Cat Hatred Isn't Something That Suddenly Occurs To You
Here, pussy, pussy, pussy...
From "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," which I hope you'll buy and read, if you haven't already. (Orders of the book -- new only, not used! --help support my writing and keep me from dining out of Dumpsters.)
(Also at B&N.)
The Palestinians Nobody Cares About
The people who profess to care deeply about the plight of Palestinians care only about certain Palestinians -- those within Israel's borders. Khaled Abu Toameh writes at Gatestone Institute:
Western journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict regularly focus on the "plight" of Palestinians who are affected by Israeli security policies, while ignoring what is happening to Palestinians in neighboring Arab countries.These journalists, for example, often turn a blind eye to the daily killings of Palestinians in Syria and the fact that Palestinians living in Lebanon and other Arab countries are subjected to Apartheid and discriminatory laws.
A Palestinian who is shot dead after stabbing an Israeli soldier in Hebron receives more coverage in the international media than a Palestinian woman who dies of starvation in Syria.
The story and photos of Mahmoud Abu Jheisha, who was fatally shot after stabbing a soldier in Hebron, attracted the attention of many Western media outlets, whose journalists and photographers arrived in the city to cover the story.
But on the same day that Abu Jheisha was brought to burial, a Palestinian woman living in Syria died due to lack of food and medicine. The woman was identified as Amneh Hussein Omari of the Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus, which has been under siege by the Syrian army for the past 670 days. Her death raises the number of Palestinian refugees who have died as a result of lack of medicine and food in the camp to 176.
The case of Omari was not covered by any of the Western journalists who are based in the region. As far as they are concerned, her story is not important because she died in an Arab country.
Had Omari died in a village or refugee camp in the West Bank or Gaza Strip, her story would have made it to the front pages of most of the major newspapers in the West. That is because they would then be able to link her death to Israeli measures in the West Bank or the blockade on the Gaza Strip. The same journalists who report about the harsh economic conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip do not seem to care about the Palestinians who are being starved and tortured to death in Arab countries.
Nor are the journalists reporting to their readers and viewers the fact that more than 2800 Palestinians have been killed in Syria since the beginning of the civil war there four years ago. A report published this week by a Palestinian advocacy group also revealed that more than 27,000 Palestinians have fled Syria to different European countries in the past four years. The report also noted that Yarmouk camp has been without electricity for more than 730 days and without water for 229 days.
It Isn't "Hate" If A Christian Baker Doesn't Want To Make The Cake For Your Gay Wedding
I hate going to weddings, but I love the idea of weddings and those cute pictures of happy couples, gay and straight.
But I also love our country's rights and freedoms, including the freedom we should have to refuse to put out creative work for a cause we do not believe in.
Damon Linker, like me, feels it's abusive and awful to try to force -- or fine and punish -- Christians and others who refuse based on their religious (or any other) strongly-held beliefs to bake cakes or take photos or do other creative work. He writes at The Week about a bakery owned by Christians that refused to bake a cake for a lesbian wedding and then was fined:
The lesbian couple complained to the authorities, a judge determined last January that the bakery violated Oregon's anti-discrimination laws, and this past Friday the state's Bureau of Labor and Industries proposed an award of damages to the couple of $135,000 (for "emotional suffering stemming directly from unlawful discrimination") -- this despite the fact that the bakery has since gone out of business and its owners (who have five children) are already struggling to pay the bills.Immediately after the proposed award was announced, supporters of the bakery owners started a crowdfunding campaign through GoFundMe to cover the family's costs. The campaign raised more than $109,000 in its first eight hours -- but then it was halted and shut down when foes of the bakery complained to the website, claiming that the fundraising effort violated its terms of service, which prohibit raising money "in defense of formal charges of heinous crimes, including violent, hateful, or sexual acts."
The "heinous crime" in this case obviously had nothing to do with violence or sex. So we're left with "hateful." The owners of the bakery didn't yell and scream insults at the lesbian couple. They didn't beat them or threaten them with violence. They merely chose not to sell them a cake for a same-sex wedding ceremony because their religious faith tells them that two women cannot marry. And that, apparently, is an example of hate.
But is it?
Surely we can all agree that an action or statement can only be said to exhibit hate when it expresses extreme dislike for a person or group combined with an implied or explicit threat. Judged by that standard, it's hard to see how the bakery owners displayed hate. What they displayed was a difference in fundamental values.
But how about the lesbian couple? They went to considerable effort to make trouble for the bakery -- and the effort succeeded. It was driven out of business. Could that not be described as an expression of hate?
Look, I find religion and the evidence-free belief in god ridiculous but I likewise will support your denying somebody a cake because you believe in astrology, unicorns, or think the letter P is the devil.
This isn't hate. It's support for religious freedom and freedom of expression -- and freedom from being forced to express yourself in ways that contradict your beliefs.
As Linker writes:
What is clear is that significant numbers of gays and lesbians are intent on acting as if both were perfectly obvious, and on using the organizing power of social media to drive the point home against anyone who violates the supposedly supreme commandment against "hating" homosexuals in this very broad sense, and even against anyone who fails to express an adequate level of hatred toward these "haters."It would be better, I think, to recognize that hatred as such isn't the problem. The problem is that those who support the legitimacy of same-sex marriage (myself included) and those who reject its legitimacy begin from very different, perhaps fundamentally incompatible moral and metaphysical assumptions. And that in many -- maybe most -- cases, "hate" has nothing at all to do with it.
Linkertronic
Flying link machines.
A Hug Now Requires "Affirmative Consent" At UVA -- Or You're Guilty Of Sexual Assault
If you don't explicitly ask for and get permission for your clothed body to touch another person's clothed body in a hug, you could now be accused of "sexual assault" through "sexual contact" at UVA.
It's part of UVA's broad new "sexual assault" policy, explains Hans Bader at Liberty Unyielding:
Because U.Va. lumps together touching, "however slight," and intercourse when it comes to sexual assault, requiring "affirmative" consent for both. ("Affirmative consent" is a misleading term, and does not include many forms of consent that occur in the real world, and are recognized by the courts, as I explain at this link. The new policy further warns that "Relying solely on non-verbal communication before or during sexual activity can lead to misunderstanding and may result in a violation of this Policy."
Here is the essential bit from the new UVA "sexual assault" policy:
A. SEXUAL ASSAULT Sexual Assault consists of (1) Sexual Contact and/or (2) Sexual Intercourse that occurs without (3) Affirmative Consent.(1) Sexual Contact is:
Any intentional sexual touching
However slight
With any object or body part (as described below)
Performed by a person upon another personSexual Contact includes (a) intentional touching of the breasts, buttocks, groin or genitals, whether clothed or unclothed, or intentionally touching another with any of these body parts; and (b) making another touch you or themselves with or on any of these body parts.
(2) Sexual Intercourse is:
Any penetration
However slight
With any object or body part (as described below)
Performed by a person upon another personSexual Intercourse includes (a) vaginal penetration by a penis, object, tongue, or finger; (b) anal penetration by a penis, object, tongue, or finger; and (c) any contact, no matter how slight, between the mouth of one person and the genitalia of another person.
(3) Affirmative Consent is:
Informed (knowing)
Voluntary (freely given)
Active (not passive), meaning that, through the demonstration of clear
words or actions, a person has indicated permission to engage in mutually agreed-upon sexual activity.
This is an awful invasion of students' lives and sex lives. Bader gives an example in another piece of how absurd policies like this play out in real life, within a marriage:
The University of California, on February 25, adopted a policy requiring affirmative consent not just to sex, but to every form of "physical sexual activity" engaged in.I and my wife have been happily married for more than a decade, and like 99.9% of married couples, we do not engage in verbal discussion before engaging in each and every form of sexual activity. Indeed, in the first year of our daughter's life, when she was a very light sleeper (she would wake up if you merely walked into her bedroom and stepped on a creaky part of the bedroom floor), it would have been unthinkable for us to engage in any kind of "out loud" discussion in our bedroom, which is right next to hers (the walls in our house are very thin, and you can hear sounds from one room in the next room). We certainly did not verbally discuss then whether to have sex. Having sex quietly when you are a parent is a sign that you are considerate of sleeping family members, and have a healthy marriage, not of sexual abuse.
Also, most sexual contact you have with a person you're dating or in a relationship with, you don't want to ask for. "May I kiss you now?" "May I use my penis to penetrate your vagina now?" I mean, if you have to ask that way, never the fuck mind, because I'm going to read a book.
Justice Roberts May Have Found A Way To Vote For Gay Marriage Rights
Adam Liptak writes at The New York Times:
WASHINGTON -- In a telling moment at Tuesday's Supreme Court arguments over same-sex marriage, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. suggested that he may have found a way to cast a vote in favor of the gay and lesbian couples in the case."I'm not sure it's necessary to get into sexual orientation to resolve this case," he said. "I mean, if Sue loves Joe and Tom loves Joe, Sue can marry him and Tom can't. And the difference is based upon their different sex. Why isn't that a straightforward question of sexual discrimination?"
That theory had gotten only slight attention in scores of lawsuits challenging bans on same-sex marriage, and it is unlikely to serve as the central rationale if a majority of the court votes to strike down such bans, an opinion likely to be written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
But it could allow Chief Justice Roberts to be part of a 6-to-3 decision, maintaining some control over the court he leads and avoiding accusations from gay rights groups that he was on the wrong side of history.
Discrimination on these terms has always been the way I've looked at it. You should be allowed to marry the one consenting adult of your choice. Because the sex of that person makes some religious believer itchy, well, we don't hand out or deny rights based on discomfort but on what's fair.
American College Students Are Now More Horrified By Free Speech Than The Lack Of It
Quin Hillyer writes at NRO about the conniption fits by students at both Oberlin and Georgetown U because campus groups were hosting speeches by Christina Hoff Sommers, whom Hillyer correctly describes as "a strong critic of the radicalization of modern feminism."
At Georgetown, most disturbingly, the student newspaper (!!) led the charge against free speech:
Anyway, the first embarrassment came in the form of an editorial by the newspaper. Read it for yourself here. It's one of the worst pieces of drivel I've ever seen from a supposedly mainstream newspaper at an elite university. Called "No More Distractions," the paper's official position is that because Sommers at various times has questioned the accuracy of certain alleged statistics on the frequency of rape, she therefore should not have been invited to speak on campus. (Never mind that rape wasn't even the topic of her Georgetown speech.) The self-contradictions in the editorial were legion. Example one: "By giving Sommers a platform, GU [college Republicans have] knowingly endorsed a harmful conversation on the serious topic of sexual assault."If it's a serious topic, and it's a university (supposedly dedicated to the free flow of ideas), how, pray tell, can a "conversation" be harmful?
But, worse, the editors write that "giving voice" to someone who argues that the statistics are inflated (by the way, as horrific a crime as rape is, the reality is that Sommers is right about its incidence) will only "trigger obstructive dialogue." What sort of Orwellian double-speak is this? How can "dialogue" be "obstructive"? Perhaps a diatribe, in certain circumstances, might be seen as somehow obstructive, but a dialogue by its very nature serves to illuminate, not obstruct. The editors then proceed to instruct readers as to what sort of "conversation" we should be having: one that focuses on only one aspect of rape, and from only one perspective. Some conversation.
Lunky
Clunkylinks.
Deelz!!
Kindle Daily Deal -- Money, Money, Money
And a customer review at Amazon: "This is a fast-paced, intriguing police procedural, full of crisp, spare writing, unrivaled dialogue, vivid scenes, and brilliant characterizations."
Today's groovy digital deal: Silhouette Cameo Electronic Cutting Machine Starter Bundle
And what the hell is this thing, you ask?
The Silhouette Cameo electronic cutting machine can cut a wide variety of materials including paper, vinyl, cardstock, fabric, heat transfer material, and so much more. With the included Silhouette Studio software, you're able to create and cut your own designs and use the fonts already installed on your computer. There are also tens of thousands of great designs available through the ever-growing Silhouette Online Store.
You can cut out uniform shapes out of vinyl, for example, and stick them on the wall for cool "wallpaper." I'd do that if I had time!
To buy stuff you don't see in my links and give me a wee kickback (that costs you nothing), Search Amy's Amazon here.
And thanks to all who shop through my links! Every purchase you make is much appreciated!
Fictional Characters Say Supposedly Deeply Offensive Things About Another Fictional Character...
And naturally, feminists and obsessive comic book fans lose their cookies over it. Matt Walsh writes at The Blaze:
Two actors, Jeremy Renner and Chris Evans, were forced to issue formal apologies for making a disparaging joke about a fictional comic book hero. For anyone not familiar with the Marvel comic book universe -- perhaps because you don't keep up on superhero news, or because you're a grown up -- Renner and Evans both play characters in the upcoming "Avengers: Age of Ultron" movie. Scarlett Johansson also stars in the film.Apparently, there is speculation among people who speculate about fictional superhero romances that both Renner's and Evans' characters will be romantically involved with Johansson's character, Black Widow, in the new movie. When asked about this at a recent press junket, Renner joked that Black Widow is a "slut." Evans laughed and muttered "whore" under his breath. Both men were obviously having a little fun by pretending they're jealous of the other person's fictional character for having a fling with the fictional character their fictional characters are also involved with.
I have now spent a paragraph explaining a superhero love triangle, which makes me weep inside.
Anyway, feminists and emotionally invested comic book fans reacted swiftly, calling the men "idiot frat boys," and proposing that an off the cuff joke about a female superhero reveals how "deeply ingrained sexist attitudes are in our culture." (Side note: isn't it sexist to call two successful grown men "idiot frat boys"?)
This is about something other than outrage. As I keep saying, it's about supposed outrage as a way to have unearned power over other people.
Thug-imore
In the wake of marches to honor Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old man who died in police custody, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake told the rioters and looters to have at it.
Here, from CBS Baltimore, is her full comment:
"I made it very clear that I work with the police and instructed them to do everything that they could to make sure that the protesters were able to exercise their right to free speech," Rawlings-Blake said. "It's a very delicate balancing act. Because while we try to make sure that they were protected from the cars and other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well. And we worked very hard to keep that balance and to put ourselves in the best position to de-escalate."
She forgot to give them her home address.
This lady -- via @Popehat -- should be mayor. (Click to play the video.)
And somebody please tell me what this has to do with Freddie Grey?
And here's a rioter cutting a hole in the hose of firefighters trying to put out the fire at CVS. How do you help your community by making it impossible for businesses like drugstores to remain there?
The mayor, slapped around in the media for her remark about giving the thugs "space" to "destroy," started singing a more mournful tune (CBS Baltimore):
What we see tonight that is going on in our city is very disturbing. It is very clear there is a difference between what we saw over the past week with the peaceful protests, those who wish to seek justice, those who wish to be heard, and want answers and the difference between those protests and the thugs who only want to incite violence and destroy our city....I'm a life-long resident of Baltimore and too many people have spent generations building up this city for it to be destroyed by thugs who in a very senseless way are trying to tear down what so many have fought for. Tearing down businesses. Tearing down and destroying property, things that we know will impact our community for years. We are deploying every resource possible to gain control of the situation and to ensure peace moving forward.
Amazingly, even gang members did better than the Mayor (who, again, changed her tune from "space" to "destroy" after a media-wide spanking). From a Justin Fenton and Erica L. Green Baltimore Sun story:
A group of men who said they were members of the Crips -- they wore blue bandannas and blue shirts -- stood on the periphery and denounced the looting."This is our hood, and we can't control it right now," one of the men said.
Eat The Poor
At Watchdog.org, Steven Greenhut asks from Sacramento whether Earth Day policies -- specifically those in California -- destroy opportunities for the poor:
As the current governor sends California into a more aggressive anti-global warming posture -- he called for 50 percent reductions in petroleum use and a massive increase in the amount of electricity generated from renewable sources -- it would be nice to hear from the old idea-churning Brown. I'd love to hear his thoughts on what this means for California's poor and middle-class families, given the degree to which such policies drive up the cost of living and, arguably, drive out job-creating businesses.There's little debate on AB 32 and how its resulting cap-and-trade system increased electricity rates and what it cost in manufacturing jobs. It will soon add even more to gasoline prices. Less discussed: The degree to which the law (and related policies) has driven up the price of housing in a state that already had some of the least-affordable markets in the nation.
...Brown's high-speed rail system, which is his most-coveted program (and one that will spend more than $69 billion even as the state struggles with insufficient water infrastructure), is a core part of this strategy. The goal is to limit suburban "sprawl," and push most new development into high-density urban areas served by mass transit rather than automobiles. Brown once pointed to Marin County, the wealthy suburb north of San Francisco, as the state's land-use model. But median home prices there are around $900,000, in part because of the county's tough building restrictions.
California's official poverty rate tracks close to the national average, but when cost-of-living factors are included, it soars to the highest in the nation.
via @reasonpolicy
Llllinks
Welsh links, or something like that.
Dick Of The Day
Guy friends me on Facebook yesterday so he can post an ad for himself and his book on my wall this morning. Deleted, banned. And as I note in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck":
And no, in case you're wondering, I don't post exciting personal details on Facebook (though perhaps the world is waiting for a photo of my lunch). I post links to stuff on my blog. But it's my wall, my choice, and yes, I'm aware than I can prohibit all people from posting to my wall without my permission. Some people post politely, about stuff relevant to me, and I'm not going to stop them because a few people are assboils.
Madison, Wisconsin Government: Let's Make Parents Irrelevant!
Molly Beck writes at the Wisconsin State Journal:
Four Madison schools could soon leave their doors open far beyond the school day to bring services like doctor checkups, extra help with homework, parenting help and meals to students and their families.A $300,000 grant paid over the next three years from the Madison Community Foundation will begin the process of developing "full-service" community schools in the Madison School District.
"Our goal is to raise student achievement for all and narrow and close achievement gaps but we cannot do it on our own," superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said Thursday. "By better coordinating our efforts (and) creating a quilt of strong neighborhood centers with strong, full-service community schools, we'll be able to make sure that the families that need coordinated services can actually get them."
Government overcreep always sounds like that. Gregg's been researching elements of a totalitarian state and I've looked at some of what he's doing, and the similarity is striking.
Public schools right now are doing a very poor job of educating students. Maybe they should be sticking to that?
And then there's this:
Traditional school staffing responsibilities could change, too, according to the Oakland model.
Translation: A hiring system for all those "social justice" workers/community organizers with student loans to pay.
As for feeding poor students, what's happened to school lunches is that Michelle Obama, lacking any sort of science background, has removed all the healthy fat and nutrients from school lunches (like from whole milk, which dietary researcher Jeff Volek deems essential. Without fat, milk is white water we have no business feeding children in a country that is not exactly Calcutta II). Also, I wouldn't eat this (photo from a child's school-provided lunch) unless I were jailed for three days without food, and maybe not even then.
Also, it would be helpful if someone would point to the elephant in the room, the fact that poor women have children out of wedlock, dooming them to a life of poverty. Could somebody maybe say, "Yoohoo, don't do that?"
What we need is free birth control of the highly preventative kind -- IUDs, injections, etc. -- provided to young women in risk groups, so they can get on in the world and get some earning power and -- radical idea...tell them it's awful to have a child without a family situation to support it -- before they start having babies.
There's No Constitution In This Missouri Cop's Version Of America
Carlos Miller explains at Photography Is Not A Crime:
A man [Chris Hogan} taking a stroll through his neighborhood was tackled and arrested by a Missouri police officer when he refused to identify himself, even though the cop did not have a reasonable suspicion that he was involved in a crime.
Hogan's statement:
I left for a walk at 12:17am on Sept. 4, 2014 and didn't come home. I headed out on my own as I often do.My path crossed Officer Mathew Tyler Badge #272 of the Breckenridge Hills, Mo Police Department 20 minutes later.
I was never told that I was suspected of any crime or given any reason as to why I was being detained.
I asked many times if I was free to go and the end result was Officer Tyler #272 and Officer Allemann Badge #247 tackling me to the ground.
I was then taken to jail and questioned. I never answered any questions and never gave them my ID through the entire 10 1/2hours I was held. I was searched and brought to the police station and questioned without being read my Miranda rights.
I told them I was invoking my 5th amendment right too not answer any questions with legal representation and was still questioned. They ultimately charged me with "Police Interference."
It costs me a $500 bond to get out the next morning at 11am. I contacted my lawyer immediately and showed them the video. We requested a jury trial from Breckenridge Hills, Mo for the Police Interference charge and they dropped my charges.
My attorneys and I met with the Chief of Breckenridge Hills, Mo on Feb. 5, 2015 in person and filed an Internal Affairs Complaint. We have been waiting for Breckenridge Hills to complete their internal investigation.
Kudos to Chris Hogan for not giving in to abusive policing.
There is a "stop and identify" law in Missouri -- but only in Kansas City. Even so,from flexyourrights.com:
As of 2013, 24 states had stop-and-identify laws. Regardless of your state's law, keep in mind that police can never compel you to identify yourself without reasonable suspicion to believe you're involved in illegal activity.But how can you tell if an officer asking you to identify yourself has reasonable suspicion? Remember, police need reasonable suspicion to detain you. So one way to tell if they have reasonable suspicion is to determine if you're free to go. You can do this by saying "Excuse me officer. Are you detaining me, or am I free to go?" If the officer says you're free to go, leave immediately and don't answer any more questions.
My own little recent episode with the cops is here, with cops coming on like the SWAT team seeking an escaped felon -- after I was the victim of a careless driver hitting my parked card (which I was not in at the time -- a minor property damage crime cops don't usually even show up for).
Being a cop shouldn't amount to being a thug with a badge -- but it too often does.
What Explains The Apparent Increase In Bad Manners
Dr. Gad Saad, who studies the evolutionary roots of consumer behavior, has a post up at Psychology Today, "What Explains the Apparent Increase in Bad Manners? Anonymity can bring out ugly aspects of human nature," about one of the central points in my book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck."
Take for example the proverbial individual chatting loudly on his cellphone at a café without any concerns to those within earshot vicinity. Why does he seem so unconcerned with other people's sensibilities? In her book, Alkon invokes Robin Dunbar's principle regarding the small bands in which humans have spent much of their evolutionary history to explain the growth of such incivility.Small bands are defined by daily repeat face-to-face interactions wherein people must self-monitor their behaviors lest they will quickly be ostracized from the group. However, in current contemporary urban settings, this mitigation factor is absent. In the same way that the online world affords people an anonymous cover, large cities offer similar "protection" in the offline world.
Gad mentions Dennis Regan because of this passage in my book, in which I explain why it's in your best interest to give a small gift to a total stranger who moves in next to you (besides it being neighborly, welcoming, and community-building):
To keep our giving and taking in balance, humans developed a built-in social bookkeeping department. Basically, there's some little old lady in a green eyeshade inside each of us who pokes us--"Wake up, idiot!"--when somebody's mooching off us so we'll get mad and try to even the score. When somebody does something nice for us, our inner accountant cranks up feelings of obligation, and we get itchy to pay the person back.A fascinating modern example of reciprocity in action is a 1971 study by psychology professor Dennis Regan. Participants were told it was research on art appreciation. The actual study--on the psychological effects of having a favor done--took place during the breaks between the series of questions about art. Regan's research assistant, posing as a study participant, left the room during the break. He'd either come back with two Cokes-- one for himself and one he gave to the other participant--or come back empty-handed (the control group condition).
After all the art questions were completed, the research assistant posing as a participant asked the other participant a favor, explaining that he was selling raffle tickets and that he'd win a much-needed $50 prize if he sold the most. He added that any purchase "would help" but "the more the better." Well, "the more" and "the better" is exactly what he got from the subjects he'd given the Coke, who ended up buying twice as many tickets as those who'd gotten nothing from him.
Regan's results have been replicated many times since, in the lab and out, by Hare Krishnas, who saw a marked increase in donations when they gave out a flower, book, or magazine before asking for money; by organizations whose fund-raising letters pull in far more money when they include a small gift, like personalized address labels; and by me after I did something nice for a bad neighbor.
On a practical note -- because I'm about making science practical, an author friend who's writing a terrific book, has a guy she needs to get some information from who's been asking her for part of her book advance (does anyone not know that these are not exactly handsome these days, for the non-famous?). I suggested she send him a small gift of appreciation -- and then wait a month or two and contact him again. I suspect the greasing of the wheels of reciprocity may end up softening him up into giving her the information he has and she needs for the book.
Hocka
Linkie.
Beat The Clock
It's beating me, so briefly, here are details on my live radio show for tonight:
Live radio tonight, 7pmPT/10 pmET: Dr. Joyce Benenson on how the evolution of male warriors/female worriers drives us
Link here! (Details there, too!)
Or pick it up in podcast afterward!
Technoscoldings
I'd like it if an "improperly removed" flash drive would scream a little as you pulled it out.
Feynman Prize In Nanotechnology To Amanda S. Barnard (Too Busy Doing Science To Complain About Being A Woman In It)
From Foresight Institute for for her theory in nanotechnology -- Amanda S. Barnard's work on diamond nanoparticles -- that has "spearheaded understanding of the structure and stability of carbon nanostructures, and the role that shape plays in establishing the properties and interactions under different conditions."
Yes, it seems Barnard was too busy making scientific discoveries to complain about how awful it is to be a woman in science.
And oops -- from a WaPo story by Sara Kaplan, there's a recent study out that finds that women are actually favored for hiring for science jobs at universities. In fact, they found that they are twice as likely to be hired for tenure-track science professorships in biology, engineering, economics and psychology as men.
Which is wrong. Because whether there are women in STEM or other areas of science shouldn't be the question, but whether the person being hired is the best person for the job.
The study is by Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci, co-directors of the Cornell Institute for Women in Science, who, Kaplan writes, "have spent much of the past six years researching sexism in STEM fields."
And get this, also from the WaPo story:
Despite the belief that women's life choices -- like taking time off to have children -- can put them at a disadvantage, men actually favored women who took extended maternity leave over those who went right back to work at a ratio of 2-to-1 (women slightly preferred female candidates who didn't take extended leave). Female evaluators also preferred divorced women over married fathers, and both genders favored a single, female candidate over a man with children.
And the researchers' conclusion:
This is the latest in a series of studies by the Cornell researchers, many of which have concluded that the scarcity of female faculty in science departments (about 20 percent in most fields) can't be blamed on innate sexism.
Barnard via @instapundit
The Art Of Unearned Attention Through Bringing A Man Down
Money quote from Ashe Schow from her story below: "So, her media campaign to brand him a rapist was art, but him defending himself is bullying?"
Ashe Schow at the WashEx on the Columbia student, Paul Nungesser, who was cleared of accusations of rape by a police investigation and the university, but has had his reputation ruined.
Despite a police investigation that failed to charge Nungesser and the university finding him "not responsible," Sulkowicz and her enablers -- including Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, have continued to harass Nungesser by calling him a "rapist."Now, Nungesser is suing his university, its president and trustees and the visual arts professor that allowed the mattress project to go forward.
Nungesser and his attorneys, Nesenoff & Miltenberg LLP, allege that the university was complicit in allowing the harassment to commence, which "significantly damaged, if not effectively destroyed Paul Nungesser's college experience, his reputation, his emotional well-being and his future career prospects."
Nungesser alleges in his 56-page lawsuit that Columbia knew about the harassment and did nothing to stop it, becoming first "silent bystander and then turned into an active supporter."
The lawsuit includes dozens of Facebook messages between the two friends -- far more than were included in the Daily Beast article in which Nungesser finally told his side of the story. The messages contained many declarations of Sulkowicz's love for Nungesser before and after the alleged rape.
...He would cleared of the charges even though he wasn't allowed to introduced the Facebook messages sent after the alleged rape showing no signs of distress from Sulkowicz.
Check out the text messages here, in the legal document. These messages do not read like a woman talking to some man who supposedly brutally raped her. Quite the contrary.
Slimy
Linky with a little algae.
Baby's Got Bank
My bank lets you bring in any resident of the county, as long as they're well-behaved. Unruly children are tied to parking meters outside. (Okay, just kidding, but it's a fantasy I've had.)
Aida, however, sat very patiently in my lap for an hour yesterday at the bank. (There's a bit of sticky tree in her hair that I had to wait till we got home to extract but she didn't even complain about that.) 
The Religion Of Pieces: Hacked Off Body Parts
In Spain, a group of Muslims were planning to behead a random person in Barcelona, writes Soeren Kern at the Gatestone Institute. (This is what Islam demands of them -- more on that below.)
Prosecutors allege that, among other plots, the group was planning to kidnap a random member of the public, dress their victim in an orange jump suit, and then film him or her being beheaded. The group also allegedly planned to kidnap for ransom the female branch manager of Banco Sabadell, a local Catalan bank, as a way to finance their terrorist activities. Apparently, the beheading was intended to induce the bank to pay the ransom.The suspects are ten men and one woman, all between the ages of 17 and 45. Five of suspects are Spanish citizens, five are from Morocco and one is from Paraguay.
The ringleader of the cell has been identified as Antonio Sáez Martínez, a Spaniard who converted to Islam after marrying a Muslim woman. Also known as "Ali the Barber," Martínez worked as a hairdresser in Barberà del Vallès, a suburb of Barcelona.
According to a ten-page detention order signed by Santiago Pedraz, a judge at the high court (Audiencia Nacional) in Madrid, Spanish intelligence listened in on at least four telephone conversations between Martínez and other members of the cell in which they talked about radical Islam and planned attacks in Catalonia. Potential targets included police and military installations, as well as the Catalan Parliament building.
Martínez is an acquaintance of a Spanish neo-Nazi ideologue named Diego José Frías Álvarez. The two are said to share a mutual hatred of Jews and allegedly discussed bombing Jewish targets in Barcelona, including synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses.
Unfortunately, beheading is commanded by the Quran and elsewhere in Islam. (The "prophet's" deeds -- often slaughtering people for profit or the slightest insult -- are to be emulated in Islam.) Timothy R. Furnish writes about Beheading in the Name of Islam at the Middle East Quarterly:
Decapitation in Islamic Theology Groups such as Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi's Al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad (Unity and Jihad) and Abu 'Abd Allah al-Hasan bin Mahmud's Ansar al-Sunna (Defenders of [Prophetic] Tradition)[10] justify the decapitation of prisoners with Qur'anic scripture. Sura (chapter) 47 contains the ayah (verse): "When you encounter the unbelievers on the battlefield, strike off their heads until you have crushed them completely; then bind the prisoners tightly."[11] The Qur'anic Arabic terms are generally straightforward: kafaru means "those who blaspheme/are irreligious," although Darb ar-riqab is less clear. Darb can mean "striking or hitting" while ar-riqab translates to "necks, slaves, persons." With little variation, scholars have translated the verse as, "When you meet the unbelievers, smite their necks."[12]For centuries, leading Islamic scholars have interpreted this verse literally. The famous Iranian historian and Qur'an commentator Muhammad b. Jarir at-Tabari (d. 923 C.E.) wrote that "striking at the necks" is simply God's sanction of ferocious opposition to non-Muslims.[13] Mahmud b. Umar az-Zamakhshari (d. 1143 C.E.), in a major commentary studied for centuries by Sunni religious scholars, suggested that any prescription to "strike at the necks" commands to avoid striking elsewhere so as to confirm death and not simply wound.[14]
...The practice of beheading non-Muslim captives extends back to the Prophet himself. Ibn Ishaq (d. 768 C.E.), the earliest biographer of Muhammad, is recorded as saying that the Prophet ordered the execution by decapitation of 700 men of the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe in Medina for allegedly plotting against him.[21] Islamic leaders from Muhammad's time until today have followed his model. Examples of decapitation, of both the living and the dead, in Islamic history are myriad. Yusuf b. Tashfin (d. 1106) led the Al-Murabit (Almoravid) Empire to conquer from western Sahara to central Spain. After the battle of Zallaqa in 1086, he had 24,000 corpses of the defeated Castilians beheaded "and piled them up to make a sort of minaret for the muezzins who, standing on the piles of headless cadavers, sang the praises of Allah."[22] He then had the detached heads sent to all the major cities of North Africa and Spain as an example of Christian impotence. The Al-Murabits were conquered the following century by the Al-Muwahhids (Almohads), under whose rule Castilian Christian enemies were beheaded after any lost battles.
The Ottoman Empire was the decapitation state par excellence. Upon the Ottoman victory over Christian Serbs at the battle of Kosovo in 1389, the Muslim army beheaded the Serbian king and scores of Christian prisoners. At the battle of Varna in 1444, the Ottomans beheaded King Ladislaus of Hungary and "put his head at the tip of a long pike ... and brandished it toward the Poles and Hungarians." Upon the fall of Constantinople, the Ottomans sent the head of the dead Byzantine emperor on tour to major cities in the sultan's domains. The Ottomans even beheaded at least one Eastern Orthodox patriarch. In 1456, the sultan allowed the grand mufti of the empire to personally decapitate King Stephen of Bosnia and his sons--even though they had surrendered and, seven decades later, the sultan ordered 2,000 Hungarian prisoners beheaded. In the early nineteenth century, even the British fell victim to the Ottoman scimitar. An 1807 British expedition to Egypt resulted in "a few hundred spiked British heads left rotting in the sun outside Rosetta."[23]
Bruce Jenner: Transgender And Says He Has The "Soul Of A Female"
I turned the TV on and he was on with Dianne Sawyer talking about being transgender. I hadn't heard him speak before, and I found him a very likable and sweet guy, and I was filled with compassion for him for what he's been through and is going through. A few excerpts from LAist, from Emma G. Gallegos:
What took him so long: "Why now? I just can't pull the curtain any longer, okay? I've built a nice little life. I just can't...again, Bruce lives a lie but 'she' is not a lie. I can't do it any more." He added, "If I die, which, I could be diagnosed next week with cancer--and boom you're gone. I would be so mad at myself that I didn't explore that side of me. You know? And I don't want that to happen."On hiding in plain site:
"I had the story. We had done 425 episodes I think, over almost eight years, and the entire run I kept thinking to myself, 'Oh my god, this whole thing.' The one real true story in the family was the one I was hiding and nobody knew about it. The one thing that could really make a difference in people's lives was right here in my soul and I could not tell that story."On whether it's all a publicity stunt:
"Are you telling me I'm going to go through a complete gender change--okay?--and go for everything you need to do for that for the show? Sorry Diane: it ain't happening, okay? We're doing this for publicity? Yeah right. Oh my god, do you have any idea of what I've been going through all my life and they're going to say I'm doing this for publicity for a show?"He hopes coming out will help others:
"What I'm doing is going to do some good, and we're going to change the world. I really firmly believe that we're going to make a difference in the world with what we're doing. And if the whole Kardashian show and reality television gave me that foothold into that world to be able to go out there and do something good, I'm all for it. I got no problem with that."
Kim, he says, has been the most supportive. She told him, if he's going to do this -- be public: "Girl, you gotta rock it, baby; you gotta look good. You gotta look really good."
Yeah, baby.
Good for him for coming out.
Linkeroni
And cheese.
Shake Your Boobies (To The Song, Bye, Bye Civil Liberties Pie...)
As Lisa Simeone, who sent me the piece, wrote in an email:
If people don't recognize that this is all of a piece -- the "war on drugs," the "war on terror," the loss of our civil liberties in general -- they have their heads up you know where.
This particular story involves 13-year-old girls who were forced to strip and "shake" their breasts in a school search for pot -- with a male security guard or male security guards present (the identity of the second man seems unclear).
Yes, a school search for marijuana, not handguns. This search is about administrators and security guards wanting to "win," not protecting anybody from any meaningful danger.
Beau Yarbrough writes for The San Bernadino Sun:
The mother of a Serrano Middle School student says the San Bernardino City Unified School District stepped over the line while searching her daughter and another student for concealed drugs."Both students were escorted to the office of Serrano Middle School by the Vice-Principal, Mrs. Shenita Stevenson and the school security guard," Anita Wilson-Pringle wrote in an article posted online. "Each girl was taken into a room accompanied by Ms. Stevenson and another unknown person (whom the kids assume is another security guard) a tall white male. The girls were then searched. Not just your standard pat-down, which is by all means legal, but they were told to take off clothing."
According to Wilson-Pringle, her daughter and another girl -- ages 15 and 13 respectively -- were told to take off their bras and shake their breasts. Both girls were also told to shake out their pants. When one girl balked, she was reportedly threatened with arrest if she failed to comply.
School officials found two bottles in Wilson-Pringle's daughter's bag, one empty, and one with a bit more than a quarter of a gram of marijuana during a drug investigation. Her daughter's bag had been left unattended for almost 40 minutes between the time the girls were pulled out of class and when Wilson-Pringle's daughter called her parents, according to Wilson-Pringle.
Their eighth-grade daughter refused to sign any paperwork and claimed the bottles were not hers, according to Wilson-Pringle. She was ticketed and given a date to appear in court.
The school went out of bounds. From Adam Freedman at Quick And Dirty Tips:
Outside of schools, the Fourth Amendment generally means that the police must have "probable cause" to search a suspect. As Justice David Souter recently summarized, that means police may only conduct a search if there is "a fair possibility or a substantial chance" a search will turn up evidence of a crime.Inside of schools, the Fourth Amendment has been interpreted differently. Ever since the Supreme Court's 1985 decision in New Jersey v. T.L.O., school officials may search a student's outer clothing -- such as jackets or backpacks -- even if there is only a moderate chance of finding any incriminating evidence.
What About Student Strip Searches?
But the constitutional status of strip searches has been in limbo all these years. In June, the Supreme Court shed light on the issue in the case of Safford v. Redding, a case involving 13-year old Savannah Redding. Redding, who was suspected of distributing prescription medicines around school, was ordered to strip down to her underwear while female school officials peeked under her bra and panties to see whether she had any pills stashed there. After that -- and I hope you're sitting down for this --a lawsuit followed.The Supreme Court held that any search that requires a student to expose his or her private parts "to some degree" is "categorically distinct" under the Constitution. In other words, it requires greater justification than a search of the outer clothing. Specifically, the Court said that a school may conduct this sort of panty-raid only if school officials have evidence that the item they suspect is concealed is actually dangerous in terms of power (say, a gun) or quantity (say, a bottle of pills), OR they must have some evidence indicating that the contraband item is hidden in that particular student's underwear.
Trigger Warnings: A Form Of Covert Narcissism
I've thought this for a while. They are yet another way for people who have done nothing noteworthy to get attention and have unearned power over others.
Liz posts at feelsandreels:
Kent University's professor of sociology Frank Furedi claims that calls for trigger warnings are a form of "narcissism," with a student's desire to assert their own importance acting as more of a factor than the content they are exposed to.
And about the now practically institutionalized infantilization of college students, she writes:
Despite beginning as a way of conscientiously moderating internet forums for abuse survivors and war veterans (although, I would imagine one seeking out a site for rape survivor discussion would already anticipate the included subject matter), trigger warnings are now serving as a threat to open intellectual discussion and debate, both on and offline. By requiring trigger warnings on classroom material, a message is being sent that an institution is more obligated to provide individualized comfort than an intellectually stimulating environment, and the removal of "triggering material" robs all students of the opportunity to learn about both historical and modern influences on the world they live in.
But, again, that's what these students are going for. They've done nothing; they're nobody. All they have is their ability to stop other students from getting an education that will help them become the somebodies they can never be -- you know, without actual work instead of just sniveling their way into importance.
And as I've noted before: If you are so emotionally traumatized by the normal college curriculum, you do belong in an institution, but not one of "higher learning."
It's NOT Letting "American Sniper" Play On Campus That "Infringes On Certain Freedoms"
Ashley Rae Goldenberg writes at The Daily Caller:
Muslim students at Virginia's largest public university launched a petition to ban the showing of "American Sniper" on campus because the film "perpetuates misleading and negative stereotypes" about Muslims and "romanticizes war" -- even though the offended students haven't even seen the film.According to the petition created by a group of Muslim organizations at George Mason University, playing "American Sniper" on campus infringes on certain freedoms.
Here, Muslim organizations, is how actual freedom works: You fight speech you dislike with more speech, not by trying to shut down speech.
Gotta love this, too, from their petition:
As thinking humans, we should recognize the issues of morality presented when such a film is shown on campus and sponsored by the Office of Student Involvement whose mission is to 'embrace diversity.'
Islam is about anything but "embracing diversity." You see this in Muslim majority countries, like in Egypt with Copts who cannot open churches and who are slaughtered for being non-Muslim.
Those for whom free speech is too uncomfortable might consider moving to Muslim-majority countries where there's none of that nasty sort of thing.
As a post-Jewish atheist, but one who was raised Jewish and went to temple and all, I supported the neo-Nazis' right to march in heavily Jewish Skokie way back when. And I still support the right of any hate group, no matter how ugly, to march and speak and show whatever ugly movies they want.
This is how freedom works. I'm all for it.
And guess what: It's ultimately better, and healthier, and more encouraging of the flourishing of people -- intellectually, emotionally, financially, and otherwise -- than the sort of state Islam calls for: Totalitarian. (The very translation of Islam is "submission.")
Chef Link-R-Dee
Those dirty rings...
Believe!
Brilliant. By Glenn Reynolds/Instapundit.
How Pathetic That It's A News Story For An Eight-Year-Old To Walk To Elementary School
Throughout evolutionary history, young children have been given responsibility, including that of the care of younger siblings.
At 8, I walked or rode my bike to Bond Elementary School every day, which was probably a half mile from my parents' house. This is normal behavior.
But these days, in Portland, Maine, it's actually noteworthy -- worthy of a news report! -- that parents are letting their 8-year-old walk to school. Via WGME:
A family in Portland says they're taking on what's called a free range parenting style to give their daughter more independence growing up. While some say the style gives kids too much freedom, Sarah Cushman and Robert Levin say it's simply going back to how they grew up. Their daughter, eight year old Cedar Levin walks to her elementary school in Portland without them."She's eight and really well equipped she's pretty mature and is really into exploring the world," said Cushman.
Her daughter, Cedar doesn't walk to school completely alone but with a friend. Cushman feels this is a better way for her to explore the world than with her mom always by her side.
First Person Look At The Kafkaesque "Committee On Sexual Misconduct" At Yale -- And Universities Across America
Via lasttango, from 2014, first-year Harvard law student Patrick Witt explains in the Boston Globe that, in the Title IX-driven kangaroo court at his undergrad alma mater, Yale, he was denied due process rights and it "nearly ruined" his life (and definitely caused substantial harm):
Harvard's new policies are substantially similar to those already in effect at Yale, my alma mater. While an undergraduate there, my ex-girlfriend filed an informal complaint against me with the then-newly-created University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct. The committee summoned me to appear and styled the meeting as a form of mediation. Its chairman, a professor with no prior experience handling dispute resolution, told me that I could have a faculty adviser present but no lawyer, and instructed me to avoid my accuser, who, by that point, I had neither seen nor spoken to in weeks. The committee imposed an "expectation of confidentiality" on me so as to prevent any form of "retaliation" against my accuser.I would say more about what the accusation itself entailed if indeed I had such information. Under the informal complaint process, specific accusations are not disclosed to the accused, no fact-finding takes place, and no record is taken of the alleged misconduct. For the committee to issue an informal complaint, an accuser need only bring an accusation that, if substantiated, would constitute a violation of university policy concerning sexual misconduct. The informal "process" begins and ends at the point of accusation; the truth of the claim is immaterial.
When I demanded that fact-finding be done so that I could clear my name, I was told, "There's nothing to clear your name of." When I then requested that a formal complaint be lodged against me -- a process that does involve investigation into the facts -- I was told that such a course of action was impossible for me to initiate. At any time, however, my accuser retained the right to raise the complaint to a formal level. No matter, the Committee reassured me, the informal complaint did not constitute a disciplinary proceeding and nothing would be attached to my official record at Yale.
Coincidentally, the same day that my accuser decided to lodge the complaint against me, the news that I had been selected as a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship had been publicly announced. The news gained national attention, with stories in every major media outlet in print and online, because of my position as Yale's starting quarterback and the fact that my interview date was set for the same day as my last Harvard-Yale football game.
Days after the initial meeting with the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct, I received a phone call from the Rhodes Trust informing me that they had received an anonymous tip that I had been accused by a fellow student of sexual misconduct. Next came a call from my summer employer, who, having received a similar anonymous tip, rescinded my offer of full-time employment upon graduation.
Months later, long after I had already withdrawn my Rhodes candidacy, the New York Times somehow also learned of the "confidential" complaint made against me, and that the Rhodes Trust had been aware of it. The paper then published a lengthy article revising the narrative of my pursuit of the scholarship and suggesting that I had intentionally misled media into believing a feel-good sports story that never was. The Times' public editor later condemned the piece for using anonymous sources, but the damage was already done; I was publicly humiliated. The memory of being told by the Committee that I had "nothing to clear my name of" was searing.
Yes, an "informal complaint" like this can be filed and a student has little to do in the wake but to try not to lose everything. A little hard to fight charges when they won't tell you what they are. The bedrock rights in our society are now denied to males on campus, and they are seriously imperiled for it.
Here's Minding The Campus with KC Johnson and Harvey Silverglate on the process:
In blunt language, this means that the accused student, Witt in this case, does not have the right within the Yale procedure to cross-examine his accuser. He does not even have the right to present evidence of his innocence. The accusation is accepted at face value, and the purpose of the process is to resolve it in a way that the accusing student feels comfortable. It is on the basis of this sort of complaint, filed under this procedure, that the Rhodes Fellowship decided that it needed to suspend Witt's candidacy. That's nothing short of extraordinary.The second story that the Times missed, that the Witt case exposed, is that by Yale's own figures, Yale is actually a hotbed of violent crime. Who knew? In the calendar year 2011, there were 13 allegations of sexual assault at Yale, according to Yale's figures. All 13 were filed under this informal complaint process, which means that the accuser never went to police, never received any sort of medical exam, and the accused student never had a right to cross-examine or to present evidence of innocence. To give a sense of how out of whack these figures are, if you accept Yale's standards, on a per capita basis there was more likely to be a sexual assault on the Yale campus, by a factor of between ten and twelve, than in the city of New Haven. And New Haven isn't just any city. According to the FBI, it's the fourth most dangerous city in the country for populations over 100,000. So the Times had one of two stories. Either one of our nation's leading institutions is so dangerous that it's infinitely more crime-ridden than one of the most dangerous cities in the country, or in fact, one of our leading universities is dumbing down sexual assault. It is, in fact, the latter. In a footnote in a lengthy report on this new process, issued by the Yale Deputy Provost, Yale conceded that the university uses, and this is a direct quote, "a more expansive definition of sexual assault than is commonly understood." Indeed, claiming that a "worry" constitutes sexual assault is expansive indeed. And so what a university has done is to take a commonly understood phrase, sexual assault under the law-a phrase that's also basically commonly understood in the general public-and defined it in a way that no one would understand or recognize. That is the real story of the Patrick Witt case.
A final point on Witt. Within this Yale informal complaint process, there is one possible procedural protection that is granted to the accused student, and that is that the process is supposed to be wholly confidential. So the accused student cannot present evidence of his innocence. He can't cross-examine the accuser. He is presumed guilty. But at least he has the benefit of knowing that it won't become public, or at least it won't become public immediately. In Yale's case, and in the case of Witt, even that one incredibly minor procedural protection was violated. And not only was it violated, it was violated with a malevolent intent. Whoever leaked this information to the Rhodes Trust, and it's a very discrete number of people who could have leaked this (either someone associated with the accuser, or I would say more likely, someone within the Yale administration), the goal was to sink Witt's Rhodes candidacy. And that leakage in turn led to the coverage in the Times and the permanent smearing of Witt's reputation. This morning, before I came over, I did a Google search, Patrick Witt, sexual assault, it yielded 33,600 hits. This is what Witt is now remembered for. There is absolutely no evidence that Yale is investigating this breach of its procedures, I emailed the Yale University spokesperson to ask if an investigation was occurring. He declined to respond. And there is no indication that at any point in the future Yale is going to investigate this breach of procedures. Indeed, it seems as if the university is not terribly concerned with assault if the issue is assault of privacy against one of its students. And that is the story of Patrick Witt.
Again, if you're sending sons to college, I suggest putting some money aside so they and some buddies can timeshare an escort. Sadly, the best advice you can give them to preserve their rights and future is to avoid all college women throughout their time in college.
Unpaid Student Loans In Tennessee? Geniuses May Take Away Your Prof'l License
The smartypants at the Tennessee Student Assistance Corporation have a bright idea about how to get people to pay their student loans: Take away their professional license.
Yes, that's right -- make it impossible for people to work in the likeliest legal way for themto make money.
That'll show 'em!
Chris Butler writes at Watchdog:
Default on your loans and the Tennessee Student Assistance Corporation will find you and contact the respective state boards, which can suspend your license....Tennessee law had never applied to Rebecca Lindeman, who is from Pennsylvania and now disabled. She doesn't like the law.
"Given these times I think it's unfair if you're making an effort to pay them," said Lindeman, who had to get a license from the federal government to work as a veterinary technician.
"Student loans are ridiculously high. I know I owed more on mine before I became disabled and, before they were forgiven, I owed more on them than I did on buying my house. Without the disability forgiveness I would have lost everything."
TSAC spokeswoman Jane Pennington said state officials only take action after trying to reach out to the borrower for 270 days.
And no, government never sends the bill to the wrong address or anything. Just like the IRS would never hang up on, oh, 8.1 million confused citizens calling with tax questions.
Just like Detroit never shuts off the water of one guy because some other guy entirely didn't pay his bill.
Here's a problem with these student loans in general. If I'm going to buy a house and want a loan, they do some sort of look-seeing to make sure there's some possibility the loan will be repaid.
Not so with student loans.
Want to get your Ph.D. in underwater Tibetan feminist basketweaving? Well, here's a pile of money!
Until that changes -- until loans are tied to likelihood of their being paid back, well, there's going to be a lot of defaulting.
P.S. Basketweaving is hard as fuck. I actually went to a summer of art school at the University of Michigan. As far as I can remember, I don't think I was entirely driven to basketweave; I think I just thought it funny to say I'd taken that class, and figured I'd get something out of it.
via @radleybalko
Klinky
Your dungeon or mine?
Baggage!
Luggage, briefcases, backpacks,and more! (Oh my!)
Also various travel goodies.
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Daddy Should Worry More About How His Daughter Will Treat Guys On Campus, Who Have Lost Their Due Process Rights
There's a story in the New York Post about David Letterman trotting out one of the world's most tired "jokes," "Treat a lady like a wh-e, and a wh-e like a lady."
It apparently took three reporters to pen this blockbuster investigative piece in the Post. Emily Smith, Jennifer Bain and Bruce Golding write:
The joke -- a version of a saying attributed to 1930s screenwriter Wilson Mizner -- was met with stunned silence, the source said.
Yawnies.
They go on to quote somebody's daddy:
Jerry Stockton, a retiree from Virginia, called the crack "disrespectful to women, and women should never be disrespected.""My daughter is going to college in September and I worry how guys will treat her," he added.
Jerry hasn't been paying attention to the news and how, under Title IX, due process has been removed from men on campus, and campus kangaroo courts (a professor or two and some girl who's late to poli-sci) are judging their guilt.
Oh, and about that: Men now have the standard of guilty until they prove themselves innocent, and the likely ruin of their college careers if they aren't convincing in that in what can amount to a he said/she said situation.
Worse yet, if a man and woman were both drinking and had sex, the man is guilty and the woman is the victim.
And in California, if under these kangaroo court terms, a guy is decided to be "guilty," he would be suspended from school for two years if a proposed bill passes.
How's that for equality?!
A Tweet About The Armenian...Uh, Thing. Yet Another Obama Campaign Pledge Conveniently Forgotten
About the 1 to 1.5 million Armenians slaughtered in Turkey starting in 1915:
@CitizenJoan
Huh? @BarackObama shuns saying 'genocide' on 100th anniversary of Armenian Genocide because he doesn't want Turkey to feel bad?
From the History.com link above:
GENOCIDE BEGINS On April 24, 1915, the Armenian genocide began. That day, the Turkish government arrested and executed several hundred Armenian intellectuals. After that, ordinary Armenians were turned out of their homes and sent on death marches through the Mesopotamian desert without food or water. Frequently, the marchers were stripped naked and forced to walk under the scorching sun until they dropped dead. People who stopped to rest were shot.At the same time, the Young Turks created a "Special Organization," which in turn organized "killing squads" or "butcher battalions" to carry out, as one officer put it, "the liquidation of the Christian elements." These killing squads were often made up of murderers and other ex-convicts. They drowned people in rivers, threw them off cliffs, crucified them and burned them alive. In short order, the Turkish countryside was littered with Armenian corpses.
Records show that during this "Turkification"campaign government squads also kidnapped children, converted them to Islam and gave them to Turkish families. In some places, they raped women and forced them to join Turkish "harems" or serve as slaves. Muslim families moved into the homes of deported Armenians and seized their property.
In 1922, when the genocide was over, there were just 388,000 Armenians remaining in the Ottoman Empire.
Bush also shunned the genocide label, but our current President, as a candidate in 2008, promised he'd acknowledge it.
Yes, there are some political concerns -- military bases, the piece linked at The Blaze explains, but shouldn't a man running for president consider that before he blusters about what a different sort of fellow he'll be in The White House?
Easy come, easy go!
Government As The Blob
I saw on my phone the other day that I could ride-share on Uber for $5. Well, I could -- if I didn't get carsick from going more than a short distance and a few turns. (Working on that, and no, I don't have a brain tumor, BPPV, or Meniere's Disease, thanks!)
Anyway, how crazy is it that paid carpooling is actually in need of being legalized in California? Reason's Adrian Moore (@reasonpolicy) tweets that it's "anti-capitalism run amok."
At the LA Times, Tracy Lien writes that a new CA bill could legalize paid carpooling:
Carpooling is one of the most popular services transport network companies like Uber, Lyft and Sidecar offer, but it faces a problem. Under California law, paid carpooling is prohibited.Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) is hoping to change that.
Introducing AB 1360 on Monday, Ting said the bill would change a Californian law written in 1961 that doesn't allow passengers in a commercial ride to each be charged separately for sharing the ride.
"We have long encouraged public transit and carpooling to reduce traffic and air pollution," Ting said. "We cannot extend this mindset to ride-sharing without changing a 50-year-old law predating the Internet."
..."[The bill] accomplishes what needs to be done, which is allowing multiple people to share a vehicle that are heading in the same direction," said Lyft's director of public affairs, David Mack. "I think there's going to be pretty swift adoption of it."
I'm guessing that there are lobbyists who will wake up and come out against it -- just like they are for the automakers, in trying to stop gearheads from working on their own cars.
Sorry, But Your Dog's Guilty Look Probably Has Little To Do With Actual Guilt
Researcher Julie Hecht writes at Sci Am that research has not found that a dog's "guilty look" necessarily corresponds with dog's knowledge of some misdeed:
In 2009, Alexandra Horowitz of Barnard College (and author of "Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know") published a study in Behavioural Processes exploring what precedes the "guilty look." By varying both the dog's behavior (either eating or not eating a disallowed treat) and the owner's behavior (either scolding or not scolding), Horowitz was able to isolate what the dog's "guilty look" was associated with. She found that the guilty look did not appear more when the dogs had done something wrong. Instead, the "guilty look" popped out in full form when the owner scolded the dog. In fact, Horowitz also found that when scolded, the most exaggerated guilt look was performed by dogs who had not eaten the treat but were scolded anyway because the owner thought the dog had eaten it. In a multi-dog household, a dog could easily look guilty without ever having transgressed."But wait!" cries the peanut gallery. "It can't only be about scolding." The claim is as follows: you come home only to be greeted by your beloved dog, this time, with low posture, ears back, squinty eyes, lip licking and a tail wagging low and quick. Or maybe the dog is under the bed and won't budge. You enter the kitchen and find that the dog has done a lovely job rearranging the trash all over the floor. Not your design of choice, but you can see what he was getting at. In this context, owners claim dogs show the "guilty look" prior to an owner discovering the misdeed. This, they claim, indicates that dogs know they have done something wrong because the owner is not scolding yet.
In 2010, I investigated this scenario while conducting research with the Family Dog Project in Budapest. In the experiment, published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science in 2012, dogs had the opportunity to break a rule (that food on a table is for humans and not dogs) while the owner was out of the room. When the owner returned, but before they saw whether the dog ate the food, the dogs who ate were not more likely to look guilty than those who did not eat. We also wondered whether owners would be better able to recognize their dog's transgression in their behavior than a researcher simply coding for the presence of the commonly assigned "look." Owners who had previously witnessed their dog attending to the rule were not able to identify whether or not their dog had transgressed in their absence. The study did not find that owners could identify a "guilty dog" without scolding.
She also points out that the joke of dog shaming photos works because the dogs do not look guilty. I dunno. I think this pug in the photo kinda does, but maybe that's just my human need to attribute something that they're looking into in these studies. (Then again, I suspect that many of these dogs at the dog shaming site have gotten a talking to.)
Goober
Peanutty links.
Shockingly, Miss Millennial,The Workplace Is About Work And Not Your Need To Wear Outfits That Show Your Sexy Originality
Via Julie Borowski at The Libertarian Republic, a girl goes on a rant about her job rejection over her inability to understand that one's precious originality and need to dress for clubs in daytime may not be an employer's priority. 
As Borowski, apparently also a Millennial -- but a more realistic one -- also writes:
I hate to throw my own generation under the bus, but that status precisely sums up why employers hate hiring millenials. We're entitled. We're classless. We're wholly unprepared for the real life outside of college "safe spaces." (Oh my god. I sound so old. Where's my cane?!")How you present yourself matters. It says a lot about you. That might require investing in an outfit a step above Charlotte Russe and Forever 21 to get the job you want. This isn't patriarchal oppression. If a dude showed up wearing something "mildly sexual" for a job interview, he'd probably be escorted from the building. It just isn't the time or place for all that.
There's a really hilarious bit in there about the "ball and chain" women must "drag behind us." Which is her interpretation of the horrible requirement that work be about work and not about one's personal need to look goth in the workplace.
I suspect that this girl comes off in person as she does in a Facebook post: As an entitled drama queen. Yes, all of us who employ people are looking for just that in an employee.
Sometimes, Doing It The Scary, Imperiling Way Is The Way You Change Things Back To Sane
KJ Dell'Antonia at The New York Times' MotherLode thinks the Meitivs should have just sucked it up and gone along with repressive government demands that they parent the way the government says they should.
These are the Maryland parents, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, whose children were once again in the custody of Montgomery County Child Protective Services. But first, the backstory:
The Meitivs are the family whose 10- and 6-year-old children were stopped by the police while walking home from the park on a (busy, urban) Maryland street and driven home (over the older child's protests). The family was investigated by the local Child Protective Services and were found responsible for "unsubstantiated child neglect."A neighbor apparently saw the children walking alone yesterday evening and called 911. A local television station reported the children were walking about a third of a mile from home at the time. Danielle Meitiv said they were supposed to be home by 6; when the children didn't arrive, she and her husband began searching for them. They were not, she said, notified that the children were in custody until 8 p.m., and weren't allowed to see them until 10:30, when the parents were asked to sign an agreement promising not to leave the children unattended before taking them home. They did.
The initial stopping of the children on their way home from the park resparked the continuing conversation about whether children are more hemmed in than they were in the past. As a broader matter, that's a good thing; it encourages parents to think about whether we're letting our children have the kinds of age-appropriate experiences that teach the lessons of independence we need as adults.
The specifics, though, worried local parents, who knew intimately the walk that the Meitiv children were taking, which crosses busy intersections with three to four lanes in either direction.
I crossed busy streets with four lanes at age 8. I also went to the park and rode miles and miles to the cider mill on my bike all by myself not long afterward.
Here's the "give into the state" gutless model -- rather than questioning the imposition of state power -- that is so pervasive in our society, and why we still have a pointless groping of diapered, 79-year-old blind grandmothers' genitalia at the airport. Dell'Antonia writes:
It's a fundamental principle of my parenting that I don't sit down with my children to help them with their homework every night. I don't believe in doing that, and I don't think it's helpful for them.That said, if our local version of Child Protective Services took my children into custody for that choice, and told me that if we didn't change, they might do it again -- I would sit down with my children every night and help them with their homework, and find other ways to promote their independence.
Question nothing. Stand up for nothing. Great that this is what you will teach your children.
Thanks, but I'd rather live in a world populating by people like the Meitivs, who stand up for their principles.
Interestingly, I find that it is often immigrants to this country who value our freedoms the most -- in the way our founding fathers did. That is, to the point where they are or were willing to risk what is most precious to them -- their right to raise their children or even their lives -- in order to preserve what is most precious to all of us (or should be): Our civil liberties.
American Airlines Seems To Be Doing Business In The Fax Era
You put your credit card in for your ticket, and instead of the charge saying it's gone through, there's a "ticket pending" notice. I bet they get a lot of calls about this.
Instead of how other airlines do things -- and how pretty much every other purchase I ever make on the Internet works -- they don't email you a confirmation.
Nopies.
Nothing.
Bought my flight maybe 45 minutes before writing this blog post and there's still not a hint that I've actually done so in my email box. Annoying.
Also, I called up the airline and a lady said, "Oh, it says ticket pending until they actually ticket you."
How long does this take?
"Depends on how backed up they are," she says.
Do they have howler monkeys stamping a pile of tickets coming down a conveyer belt?
And then there's the question of baggage. I travel like Liz Taylor but sans entourage and with crappier luggage. On every other airline, I pay for it in advance -- to save money and so I can just drop my bag off with the Skypcap.
Well, American also doesn't have online baggage payment. Hellooo, long line at airport!
Now, I'm just hoping the planes won't be powered by men peddling stationery bicycles.
Linkmeister
The unibrau.
Boot The Messenger! United's Response To Accusations Of Lax On-Plane Security
Jack Gilliam writes for the AP that UAL stopped a security researcher Chris Roberts from boarding his California-bound flight on Saturday in the wake of his tweets suggesting the airline's onboard systems could be hacked:
Roberts had been removed from an earlier United flight Wednesday by the FBI after landing in Syracuse, New York, and was questioned for four hours after jokingly suggesting on Twitter he could get the oxygen masks on the plane to deploy. Authorities also seized Roberts' laptop and other electronics, although his lawyer says he hasn't seen a search warrant.A lawyer for Roberts said United gave him no detailed explanation Saturday why he wasn't allowed on the plane, saying instead the airline would be sending Roberts a letter within two weeks stating why they wouldn't let him fly on their aircraft.
"Given Mr. Roberts' claims regarding manipulating aircraft systems, we've decided it's in the best interest of our customers and crew members that he not be allowed to fly United," airline spokesman Rahsaan Johnson told The Associated Press. "However, we are confident our flight control systems could not be accessed through techniques he described."
...When asked what threat Roberts posed if United's systems couldn't be compromised, Johnson said Sunday: "We made this decision because Mr. Roberts has made comments about having tampered with aircraft equipment, which is a violation of United policy and something customers and crews shouldn't have to deal with."
Roberts also told CNN he was able to connect to a box under his seat at least a dozen times to view data from the aircraft's engines, fuel and flight-management systems.
"It is disappointing that United refused to allow him to board, and we hope that United learns that computer security researchers are a vital ally, not a threat," said Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents Roberts.
Cardozo said Sunday he hasn't seen a copy of a search warrant that would have been used to seize Roberts' electronics, and that he's working to get the devices returned.
Geniuses. Yes, the "solution" is keeping the guy off the airline rather than talking to him about what he knows -- and finding out if he is, indeed, telling the truth -- and using this to fill any security holes.
The TSA: Giving Terrorists Exactly What They Wanted
Ned Levi writes at Consumer Traveler that it takes only examining the TSA's budget -- of which 79 percent is spent for airport screening and only 4 percent is spent for intelligence -- to see their security priorities are upside down.
Yes, only 4 percent for intelligence. The rest goes for repurposed mall food court workers who will, among other things, feel your hoohoo for plastic explosives. Even if you are a 79-year-old grandma from Peoria and your most suspicious act is frequently leaving your bifocals on top of your car as you drive away from church.:
The priorities shown in TSA's budget make no sense. Setting aside so much of their budget to screen law abiding citizen travelers tells me fear and mistrust of the American people seem to be the guiding principles of TSA.It appears TSA doesn't understand the terrorists' goal. Simply put, terrorists aim to terrorize, to coerce or intimidate people by causing fear. Their goal isn't to kill individual people, but make them afraid, very afraid. They might use explosives to blow up or crash planes as tactics, but their goal is terror, and to make us react so radically that we give up on who we are and what we stand for as a nation. TSA is playing directly into terrorist hands by adopting the terrorists' own strategy of fear, humiliation and dehumanization, and applying it to the American traveling public.
...At TSA airport checkpoints we see TSA humiliation and dehumanization of passengers. There continues to be a documented disregard for air traveler health at TSA checkpoints. TSA treats air travelers as if they are idiots, with absurd, arbitrary regulations which do nothing to increase security. TSA suspends our Constitutional freedoms every time we go through a TSA checkpoint. Much of what occurs at TSA checkpoints may actually make us more vulnerable than ever before while we're aloft.
...• The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protects US citizens, in part, by prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures. It requires a warrant for searches and seizures and "probable cause" is required to obtain the warrant, yet every day air travelers are subjected to TSA agents performing enhanced pat-downs, including rubbing passengers' genital areas, without probable cause, nor the lessor standard of reasonable suspicion, or a warrant.
TSA needs to get a grip on itself and stop letting the terrorists win. They must eliminate their tactic of traveler humiliation and dehumanization. TSA's fear tactics do nothing to protect us from dedicated, professional, trained terrorists.
Let's get back to pre-9/11 security, which was effective in stopping the odd amateur terrorist. Let's treat our citizens traveling by air with dignity, and keep their Constitutional rights intact.
He gives some great examples of the absurdity that passes for security in his piece, like how a gun decoration on the side of the purse is supposedly a threat to the lives of all of those on a plane, or:
• TSA states a 13-ounce bottle of any liquid brought into a plane's cabin is dangerous and prohibits it, but that bringing four 3.4-ounce containers of the same liquid into the cabin is somehow magically safe.
Yes, this is what happens when we have "security," which, as I wrote when I tried to get American women to be civilly disobedient at TSA "checkpoints" in airports, in no way takes the place of meaningful security:
Meaningful measures to thwart terrorist acts require highly trained law enforcement officers using targeted intelligence to identify suspects long before they launch their plots.The TSA's main accomplishment seems to be obedience training for the American public - priming us to be docile (and even polite) about giving up our civil liberties. The TSA not only violates our Fourth Amendment rights but also has posted signs effectively eradicating our First Amendment right to speak out about it. One such sign, in Denver International Airport, offers the vague warning that "verbal abuse" of agents will "not be tolerated." Travelers are left to wonder whether it's "verbal abuse" to inform the TSA agent probing their testicles that this isn't making us safer, or are they only in trouble if they throw in an obscenity? Not surprisingly, few seem willing to speak out and risk arrest.
Hellooo, Dipshit! CA Lawmaker Tries To Put The Clamps On Uber, Lyft, Etc.
From a tweet:
@johnhrabe
Stupid CA Lawmaker of the Week: Adrin Nazarian, who wants to end ride-sharing bc it's "simply high-tech hitchhiking"
Detailed stupid at TechCrunch, where Alex Wilhelm writes that this is supposedly about passenger safety.
In the comments, Jenny Reiswig cuts the crap:
Jenny Reiswig
Search "taxi driver convicted" and you'll see that the traditional cab companies don't do better at keeping crooks off the street. I use ridesharing services frequently - I appreciate the safety of being able to see my car approaching on the map so I know I don't have to stand out on the street and wait.
I've taken Uber multiple times in Boston, at an ev psych conference, and in LA, and it's been great -- and vastly cheaper than taxis. I love that it's now possible for people to earn an income or a side income without starting a business.
And, like Jenny, I love that I can see the car approaching on the map, that I can see the driver's plate number to match it to the car, and that I can see the ETA counting down in the ap.
Hey, Feminists, Here's The Real "Rape Culture"
Guilty people are sentenced to prison -- not to years of horrible sexual abuse -- but that's what happens to many in prison, and it's terribly wrong.
Congress, in 2003, passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act. As Chandra Bozelko writes in The New York Times:
The way to eliminate sexual assault, lawmakers determined, was to make Department of Justice funding for correctional facilities conditional on states' adoption of zero-tolerance policies toward sexual abuse of inmates.Inmates would be screened to identify possible predators and victims. Prison procedures would ensure investigation of complaints by outside law enforcement. Correctional officers would be instructed about behavior that constitutes sexual abuse. And abusers, whether inmates or guards, would be punished effectively.
But only two states -- New Hampshire and New Jersey -- have fully complied with the act. Forty-seven states and territories have promised that they will do so. Using Justice Department data, the American Civil Liberties Union estimated that from 2003 to 2012, when the law's standards were finalized, nearly two million inmates were sexually assaulted.
Bozelko goes on to explain:
Ultimately, prisons protect rape culture to protect themselves. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about half of prison sexual assault complaints in 2011 were filed against staff. (These reports weren't all claims of forcible rape; it is considered statutory sexual assault for a guard to have sexual contact with an inmate.)I was an inmate for six years in Connecticut after being convicted of identity fraud, among other charges. From what I saw, the same small group of guards preyed on inmates again and again, yet never faced discipline. They were protected by prison guard unions, one of the strongest forces in American labor.
Sexualized violence is often used as a tool to subdue inmates whom guards see as upstarts. In May 2008, while in a restricted housing unit, or "the SHU" as it is commonly known, I was sexually assaulted by a guard. The first person I reported the incident to, another guard, ignored it. I finally reached a nurse who reported it to a senior officer.
When the state police arrived, I decided not to talk to them because the harassment I'd received in the intervening hours made me fearful. For the same reason, I refused medical treatment when I was taken to a local emergency room.
Subsequent interviews with officials at the prison amounted to hazing and harassment. They accused me of having been a drug user, which was untrue, and of lying about going to college, though it was true I had. The "investigation," which I found more traumatic than the assault, dragged on for more than two months until they determined that my allegation couldn't be substantiated. The law's guidelines were followed, but in letter not in spirit.
And although the author of this piece is a woman, it's mainly men who are the victims of prison rape.
Linky-Doo
Ruh-roh!
Gwyneth Paltrow's Bad Math
I didn't look into the figure -- $29 a week -- that Gwyneth Paltrow claimed families on food stamps live on, but Ari Armstrong did:
Her figures are a complete fabrication (as I pointed out on Twitter). According to the USDA, which runs SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps), the "maximum monthly allotment" for a family of four is $649--more than five times what Paltrow claims. The maximum amount a single person can get in a month is $194.Paltrow makes two factual errors. Apparently she picked up the $29 figure from the Food Bank for New York City, which Paltrow mentions on Twitter. But that figure pertains to an individual, not a family.
Paltrow also confuses the average SNAP contribution with what a person or a family "has to live on." A key term in SNAP is "supplemental." The program is intended to supplement an individual's or family's food budget, not to provide every last morsel. If a recipient of SNAP handouts receives less than the maximum, that's because the program deems the recipient able to spend some of his own money on food. Thus, the average SNAP benefit is not relevant in calculating how much the recipient spends on food.
He also takes a Randian view on the government providing (and taking from taxpayers to provide) at all:
The deeper problem with Paltrow's cause is that it presumes that taking wealth from some people by force and handing it to others is moral. It is not. Individuals have a moral right to use their wealth as they see fit. If a person wishes to give money or food to other individuals or to a food bank, that is his right. If he wishes to spend his money on something else, or save it, that is also his right. In no case may government morally seize people's wealth by force and turn it over to others.
Your thoughts?
Agree Or Disagree?
I'm moderating a panel on memoirs tomorrow at LA Times Festival of Books, and I'm asking my panelists about privacy -- jumping off from this Anne Lamott quote:
"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better." --Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Dinky
Tinylinks.
Rude, Racist Thoughts For "Straight, White Male Publishing"
For the record, my first editor was a woman and the second two have been gay men. Isaac Fitzgerald at BuzzFeed was looking for some clickbait when he took these pictures.
"We asked attendees at the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference if they had any messages for the predominantly white publishing industry. Here are their answers."
Here's one of the photos. Asinine. I don't read books -- or research -- based on what's in the pants (or skirt) of who wrote it. I read books because they seem good. 
Also, dearie, you'll do better in being thought a good writer if you learned that it would be "read 'fewer' straight, white men."
Publishing is marketplace. They are very, very careful now to see that authors' books will sell. They are not keeping people out because they are black or whatever; they are keeping them out because they don't come with an audience or their books don't seem like they will garner much of one.
Rules Are Rules! Even For A Girl Who Might Not Live All That Long Past Graduation
The "zero tolerance"/"zero thought" brigade known as public school administrators strikes again.
At Opposing Views, Dominic Kelly writes:
A Texas teen battling cystic fibrosis was heartbroken when school officials told her that she couldn't walk at graduation with her friends because she wasn't completely finished with her last required class.Reports say that Victoria McKennon, 17, has been battling the rare genetic disease for most of her life. It's rare that people with the disease live long enough to walk across the stage for their high school graduation, but McKennon has beaten the odds. Even though she's a great student, the teen has had to miss many school days because of her illness.
Despite her absences being excused, she has had to play catch-up in order to be at the same place as her friends. McKennon is caught up enough to where she only has to complete one class during summer school in order to officially graduate, and the teen's parents have asked the school if they'll allow their daughter to walk across the stage during the big ceremony with her friends in June.
"I've had this entire ceremony thought of in mind, at the big place and all my friends walking on stage, and then after you get off, you're like, whoa I'm done with high school. This is great," McKennon told WFSB.
"I don't know how long Victoria is going to live," Victoria's mom Grace admitted. "Of course we always aim for the moon, the sky, and the stars, but in reality her life span is limited, and so every experience is very important for her."
Rotten bullies. Have to treat her like she's the same as some kid who skipped school all year to smoke pot out by the Dumpster.
There are people in the world, for whom the little things are large triumphs, and to keep them out on a technicality is just inhumane.
If This Is Your God, Your God Is A Pathetic Loser
Christopher Dickey at The Daily Beast quotes Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hebdo, slaughtered for Allah, whose book, "Open Letter to the Fraudsters of Islamophobia Who Play Into Racists' Hands," was just published:
Charb writes with contempt, for instance, about the religious groups, both Muslim and Catholic, that took Charlie Hebdo to court in the past. Why would they need to do that if they truly believed punishment would come in the afterlife, he wonders. Why would "God, the creator of the world, the guy with the big shoulders who plays with our planet like a driver stopped at a red light plays with his boogers" need a lawyer to defend him from cartoonists?By the same token, why would Allah need men with Kalashnikovs to attack journalists, police officers and Jewish shoppers in a Kosher market? Charb did not live to address that question directly, but his fury at religious fanatics and those who make excuses for them gives us a perfect idea what he thought.
Dizzy
Linkzy.
Love This Kid: Fourth Grader Speaks Out Against Standardized Testing
Fourth grader Sydney Smoot has some great points!
via@BoingBoing
Three California Legislators Want To Make It Easier To Ruin Young Men's Lives
Are voting parents of sons and people who care about due process all comatose when they vote?
Legislators who brought this bill need to be recalled from office and replaced -- as do any who vote for this bill. The rest of us should at least email them to express our disgust. See below the post for their contact info.
Ashe Schow writes for the WashEx:
Last year California passed a law that defined nearly all sex on college campuses as rape unless proven otherwise. Now, in addition to making it easier to label someone a rapist for just about every sexual encounter, state legislators want to go further to ensure that accused students' lives are severely disrupted -- if not ruined -- by introducing mandatory minimums for their punishment.The mandatory minimum would be a suspension of two years for students found responsible for sexual assault. But bear in mind that the burden of proof already lies with the accused, thanks to California's "yes means yes" law. Accusers do not have to provide any proof that that they failed to give consent or were unable to consent due to incapacitation, and now a guilty finding would carry a minimum punishment under this new proposal.
First they made it easier to brand a student a rapist, and now they want to make it easier to ruin that student's life.
Again, the problem. Nobody should get away with rape without punishment but this isn't about proving rape by any legal standard. It's about pointing a finger and letting the male student prove that there was consent:
Accusers do not have to provide any proof that that they failed to give consent or were unable to consent due to incapacitation,
Again, I go back to my suggestion that parents of sons sending them to campus warn them to avoid all campus women and give their sons an allowance to time-share an escort with their male friends.
Yes, that's what it's come to in yet another rollback of rights -- and especially rights for those evil turds, men -- in what used to be the United States of America.
Who are the assembly members behind the bill?
Evan Low, Democrat:
Capitol Office P.O. Box 942849, Room 2175, Sacramento, CA 94249-0028; (916) 319-2028District Office
20111 Stevens Creek Blvd., Suite 220, Cupertino, CA 95014; (408) 446-2810
Kevin McCarty, Democrat:
Capitol Office P.O. Box 942849, Room 2160, Sacramento, CA 94249-0007; (916) 319-2007District Office
915 L Street, Suite 110, Sacramento, CA 95814; (916) 324-4676
Das Williams, Democrat:
Capitol Office P.O. Box 942849, Room 4005, Sacramento, CA 94249-0037; (916) 319-2037District Office
101 West Anapamu Street, Suite A, Santa Barbara, CA 93101; (805) 564-1649
89 South California Street, Suite F, Ventura, CA 93001; (805) 641-3700
Whaddya Think Of Chris Christie's Social Security Proposal?
Jeff Spross writes at The Week:
For retirees with income over $80,000 a year from other sources, Christie wants to reduce their Social Security benefits. For retirees making over $200,000, he wants to cut off the benefits entirely. And he wants to raise the program's retirement age from 67 to 69, and its early retirement age from 62 to 64. Marco Rubio has proposed a similar set of changes, and you could see his proposal and Christie's as the GOP answer to the growing desire among Democrats to raise Social Security benefits across the board.Christie wants to phase in his changes gradually. But retirees in general, and wealthy retirees in particular, are still a formidable voting bloc. Which is why going after Social Security benefits is generally viewed as political suicide.
But just because a policy proposal is ballsy doesn't mean it's worthwhile on the merits. So let's go through the good and bad here.
In addition to getting a cheer for political bravery, Christie also gets one for his top line point: "Do we really believe that the wealthiest Americans need to take from younger, hard-working Americans to receive what, for most of them, is a modest monthly Social Security check?" It's hard to argue with that; wealthy retirees don't need the money, and it could be better spent elsewhere.
There's also a subtler issue: Bigger Social Security benefits go to richer beneficiaries who brought in more income over the course of their working lives. That's because our political discourse treats Social Security as a savings program; people who made more money while working "saved" more, ergo they should get a bigger payout.
But Social Security doesn't actually work like a bank account or an investment portfolio and it never has. Money comes into the government -- whether via the payroll tax or the income tax -- and then goes out as spending -- whether through Social Security or any other program that gives people aid. The distinction introduced by the trust fund model is a pure abstraction, and American politics clings to it so tightly out of the morally juvenile impulse to tar recipients of other government programs as lazy or shiftless. But retirees are virtuous! So give them government aid, just don't call it "welfare," even though that's what it is.
Leggo
My linko.
Moderate Muslims Exist; Moderate Islam Does Not
Robert Spencer at Jihadwatch:
Johnson here confuses moderate Islam with moderate Muslims. In Ibn Warraq's lapidary formulation, there are many moderate Muslims, but no moderate Islam. In other words, there is no traditional, mainstream sect of Islam or school of Islamic jurisprudence that does not teach warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers. But that doesn't mean that every Muslim is with that program, any more than Jesus' teaching means that every Christian turns the other cheek and loves his enemies.
More from The JPost, from Tawfik Hamid. Who is Hamid? A guy who'd know:
The writer is an Islamic thinker and reformer, and a one-time Islamic extremist from Egypt. He was a member of the terrorist organization JI with Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who later became the second-in-command of al-Qaida. He is currently a senior fellow and chairman of the study of Islamic radicalism at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. www.tawfikhamid.com
His words on Islam:
Saying that "Islam is the religion of Peace" or condemning the IS as being "un-Islamic" without condemning the principle that Muslims must fight non-Muslims to subjugate them to Islam is not just hypocritical but also counterproductive as it hides the true cause of the problem and impedes the efforts to solve it. Similarly, not calling the IS the Islamic State (to avoid using the word Islamic)--as suggested by some Islamic scholars--is not going to change the painful fact that the IS is using an approved and unchallenged principle of the Islamic theology. Such scholars need to work on providing peaceful alternatives to the current violent theology instead of asking the world not to call the IS the Islamic State. In brief, there are certainly many moderate "Muslims." Until the leading Islamic scholars provide a peaceful theology that clearly contradicts the violent views of the IS, however, the existence of a "moderate Islam" must be questioned.
The Hostile State, The Hammer Of Title IX, And Feminism As A Form Of Institutionalized Castration
In the original story by David Lat at Above The Law, a Drexel University professor, Lisa McElroy, apparently inadvertently sent her students a link to anal bead porn instead of a link to a "great article on writing briefs" that her message to them described.
Tamara Tabo writes, also at Above The Law:
Nevertheless, Drexel put the professor on leave pending an investigation under the school's sexual harassment and misconduct policy. David later interviewed Professor Michael A. Olivas of the University of Houston Law Center, an expert in education law. Professor Olivas explained why, under Title IX, universities have little choice but to undertake an investigation in situations like this. Title IX is, of course, the federal civil rights law that forbids sex discrimination at schools receiving federal financial support.Lisa McElroy probably did not intend to create a hostile environment for anyone. She may not have actually offended most of her students. Common sense and compassion will probably lead to a quiet resolution to the case. I hope so.
But what if Lisa McElroy were a man? Would observers be as quick to give the benefit of the doubt?
...As a university employee, my personal experience with Title IX has been discouraging, frustrating, alienating. I have been recruited to join complaints against male colleagues, most recently against someone with whom I was friends outside of our workplace. I have, when I refused to be a complainant, been interviewed as a witness. I have, when interviewed as a witness, been grilled over a multitude of conversations and social interactions that took place away from campus, in the company of adults, that I never expected that I would one day have to explain in a formal setting.
...Title IX doesn't make me feel safer. It makes me feel paranoid. I can hardly imagine how much more paranoid it makes my male colleagues.
What we effectively have now is institutionalized discrimination against men. Due process in campus sexual assault claims? Sorry -- not if you're a man. And if you are a man in college -- one receiving federal funding -- and if you and the woman you had sex with in college were each drunk, there's only one of you who's guilty, and it's the one of you with the penis.
Feminism was supposed to be about equal rights. Feminism has led to -- and too many feminists demand these days -- a witch hunt to root out men who don't think and act in "approved" meek eunuch-like ways. In effect, feminism is has become a form of de facto castration, with the state administering the cut or the dose of the castrating drug.
via @Overlawyered
Racism: The Assumption That It's An Explanation For Every Questioned Behavior
Theodore Dalrymple, in 2009, writes of the indelibility of an accusation of racism:
For the notion that racism is so pervasive and institutionalized that it is everywhere, even where it appears not to be, induces in the susceptible a paranoid state of mind, which then finds racism in every possible situation, in every remark, in every suggestion, in every gesture and expression. It is a charge against which there is no defense.Two incidents in my clinical experience illustrate this nonfalsifiability. In the first, the lawyers for a black defendant asked me to appraise his fitness to plead. The defendant faced charges of assaulting another black man, out of the blue, with an iron bar. The man was obviously paranoid, his speech rambling and incoherent; his lawyers could obtain no sensible instructions from him. I argued that he was unfit to plead. Whereupon the man's sister denounced me as a racist: I had reached my conclusions, she charged, only because her brother was black. Her 15-year-old daughter started to describe to me her frequent difficulties in understanding her uncle, only to be told to shut up by her mother. The lawyers had been unable to obtain instructions from the defendant only because they were white, the sister persisted. Give her brother black lawyers, and he would be perfectly reasonable. Of course, if I had said that he was fit to plead, she could have claimed with equal justice (which is none) that I came to that conclusion only because he was black.
The second case, far more serious, ended in a man's death; the blame was partly mine. A black man in his mid-twenties arrived at our hospital with severely cut wrists. He was nearly exsanguinated and needed a large blood transfusion; his tendons also needed an operation to repair. By all accounts, he had been a perfectly normal man, happily employed, a few weeks before, but suddenly he had stopped eating and become a recluse, barricading himself in his house until police and family broke in to reach him. His suicide attempt was not one of those frivolous gestures with which our hospitals are all too familiar. If ever a man meant to kill himself, this man did.
His mother was by his bedside. I told her that her son should remain in the hospital for treatment (you'd hardly have to be a doctor to realize this). At first she was perfectly agreeable; but then a friend of the young man, himself young and black, arrived and instantly accused me of racism for my supposed desire to lock the patient up. I tried to reason with this friend, but he became agitated and aggressive, even menacing. Whether from conviction or because she, too, felt intimidated, the mother then sided with the friend and started to say that I was racist in wishing to detain her son.
I could have insisted on the powers granted to me by law--asking a court to have social services replace the mother as the patient's nearest relative for the legal purpose of keeping him in treatment. But I did not fancy the process: the young friend had threatened to bring reinforcements, and a riot might have ensued in the hospital. Instead, I agreed to the demand that I let the patient go home. The two said that they would look after him, and I made them sign a paper (of no legal worth) acknowledging that I had warned them of the possible consequences.
This piece of paper they screwed up into a ball and threw away immediately outside the ward, where I found it later. I had made copies, and it was one of these that I sent to the coroner when, six weeks later, the young man gassed himself to death with car exhaust. The notion of ubiquitous, institutionalized racism resulted in his death; and I resolved that it would never intimidate me again.
Slippery
Wet and shiny links.
Denver TSA Groping Scheme Update: What You're Not Hearing From Mainstream Media
I gave a talk on Tuesday at Cal State Fullerton, and was only fleetingly online, so I kind of missed the news cycle, including the story of the Denver TSA groping scheme.
But terrific Chris Bray at TSA News Blog (which cross-posts my TSA blog items) has an update with his investigation to fill in the massive holes in reports by mainstream media:
The TSA has actively protected employees who were allegedly conspiring to commit frequent and serious acts of sexual assault. And the news reports about the event have left out more questions than they've answered, in part because no one appears to have bothered to get the police report -- which took me all of five minutes by email from my living room, a thousand miles from Denver.But before I describe the evidence, let me say this again: The TSA received a tip that some of its employees were sexually assaulting airline passengers in an airport checkpoint, and that the crime was routine and ongoing. And the TSA's response was to protect those employees.
...in November of 2014, the TSA was warned that two of its officers were currently, actively conspiring to commit sexual assault. But the TSA did not notify the police about that anonymous tip. The Denver Police Department is the agency that regularly polices Denver International Airport; the DIA Bureau is listed on this directory.
If the TSA had notified the police about the tip in November, the police could have been watching the checkpoint to observe the groping incident that was instead witnessed by a TSA employee. But the police didn't know about an allegation of active, current, ongoing sexual assault, because the TSA didn't tell them.
And so an act of sexual assault occurred right in front of a TSA investigator -- and the investigator let the victim walk away without approaching him and identifying him.
Then, in March 2015, the TSA informed the police of the allegation, and of the evidence of the event that a TSA investigator had personally witnessed more than a month before. But the TSA didn't notify the police until both employees had been fired -- in other words, until both participants in a scheme to commit sexual assault had been removed from the place in which they allegedly committed it.
It's as if someone called the fire department to report a pile of cold ashes. The TSA waited to call the police until the passengers were long gone, the TSA officers alleged to have committed the crime were long gone, and the crime witnessed by a TSA investigator was more than a month old.
Then Special Agent Charles Stone called the District Attorney's office, asked if charges would be filed in the absence of named victims, got the information that no named victims meant no charges . . . and then told the police detective assigned to the case that it wasn't possible to identify any victims.
...The TSA has had more than its share of embarrassments about employees being arrested for on- and off-duty crimes. In this instance, they received a serious allegation of ongoing sexual assault by TSA employees, and handled it in a way that kept the police from being able to investigate and which prevented prosecutors from filing charges. They protected a TSA agenet who committed a dozen acts of planned and deliberate sexual assault, and they protected the agent(s) who helped him. They let a crime victim walk away unidentified, and they called the police only when it was too late to matter.
Unforgivable.
Police Intimidation -- And Not Bowing To It: Why I Didn't Answer When The Cops Were Banging On My Gate Last Night
I'm so sick of it. Assholes park in our neighborhood and hit our cars. All the damage -- the gashes on my car, front and rear -- is from other drivers who park here hitting it.
I don't hit people's cars. I sometimes go back and forth 10 times to get out of a space so I don't.
Well, last night, I got back from my talk at Cal State Fullerton (after a two-hour nap at Gregg's), and just after I had unloaded my suitcase from my parked car, some jerk of a girl parked in front of me (who had ample space in front of her car) hit my car. To the point where I saw it move.
Pissed me the hell off. Again, she could have made a few turns to get out of the space, but no...she just backed right into my car.
My street is too dark to see whether there was damage. I'll look in the morning.
I got her plate number and told her I was writing it down, then came back out and got her registration and license info. She didn't ask for mine. I went back in the house.
An hour later, there's banging on my gate and a police light outside. I'm not answering. I know my rights. No warrant? No Amy.
They start using a loudspeaker. "Amy Alkon, come out of the house." No word about why.
No Amy.
Somehow, they get through my neighbors' gate and start banging on my windows and my back door. At some point, they can see me, because I'm sitting at my computer wondering whether Walter Moore (a lawyer friend of mine) might be awake.
Still no word about why they want to talk to me -- or whatever.
My neighbors give them my cell phone number. My cell phone doesn't ring at home, so I only saw afterward that they'd called it.
My neighbors then give them my home phone number.
I'm on with Gregg, telling him what's going on, but I decide to answer. (I told Gregg it was probably about the jerk girl who hit my car earlier.)
The cop on the phone tells me to come out. I don't admit that I'm me on the phone. I ask what the deal is. He says that the girl who hit my parked car needs my license insurance info, and that I have to provide it, even though my car was parked.
I tell them I won't come out, but I'll photocopy it and hand it over the fence, which I do, with Gregg on the phone, in case there's any funny business.
After they leave, I think about this. They wanted to play it all mysterious bully -- thinking that I would just obey their order to come out of my house; that I'm like every other idiot citizen who's clueless about their rights.
Had they, when they banged on my gate, said, "We need your license and registration," I would have come to the gate.
This "Amy Alkon, come out of the house" business on the loudspeaker -- nuh-uh. (They should only come so fast and be so responsive when the bar near us constantly violates the noise laws -- to the degree that I can hear booming music in my pillow, which is illegal under LAMC 115.02.)
A friend of mine who is a cop said to NEVER let the police into your home unless they have a warrant. And don't let the fact that you are not a criminal stop you. Also, she advises, don't ever answer questions for the police -- even if you have not committed a crime. The information can be twisted and used against you in court -- as evidence that you actually were there, had motive, or something.
UPDATE: Just found this in a forum about what to do when someone hits your parked car:
If the registered owner of an involved vehicle is present at the scene, he or she shall also, upon request, present his or her driver's license information, if available, or other valid identification to the other involved parties.
The woman who hit my car didn't request my information. I'm guessing she got a tongue-lashing from Daddy about that. Maybe Daddy called the police station. I'm awaiting permission to post what my cop friend said about their way overboard response to a completely inconsequential occurrence, and one in which I was not guilty of anything!
I had a readout on my caller ID last night and I just now called the number. There was breathing and no words the first time I called (from my blocked number). I said I wanted the reason for the ridiculously forceful behavior the night before. The second time, there was a mumble and then the same silence. Here's the readout from my caller ID, Jacob T. Fraijo:
I'm filing a complaint against these officers. It is my suspicion -- though I have no proof -- that this rather outrageous behavior (it sounded like the SWAT team going after some escaped felon) was meant to intimidate and embarrass me as a way of punishing me for standing up for my neighbors' right and mine to have noise laws enforced in my neighborhood.
MORE -- from my friend the cop, who wishes to remain nameless but gave permission to print this email:
You did exactly the right thing! It's bizarre that cops would respond to a non injury accident, property damage only, the car was parked (so you weren't part of the equation) and you were the victim. Why she called was strange. It should cause you to be wary. Again it is something that would be handled by insurance companies. I am not even sure if an exchange of information on your part is required. If you are curious, you can always look up the vehicle code.The fact that police responded, should have rightly given you pause. Why would they for that? Even the cops giving an explanation why they are there, is meaningless, we are allowed to by law lie. Plus their forcefulness, over something that is basically chicken shit, should cause alarms to go off in your head. What if she was spiteful bitch and said you had threaten her (Terrorist Threats?) She could accuse you of that felony easily. You don't have the ability to disprove it. The cops don't have to be in the presence of the commission of the crime. They are however obligated to arrest you (because it's a felony) if they believe her.
FYI- Your neighbors are assholes for giving them your private information, which may now be entered into a data bank. Assholery is my girlfriend's name for it.
There was no upside for you, period! Glad you kept your wits about you. Dealing with cops is inherently stressful. Best case they go away, worst case you get arrested!
Follow-up email from my cop friend:
As a side note, victims don't have to cooperate necessarily. You could refuse a report and/or refuse to prosecute. The likelihood that the damage to your vehicle, rose to the amount, that requires reporting to the DMV, not the police department, is slim. Probably at best you suffered paint transfer. The whole police response is very strange. It makes no sense that the police responded, unless some crime was alleged. If she is indeed claiming a felony occurred let them call a judge and get a warrant for night service! Again you might say something to them that could be misconstrued. People get nervous around the police and run their mouths. If there is really a crime a detective will contact you, don't talk except for getting their info and why they are calling. Even better let it go to voice mail. Say nothing else and contact an attorney if necessary.
UPDATE: The women's insurance company examined my car and hers, found her at fault, and sent me a check for $661 to repair the damage to my bumper.
I Took The Train! And Then The Other Train
I had a pretty great day on Tuesday, which is why I never had time to post more blog items.
I'm doing speaking engagements now, and I gave a talk to hundreds of students and some faculty in the Psych department at Cal State Fullerton about applied science -- how science can be used to solve your problems or problems in society, and how you can maybe even make a career of that.
I loved the people there -- students and faculty -- and it went really well. I got to see the cool lab of my friend, twins researcher Nancy Segal, most recently the author of Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior
The night before, I stayed over at Gregg's and he drove me to Union Station in downtown LA, where I caught a train to Fullerton. It was super-pleasant and only a half hour and cost me $12. This is a photo I took just outside the Fullerton train station.
Gregg had to work until 6 p.m., and Uber was on surge pricing, and I was trying to figure out how expensive it would be to get to his place when I ran into Mr. Train, Tom Zoellner (author of the book Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World--from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief
Tom told me to take the subway -- which I ended up doing, though I snarled at how muddled and hard to decipher the maps are and how there is not a soul to help you. I finally caught the red line to Hollywood and Highland, which was much closer to Gregg's, and he came and picked me up. This is the Hollywood sky as I walked along Hollywood toward Gregg's.
Miss Thing spent the day at Gregg's, extorting walks and other goodies.
This photo of her is from the day before. Joyce Benenson, one of the researchers who gave a talk at the Northeast Evolutionary Psychology Society conference in Boston this past week and weekend, mentioned that she had a book out in passing in an email. I looked it up, and -- coolio -- it was Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes
I'll be having her on my radio show to discuss it soon. Joyce, that is, not Aida, my dog.
"Why Should The Poor Have To Prove They're Worthy Of Govt Benefits?" Is The Wrong Question
In a piece at the WaPo by Emily Badger lamenting attempts to see that the poor aren't, say, spending the welfare check at the strip club, she spits out this:
The second issue with these laws is a moral one: We rarely make similar demands of other recipients of government aid. We don't drug-test farmers who receive agriculture subsidies (lest they think about plowing while high!). We don't require Pell Grant recipients to prove that they're pursuing a degree that will get them a real job one day (sorry, no poetry!). We don't require wealthy families who cash in on the home mortgage interest deduction to prove that they don't use their homes as brothels (because surely someone out there does this). The strings that we attach to government aid are attached uniquely for the poor.
We shouldn't be subsidizing farmers to begin with. Can't make it in one business? Go into another.
We should require government grant recipients to prove that their degree will get them a real job one day.
If you're getting free or low-cost money, there should be strings.
Chimpylinks
Eep, eep, eep...
Rent-Free Housing For Students At Senior Acres In The Netherlands
Smart idea -- giving students free rent in a senior living facility in exchange for spending 30 hours a month acting as "good neighbors" to the seniors around them.
Carey Reed writes at The Rundown about this project, aimed at warding off the negative effects of aging.:
Officials at the nursing home say students do a variety of activities with the older residents, including watching sports, celebrating birthdays and, perhaps most importantly, offering company when seniors fall ill, which helps stave off feelings of disconnectedness.Both social isolation and loneliness in older men and women are associated with increased mortality, according to a 2012 report by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
"The students bring the outside world in, there is lots of warmth in the contact," Sijpkes said.
Six students from area universities Saxion and Windesheim share the building with approximately 160 seniors. They are allowed to come and go as they please, as long as they follow one rule: Do not be a nuisance to the elderly.
Sijpkes joked that this is not difficult for the younger residents, especially since most of the older people living at the home are hard of hearing.
Via @VPostrel, who's been "proposing this for years, but also with artists."
Lunks
Links with more muscles than sense.
How Much Is That Pretend Security In The Window?
Yes, these are the bright lights providing "security" at America's airports.
@rogerkimball
WHY DO WE PUT UP WITH THIS? TSA agent to friend of mine: "What's this?" "A fountain pen." "Never heard of it. It's sharp, looks dangerous."
Valiantly Protecting Consumers From Saving Money On A Ride To LAX
Many major cities or even perhaps most have streamlined, affordable ways to get to their airports. Los Angeles is not among them.
Los Angeles-based Fast Company reporter Neal Ungerleider has an op-ed in the LA Times calling for the city to start letting Uber and other ride-sharing services to pick up passengers at LAX.
I'm with him on this.
I was just in Boston, and I ended up staying in not such a great neighborhood, safety-wise, plus it was pretty far from Boston Common, where I needed to for the ev psych conference. Well, while a taxi ride would have been, I'm guessing, $25, it cost me only $10 or thereabouts for an Uber. And I got to Logan Sunday morning for $21.
Yet, here in LA, city government and special interest groups (taxis!) have kept the ride-sharing services from picking up at LAX -- while curtailing the number of taxis that can operate in the city. As Ungerleider writes:
Long before anyone had ever used a smartphone app to hail a car, the taxi supply to LAX was strictly regulated and artificially limited.According to research by L.A. Weekly's Gene Maddaus, there are about 2,300 cabs allowed to operate within the city. Each is assigned a letter from A to E, and may only complete airport pickups on the day corresponding to their letter. This rotation system, the result of an agreement between taxi companies and LAWA, means longer and slower taxi queues for travelers than is necessary.
Many LAX customers would choose to circumvent this silliness by ordering an Uber -- if only that were possible. As the law stands, ride-sharing services can drop passengers off at LAX. But only Uber's black cars and SUVs with commercial licenses can pick them up.
These luxury services cost $75 to downtown and $59 to Santa Monica. If Lyft and Uber's more mass-market products were offered for LAX pickups, fares would surely be cheaper. (It's difficult to predict by exactly how much, because of airport fees. But here's what we do know: The mass-market UberX charges 90 cents a mile in Los Angeles as opposed to $3.55 a mile for black-car service.)
Also, I love that these drivers are smallbusinesspeople on wheels. And I particularly liked my driver to Logan this morning, Jeremias, who arrived in a suit, tie, and a snazzy hat. 
Knottypinelinks
Slap me some woodgrain.
Gwyneth On The FoodTown Cross
In the latest in stunt social justice, Gwyneth Paltrow is going to eat off a $29 weekly allowance to simulate the the food stamp allowance for families...while living where she lives, wearing what she wears, and all the rest. (I'm guessing the servants will prepare those beans.)
Her tweet with the photo is here.
I like this tweeter's advice to Paltrow:
@dstfelix
.@GwynethPaltrow @RidingShotgunLA sell all your shoes and give them the money instead
Veronica Doglake
Per my request, Gregg is sending me pix of Aida, my wee Chinese Crested, while I'm on the plane home. They just got back from their walk. 
My Labia Will Send Logan Airport TSA Thug Melendy A Postcard
My labia and I just got through a very gropey gropedown by TSA worker Melendy, a sturdy little blond white woman at Logan International Airport. To the point where I think they're now on speaking terms.
TSA thug Melendy got all up the side between my thigh and my labia -- four times. It was so disgusting. As was her groping my hair and reaching in my pants at the waistband with her gloved hand so deeply that she touched the top of my underwear.
This is security?
This is traveler-intimidating, security puppet show bullshit -- in a pretend cop costume.
TSA thug Melendy also reached in my shirt at the top. Gross.
Oh, and at the beginning of the screening, she asked whether she was to give me a "standard" or "modified" patdown. "What's a modified patdown," I asked TSA thug Melendy.
"I don't have to tell you that," TSA thug Melendy replied.
Here I am, flying back from an ev psych conference and I'm forced to have a woman who is not my gynecologist give me a breast and vagina exam. Yuck.
Prostitution is a cleaner way to earn a living groping strangers' bodies. You get paid for that, too, but the people you do it to are consenting.
Logan, by the way, is one of the top 20 airports where TSA thugs are most likely to steal your stuff.
Most of the TSA thugs I had any interaction with today earnestly told me they're protecting us.
Yes, people whose job choices amount to taking money for violating other citizens' bodies and right to not be searched without probable cause -- reasonable suspicion that they are committing or going to commit a crime -- are about as likely to find a terrorist as my dog is.
We find terrorists through having trained intelligence officers doing probable cause-based policing, not by security theatering every person who wants to fly to an ev psych conference or to visit Grandma.
Pregnancy As A Mother/Fetus Battle For Resources
At NEEPS -- the NorthEast Evolutionary Psychology conference this weekend in Boston -- we heard about biologist David Haig's thinking on pregnancy. It's actually well-described by Carl Zimmer in this New York Times piece (though Haig calls himself a "biologist" and not an "evolutionary biologist" as Zimmer does in the piece).
In short, pregnancy can be awfully dangerous to the mother, and Haig doesn't think this is an accident. (Sneaky fuckers, those fetuses.)
Dr. Haig argues, a mother and her unborn child engage in an unconscious struggle over the nutrients she will provide it.Dr. Haig's theory has been gaining support in recent years, as scientists examine the various ways pregnancy can go wrong.
..."We tend to think of genes as parts of a machine working together," Dr. Haig said. "But in the realm of genetic conflict, the cooperation breaks down."
In a 1993 paper, Dr. Haig first predicted that many complications of pregnancy would turn out to be produced by this conflict. One of the most common complications is pre-eclampsia, in which women experience dangerously high blood pressure late in pregnancy. For decades scientists have puzzled over pre-eclampsia, which occurs in about 6 percent of pregnancies.
Dr. Haig proposed that pre-eclampsia was just an extreme form of a strategy used by all fetuses. The fetuses somehow raised the blood pressure of their mothers so as to drive more blood into the relatively low-pressure placenta. Dr. Haig suggested that pre-eclampsia would be associated with some substance that fetuses injected into their mothers' bloodstreams. Pre-eclampsia happened when fetuses injected too much of the stuff, perhaps if they were having trouble getting enough nourishment.
In the past few years, Ananth Karumanchi of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues have gathered evidence that suggests Dr. Haig was right. They have found that women with pre-eclampsia had unusually high levels of a protein called soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase 1, or sFlt1 for short.
Other labs have replicated their results. Dr. Karumanchi's group has done additional work that indicates that this protein interferes with the mother's ability to repair minor damage to her blood vessels. As that damage builds up, so does her blood pressure. And as Dr. Haig predicted, the protein is produced by the fetus, not the mother.
Shitty little ingrate, right from the start.
I'm reminded of Steve Gaulin and William Lassek's research on the bimbo body -- and their finding that women with an hourglass figure and big boobs (and very importantly, hip fat rather than belly fat) seem to be more fertile, to produce smarter children, and to have their children take less from them cognitively during their pregnancy. And yes, depressingly, children do seem to rob mommy cognitively during pregnancy, according to Gaulin and Lassek's work.
Getting back to Haig, he later told me about moss -- that it actually communicates with fellow, uh, mossy bits. I hope he'll come back and present on that next year, and no, I'm not kidding.
Boston Baked Beanielinks
Luckily, I managed to avoid beans the entire time I was in Boston. Not a fan.
When Boyfriends Babysit
Gregg is babysitting my normally elegant wee Chinese Crested, Aida -- who now has the hairdo of a crazy street wino.
"Believe The Survivor Syndrome," A Media Trend
Cathy Young, one of the handful of women whom I respect for caring about and calling for fairness for both men and women, has a piece up at Real Clear Politics on the media's "willingness to treat uncorroborated narratives of victimization as fact." Young says this may be "partially due to sensationalism":
But it also reflects a climate in which any suggestion that a woman who says she was raped may be lying is often treated as "victim-blaming" or "rape apology." Let's not forget that skeptics who questioned the Rolling Stone story before its unraveling were widely and viciously attacked as prejudiced against rape victims. Today, the feminist party line is that Rolling Stone let down sexual assault victims by not fact-checking Jackie's account; but back in December, it was that insisting on more scrutiny and corroboration of accounts of sexual assault would silence victims' voices.Given the very real history of widespread ugly biases against women who reported sexual violence, the reluctance to accuse women of "crying rape" is understandable. But the assumption that "women don't lie" leads to an equally ugly bias. Yet the CJR report itself downplays the problem of false allegations, making the familiar claim that only 2 to 8 percent of rape reports are false. Using the same statistics, New York University professor Clay Shirky writes in The New Republic that Jackie is a rare aberration: "If someone says she was raped, she is almost certainly telling the truth."
In fact, this estimate is based on studies in which some eight percent of rape reports are proven to be groundless or fabricated--but the majority remain unresolved. If every sexual assault complaint that that can be neither substantiated nor disproved is treated as presumptively true, that is a textbook case of "presumed guilty" (at least when specific defendants are involved).
On a lesser scale in terms of the type of crime "crime," this is also what was done to Bora Zivkovic, the former blogs editor of Scientific American. He was accused of "sexual harassment" for behaviors that in no way met any such standards.
Nevertheless, people -- including, largely, self-proclaimed, chest-thumping "skeptics" -- all piled on and believed the women who squawked "J'accuse!" There was nary a question of what was Bora's side of this, whether it met standards for sexual harassment, etc. There was just a quick witch-hunt and the ruin of a man I perceive to be a good guy.
Cathy Young's ending also fits in Bora's case:
In a Monday press conference, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism dean Steve Coll urged the media to "have a conversation" on better reporting on sexual violence--while dean of academic affairs Sheila Coronel called the Rolling Stone story a "useful case on how to report, with sensitivity, about victims of sexual assault while also verifying and corroborating the information they provide." This is sound advice. But the conversation must start with the uncomfortable fact that, as this story illustrates, those who tell such stories are not always victims.
Handout City: Why Can't We All Be "Too Big To Fail"?
The rich get...their hands out.
The latest: A NYC taxi mogul contends that he, like the banks, is "too big to fail."
Used to be that NYC taxi medallions went for serious coin -- more than a million dollars. It was an artificially high price caused by government limits on the number of taxis they could be issued for.
Josh Barro writes for The New York Times:
One of New York City's largest taxi fleet owners is asking for a bailout.Evgeny Freidman, known as Gene, said in an interview Thursday that the taxi industry, like the financial industry, was too big to fail. He would like the city to guarantee taxi medallion loans, which would induce banks to extend more credit to fleet owners like him, and he compares this approach to the federal government's actions to save large banks and insurers in 2008.
"I still see Bernanke saying, 'I hate A.I.G.; I don't want to give them any more money, but I have to,' " he said, referring to the former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and the large insurer that was bailed out in 2008.
Mr. Freidman's problem is not unlike that of any homeowner who bought real estate in the early part of the century thinking prices could only go up. In New York, medallions, the license that is required to operate a yellow taxi, are fixed in number, and their price rose for decades because of increased demand and restricted supply.
Oopsy. Or rather, Ubersy!
As a NYT commenter "another view" writes:
Privatize profits and socialize risks, huh Gene.
via @adamkissell
Evo Linko
Paleolinky.
Security Idiocy Has Gone International
Dumbskulls at Heathrow confiscated actress Alyssa Milano's pumped breast milk, telling her that they would have let it through if she had a baby with her.
Her tweet:
@Alyssa_Milano
(2 of 2) They said they would let the pumped milk through if I had the baby with me. Why would I need to pump if I had the baby with me????
Another tweet:
@Alyssa_Milano
.@HeathrowAirport Why can you test my toiletries to make sure they are safe but you have to throw away my breast milk?
The Most Violent Age? Hint: If You're Socking Somebody To Steal Their Car, It's Probably A Plastic One Driven By Batman
No, according to Steven Pinker's talk today at the Northeast Evolutionary Psychology Society conference in Boston, the most violent ages aren't, oh, 16 to 25.
It turns out that the "terrible twos" really are pretty terrible. Pinker pointed out that this is the time that humans are most violent -- constantly kicking, punching, and biting.
If we gave all the 2-year-olds guns, Pinker noted, we'd really be in trouble.
The reasons Pinker points to for the substantial decline in violence over the centuries (and especially recently) include: The spread of democracy, literacy, trade, and cosmopolitanism. He contends they help us "increasingly control our impulses, empathize with others, bargain rather than plunder, debunk toxic ideologies, and deploy our powers of reason to reduce the temptations of violence."
I asked Pinker a question I actually knew the answer to (via evolutionary psychologist Catherine Salmon) but wanted to get out there -- whether the spread of Internet access and, in turn, access to porn, seemed to decrease sexual violence. The answer is, it seems very possible.
Pinker didn't seem familiar with that research. He mentioned some papers by Owen Jones, a lawyer with an evolutionary orientation. But I think I found at least one of the papers Catherine (and somebody else I've read) probably referenced (the chapter she wrote on this is at home in LA). Via a Steve Chapman article at reason:
How can it be explained? Perhaps the most surprising and controversial account comes from Clemson University economist Todd Kendall, who suggests that adult fare on the Internet may essentially inoculate against sexual assaults.In a paper presented at Stanford Law School last year, he reported that, after adjusting for other differences, states where Internet access expanded the fastest saw rape decline the most. A 10 percent increase in Internet access, Kendall found, typically meant a 7.3 percent reduction in the number of reported rapes. For other types of crime, he found no correlation with Web use. What this research suggests is that sexual urges play a big role in the incidence of rape -- and that pornographic Web sites provide a harmless way for potential predators to satisfy those desires.
That, of course, is only a theory, and the evidence he cites is not conclusive. States that were quicker to adopt the Internet may be different in ways that also serve to prevent rape. It's not hard to think of other explanations why sexual assaults have diminished so rapidly -- such as DNA analysis, which has been an invaluable tool in catching and convicting offenders.
...But if expanding the availability of hard-core fare doesn't prevent rapes, we can be confident from the experience of recent years that it certainly doesn't cause such crimes.
More on Kendall's paper and crime drops from Slate's Steven E. Landsburg.
Pinker's book on the decline of violence: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Shaken Baby Syndrome May Be A Bullshit Diagnosis That's Sent A Bunch Of Innocent People To Jail
Susan Goldsmith, whom I grew up with in Michigan (though she's a few years older) is a terrific investigative reporter, and just put out a documentary, "The Syndrome," on "Shaken Baby Syndrome" and the medical and legal industry that's risen up to promote the notion that violent baby-shaking by adults who snap has killed thousands of infants.
In the LA Weekly, Amy Nicholson has the story about what Goldsmith lays out in her film:
A diagnosis of Shaken Baby Syndrome was supposed to explain mysterious deaths in babies without bone fractures, bumps, bruises or neck injuries. How did they die? A theory arose that babies were under attack by loved ones. For decades, doctors in the U.S., and dozens of other countries were trained to look for three internal symptoms that experts claimed were proof of a powerful shaking assault on a tiny child: brain swelling, blood on the surface of the brain, and blood behind the eyes. Well-meaning doctors were instructed that these symptoms could only occur due to intense shaking--if a parent or babysitter said the child had fallen or suddenly fell ill, that was a lie.Proponents of the theory grew so powerful in political circles, where elected officials were keen to show they supported helpless children, that laws were passed across the U.S. requiring a doctor who spotted any of the three symptom to alert authorities. Failure to report symptoms, even if a doctor found the parents' explanation made sense, could result in fines, civil lawsuits, or even jail time.
...The Syndrome interviews several medical experts who openly dispute the once-undisputed Shaken Baby Syndrome theory. Three major skeptics are Dr. Patrick Barnes of Stanford, who once believed it and now testifies in court against it, Dr. Ronald Uscinski of Georgetown who decries the hysteria as "pure Hell," and pathologist Dr. John Plunkett, who tested bio-mechanical dummies to determine how much shaking was needed to scramble the brains of an infant or toddler.
Plunkett's findings have sparked a growing acceptance that the thin science underlying Shaken Baby Syndrome theory is wrong. For one, the three hidden symptoms such as blood behind the eyes can't be created without causing whiplash to the neck. Yet, The Syndrome points out that there has never been any serious neck damage in any of the Shaken Baby Syndrome cases, according to records from hundreds of prosecutions.
Further, between a quarter to a half of all infants in America are born with blood leaks in the brain, a condition that can compound injuries that could result when an infant suffers a short, accidental fall--the sort of mishap Chadwick has long instructed physicians to consider a lie.
Goldsmith's film stresses that a short fall can cause 50 to 100 times more trauma to a baby than shaking, and as a reminder, points to the adult deaths of Natasha Richardson and Gary Coleman, both of whom died after innocuous-seeming tumbles. Yet the mandatory requirement that doctors must alert authorities to the three "symptoms" drilled into them since medical school has lead to doctors, consciously or not, to settle on an SBS diagnosis without exhausting accidents and underlying medical problems as causes.
FrozenTundraLinks
Okay, so it's not that bad here in Boston. But when you're used to Venice, California, well, it kind of is.
How Physically Able Are Women For Combat? Not Very.
Aaron MacLean writes at the Free Beacon that an experiment admitting women to a Marine Infantry Officer ended with zero female grads this time and a total of 29 attempts by female officers as failures:
The Marine Corps Times reports that the final iteration of the experiment concluded when the two female volunteers participating in the current IOC class in Quantico, Virginia, were dropped on April 2 during the grueling Combat Endurance Test, a gateway evaluation that occurs on the first day of the course. Nine male students (out of a total of 90 who began) also were cut.This result means that zero of twenty-nine attempts by female officers at the course have been successful.
The senior leadership of the Department of Defense has made no secret of their intent to integrate women into ground combat arms units across the military, insisting that the services "validate" their physical standards to ensure that they are "current."
Related: Wayne State law professor and evolutionary psychologist Kingsley Browne on why coed combat will mean more dead men.
Take-No-Responsibility Feminism
It is astonishing to me that so many young women are growing up so wildly and willfully naive -- and it's the naivete of entitlement...the thinking that you can do absolutely anything and nothing bad should happen to you.
And no, no one has a right to take advantage of you and have sex with you when you're blind-drunk or passed out, but the reality is, bad things can happen when you let yourself be totally out of control. The "logic" that allows women to go to frat parties and get so out of it that they don't remember what happened the next day -- well apply that to getting blind-drunk and walk home across the diag and just hoping you don't get mugged.
And then there's the notion that I see here and there that you can use a man for vacation housing or temporary housing -- sleep in his bed -- and expect him to him behave as if you are two nuns sharing sleeping quarters.
Who raises women to think this way? I somehow had a sense that I had to be personally responsible -- which is why I got really drunk at 15 when I went with my parents to my cousin's wedding. If something happened to me, my dad would be right there. (He laughed at me as I threw up at the side of the road.)
I've also done risky things with men -- but each time, I assessed that there could be consequences and accepted them. I didn't have a fairy dust and unicorn farts view of the world in which I had or have some sparkly forcefield surrounding me and protecting me from all the things that could possibly happen.
Christina Nehring writes at ELLE:
Take a not-untypical story that originated recently, tore its way through the Internet, and sparked international debates on Facebook and Twitter. It was written by a 20-year-old woman named Sophia Katz who made a trip to New York to network for her prospective writing career, after accepting a twentysomething editor's invitation to stay at his place. "Stan" had e-mailed her that she was "welcome to sleep in my bed--ha ha."Sophia accepted his invitation, appeared in the editor's Brooklyn pad soon afterward, and spent many days accompanying him to readings and nights sleeping next to him in his bed. On the second night, "we were sitting on his bed and he began kissing me.... I had no interest in making out with him or having sex with him but had a feeling that it would 'turn into an ordeal' if I rejected him.... I knew I had nowhere else to stay, and if I upset him, then I might be forced to leave." When she hears his roommates enter, she speaks up: "Stan, please, can we just do this later? Your walls are really thin."
He reassures her that his roomies don't mind.
"Wait," she says, "aren't you going to use a condom?"
"Please don't make me do that..." he implores. "I'm clean. Are you?"
"There was no way for me to win," she declares, and gives herself over to the advances of her host. The scenario repeated itself again and again over the several days she remained in his flat. Back home, her networking trip over, she wrote about the incident.
What person thinks that a man invites you to come stay with him and sleep in his bed and that this will be all there is to it?
"I had nowhere else to stay." Meaning, "I thought I'd freeload rather than earning money or searching out one of the rooming houses that still exist for young women." When I first got to New York, I stayed at the 47th Street Y. Shower down the hall and all that.
Also, if you put yourself in a situation like this woman did, where you finally just get tired of the "ordeal" of turning him down, who really is to blame -- but you?
Nehring says this, too, about Sophia's "trading sex for rent" scheme:
As difficult as it can be to judge the suffering of others, it seems clear that she was not overpowered by Stan so much as she tacitly accepted a sex-for-rent deal with him. Worrying that erotic activity will be overheard by acquaintances a few feet away--rather than, say, signaling to them for help--suggests assent. As does, perhaps, continuing to have sex with him after he brushed off her suggestion that he use a condom. To claim that Sophia presented to Stan "every iteration of 'no' that a person could muster," as a Salon writer and many others have done--is simply inaccurate.Let me stop here to say that Stan is a jerk, a boor, and an opportunist. His encounter with Sophia was seedy. Had I stayed in his bed that night and subsequent nights, I'd regret it very badly too. But regret is not the same thing as being victimized.
The fact that a number of young (and less young) women feel moved to equate the two suggests a real fragility in our culture. As sex has become an expectation between available single persons rather than a surprise or a transgression, it has also become less tempting and meaningful. And as touch--via "Cuddle Up To Me" parlors, Tinder-style apps, and ubiquitous massage and sensual "service" providers--has become available on tap, it has grown easy for a person "tapped" to feel used and unsatisfied--especially when she is emotionally invested. But these are the risks of freedom.
And if, by our teens, we have not followed Hamlet's advice to Ophelia to "get thee to a nunnery," there are endless risks and trade-offs we embrace in our lives. The fruit of these risks can make us legitimately unhappy or unproud or angry--just as they can enchant, inspire, and transform us for the better. Either way, the attempt to eliminate them, via Big Brother-like legislation and finger-pointing, is a cure often worse than the disease.
...It's worse because it turns the clock back on gender equality and gender relations both. It cuts the breeze of freedom, exploration, and responsibility that was once integral to the American dream.
...When everyone is a rape victim, no one is a rape victim. When enfranchised women who take their chances with men they find attractive or useful are equated with those who are forced to have sex via threats or deeds, everybody loses: The enfranchised women are cheated of the personal equality and responsibility for which their feminist forebears fought. The women assaulted are robbed of legitimacy because those who might hear of their plight are increasingly desensitized to the concept of rape and fail to act with conviction to punish and prevent it.
via @cathyyoung63
Igloo
Chillylinks.
I'm in Boston for an ev psych conference and the AEPS (Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society) business meeting (I'm president) and it is cold and rainy here.
Tomorrow, Thursday, I need to find a coffee shop to write in near Suffolk School of Law on Tremont Street. Need a plug; don't need Wifi. Need a place where they won't be mad if I sit for a long period of time. (I will buy coffee and food!)
Suggest away!
PS Did AirBnB and Uber. So far, so good!
Violated At The Airport By TSA Thug Sharonda Juana Walker (not sure on the spelling of "Sharonda")
I'm calling on everyone to name the name of the TSA thug who violates your body and right to probable cause (as a reason for search).
There's not an ounce of probable cause to search me at the airport -- as I was today at LAX. To violate my body. To touch my breasts. To grope my hair. To have the blue latex-gloved hand of Sharonda Juana Walker, feel inside my turtleneck.
And no, I don't go through the scanners, and the metal detector line wasn't an option at just before 7 a.m., when I got to the airport to leave for...no, not an ISIS meet-and-greet but an evolutionary psychology conference in Boston. Apparently, the sparse traffic at the airport at this hour leaves them plenty of time to feel up travelers.
A NOTE: I'm not quite sure I got the spelling of "Sharonda" right because she first told me her name when she saw me looking at her nametag, but then when she was done pointlessly feeling me up, she refused to let me see her name or tell me it again.
Her "Walker" name bar pinned to her chest also said "lead," which I think means she's in charge of something. Maybe she's the head groper on the floor? And because I couldn't take a photo of myself and her as she was groping me, she's a big, tall, overweight black woman with odd ice cream scoops of hair billowing on her head.
Yes, the jobs program (and the payout program to the connected entitled like Michael Chertoff), aka the TSA, continues to grope citizens at the airport, sans probable cause.
The notion that anyone who has to work for the TSA to earn a living -- basically repurposed mall food court clerks, if that -- could catch a terrorist with an IQ over the highway speed limit is absurd.
The reality is, anyone smart enough to survive in this blog comments section could figure out a way to get an explosive device into the airport and onto a plane.
And the sad reality is, the TSA continues because so many Americans go through without complaint -- as their bodies and rights are violated in a pointless exercise, making a mockery of our constitutional right to probable cause: reasonable suspicion we've committed a crime before we are searched.
The despicable Sharonda Juana Walker's comment to me as she was groping my body: "You can always take the bus."
Showing how ignorant she is. She doesn't even know that the very agency she is a "lead" for detains and searches Americans sans probable cause at bus stations.
The tone of the "bus!" comment reinforces my suspicion that some of the TSA workers love groping people who get to fly places -- as a sort of revenge against them for their ability to travel and to afford travel, and as a way to have power over people they normally would have no contact with.
"Have an awesome flight!" she yelled to me.
Prostitution is a far more noble profession than working as a TSA thug. Not that I have a problem with prostitution. But to earn money for providing a service to a consenting adult is a moral thing to do, while to earn money to violate the bodies and constitutional rights of your fellow citizens is something that every TSA thug needs to be called on -- and vocally shamed for.
And a note on that. When you go through the TSA line and you are violated, name names. On blogs, on Facebook, on Twitter; anywhere you can.
It is reprehensible to violate the bodies and right to probable cause of fellow Americans for money, and anyone who does that should be called out for that.
Hey, Joan Walsh Anglund: We're The Government And We'll Take Your Writing And Call It Maya Angelou's
Poet and children's book author Joan Walsh Anglund wrote a line in her 1967 poetry book, "A Cup of Sun":
A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
But never mind that. A bunch of Internet quote sites say the line was Maya Angelou's (probably because it's reminiscent of the title and a line from her 1969 autobiography, "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings"), so the government stuck the line on a stamp about her. Jonathan Turley gets it right on this:
I view the use of another author's quote for this commemorative stamp to be terribly insulting and embarrassing but it did not seem to bother the U.S. Postal Service. Spokesman Mark Saunders admitted that he was unaware of the Anglund quote, but told the Washington Post that many people mistakenly attribute the quote to Angelou. This includes President Obama who used the quote, pointing out that "numerous references" attributed the quote to Angelou.Indeed, President Obama attributed the same quote to Angelou during the presentation of the 2013 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal. Again a bizarre and embarrassing use of another author's work. Saunders however dug deeper into the hole and insisted "The sentence held great meaning for her and she is publicly identified with its popularity." Perhaps but it is not her work. It is like a stamp honoring the great architect Mies van der Rohe with the image of a Le Corbusier building.
What is truly bizarre is that between the Postal Service and President Obama, Anglund appears to be losing credit for her own writing. It is now becoming "associated" with Angelou and that appears to be enough for the government.
The government's standard is truly amazing -- on many things. I ordered some black T-shirts off eBay in early March. I never got them. I checked the tracking. It reads -- from March 5 -- that the shirts are still on the truck, waiting to be delivered.
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.
Execution By Cop: Sickening Murder By Cop Of An Unarmed, Fleeing Black Man
It was a traffic stop. The guy was running away, posing no danger to the officer.
Michael S. Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo write in The New York Times that a South Carolina police officer was charged with murder in a black man's death. The video -- and what the officer did: shoot an unarmed, fleeing man in the back -- is horrible and sickening to watch.
From the story:
A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder on Tuesday after a video surfaced showing him shooting and killing an apparently unarmed black man in the back while he ran away.The officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, had said he feared for his life because the man took his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday. A video, however, shows the officer firing eight times as the man -- Walter L. Scott, 50 -- fled.
...The shooting unfolded after Officer Slager stopped the driver of a Mercedes-Benz with a broken taillight, according to police reports. Mr. Scott ran away, and Officer Slager chased him into a grassy lot that abuts a muffler shop. He fired his Taser, an electronic stun gun, but it did not stop Mr. Scott, according to police reports.
Moments after the struggle, Officer Slager reported on his radio, "Shots fired and the subject is down. He took my Taser," according to police reports.
But the video, which was taken by a bystander and provided to The New York Times by Mr. Scott's lawyer, presents a different account. The video begins in the vacant lot, apparently moments after Officer Slager fired his Taser. Wires, which carry the electrical current from the stun gun, appear to be extending from Mr. Scott's body as the two men tussle and Mr. Scott turns to run.
Something -- it is not clear whether it is the stun gun -- is either tossed or knocked to the ground behind the two men and Officer Slager draws his gun, the video shows. When the officer fires, Mr. Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.
The officer then runs back toward where the initial scuffle occurred and picks something off the ground. Moments later, he drops an object near Mr. Scott's body, the video shows.
As David Burge -- @iowahawkblog -- tweeted:
@iowahawkblog This is a goddamned obscenity. Surprised he didn't shoot the cameraman too. #WalterScott
Also sickening is the description in the article of how Scott was just left there on the ground, face-down and cuffed, "for several minutes after the shooting." Police reports claim the officers performed CPR. That's not what the camera said. After those "several minutes":
A second officer arrives, puts on blue medical gloves and attends to Mr. Scott, but is not shown performing CPR. As sirens wail in the background, a third officer later arrives, apparently with a medical kit, but also not seen performing CPR.
How many others have had their lives ended in a similar way by this particular cop?
Watch The Pho: Seattle's Minimum Wage Hike And The Effect On Cheap Eats And Cheap Eateries
Thanh Tan writes in the Seattle Times that to see the effects of the minimum wage hike there in the coming months, follow the pho -- the noodle soup meal that is "Vietnam's most popular comfort food":
Some restaurants might respond by adding service fees and increasing menu prices. Ivar's recently announced plans to end tipping and pay all employees $15 an hour.A seafood mainstay can do that. Pho is different. It exists to be large, tasty and cheap.
Quynh-Vy Pham's family owns four Pho Bac restaurants in the city. Her parents opened the original shop at the corner of South Jackson Street and Rainier Avenue South in 1982.
Pham says they will hold on to current prices -- $7.75 for a small bowl, according to the restaurant's website -- as long as possible. Like so many others pho proprietors, their restaurant is not designed to be an Ethan Stowell or Tom Douglas establishment where customers expect to pay premium prices.
"It's hard for people to pay $15 for a 'to pho,' " Pham says, referring to the Vietnamese translation of a bowl of soup. "The culture of Vietnamese restaurants means we have to be price aggressive."
...Taylor Hoang, owner of five Pho Cyclo Cafe restaurants, says the [ethnic business owners'] coalition requested a training wage or an exemption for microbusinesses with fewer than 10 employees.
They got nothing.
Anxiety is widespread, Hoang says, because the city is still releasing and translating information for non-English-speaking communities. For her, increasing the price on a product like pho is harder than it seems.
"Pho is not categorized as fine dining. People who eat this type of food have a certain expectation in their mind, so they are very price sensitive," she warns. " If they have to pay more than $10 plus gratuity and tax, it's no longer an affordable luxury for customers who are used to eating with us a few times a week."
To reduce expenses, Hoang is considering making their meatballs in-house using machinery rather than the handcrafted meatballs they commission from a local producer. Same goes for the tofu and hand-sliced rare steak.
"There are different ways we can cut our costs. At the same time, that's going to trickle down to supporting businesses," she says.
A review of "burgeoning literature on the employment effects of minimum wages - in the United States and other countries - that was spurred by the new minimum wage research beginning in the early 1990s" by UC econ prof David Neumark and Fed Reserve deputy director of research and stats William Wascher:
A sizable majority of the studies surveyed in this monograph give a relatively consistent (although not always statistically significant) indication of negative employment effects of minimum wages. In addition, among the papers we view as providing the most credible evidence, almost all point to negative employment effects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries. Two other important conclusions emerge from our review. First, we see very few - if any - studies that provide convincing evidence of positive employment effects of minimum wages, especially from those studies that focus on the broader groups (rather than a narrow industry) for which the competitive model predicts disemployment effects. Second, the studies that focus on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups.
And from page 3 of a paper published at Alec.org, a problem commenters here have mentioned before -- minimum wage jobs were never intended to be a way to support a family for life but a way into the working economy.
Misconception: Minimum wage earners are trapped in poverty.TRUTH: Minimum wage jobs are viewed by many as the first step in a long career path. Nearly two-thirds of minimum wage earners gain pay raises within the first year of employ- ment.viii From 1981 to 2004, the median annual growth in wages for minimum wage employ- ees was nearly six times that of employees earning more than the minimum wage.
Women who have children out of wedlock with little means of supporting them bring those children up in poverty and tend to funnel those children into the go-nowhere jobs. That, however, is not addressed by, say, black leaders like Jesse Jackson, despite a reported 70-some percent of black women bringing children into the world as single mothers, perpetuating the cycle of poverty.
via @Mark_J_Perry
It's Easier To Not "Care About" Money When You Live in A $10.5 Million Gramercy Park Apartment
Chelsea Clinton also, with zero experience, got a $600,000-a-year salary for occasional reporting for NBC.
She told Fast Company in an interview in the May print edition by Danielle Sacks:
"I was curious if I could care about (money) on some fundamental level, and I couldn't."
She was talking about why she gave up gigs like the NBC dealie to join her family's philanthropic foundation.
Again, far easier to not care about money when not having it will never, ever be one of your worries.
via the New York Daily News
Terry Bressi Stopped 300-Plus Times By In-Country Border Patrol
We aren't supposed to have to "prove our innocence on demand," says Bressi. It's not what this country was founded on. Yet, that's exactly what he's had to do at in-country immigration checkpoints.
"This is not increasing our security, in fact, it's making us less secure. It's just feeding an empire building, it's feeding agency budgets, and job security for various law enforcement agencies," says Bressi.
Here's another video with Robert Trudell showing what goes on on "these suspicionless stops" -- and which shows him refusing to go along:
Oyster
Links on the half-shell.
God Is Imaginary
50 simple proofs by Marshall Brain, who writes, "It is easy to prove to yourself that God is imaginary. The evidence is all around you."
I would add that you just need to want to reason and do it, which many, many people (including religious people) do not.
For example, check out Proof #14 -- Examine Jesus' miracles. An excerpt:
If someone were to come to you today and say, "I am God!", what would you do? Yes, you would immediately ask for proof. Of course you would. And you would not want goofy proof.You would want real, solid, tangible proof.No normal person, and I mean no one, would accept anything less than rock solid proof from a person who claims to be God.
Why should it be any different with Jesus? Jesus was a man who claims to be God. If he is God, then he ought to be able to prove it in a real, inimitable way. If he cannot prove it then, quite clearly, he is not God.
A Christian would say, "But Jesus HAS proven it! Just look at all of the miracles he did in the Bible! He healed the sick! He changed water into wine! That PROVES that Jesus is the Lord!" Does that make sense to you? Imagine that someone, today, were to come up to you and say, "I am God, and I will prove that I am God by healing the sick and turning water into wine!" What would you say? Be honest. You would not believe this person because:
1. Everyone has seen all sorts of "faith healers" who can "heal" the sick. And we all know that this sort of "healing" is quackery. If it were true, then we would not need doctors, hospitals or prescription medicines.
2. Turning water into wine... Doesn't that sound like something that a B-grade David-Copperfield-wannabe magician would do in a nightclub act? There are a dozen ways that you could stage things to make it look like water is turning into wine. There is no reason why a normal person would accept a magic trick as proof that someone is God.
3. Neither of these miracles left behind any evidence. Nothing that we can see, nor anything that can be scientifically tested today. Not one of Jesus' miracles left any tangible evidence for scientists to study.
It is as simple as that. If someone claimed to be God today, you would never believe it if the evidence consisted of faith healing and magic tricks. Never. Yet billions of people claim that Jesus' faith healing and magic tricks prove that he is God.
I particularly like this one:
Proof #21 - Understand Jesus' Core MessageSimply take a moment to think about the following statement:
"Hello, my name is Jesus. I love you deeply. I have loved you since you were conceived in the womb and I will love you for all eternity. I died for you on the cross because I love you so much. I long to have a loving personal relationship with you. I will answer all of your prayers through my love. But if you do not get down on your knees and worship me, and if you do not EAT MY BODY and DRINK MY BLOOD, then I WILL INCINERATE YOU WITH UNIMAGINABLY TORTUOUS PAIN IN THE FIRES OF HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY BWAH HA HA HA HA HA!"Yes, this is the central message of Christianity. See John 6:53-54 and Mark 16:16.
Think about this message. We have a being who, according to the Standard Model of God, embodies love. Yet, if you do not get down on your knees and worship him, you will be physically tortured for all eternity. What sort of love is that?The utter silliness and contradiction of Jesus' core message should make it obvious to you: God is imaginary.
Beyond the lack of evidence for the existence of god, the idea that a Supreme Being would need constant worship is just too Junior High Megalomaniac -- isn't it for you, too?
Maureen Dowd Scoop! Real Life In The CIA Is Not Like Television!
MoDo clears it all up for us in The New York Times:
"The problem is that they portray most women in such a one-dimensional way; whatever the character flaw is, that's all they are," said Gina Bennett, a slender, thoughtful mother of five who has been an analyst in the Counterterrorism Center over the course of 25 years and who first began sounding the alarm about Osama bin Laden back in 1993."It can leave a very distinct understanding of women at the agency -- how we function, how we relate to men, how we engage in national security -- that is pretty off," Bennett said. She was sitting in a conference room at Langley decorated with photos of a memorial for the seven C.I.A. officers -- including Bennett's close friend Jennifer Matthews -- who were blown up in 2009 by a Jordanian double agent in Khost, Afghanistan.
Agreed Sandra Grimes, a perky 69-year-old blonde who helped unmask her C.I.A. colleague Aldrich Ames as a double agent for the Russians after noticing that he had traded up from a battered Volvo to a Jaguar: "I wish they wouldn't use centerfold models in tight clothes. We don't look that way. And we don't act that way."
Indeed, when I ask Bennett if she is wearing a Tory Burch dress, she replies, "I couldn't afford anything like that. It's probably Burlington Coat Factory."
I talked to several current and former women at the C.I.A. at the request of the usually close-lipped agency, which wants to show a stable side missing from portrayals like the one in the new NBC drama "State of Affairs." In the premiere, Katherine Heigl's C.I.A. analyst gets wasted on shots, picks up a stranger and upbraids her shrink for being "judge-y" -- all before briefing the woman president. The women I spoke with agreed that the "honey pot" image of C.I.A. women using sex to get secrets, as Carrie did in "Homeland," was Hollywood sensationalism.
Wow...really? Do they really do that sort of thing in TV?
The New York Times Awakens And Tells Us What We Already Know: College Tuition Is Rising To Pay The Administrators
Sure, there are spa-like gyms and other fabulous facilities being built on campus. And there's the way-too-easy money -- the loans of hundreds of thousands of dollars to students studying Tibetan feminism and "gender theory" who have not a dream of paying that money back (unless they accidentally get a job at a hedge fund or live to be 133 and continue working into their 120s).
But also, law Prof Paul F. Campos writes in The New York Times of something professors and others who write about college have been saying for quite some time:
Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970.By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.
Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 -- a 221 percent increase.
The rapid increase in college enrollment can be defended by intellectually respectable arguments. Even the explosion in administrative personnel is, at least in theory, defensible. On the other hand, there are no valid arguments to support the recent trend toward seven-figure salaries for high-ranking university administrators, unless one considers evidence-free assertions about "the market" to be intellectually rigorous.
What cannot be defended, however, is the claim that tuition has risen because public funding for higher education has been cut. Despite its ubiquity, this claim flies directly in the face of the facts.
There are those who believe the rise of the crazily-compensated administrative staff coincides with the death of free speech on campuses across America. When you're making a small fortune presiding over a campus, well, you can't be having headlines pop up about those unruly students or staffers saying untoward things. (Welcome to so-called "free-speech zones," created by those who don't understand that the First Amendment wasn't written to only be applied within small, set-off enclosures.)
Lulu
Linkie-lu.
What Would Jesus Bake?
"Christians should be the FIRST people baking cakes--for everyone who asks us," blogs a Christian writer at TenThousandPlaces:
If you believe gay marriage is immoral (I don't, myself) and a gay couple comes into your shop and asks you to bake a cake for their wedding, what should you do? If God causes the sun to rise and the rain to fall on the wedding days of straight and gay couples, then what is our responsibility? If it is against the law to discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation, but you believe strongly that their lifestyle is immoral, what should you do?Christians, our Jesus said, "Go with them two."
If you are wondering if it is worth being sued and losing your business to stand up for what you believe is right, if you miss the look of hurt in the couple's eyes when you refuse them and only see an angry, media-driven, ACLU-led mob attacking the small business owner who is only standing up for what you believe in, what should you do?
Christians, our Jesus said, "Go with them two."
Jesus said, not only should you follow the law of the land -- the law which in America for the most part prohibits discrimination against people because of their sexual orientation -- not only should you do the minimum you have to do, you should go the extra mile. (Yes, that's where that expression comes from!) Do *twice* what the law requires.
If someone forces you to bake a cake for a gay wedding, bake for them two.
Christians, our Jesus said to not only follow the law, but to rise to a higher standard of love. Christians should be the FIRST people baking cakes -- for everyone who asks us. We should be known for our cake baking. People should be saying, "There go those crazy Christians again, baking cakes for everyone. They just won't quit!" Then, when we share the reason for our wild, all-inclusive love, people will want to hear it. "Let your light shine before others," said Jesus, "that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
Christians, when we dig our heels in and insist on our right to discriminate, we are hurting people -- we are hurting so many people, so deeply. Behind the ACLU and the liberal media are real people, who have been hurt again and again in the name of Christ. Christians, you and I have hurt them. I know most of us have really good intentions, but we are making Jesus the last thing they want to hear about.
via @stevesilberman
Shouldn't Peter Singer Be Living In A Lean-To As Long As There Are Starving People In The World?
Alexandra Wolfe writes at the WSJ about philosopher Peter Singer's latest goal -- getting people to give away a third of their income:
Peter Singer would sooner donate a kidney than sponsor a concert hall. So when entertainment mogul David Geffen gave $100 million in early March for the renovation of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York--it will soon be renamed David Geffen Hall--Mr. Singer questioned why people thought he was doing so much good.Over Skype from his home in Melbourne, Australia, Mr. Singer says that he doesn't understand "how anyone could think that giving to the renovation of a concert hall that could impact the lives of generally well-off people living in Manhattan and well-off tourists that come to New York could be the best thing that you could do with $100 million." He notes, for example, that a donation of less than $100 could restore sight to someone who is blind. Mr. Geffen declined to comment.
Geffen, who is also an asshole who tried to block Malibu public beach access for the non-wildly-rich, also gave $300 million to UCLA Med School, $100 million of which is a scholarship fund for students attending the school.
More about Singer from the WSJ piece:
A scholar with appointments at Princeton University and the University of Melbourne, Mr. Singer, 68, considers himself a utilitarian philosopher. "To be a utilitarian is to decide what one ought to do by the principle of what will have the best consequences," he says. "To be a utilitarian philosopher is to think about how this view can be defended and how it should be applied in a variety of contexts."
This "utilitarianism" is anti-individualistic totalitarianism dressed up in a tweed jacket with corduroy elbow patches. And with shovel-fulls of hypocrisy on the side:
WSJ commenter Robert Ray notes:
The article referenced below (Kurlich [equip.org]) says that Singer paid a lot of money to support his mother with Alzheimers, although by his logic she was no longer a person and could have been just killed. The money he saved could have been given to the poor.
Scott Klusendorf writes at equip.org:
Singer is just as inconsistent when it comes to applying his ethics to family members. New Yorker Magazine reports that Singer spends considerable funds caring for his mother, who suffers from Alzheimer's Disease.27 His actions, while laudable from a theistic point of view, flagrantly violate his own moral theory. Given her incapacity to reason, recognize others, or see herself existing over time, his mother is no longer a person as defined by Singer. If he truly believes this, he should take the substantial funds spent on her behalf and use them to increase the happiness of other sentient beings, nonhuman and human, who legitimately function as persons.
Yes, all that preaching about cost-efficiencies and medical rationing for the greatest good goes -- whooosh! -- right out the window when it's his Alzheimer's-stricken mom on the chopping block.
Also, altruism is not necessarily unselfish. People get something out of it -- attention and admiration from other citizens or even just the feeling that they are holier than the non-givers. If Singer hadn't advocated for such outrageous things -- killing disabled babies so a mother won't be too burdened by their care to have another possibly non-disabled child -- would anyone know who he is?
Gobble, Gobble
Oops. Wrong linkieday.
Gratuitous Dog Photo
Aida, my wee Chinese Crested.
Stupid Government Controls On Apartment Size In Boston
I lived in a 350 square-foot studio in New York City -- which was big compared to my initial pad, an 8 x 10 "apartment" in a converted SRO called the George Washington Hotel at 23rd and Lex. I would have liked more space in both cases, but both places made it in the neighborhood of affordable for me to live right in Manhattan, where I wanted to be.
In Boston, where the housing market is beyond packed and expensive, there are prohibitions against building apartments "too small." Prohibitions not written by people who are in their early 20s and just out of college and needing a place to live.
A Boston Globe editorial:
Virtually everyone who lives in Boston has decided to skimp on space to some degree. Yet city rules limit just how big of a sacrifice tenants can make; by one rule of thumb, new one-bedroom apartments must be 750 square feet or more to gain zoning approval, and studios must be 500 square feet. The city eased up in 2006 by creating a new category of "metro" units, which allow for one-bedrooms as small as 625 square feet, and studios as small as 450 square feet, in dense areas north of the Mass. Pike or along major transit lines.But even that laxer standard can mean rents well north of $2,000 a month for a small apartment. The obvious way to bring that cost down -- without rent subsidies or elaborate regulatory interventions -- is to relax the prohibition on smaller units, and to encourage their construction all across the city. Building thousands of micro-units in transit-friendly locations, such as the Forest Hills T station and the Longwood Medical Area, would provide market-rate housing within the reach of people just getting their start in Boston. And neighborhoods would benefit as new residents bring their business to local stores and eateries.
Regulating low-cost market-rate housing out of existence, or refusing to let it be built in the first place, doesn't eliminate the demand for it. Students and others seek cheaper under-the-table living quarters: unlicensed rooming houses, illegally divided units. The consequences can be tragic, as when 22-year-old Boston University student Binland Lee died in April in a fire in an overcrowded rooming house in Allston.
That tragedy prompted calls, quite reasonably, for stepped-up safety inspections. Yet Bostonians -- and especially candidates in the upcoming mayoral race -- should also reconsider development policies that yield luxury housing and subsidized housing, but nothing in between.
Letting developers build smaller, cheaper market-rate apartments runs up against half a century of assumptions about housing policy. An earlier generation of community activists in a tumultuous era in Boston saw housing matters in stark moral terms: Proposals for new apartment and condo buildings were intrusions into the fragile fabric of a historic city; rising rents were proof of landlords' indifference to tenants' plight. Today, rent control is history, and it's clearer that Boston's stiff housing costs primarily reflect the mismatch between the limited supply of housing and growing demand for it. Yet an instinctive suspicion of the motives of for-profit builders and landlords still colors the development debate.
Indeed, Shen cites the fact that rents per square foot are significantly higher for smaller units than for large ones as a reason to proceed carefully on building micro-units; there's a palpable concern at the agency that developers will exploit the price differential to build too many small units.
Doesn't the marketplace decide what's "too many"? Why should the city tell you that you can't rent an 8 x 10 room if that's what serves your budget and needs -- rather than a bigger, less-expensive place a long commute away?
Nitwit commenter at The Globe decides people should instead live with roommates -- because that's what he thinks is the right thing.
ParksLover
Those microunits are nothing but modern age tenements and gravy trains for developers -- it's all about greed and exploitation of young renters. The city is wise not to allow them on a wide scale. This editorial is so idiotic on so many leveles. Contrary to what it claims, neigborhoods will not gain anything from this type of inherently transient housing.Living with roommates in larger apartments is a time-sanctioned rite of passage - why would anyone prefer living in a shoebox-size unit that is goign to cost them twice as much as renting a room in a larger apartment? The ADD Inc. employee makes little money, pays off student debt -- he is clealry better off paying less than $700 for his room in Sommervile than $1500 for a new microunit.
Boston needs normal size apartments -- and if some young people want to split the rent, or put locks on their bedrooms doors for privacy -- so be it. What's so wrong about it? Nothing!
So what if developers are hopping on "gravy trains." Let the young renters choose what works for them -- whether that's living with roommates or living alone in a tiny space.
Smart Thinking: Discriminating Between Discriminations
Julian Sanchez blogs:
As I argued in Newsweek a few years back, the "purist" libertarian position that condemns all anti-discrimination laws, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as a priori unjust violations of sacrosanct property rights is profoundly misguided and historically blinkered. We were not starting from Year Zero in a Lockean state of nature, but dealing with the aftermath of centuries of government-enforced slavery and segregation--which had not only hopelessly tainted property distributions but created deficits in economic and social capital transmitted across generations to the descendants of slaves. The legacy of state-supported white supremacism, combined with the very real threat of violence against businesses that wished to integrate, created a racist structure so pervasive that unregulated "private" discrimination would have and did effectively deprive black citizens of civic equality and a fair opportunity to participate in American public life.We ultimately settled on rules barring race discrimination in employment, housing, and access to "public accommodations"--which, though it clearly restricted the associational freedom of some racist business owners within a limited domain, was nevertheless justifiable under the circumstances: The interest in restoring civic equality was so compelling that it trumped the interest in associational choice within that sphere. But we didn't deny the existence of that interest--appalling as the racist's exercise of it might be--and continue to recognize it in other domains. A racist can still invite only neighbors of certain races to dinner parties, or form exclusive private associations, or as a prospective employee choose to consider only job offers from firms run or staffed primarily by members of their own race. Partly, of course, this is because regulations in these domains would be difficult or impossible to enforce--but partly it's because the burden on associational freedom involved in requiring nondiscrimination in these realms would be unacceptably high.
He is with me on the notion that cake bakers and photographers should not be forced to create work that goes against their religious beliefs (or simply that is not in tune with their "bigotry," though I don't think every person who refuses to, say, photograph a gay wedding is "bigoted"; they might truly just be keeping to their religion):
The discrimination involved here doesn't plausibly deny the gay couples effective civic equality: There are plenty of bakers and photographers who would be only too happy to take their money. Under the circumstances, the urge to either fine or compel the services of these misguided homophobes comes across as having less to do with avoiding dire practical consequences for the denied couple than it does with symbolically punishing a few retrograde yokels for their reprehensible views. And much as I'd like for us all to pressure them to change those views--or at the very least shame them into changing their practices--if there turn out to be few enough of them that they're not creating a systemic problem for gay citizens, it's hard to see an interest sufficiently compelling to justify legal compulsion--especially in professions with an inherently expressive character, like photography. In short: Yes, these people are assholes, but that alone doesn't tell us how to balance their interest in expressive association against competing interests at this particular point in our history.In a sense, bigotry in the economic realm is a bit like pollution: Whether a prohibition is justifiable--and how stringent the limits should be--will depend on whether enough people are doing it that you have an appreciable aggregate harm. We don't just deem carbon emission an intrinsic wrong and categorically ban it--we recognize that industrial smokestacks are probably worth regulating fairly strictly, while banning fireplaces would limit individuals freedom to use their property more severely than can be justified by the public interest in avoiding the marginal ecological harm imposed, given levels of fireplace usage observed in the real world.
...The point is that treating private discrimination as either a categorical wrong committed by troglodytes with no liberty interests meriting consideration or an utterly inviolable right of conscience, divorced from either historical context or practical consequence, seems like a stupid way to approach the issue. If there are still enough hardcore bigots to justify restricting their expressive association in the economic domain--or in subsets of that domain--then I hope their numbers soon dwindle to the point where those restrictions become unnecessary. But at some point, I would hope we can at least agree in principle, they become a sufficiently irrelevant minority that we are not entitled to inflict legal penalties strictly as a means of signalling our superior enlightenment and symbolic disapproval.
Bleh, Bleh, Bleary
Incoherentlinks.
HUD Doling Out $24 Million To Help Public Housing Residents Boost Pay
The HUD story:
CHARLOTTE, N.C. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development says it is investing more than $24 million over four years to nine public housing authorities and their partners to help residents secure higher paying jobs and become self-sufficient.
Here, I'll help, free of charge:
1. Nix prohibitions against women running daycares out of their homes.
2. Get black church leaders like Jesse Jackson to get young black women to get IUDs and other highly protective forms of birth control so they won't have babies without daddies (as a reported 72% of black women do) and raise them in poverty and single motherhood, starting them out with the worst possible shot in life.
Ex-IRS Ethics Office Lawyer Disbarred For Ethics Violations
From TaxProf Paul Caron:
A lawyer who worked in the IRS ethics office was disbarred Thursday by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, which concluded she misappropriated a client's funds from a case she handled in private practice, broke a number of ethics rules and showed "reckless disregard for the truth" in misleading a disbarment panel looking into the matter.The lawyer, Takisha Brown, reportedly had bragged that she would never be punished because her boss would protect her, but an IRS spokesman said Wednesday that she was no longer an employee at the agency.
via @instapundit
Regulatory Crimes: "You Are Probably Breaking The Law Right Now"
Glenn Reynolds writes about "regulatory crimes" at USA Today, crimes legislated into existence that we have no idea are crimes -- yet we can be judged guilty of them, possibly of a felony.
These regulatory crimes can be used to railroad in a person who is doing something "objectionable," like speaking out on a contested issue -- or any citizen.
An example? Picking up a bald eagle feather is a felony. And Reynolds notes that even feathers from "lesser-known birds," like the red-tailed hawk, are included in this (I'd be wildly lucky if I could tell a brown pigeon feather from that of either other bird):
And it gets worse. While the old-fashioned common law crimes typically required a culpable mental state -- you had to realize you were doing something wrong -- the regulatory crimes generally don't require any knowledge that you're breaking the law. This seems quite unfair. As Cottone asks, "How can people be expected to know all the laws governing their conduct when no one even knows exactly how many criminal laws exist?"
That "culpable mental state," that's "mens rea," misquoted as a "guilty mind," but that's how I remember it. It actually means "the mind of the accused."
Reynolds continues:
Of course, we may hope that prosecutorial discretion will save us: Just explain to the nice prosecutor that we meant no harm, and violated the law by accident, and he or she will drop the charges and tell us to be more careful next time. And sometimes things work that way. But other times, the prosecutors are out to get you for your politics, your ethnicity, or just in order to fulfill a quota, in which case you will hear that the law is the law, and that ignorance is no excuse. (Amusingly, government officials who break the law do get to plead ignorance and good intentions, under the doctrine of good faith "qualified immunity." Just not us proles.)To solve this problem we need for judges to abandon the presumption that people know the law, at least where regulatory crimes are concerned, and require some proof that the accused knew or should reasonably have known that his conduct was illegal. Alternatively, Congress should adopt legislation requiring such proof. (And I would favor allowing defendants in any action brought by the federal government -- civil or criminal -- to have the option of arguing to the jury that the government's action against them is unfair or biased, with the charges dropped and legal fees being charged to the government if the jury agrees.)
Under the vagueness doctrine, a law is void if a person of reasonable intelligence would have to guess at its meaning, because it would be unfair to punish someone for violating a law that cannot be understood. It seems just as unfair to punish people for violating a law that they couldn't reasonably be expected to know about.
Law that can't be known is no law at all. If we wish to remain a nation of laws, Congress and the courts need to address this problem, before it's too late.
A book about this is theFIRE.org founder Harvey Silverglate's Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent
The Allure Of The Islamic State
Three UK teenagers stopped watching "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" and ran off to join ISIS.
Just another flavor of teen or young person rebellion, as Simon Cottee contends in the LA Times? Not quite.
The underlying problem is the tenets of Islam, which command Muslims to convert or kill the "kuffars" -- the filthy infidels. The interfaithy bits at the beginning of the Quran, when Mohammed had little power, are "abrogated" (nullified) by the later "slaughter them!" passages. (Non-Muslims don't know this.)
This isn't to say that all Muslims or even most Muslims practice their religion as it is commanded to be practiced. (The Quran is said to be the word of Allah, infallible and unquestionable, and this is a failsafe against reform.)
As for a "sacred cause" hopped on by young people, I'm an atheist, but I have no problem with that Jesus stuff (as practiced by modern Christians) of "feed the poor," "heal the sick," etc.
All religions are not created equal, and Islam, for any objective person who's read extensively in and about it, is a totalitarian system masquerading as a religion, and one that stands against all the enlightenment values and freedoms we cherish, like, oh, letting gay people live their lives instead of oh, slaughtering them, as Islam demands.
As a commenter at the LAT site put it:
ZeroDarkThirty
Why must everyone dance around the fact that barbaric violence has been part of fundamentalist Islam since its very beginning? Muhammad was a violent warlord who personally slaughtered thousands of "infidels" and converted many to Islam under threat of death. It should not be surprising that his most fundamentalist followers would do the same. The Quran easily lends itself to interpretation as a war manual and the Islamic extremists can generally quote it much better than the moderate Muslims who follow a less literal interpretation
Another post from the same commenter:
It is not hard to make the transition from the violence of Fundamentalist Islam to violent Muslim jihadist, as these stats from Pew Research Center show: http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-beliefs-about-sharia/ % of Muslims supporting DEATH PENALTY for leaving Islam: Egypt 86% Jordan 82% Afghanistan 79% Pakistan 76% Palestinian Territories 66%% of Muslims supporting STONING TO DEATH for adulterers:
Pakistan 89%
Afghanistan 88%
Palestinian Territories 85%
Egypt 81%
Jordan 67%
Iraq 58%
Monkey
Hairylinks. With a few fleas.
Never Mind The Evidence; You're Guilty Of Sexual Assault Because You're Male And Had Sex
We now have a standard of presumed guilty unless proven innocent in college sexual assault allegations against males. A judge found against a Vassar student accused of sexual assault. Ashe Schow writes in the Wash Ex of the case of Peter Yu, a Chinese-born Vassar student who was accused of sexual assault by a woman he lost his virginity to -- a year after they slept together:
Between the time of the encounter and the accusation, Yu and his accuser exchanged multiple friendly Facebook messages. One message from the accuser said: "I'm really sorry I led you on last night I should have known better then [sic] to let my self [sic] drink yet, I really don't want this to effect [sic] our team dynamic or friendship. I don't think any less of you at all I had a wonderful time last night I'm just too close to my previous relationship to be in one right now."Another message, sent two months later, said: "Peter, I wanted to write to you to apologize for that night about two months ago, I have not been trying to avoid you since then." She again apologized for the evening and said: "I did not treat you very well, it was disrespectful on my part to do what I did because I was drunk." She also stated that she would like to remain friends and "I care about you and I never ever meant to hurt you and we were both drunk."
The accuser, during the investigation a year later into whether a sexual assault occurred, claimed the messages "did not correctly reflect her feelings" due to her being in a state of "shock and disbelief" about the encounter.
The legal decision by Judge Ronnie Abrams:
On Tuesday, a summary judgment was issued in favor of Vassar. The judge in the case, Ronnie Abrams, was recommended to the federal bench by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who has no problem labeling young men as rapists without any due process.Abrams' dismissal of Yu's charges are based on the fact that Title IX does not require adequate due process rights to students accused of sexual assault. Thus, a school following Title IX cannot, in theory, violate a student's due process rights. In the alternative, because Vassar is a private college, due process rights do not apply.
Basically, schools can get away with branding young men as rapists (and avoiding problems from the Obama administration) for what reasonable people would not see as rape because of a flawed law.
Abrams accepted the argument that an accuser who has been drinking cannot give consent. She also noted that the accused's level of intoxication is irrelevant. But what if Yu had filed the complaint, claiming (as the accuser hinted in her Facebook post) that she had taken advantage of his drunkenness to seduce him. This almost turns the case into a "first to file" argument, even if it is difficult to see how, in today's climate, a man who brought similar charges against a woman would have his case taken seriously.
As Instapundit put it:
Apparently, it's now a matter of law that you can't believe anything women say, even as you are required to believe everything women say.
Indiana Pizzeria: Gays Okay; Gay Weddings Not Okay; And Why This Gay-Rights-Promoting Atheist Says That Should Fly
I'm a gay rights- (including gay marriage)-supporting atheist libertarian -- not exactly a fundamentalist Christian. In fact, I find the evidence-free belief in god and all the trimmings silly and childish. I also find it, uh, interesting, how people go all pick and choosie with their scriptures, like in how nobody Christian is stoning the neighbors for adultery or because they're wearing a mix of fabrics.
However, I'm also for freedom of religion and for the freedom of people with non-essential businesses (not hospitals, for example) to serve whomever they want and to refuse to served whomever they want. (This decision should be their right, and my thinking on this goes far beyond religion -- like if you don't like redheads who are writers or if you find this redheaded writer deplorable or just bothersome for some reason.)
James Queally writes in the LA Times of the story about Indiana pizzeria owners who refused to cater a gay wedding:
Kevin O'Connor, who owns Memories Pizzeria in Walkerton, Ind., with his two children, spoke with the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, shortly after his daughter's comments to a local television reporter went viral and made his restaurant the latest battleground in the national dispute over Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act.Critics have blasted the legislation, calling it an invitation for business owners in the conservative state to discriminate against gays and lesbians.
Although he supports the legislation, O'Connor told The Times he did not make a public decree that he would not serve same-sex couples, nor did anyone ask him that question.
But in the television interview, which led thousands to attack his business on Facebook and on Yelp, his daughter Crystal said she would flat-out refuse service to a gay couple who asked to have their wedding catered.
"We service anyone. I don't care who it is. I don't care if they're covered with tattoos, I don't care if they got rings in their ears. I don't care if they're gay. The only thing I said was I cannot condone gay marriage," O'Connor, 61, told The Times. He said he believes his decision not to cater same-sex weddings is simply an expression of his religious beliefs.
"If they want to come in the store, that's their privilege, they can do that. But I can't condone gay marriage, that's against my belief," he added.
I sure wouldn't patronize his pizzeria but, again, I believe it's absolutely his right to decide who he will and will not serve based on his religious beliefs or any other beliefs.
BHouston884 writes in the LA Times comments:
The problem is catering a wedding becomes a highly personal affair, they become part of it, and they should not, under any circumstances be required to do it. period.
And PS, the owner's a nitwit. Alyssa Marino writes at local Indiana station ABC57:
That lifestyle is something they choose. I choose to be heterosexual. They choose to be homosexual. Why should I be beat over the head to go along with something they choose?" says Kevin O'Connor.
I didn't choose to be hetero any more than he did. And it's exceptionally idiotic and backward to believe people "choose" to be gay. Until very recently, many, many people who have been gay have lived lives of misery or been slaughtered for it. And in Islamic countries, they still are slaughtered for it. (Yeah, woohoo, whoopie, let's be gay and get hanged or beheaded!)
Idiocy.
But again, idiocy he is entitled to.
And the reality is, as I heard about Arkansas's Republican governor, whose son signed a petition against a similar bill in his state, younger Republicans are not opposed to gay marriage to the degree their parents are and have been. Not anywhere close to that.
More here about the Religious Freedom Restoration Act -- the one signed by Bill Clinton and the ones that followed, passed by states.
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The Ontario Homeopathy Act: (Unicorn Parking Rules Now In Effect In Ontario)
André Picard writes for the Globe and Mail of Canada that the Ontario Homeopathy Act takes effect today, and in that, legislators in Ontario are aiding and abetting homeopathic quackery (which is the only kind of homeopathic "medicine" there is):
There is no scientific case for homeopathy. It is undiluted quackery.Edzard Ernst, an emeritus professor at the University of Exeter, who has published more than 100 papers on the subject, describes it as follows: "Homeopathy is based on the belief that 'like cures like' and that the dilution of medicine - homeopaths call the process 'potentiation' - renders it not weaker but stronger."
Homeopaths believe that the water molecules retain a "memory" of the original substance, allowing nano-doses to trigger a healing response in the body.
None of these concepts have any basis in biology, physiology or medicine. They are vestiges of centuries-ago practice, when homeopathy was an attractive alternative to bleedings, leeches and other snake-oil potions.
...If someone wants to take a magic potion to treat a cold, acne or some other banal everyday ailment, there's no harm in doing so, other than a lighter wallet. (And no benefit either.)
The problem is that, all too often, homeopathic concoctions are touted as a substitute for vaccination, or for the treatment of potentially life-threatening conditions such as asthma and cancer.
...Health Canada has taken the position that it is better to regulate the safety of homeopathic products - but not their effectiveness, as it does with prescription medicine - than to have no rules. And banning homeopathic products altogether would be hard to justify legally because, after all, the pills and potions are little more than water.
The problem, as Picard notes, is that regulating this pretend medicine gives it a veneer of legitimacy.
Homeopathy is not evidence-based. It should be marginalized, not embraced. There is no excuse for pandering to the deluded by diluting our ethics, standards and public policies.
Ellen Pao Case: It's About The Work, Not The Ladyparts
Heather Mac Donald writes in the WSJ about the Ellen Pao's unsuccessful "gender discrimination" lawsuit, noting that meritocracies care about profits, not gender:
Ms. Pao's suit is a perfect example of the feminist vendetta against Silicon Valley companies. That vendetta is based on the following conceit: Businesses refuse to hire or promote top-notch employees who would increase their profits, simply because those employees are female. Reality check: Any employer who rejects talent out of irrational prejudice will be punished in the marketplace when competitors snap up that talent. For the feminist line of attack on Silicon Valley to be valid, every tech firm would need to be conspiring in an industrywide economic suicide pact.Kleiner Perkins had devoted considerable time and resources to developing Ms. Pao's potential. The idea that the firm was simultaneously thwarting her because of her gender and forfeiting its own investment in her is absurd.
Even leaving aside market pressures, the claim that any high-profile company today would discriminate against highly qualified females defies political reality. Every elite business is desperate to hire and promote as many women as it can to fend off the gender lobby. Women who deny that their sex is an employment asset are fooling themselves.
But in a sign of how irrational Ms. Pao's view of the world is, she has now positioned herself as a martyr for Silicon Valley's allegedly oppressed Asians as well as its females. "If I've helped to level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it," she said after her courtroom defeat. Never mind that Asians are overrepresented in Silicon Valley and at Kleiner Perkins, compared with the national population, thanks to their talents, not least in science and engineering.
Most men don't make senior partner at Kleiner Perkins. In three decades only five junior partners out of 24 have been promoted to senior rank. Those disappointed males don't file discrimination suits, they suck it up and go on to other jobs. Too many females, however, have been taught to see themselves as perpetual victims of the patriarchy. The scant evidence that Ms. Pao assembled to prove that her advancement was blocked because of her gender reeks of the trendy academic theory of "microaggression"--a word that refers to racism and sexism that is otherwise invisible to the naked eye.
My last assistant was a guy. Why? Because he was the best person of those who applied for the job. My current assistant is a woman? Why? Because she was the best person of those who applied for the job. Why on earth would it make sense for me to hire anyone but the best -- the best person -- for the job?
Parasites Are The Space Aliens You've Been Worried About
Parasites can -- and do -- control our behavior. I've read some papers on this in Ev Psych -- on "moral emotions," for example, changing in response to disease.
Robert Sapolsky talks about parasites from this angle -- and especially Toxoplasmosis in cats (and spreading from there) in a fascinating video from Edge TV.
There's a fascinating thing he points out about 13 or so minutes in -- that rabies "knows more" about about aggression than neuroscientists -- because it makes you aggressive so you'll bite someone and pass it to a new host.
Sapolsky says at the start of the tape that he basically doesn't think we have free will -- I'm guessing, at least in part, because he sees the ways neurochemicals and toxins drive us. I guess I would say that we have "compromised will." You?
Mutter
Grumblylinks.
