This was normal when I was growing up. I walked to school, three-quarters of a mile away, rode my bike to the store, and went to the park after school and came home in time for dinner. And to think that I called my parents "overprotective."
Today, they'd be near-criminals, like the Maryland parents accused of "unsubstantiated" child neglect (a legal term there), for letting their children, ages 10 and 6, walk home without them or other adults from a park a mile away from their house.
Donna St. George writes in the WaPo:
The finding of unsubstantiated child neglect means CPS will keep a file on the family for at least five years and leaves open the question of what would happen if the Meitiv children get reported again for walking without adult supervision.The parents say they will continue to allow their son, Rafi, 10, and daughter Dvora, 6, to play or walk together, and won't be swayed by the CPS finding.
"We don't feel it was appropriate for an investigation to start, much less conclude that we are responsible for some form of child neglect," said Danielle Meitiv, who said she and her husband plan to appeal and worry about being investigated again by CPS.
...The Meitivs' case has produced strong reactions about what constitutes responsible parenting, how safe children really are and whether the government overstepped its role.
The Meitivs, both scientists by training, embrace a "free-range" philosophy of parenting, believing that children learn self-reliance by being allowed to make choices, build independence and progressively experience the world on their own.
...The Meitivs say they have let their children walk together to a park a block away, to a nearby 7-Eleven and to a library three-quarters of a mile from their house. Lately the children walk home from their school bus stop.
They say that when CPS started its investigation, on the day of their children's walk from the park, Alexander Meitiv was asked to sign a form saying he would not leave the children unsupervised until CPS followed up. When he resisted, saying he wanted to talk to a lawyer, he was told that if he did not sign, the children would be removed, the Meitivs said.
CPS officials have said they are guided in part by a state law that says children younger than 8 must be left with a reliable person who is at least 13. The law addresses children locked or confined in a building, dwelling, motor vehicle or other enclosed space, but does not mention children outdoors on a walk.
...Danielle Meitiv said that in spite of the decision, her children played at a nearby park by themselves Monday, when schools were closed for the snow day. They came home with a lost dog, and the family found its owner.
Throughout human history, 10-year-olds, or even younger kids, have cared for their younger siblings. This teaches the older child responsibility and takes some of the responsibility off the parents. And no, that is not a bad thing. A child's parents should not be spending the entire day all up in their business. As researchers Judith Rich Harris, Peter Gray, and Gabriele Principe point out, children are largely socialized by other children.
Related: How Germans parent. (Not like the pussies we've become.)
Oompa
Linkloompa.
And Then They Were Monsters: How PETA's Ingrid Newkirk Is Like Che Guevera
Douglas Anthony Cooper writes (in a long but worthwhile read) at HuffPo, that Ingrid Newkirk, who got into the animal rights business over her horror at euthanization of some kittens, founded an organization -- PETA -- that now slaughters animals by the thousands, and fast, too:
PETA, for reasons near impossible to comprehend, decided to devote itself to precisely the treachery that inspired Newkirk's mission in the first place. Her organization now routinely takes in animals, with the gentle lie that it intends to re-home them. It then exterminates them. Generally within twenty-four hours. All of them.Correction: almost all. Some lucky 3 percent managed to escape PETA's euthanasia machine last year. How these blessed few got chosen is an interesting question in itself. While we are being precise: the workers at that first shelter were not in fact treacherous -- they did not lie about their intentions. They were less vicious than the organization that Newkirk founded in response to their blithe slaughter.
Consider this grotesque moral path. It really is difficult to come up with a more perverse character arc. Imagine Harriet Tubman deciding late in life to become a slave trader. Or Raoul Wallenberg collaborating with the SS. Or St. Francis of Assisi joining the butchers' guild.
...A former PETA employee spoke of one particular incident that burned into her mind forever: A teary-eyed man showed up at PETA headquarters one day with his beloved pet rabbit. The man had grown old and sick and was no longer able to care properly for his friend. He supplied a cage, bed, toys, and even vet records for this pet. He was assured by PETA workers that they would take 'good care' of his rabbit and find him a home. The man left distraught but no doubt believing that his friend would be able to live out the rest of his life in a loving, compassionate home... PETA workers carried him to the 'death house' immediately and ended his life.
This was not an isolated incident: as I have documented, it is the way that PETA operated, and still does.
How does this happen?
The closest analogy I can think of is Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Not the Che from Albert Korda's iconic and ubiquitous photograph -- the guerilla with a beret gazing ominously towards the horizon from t-shirts -- but the young medical student in The Motorcycle Diaries: a sincere humanist, whose encounters with the dispossessed moved him to become an almost saintly advocate for the poor. I am convinced that Ernesto Guevara was, like the young Newkirk, a truly decent soul.
And then something happened.
The Che that was assassinated in 1967 is still lionized by people who have chosen to maintain a comfortable distance from the historical details, but the older Guevara is not admirable. This is not an ideological observation. Whether regarded from the left or the right, Che was a murderer.
He was among the 82 guerillas who invaded Cuba with Fidel Castro in 1956. Fulgencio Batista's soldiers decimated them, and the myth is that in the retreat from the slaughter, Che had to make a rapid decision between carrying a medical kit, or ammunition for his rifle. He chose bullets.
And then he began to execute people.
Thumbsucking Losers Known As College Students Unprepared For The Real World (Where There Are No Trigger Warnings, Etc.)
A U of Iowa professor put up a "public art piece" [photo at link] referred to by Vanessa Miller in the Iowa Gazette as a "Ku Klux Klan-likened sculpture."
Predictably, in today's pussified America, students who were offended "asked for and received exceptions from or assistance with class work due to the display's impact on their schedule or 'state of mind'":
"A very small number of students requested assistance with academic courses because the display impacted their ability to fully engage in classes at that time," said Jeneane Beck, senior director of UI News Media Relations....[Chemistry professor Christopher M.] Cheatum said one student missed a makeup exam at 6:30 p.m. Dec. 5 -- about eight hours after the statue in question was dismantled and more than an hour after meeting with administrators on the topic. That student emailed a professor just before midnight Dec. 5 to report he had missed classes and "was not in my right mind to be able to think about chemistry concepts tonight."
"This student, by his own admission, had 1.5 hours after the event(s) in question were over to gather himself and prepare for the exam," Cheatum wrote in his email to administrators. "If we were to allow an exception in this case, we would then set a precedent that being involved in some protest or political action is a legitimate basis for missing an exam, which we might then have to accommodate for other protest situations, to which we would not be so sympathetic."
Cheatum said the faculty was inclined to decline the student's request -- even though the test accounted for 15 percent of the course score and, thus, a significant part of the final grade. But they wanted administrative input before making a final call, Cheatum wrote.
The next day, Vice President for Student Life Tom Rocklin sent an email mentioning social media buzz around "extensions for students affected by current and recent events" and said Helena Dettmer, associate dean for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, had advised faculty to approve it. Rocklin also provided a contact in the Dean of Students Office for others "who need accommodations" to help them "sort through options and sometimes advocate on their behalf."
These kittens are likely to graduate college expecting to be coddled and swaddled in the work world. Good luck with that. I wouldn't hire you. Maybe somebody will.
This is also not the stuff entrepreneurialism is made of. I spent much of last week at a big psych conference, worked my ass off on Sunday to catch up on my column, and then woke up with a migraine on Monday. Did I take my teddy bear and go to bed? No, I shoveled down some Naproxen and got cracking (with a couple naps and more Naproxen in between).
via @Popehat
Twinkie
Linkie with delicious cream filling not found in nature.
Deelz!
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And thanks to all who shop through my links! Every purchase you make is much appreciated!
In Defense Of Drunk Sex
The state -- here and in the UK -- is starting to say sex may only be performed in a state of sobriety, and not just on campus. This sort of edict infantilizes women and turns men who aren't eunuchs into criminals -- until they prove otherwise. (Remember, we're supposed to have the reverse of that -- that "innocent till proven guilty" thingie.)
Brendan O'Neill writes at reason:
Alison Saunders, Britain's Director of Public Prosecutions, the boss lady of all the British state's legal actions against suspected lawbreakers, has issued new advice on rape. Sent to cops around Britain as part of a "toolkit" of tips for dealing with rape cases, it says society must move "beyond the old saying 'no means no'." Because apparently women are sometimes incapable of saying no when they would probably like to. When? When they're shit-faced, as Americans say; or pissed as a fart, as us Brits prefer."It is not a crime to drink," said Saunders (she might have added a "yet," because I'm sure some teetotaler in the corridors of British power is working on this), but it is a crime "to target someone who is no longer capable of consenting to sex through drink," she continued. And she wants the law to be better able to deal with what the press has called those "grey areas" (50 Shades of Grey areas?) in which sex happens when someone is "incapacitated through drink or drugs." Her advice to cops and lawyers is that in every case of allegedly dodgy, drunk, disputed sex, they should demand of the suspect: "How did [you] know the complainant was saying yes and doing so freely and knowingly?"
There are many terrifying things about this advice. The first is its subtle shifting of the burden of proof so that it falls to the defendant to prove that the claimant said "yes" rather than to the claimant to prove she said "no" and was ignored. As Sarah Vine of the Daily Mail says, this could lead to a situation where "men in rape cases [will] automatically be presumed guilty until they can prove they obtained consent." In essence, this would mean sex becoming default a crime until you, the drunk dude who slept with the drunk girl, can prove that your sex wasn't malevolent. Imagine raising such an idea in the year in which we celebrate the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, midwife of the presumption of innocence, which for centuries guarded citizens from the whims and prejudices of the mighty state and powerful prosecutors like Ms. Saunders.
But even worse is her thought-free mash-up of drunk sex and rape, as if they're the same. When Saunders talks about sex that happens while one or both parties is hammered, she's sticking her snout--the state's snout--into what for many people is a perfectly normal part of life: college parties, house parties, youthful get-togethers, at which the truly shocking thing would be to see sober people getting it on.
Here's how this plays out -- and what's wrong with it.
The University of Wyoming takes this authoritarian downer on drunk sex to its logical conclusion by warning students: "Sex that occurs while a partner is intoxicated or high is not consensual... it is sexual assault." If this stipulation were enforced retroactively, pretty much every person I went to university with could be arrested for rape. Everyone had a blind-drunk bang at some point, because it was fun.
I've had plenty of tipsy-ass sex and a bit of blind-drunk sex, and I enjoyed all of it. Very much. And the state's going to tell me I have to drink cherry pop and only cherry pop before? What's next, telling us permitted sex positions?
Oh, and I've regretted some of this unsober sex -- but just the times that it was bad. But I didn't call anyone a criminal -- I just called myself an idiot and told myself to not be so dim in the future.
This is called being an adult. If it doesn't work for some, the answer isn't to curb the rights and freedoms of all of us; just theirs, until they can safely leave the house without their aide without having harm come to them.
"Transparency!" Is Dumb When Patients Have No Idea What They're Looking At
Another genius idea from government!
Joel Zinberg writes at City Journal that Medicare and Medicaid will begin publishing annual reports of the amounts doctors were paid and the procedures they performed:
The new policy will accomplish little beyond confusing patients and embarrassing physicians.The problem is that patients cannot intelligently interpret the CMS data. If the records show, for example, that a doctor has received what seem like high payments for a particular procedure--and for performing that procedure an unusual number of times--is the doctor an expert, or a crook? Health researchers have long maintained that high-volume providers have better outcomes. Perhaps the doctor is especially proficient, and her expertise attracts large numbers of patients who need the procedure? The CMS records won't help patients assess the quality of the services provided or compare one doctor with another. A patient could just as easily believe that the highly paid doctor is over-utilizing the procedure, performing unnecessary and possibly harmful procedures to boost revenue.
The payment records could also mislead patients because they don't indicate whether a payment was made to a single provider or to multiple providers out of a single office, using one provider's Unique Physician Identification Number for billing purposes. A pathologist in Minnesota collected $11 million from Medicare in 2012. It wasn't fraud; he was chairman of the Mayo Clinic's Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, one of the busiest in the country, and the entire lab billed under his name and Medicare number.
...One is left with the suspicion that the primary purpose of the record release is to shame doctors whom policymakers believe routinely exploit the current fee-for-service payment system for personal gain. True, some physicians are guilty as charged; as in any profession, some bad apples exist. But most physicians take their professional duties seriously. They make a good faith effort to perform services for the best interests of their patients and not for personal gain. They don't deserve to be pilloried based on misleading information.
And a comment from "Nikki" at City Journal:
Medicare and Medicaid have always been so quick to blame the physician for fraud and abuse when they should be looking elsewhere.Take the hospital/independent laboratory setting for example. They are routinely submitting claims for reimbursement for the following: lack of medical necessity, unbundling, upcoding, duplicate billing, and billing for services that were never performed. Specimens that are grossly hemolyzed should not be billed, however, because they "did the work" they feel they should be paid for them. If the physician orders a re-draw, this test is being billed within 1-3 days of the original draw or it is being billed with the appendage of a modifier. Medicare and Medicaid reimburse the provider without blinking an eye.
Non-blood specimens are being billed on occasion with a venipuncture charge -- also paid by Medicare and Medicaid. Specimens that are drawn in the physicians office and sent to the laboratory for processing are being billed with a draw fee. If the laboratory bills first, they get paid and the physician's charge is denied. I agree that these reports are going to be misleading and not at all accurate.
Furry
Hairy links.
Arquette Won An Oscar But Lost In The Identity Politics Race
Shikha Dalmia explains at The Week that feminism's oppression obsession undermines women. First, her def of "identity politics":
Identity politics instructs people to define their politics not by reference to general moral principles of justice and rights, but some shared experience of oppression.
Dalmia writes about Arquette's Oscars speech:
First, during her acceptance speech, she suggested that women deserve wage equality with men because they give "birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation." But where does this ova theory of value leave non-procreating women who fail to secure Uncle Sam's future revenue stream?Then, backstage, she went into full Joan-of-Arc mode, demanding that "gay people, and the people of color" join her fight to end wage discrimination against women "once and for all." This is a very odd statement coming from a lady so rich that she actually chooses to forego wages. One can debate whether Hollywood's pay scale discriminates against female actors, but that's pretty irrelevant when it comes to Arquette. She has joked that she got paid less for Boyhood, a brilliant indie movie 12 years in the making that won her the Oscar, than she paid her dog walker. Why did she do it? Because it was a satisfying role that she could amply subsidize with lucrative gigs on TV shows such as CSI and Medium. In other words, she willingly traded monetary income for psychic income, a "luxury" -- her word not mine -- that the vast majority of men in the world -- white, Asian, black, Latino, native American -- can't afford, forget about women. If anything, instead of complaining, she should be marveling at a system that gives her such options.
But of course, feminists are not criticizing her for under-appreciating what she's got, because that would be tantamount to endorsing patriarchy. They are instead accusing her of "structural erasure," "intersectionality failure," and other feminist sins that are all fancy ways of saying she spoke out of turn.
In the feminist critical theory dogma, there is a hierarchy of oppression that Arquette apparently failed to respect when she asked "gay people and people of color" to support her fight for gender wage equality, given that the oppression they face is greater than hers. Also as per the dogma, she failed to appreciate that curing wage discrimination against (white) women like her would do little to cure it against, say, Latinas or black women, since it is compounded in their case by their racial membership. So suggesting that they drop their struggles and join hers bespeaks a tinny self-absorption, they accused.
Feminists may be right about that. But what they fail to understand is that if Arquette has fallen prey to what might be called the narcissism of oppression, it's their fault -- or at least the fault of the identity politics that feminism has encouraged.
Today, we're all "oppressed" (see her note about white men and affirmative action) but it's stylish and feminism-approved to be a member of some groups (generally those who can get grants for tuition not available to white men and often white women in the same income bracket).
"Even Misogynistic Losers Have Constitutional Rights"
Lawyer -- and law prof! -- Nancy Yeong deals with some street harassment and comes to the conclusion (which I hope will be embarrassing to her in hindsight) that the First Amendment needs a little pulling back. As Scott Greenfield puts it at Simple Justice, "Nancy takes a leap." Nancy's words, quoted by Scott:
Nancy: "We prioritize the speech of some misogynist loser yelling at a woman on her way to the office."
Nancy continues:
If we actually read the First Amendment through the lens of the Fourteenth Amendment in any kind of meaningful way (which, actually, we should, because of pretty basic canons of interpretation like "last in time" and tricky math concepts like 14 > 1) we'd recognize that inequality-reinforcing speech deserves regulation and punishment.
Scott writes:
Even misogynistic losers have constitutional rights, though whatever that woman might want to say once she gets to her office is pretty much her own choice, unless the misogynistic loser happens to be the dean of her law school. I doubt that's the case or Nancy would have mentioned that. So it seems fair to conclude that the woman was free to call the misogynistic loser anything she wanted once she got back to her office. Even really bad names. Did someone deny Nancy her right to do so?Or, perhaps more accurately, what she might say if she wasn't distracted and exhausted from the daily grind of street harassment. There are speech interests on both sides of the street harassment debate, but First Amendment absolutists are hellbent on only seeing one of them.
It's especially disgusting to have a law prof think some indignity she's suffered is reason to shut down free speech. One of the truly great things about this country is how we have the right to offend through speech -- which is also the right to try to make things better.
Reigny
Royally wet links.
