Indiana set to lose billions as boycott of state ensues.

Hissy fit from Crid in 3... 2... 1...

Read the whole thing at Minding the Campus, and then do this: Go to Google News and search for “teacher + arrest + sex.” How many times a week are public school teachers in America charged with illegally having sex with their underage students? My guess is that it happens more commonly than college students getting raped. So why aren’t feminists marching into your local Board of Education meeting and demanding that something be done about the “rape epidemic” in public schools?

Source

I agree with Amy. It's about criminalizing men. And we all really know that when an adult female teacher has sex with an underage male student, it's still the male's fault.

Pundits talking about education these days are fond of pointing out how efficient and effective Finland's schools are. However, a new report suggests that while Finnish girls read very well, Finnish boys don't read much better than anyone else.

This was mentioned in today's Instapundit, but might bear repeating here:

- There are about 11,000 Starbucks outlets in the United States.

- There are also about 14,000 McDonald's stores in this country.

However, there are about 35,000 museums in this U.S., outnumbering Starbucks and McDonald's, combined, by a wide margin.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Hmm. Vehicle attack on a gate at Fort Meade, where the NSA headquarters is. Two men dressed as women? Details are scarce right now.

> Hissy fit

Patrick, you're NINE. And you're terrified.

There's only one force in the human heart that could leave someone's mind as closed, as breathless and insensate to the surrounding environment as yours: Fear. That others might have challenging ideas is something you cannot handle, therefore you choose not to consider their words at all. Having no idea what positions people actually take, you assign roles in your daydream menagerie, sustaining an illusion of participation. And "hissy" is a role you have conveniently at hand, always.

You have no fucking clue how anyone else feels about Indiana, about religious freedom, about gays or anything else. You're not old enough to worry about such things.

You're certainly not old enough to persuade.

Crid, you're so predictable!

Indiana did not just pass an anti-gay law.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/indiana-didnt-actually-pass-an-anti-gay-bill-2015-03-30?link=sfmw_fb

But after talking to some legal experts who had actually read the law in question, I found out Indiana had done no such thing.

AND

The law, he said, was actually no different from the federal religious-freedom law that has been on the statute books since 1993. All the reports and commentary he’d heard had been wrong.

Another law professor, Daniel Conkle at Indiana University, said the new law is also the same as those currently in place in 30 other states. Nineteen state legislatures have passed such laws, and in another 11 states the courts have made rulings in a similar vein, he said.

What the legal experts told me: In a nutshell, the new law does not give anyone carte blanche to refuse to serve homosexuals, or any other group, based on religion (or any other grounds).

Instead, the law simply says the state can’t force you to do something that’s against your religion unless it has a very good reason to do so — the “compelling interest” rule. If it tries to do so, you can go to court and plead legal objection under the religious-freedom law. The court will have to decide if there is a compelling reason to override your religious freedom, or not. Combating discrimination, incidentally, might well be such a reason.

AND

None of this, I should add, means that the new Indiana law will not be used to justify discrimination against gays in some contexts. No one can prove a negative, and we will have to wait for it to be tried in court.

Mark Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School, said the law might be used to justify discrimination against gays — if the courts agree that that was the intent of the legislators who passed it, and if the courts cannot find a compelling public interest against such discrimination.

In other states, professors said, the laws had not so far been used to justify such discrimination, although that doesn’t mean the same will be true in Indiana. A florist in Washington state tried to plead religious objection against providing flowers at a gay wedding, but the courts ruled against the business owner.

Professor Conkle at Indiana University notes that, ironically, the law won’t change much in many parts of Indiana anyway. Indiana has no statewide laws banning discrimination against gays in the first place (although some counties have local ordinances). In many parts of the state, a business owner who didn’t want to serve gays wouldn’t have to plead exemption from the law on the grounds of religion. There’s no law to be exempt from. Conkle, who adds that he is a supporter of marriage equality, is a professor of law and of comparative religion.

There are some interesting anecdotes in the article about how various religious groups have sued under these laws to protect their right to practice their faith - Muslim prisoners to grow beards, Native Americans to have long hair, etc.

Hmm. Vehicle attack on a gate at Fort Meade, where the NSA headquarters is. Two men dressed as women? Details are scarce right now. ~ Posted by: Cousin Dave at March 30, 2015 9:19 AM

Two men dressed as women?

Anyone seen Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari lately?

[Wow, that's a dated reference.]

Conan: Anyone seen Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari lately?

♪♫ I don't care what you say any more; this is myyyyy life! ♫♪

At least one report said that cocaine was found in the men's car. So now we have two dudes dressed as women, with coke in the car, trying to ram the gate at Fort Meade. One is killed in the ensuing shoot-out. Per WTOP News, "An FBI spokeswoman said the incident was not believed to be linked to terrorism." No kidding. A serious terrorist would have been better prepared.

Of course, that leaves us wondering what was actually going on.

Coney-- Thanks for the link, sharing it with others.

More on "affirmative consent" now live in New York state and California:

For example, if a student throws her arms around her boyfriend and kisses him without his permission, even if she has done this dozens of times before, she has violated affirmative consent policies. She can, at some later date, be hauled before a campus judiciary on charges of sexual assault.

Remember: yes means yes. To bad the law isn't binding on the legislature that passed it.

I wholeheartedly disagree:

As long as you learn from your mistakes, no one can blame you for trying to be a good person. Don’t worry. We all get to come back.

One wants to admire such confessionals, but they ask too much.

Basically, I want every little peckerhead out there to be "worrying" in the highest adult style.

I agree with Amy. It's about criminalizing men.

Yes, yes.

But sometimes you simply need to bang the pots. People with a functioning moral compass will wake up and smell the coffee.

Eventually the non-man-hating portion of women will say "Hey, this isn't right. And giving these predators much more lenient sentences doesn't make sense, either."

The man-hating portion? well, there's no helping them until we send them all to the moon. If you can put one feminist on the moon, you can send them all.

Changing the subject, yet again, based on something I saw on my Facebook.

One of the last of the Doolittle Raiders, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hite died yesterday in Nashville. He was 95. He was one of eight airmen captured after the raid, and one of only four prisoners who made it home when the war ended.

Think for a minute about the timing of the raid Colonel Hite flew in. The Doolittle Raid took place on 18 April 1942. We had been at war with Japan for less than five months, and things were going badly. The Philippines would fall in less than three weeks, but the Battle of the Coral Sea would take place at the same time, upsetting Japanese plans in New Guinea. The Imperial Navy would lose four aircraft carriers at Midway a month after that.

A lot can happen in a couple of months. Only two of the original 80 Raiders are still living now.

Never even saw the movie, but I was working in entertainment at the time, so the clips were everywhere. The footstep at :33 still chills my ass.

♪♫ I don't care what you say any more....♫♪

~ Posted by: Patrick at March 30, 2015 11:28 AM

I had forgotten that song was used as the theme song.

Never actually saw the show, just a few clips. Looked kinda stupid.

I first heard about it as the answer to a trivia question about Tom Hanks.

"Good intentions have little to do with virtue: You will not be forgiven for being timid, incurious, conciliatory, or consensus-minded. COURAGE is the essential component of decency."

Predict that, Patrick?

Have anything as profound to add?

Nope.

Never even saw the movie, but I was working in entertainment at the time, so the clips were everywhere. The footstep at :33 still chills my ass. ~ Posted by: Crid [CridComment at Gmail] at March 30, 2015 2:43 PM

Read Thirty Seconds over Tokyo and The Flying Tigers in the fifth grade. Read Day of Infamy shortly afterward. Those books were part of a multi-year off-and-on study of World War II that lasted into my college years.

Way too many historical errors in that movie for my enjoyment. I can suspend my disbelief, but that movie required me to beat it senseless.

The movie shows fighter pilots being used as bomber pilots - for a mission that required advanced bomber pilot skills. Not gonna happen.

Flying the two planes calls for different skill sets and knowledge.

When the Flying Tigers tried to train bomber and transport pilots to be fighter pilots, the multi-engine pilots wrecked several planes trying to land them 10 feet off the ground.

At least bomber and transport pilots started their flight training in single engine trainers, so they had some experience in smaller planes. Fighter pilots would likely never have never have been at the controls of the larger aircraft, so they'd have had to attend the flight school all over again.

Why use converted fighter pilots when you've got a large supply of experienced B-25 pilots chomping at the bit to exact revenge?

Never even saw the movie ...

You missed little. I watched about the first half of it on DVD, but the stupid was so strong I didn't finish it.

If you want to see the story told correctly, try and find a copy of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) with Van Johnson and Spencer Tracy. It tracks very closely with the book of the same name, which was written by one of the pilots. Here's a clip, if you're interested. The gunner, by the way, is still alive, one of the remaining two.

Also what Conan said, since we were typing at the same time, apparently.

> Have anything as profound

Shit, if I'd known people were reading, I'd have thought about it some more. (The worst bastards need courage, too.)

> I can suspend my disbelief, but
> that movie required me to beat
> it senseless.

Why, I never bought a ticket. Ebert once said of his comet movie: This film is a trailer for itself. I saw ten minutes of it once, and Ebert wasn't just being smartass... It was true! Film, generally, can't do history. That was a decade when we'd been disappointed by Malcolm X and a few other things, real boatwrecks of history... The chance that Michael Bay would care about verisimilitude for WWII was just too small.

We 'did' that war in 5th grade, too... Something like seven months. Film and books and lectures and we made maps and colored-paper timelines and everything but memorizing the street addresses of the German camps. When you're a kid, it can be a pain in the ass, even if it was just 15 years before you were born... I didn't realize the school was setting me up so well to understand America's place in the world in my adulthood. Presumably, the school knew exactly what it were doing. But it wasn't a fashion: There was no special fascination with that war in 1968-1969. There were other military matters in the news, thing that were starting to make America's capacity for violence seem less noble.

Way too many historical errors in that movie for my enjoyment. I can suspend my disbelief, but that movie required me to beat it senseless.

I've found that having been in the military I can no longer watch military movies.

Its like they hired a bad conduct E2 as thier military "adviser"

It's funny; nearly all of what I know of WWII stems from reading that I've done on my own as an adult. We were taught very little about it in school. Part of this doubtless stemmed from the Southern obsession of harping endlessly over the Civil War to the exclusion of all else. But I also think that part of it was that, in the 1960s, WWII was still too new. People weren't thinking of it as "history"; it was still something that had just happened recently. Looking back now, I see how it was still fresh on everyone's minds; watching Combat and Victory At Sea back when Nick at Nite was re-running them, in the early '90s, was enlightening in that respect.

We were taught very little about it in school. Part of this doubtless stemmed from the Southern obsession of harping endlessly over the Civil War to the exclusion of all else.

Less the actual Civil War than the lead up to it and the Reconstruction afterward.

Not only a Southern obsession plays a part, but a Northern obsession to teach how racist Southerners were and imply still are).

Part of it, too, stems from poor time management.

By the end of the semester, the trailing edge of history gets shoved into a quick "we won" description where the leading edge of history got a complete breakdown.

16 weeks total = 2 weeks on colonial days (1 week for the Stamp Act alone), 1 week on Revolution, 3 weeks on 1800-1860, 2 weeks on Civil War, 3 weeks on Reconstruction, 1 week on Indian Wars, 2 weeks on Industrial Revolution, 1 week on World War I - that leaves 1 week to cover 1918-present.

Jazz Age, Great Depression, World War II, Berlin Airlift, Kitchen Debates, Bay of Pigs, Watergate, Vietnam, Cold War, Civil Rights, Iran Hostages, etc. - all get shafted in study time, leaving a population that actually knows very little about them and, as a result, will believe anything they're told by someone who pretends to know about them.

Effectively parodied in this Simpsons clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf557RtIuro