Mom Arrested And Shackled After Her Honor Roll Student Sick, Missed More School Days Than Allowed
Victor Skinner writes for eagnews that Julie Giles, a Georgia mother and substitute teacher, was arrested, shackled, and jailed last week because her honor roll son was sick and missed more days than his school allows.
Giles wrote:
Sam has had 6 more unexcused absences (an absence without a doctor's note) than the county allows per year this year. I received a certified letter Saturday about this issue and Keith [my husband] contacted the [Board of Education] on my behalf yesterday while I worked subbing. I have been notified that a warrant for my arrest will most likely be issued. My family's doctor has written a character reference for me, and I have the support of many [Board of Education] employees, but at the moment it still appears I will be arrested. If the Sheriff and the Attendance Officer moves forward I will be given the opportunity to turn myself in. I spoke to a county employee yesterday that says arrest IS likely.
Giles added:
... the doctor reissued 3 excuses that Sam didn't turn in, so basically I am being arrested for THREE days
From Skinner's piece:
Giles wrote that she wasn't informed about her son's absence problem until days before her arrest warrant was issued."I believe that education is paramount. I understand that attendance is a crucial part of academic success. I know that laws need to be put into place to protect children, but putting parents in shackles isn't the answer. I feel that the actions taken against me show no real concern for my son," she wrote, according to MadWorldNews.com.
"Surrounding counties implement social worker visits, more meetings, and set a court date before police action is taken. Only is a warrant issued in these areas when the court date is missed. This abuse of power is hurting families. Both of my sons have been traumatized. I believe that there needs to be more than one meeting with the parent before the parent is arrested."
Advice Goddess Free Swim
It's Saturday night, and I'm in Columbia, Missouri, for the big annual ev psych conference. Leaving Sunday morning at a horribly early hour, so I'll blog later in the morning.
As for here in blogland, for now, you pick the topics.
P.S. One link per comment or my spam filter will eat your post.
Vladimir And Estragon, Your Wait Is Over
Car outside bakery Friday morning in Columbia, Missouri. 
Lanky
Skinny links.
Penile Colony: The Latest In Research On Penis Size
I'm at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference in Columbia, Missouri.
Geoffrey Miller presented research on penis size Thursday morning, and here's the part you really care about: 
Personally, I was "triggered" by how they used 3-D-printed blue "silos" (rather than 3-D-printed actual penises) to represent penis size in their research -- one of which they nicknamed something like "Papa Smurf."
How Crazy That It's A Crime To Withdraw Your Own Money From The Bank In Government-Unapproved Amounts
Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was paying loads of blackmail money to somebody, and I have to suspect it was for doing something truly terrible.
Monica Davey writes for The New York Times that he was paying $3.5 million to someone for his "misconduct" from years ago.
He has been indicted -- charged with lying to the F.B.I. and making cash withdrawals from banks in a way that was designed to hide the money he was paying. He was accused of "structuring" -- withdrawing less than $10K at a time to avoid bank questions.
About the person he was paying off, Davey reports:
Mr. Hastert, who was once a high school teacher and wrestling coach in Yorkville, Ill., had so far paid $1.7 million to the person, who had lived in Yorkville and had known Mr. Hastert for most of his or her life. Mr. Hastert worked in Yorkville from 1965 to 1981.In 2010, during meetings between Mr. Hastert and the unnamed individual, the two discussed "past misconduct" by Mr. Hastert against the person, according to the indictment.
In those meetings and in later discussions, Mr. Hastert agreed to provide money to the person "in order to compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct," the indictment said. It said he was structuring the cash withdrawals in increments designed to avoid bank reporting requirements. The indictment does not provide details of the misconduct.
...Each of the two charges carries a penalty of as much as five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, the prosecutor's office said.
Again, really does sound like he did something creepy-horrible.
But about the banking law-breaking, it is just insane that we have laws that tell you how you can and cannot withdraw your own money from your own bank account.
It's one more way our rights are being yanked away from us in the name of crime-stopping.
This law on "structuring" -- which has been used to allow government to steal the money of people who are not paying other people off for some prior misconduct -- needs to be repealed.
Where Culture Comes From
There's this common misconception that culture is some sort of randomly occurring set of behaviors that just falls out of the sky and then gets spread by, oh, television.
AJ Figueredo at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference (at dinner on Thursday night): "Culture doesn't happen by itself. It coevolves with genes."
AJ's research is here.
Pleistocene
Very, very old links.
Govt As Thief: Toys In The Yard Earns You A Ticket In Pagedale, MO
We see this in LA. Jerks on our City Council vote in costly measures we can't pay for, so they just raise parking ticket rates until sleeping in on "street cleaning" morning becomes a financial hardship for anybody who isn't an exec at a hedge fund.
Jennifer S. Mann writes about Pagedale in STLToday about the offenses being ticketed:
Pants worn too low or grass grown too high. Children riding bikes without helmets. Barbecue pits or toys in front yards. Basketball hoops in the streets....Vincent Blount, 54, and Valarie Whitner, 55, have lived in Pagedale for 20 years. For at least the last seven, they've been battling Pagedale's municipal court.
The couple say they've been ticketed for everything you can think of: high grass and peeling paint, an overgrown tree, not recycling and more."Every year. Every year," said Blount, sighing. "They just got me again."
The latest citation was for a tree limb that fell onto their garage during a winter storm, the couple said. They waited until their insurance company assessed the damage, then placed the chopped up limb on the empty city lot next door. Before a tree service could pick it up, the city's housing and sanitation inspector arrived.
The couple explained the situation but said it didn't matter. They received another ticket.
In April, the inspector sent a list of 17 demands for the property.
The couple were given a 30-day deadline to, among other things, add screens and curtains to the windows; remove a dead branch from a tree out back; replace a missing shingle; use weedkiller; finish repairing the garage; install a rear screen door.
The repairs cost money -- money the couple have been using to pay the court. They pay $100 a month on a tab that has grown to $1,810. About $1,000 of that was due to nontraffic violations. They still have $800 to pay off.
Reps for the city claim this isn't intended to be a revenue-raiser. Meanwhile, the high grass warnings give people just one day to fix the problem.
via @Overlawyered
Advice Goddess Free Swim
It's Wednesday night, and I've just arrived in Columbia, Missouri, for the big annual ev psych conference -- where -- drum roll...I will actually be speaking.
As for here in blogland, you pick the topics. I'll post more on Thursday morning.
P.S. One link per comment or my spam filter will eat your post.
Backwards Day? Democrats Seek To Stop GOP Senators From Making Birth Control OTC
Elizabeth Price Foley posts at Instapundit:
So let me get this straight: A coalition of GOP Senators is trying to make contraceptives more readily available to women by making them OTC, but liberal/progressive groups like Planned Parenthood oppose the idea, simply because women might actually have to pay for their contraceptives rather than get them free?
She also points out possible self-interest on the part of Planned Parenthood:
Far fewer women (especially young women) will need to go to Planned Parenthood if they can just go to the local drugstore and obtain contraceptives. That would leave Planned Parenthood mostly in the business of STD testing, pregnancy testing and abortions.
Fascinating Long Read: Skyping With The Enemy
"I went undercover as a jihadi girlfriend..." writes the pseudonymous French journo, Anna Erelle.
Her book about this, In the Skin of a Jihadist: A Young Journalist Enters the ISIS Recruitment Network
Enterprising 16-Year-Old Photographer Gets Lesson In Lying, Coercive Assholism From Asst. Principal
Nick Gillespie writes at reason that Anthony Mazur, a 16-year-old student at Texas' Flower Mound High School, who's also a photographer for the yearbook, took pictures of athletes and other students and then posted them on a Flickr account where he sold some of them to parents.
As it happens, according to his school district's policy, there's no issue with that and Mazur apparently owns the the copyright to work he produces.Cue administrative outrage:
Back in March, Mazur says he was called into FMHS Assistant Principal Jeffrey Brown's office, where he saw that Brown had his website pulled up on a computer there. He said that Brown was angry at him, and told him that posting the pictures online was illegal, and violated copyright. According to Mazur, Brown also worked the angle (contrary to the policy listed above) that the camera belonged to the district. When Mazur argued that the copyright belonged to him, he says that Brown changed his tune and said that it violated student privacy. Brown allegedly told Mazur at the time that a parent had complained.Mazur alleged that Brown told him in a coercive tone "I'm just asking you to take the website down, I'm not asking you to return any money." Mazur said he assumed Brown meant the school, with regards to returning money. Mazur said Brown told him that he "wouldn't report [Mazur] to the IRS" over the money he earned from selling the photos. Brown told Mazur that he was issuing an "administrative directive" to take the photos down. At this point, Mazur said he requested that his parent be brought into the discussion.
The assholministrator first claimed privacy concerns, then said the profit was the problem.
And note the stupidity and/or creepy lies, like that posting pictures online somehow violates copyright. (Copyright belongs to the creator unless it is signed away.) Then there's the threat of reporting him to the IRS. What a toadish bully, this guy is.
No, wouldn't want a kid to earn money through his work and learn all the ensuing lessons from that. No, keep him penniless so he can be appropriately humble while getting a degree in Tibetan feminism.
Gillespie gets it:
And then try to re-imagine school as a place that is not the equivalent of a minimum-security prison (attendance is mandatory!) but is instead actually interesting, challenging, and effective in reaching most kids in some sort of individualized way.
Whole story is here, by Steve Southwell, in the Lewisville Texan. A relevant bit:
Mazur said he and his yearbook class had gone to a journalism convention in San Antonio back in October, and at that convention, one of the speakers was a teacher from Argyle High School, who told them of a student who was selling their work. Inspired by the possibility, Mazur asked the speaker about the copyright issues, and the teacher explained to him that as the photographer, he owned the pictures he took, and was entitled to the rights. Lewisville ISD's own policy (CY Local) states explicitly that "A student shall retain all rights to work created as part of instruction or using District technology resources."...Although the Mazur family is fighting the decision, Anthony says he is undeterred. He has since obtained his own camera, and is continuing to photograph sporting events, where he says he has the same access as other members of the public, and members of the media. "They're not going to stop me, I'll keep doing what I love," said Anthony.
Donkey
Linkie with haw.
Thought Crimes: The Time To Investigate Whether Someone's Committing Them Is Before They Create Custom-Made Jewelry For You
I joke that I'm so much for gay rights and gay marriage, I should have a girlfriend.
However, I'm against forcing people to do creative work -- for any reason -- and especially when they have some religious opposition.
I'm also against customers deciding after the fact -- after they've already ordered a good or service -- that they aren't going to pay or they're going to return some item on grounds of somebody not sharing their beliefs.
In other words, there's a time to decide that you don't want to do business with somebody, and it's BEFORE they do a bunch of work for you.
That's the fair thing.
If you don't do that, and subsequently learn that their beliefs offend you, well, you can throw away what they've made, but in what universe is it fair to demand your money back?
Well, that's what happened. Rod Dreher writes about Esau Jardon, a Christian jeweler in Canada who made rings for a lesbian couple who subsequently demanded their money back after learning that he, personally, believes marriage should be limited to heterosexuals:
This Christian jeweler agreed to custom-make engagement rings for a lesbian couple, knowing that they were a couple, and treated them politely. But when they found out what he really believed about same-sex marriage, even though the man gave them polite service, and agreed to sell them what they asked for, the lesbian couple balked, and demanded their money back -- and the mob threatened the business if they didn't yield. Which, of course, he did.You understand, of course, that this is not about getting equal treatment. The lesbian couple received that. This is about demonizing a point of view, and driving those who hold it out of the public square. Just so we're clear about that.
I bought some olive oil not long ago at a tiny grocery store owned by an Arab Muslim immigrant. If I find out that the merchant supports ISIS, am I entitled to declare my jug of olive oil tainted, and demand a refund? Is a fundamentalist Christian permitted to send her osso buco back to the kitchen if she discovers that homosexual hands cooked it? Of course not.
More from the CBC, including video.
I think this is just so childish, the notion that a person you buy a product from must share your vital beliefs. Do these women interrogate the supermarket manager? The shoemaker?
Still, I can understand how they might see a wedding ring maker differently, but again, if this matters to them, there's a time to figure that out, and it's beforehand. Realize afterward that it's a problem, well, the graceful thing to do is to let it be on you. Give the wedding rings to Goodwill and go order new ones from a LGBTQ jeweler, and you'd better check that he or she is also in lockstep on eating vegan and anything else that might be a line you just won't cross.
Oh, and in the video, one of the two women speaking called the jewelers "anti-gay." Ridiculous -- especially considering the lovely treatment they, as two out lesbians ordering wedding rings, got from the business.
The reality is, because people have religious beliefs that gay people should not marry -- beliefs that I, as a strong supporter of gay marriage, am entirely opposed to -- does not mean they're anti-gay. Sure, they might be, but it is just bullshit that every person who believes that gays and lesbians shouldn't be allowed to marry is a hater.
Unintended Consequences: The Govt Response To The Nail Salon Exposé
William McGurn makes some good points in the WSJ about the "two-part exposé in the New York Times, one focusing on the lousy pay and the other on the health threats" and the leap to action by politicians to regulate change:
Like so many other bursts of progressive passion, chances are that while their bid for more government will make the pols and activists feel better about themselves, it will do little to improve the lives of these women.That's because most of what they propose does nothing to resolve the fundamental issues the Times rightly identifies as making these women workers vulnerable to abusive bosses: They don't speak English, they don't have skills, and about a quarter of them are here illegally. All this greatly limits their job opportunities.
To put it another way, will a crackdown on licensing really help women who will need to complete the 250 hours of study for a New York state license? What about closing down the salon of a rotten employer because he doesn't pay the women sick leave?
In a 2001 column, no less than Paul Krugman noted a similar case of good intentions that had terrible unintended consequences, citing a bill proposed in the 1990s by Sen. Tom Harkin (D., Iowa) to outlaw child labor in products made overseas. The threat of the legislation succeeded in the sense that some companies in Bangladesh stopped hiring children.
But Mr. Krugman noted that follow-up research by Oxfam found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets--and that a significant number were forced into prostitution.
Slinky
Links tumbling down the stairs.
Thanks To All Who've Served In Our Military
And our deep condolences to those who didn't come home or who came home with terrible injuries -- mental and/or physical.
A link to my previous post on my trip with Gregg to trace the steps of his uncle, who died in the hedgerows in Normandy.
Parenting Is About Judgment Calls -- And They Should Be Made By Parents, Not The Government
My mother often left us in the car at the grocery store when we were kids. And not for two minutes. While she did all of her grocery shopping.
She did this in temperate weather -- and because we could read (me) and color (my younger sisters) instead of dragging around the store with her, bored (and probably whining, at least a little).
Well, there's a case before the Supreme Court in New Jersey to decide whether leaving a kid in a car for a few minutes equals child abuse. It's a "zero tolerance" question. No, "Well, it was just a minute while I went in to get eggs at 7-Eleven and left her strapped, sleeping, in her car seat."
If the case goes against the parent here, the government will get to decide -- to act in loco parentis, even though you're right there, just paying quickly for your eggs and getting back in your car -- and you'll be marked for life as a child-abuser. No pleading. No evidence. No discussion.
Lenore Skenazy writes at Yahoo
A mom left her son in the car for what everyone agrees was under 10 minutes to run an errand. The toddler slept through the whole "ordeal," but the mom was found guilty of neglect, even upon appeal, when the three appellate judges ruled that they didn't have to list the "parade of horribles" that could have happened to the child. Which is, of course, fantasy as policy again: Just because the judges could imagine a kidnapping, or carjacking, or a big bad wolf, doesn't mean that these are at all likely. They aren't. As the Washington Post just wrote:"There's never been a safer time to be a kid in America."
...To label all parents as "negligent" because they let their kids wait in the car during an errand is just like labeling the Meitivs in Maryland "negligent" for letting their kids go outside unsupervised: Nothing bad did happen to those kids as they walked home from the park. Nothing bad was likely to happen to the kids -- we are at a 50-year crime low and Silver Spring is hardly a hotbed of crime, as it was recently voted "the most caring" suburb in America. But because some cops and CPS workers could imagine something terrible happening, the parents are under investigation.
Fantasy cannot be the basis for policy. If it is, any made-up idea can be used as rationale to lock folks up or put them on a list.
Parents must be allowed to make decisions -- even ones that others consider sub-optimal -- so long as they are not putting their children in immediate, obvious, and indisputable harm's way....
Like letting them get anywhere near those delusional New Jersey appellate court judges.
Per lawyer David Pimentel, who, with Lenore Skenazy, filed an amicus brief on behalf of the mother:
We remain hopeful that the Court will uphold the mother's right to defend herself, and that it will allow the lower court to consider the reasonableness of the mother's action, the likelihood of harm, the imminence of the danger, before labeling her as a child abuser, stigmatizing her for life and making it virtually impossible to ever to get a job working with children, to adopt a child, etc.If the N.J. Supreme Court upholds the lower court, child-left-in-car cases in New Jersey will be very straightforward. Even if the investigation shows that no criminal child endangerment occurred (so charges are dropped), absent extenuating circumstances, it will be virtually automatic that the parent will be branded as a "child abuser" for the rest of his or her life. Not only is the parent presumed guilty, the parent is not even entitled to a hearing to prove his or her innocence.
Again, we're seeing our country slowly but surely being transformed into an English-speaking, McDonald's-eating Mini-Me of the USSR. We need to speak up -- and how great that Pimentel and Skenazy are volunteering their time in this case -- before we wake up in a country we really, really do not want to live in.
via @Overlawyered
Advice Goddess Free Swim
It's Sunday night, and I'm sleepy. You pick the topics. I'll post more on Monday morning.
P.S. One link per comment or my spam filter will eat your post.
Advice Goddess Radio, Tonight, 7-8 pm PT: Dr. Todd Kashdan On The Upside Of "Dark Side" Emotions
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
*"Best Of" replay tonight for Memorial Day weekend in the USA.
This is a show on how the negative can be positive -- on how we actually need the emotions that make us uncomfortable. They make us whole, balancing the "positive" emotions.
On tonight's show, Dr. Todd Kashdan lays out the science on how anger, anxiety, and other "negative" feelings can actually be motivating, illuminating, and helpful -- giving us our best shot at success and fulfillment.
Dr. Kashdan's myth-busting book he'll be discussing, co-authored with Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener, is The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self--Not Just Your "Good" Self--Drives Success and Fulfillment.
Listen to the show at this link at showtime or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2015/05/25/advice-goddess-radio
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
Please consider ordering my new book, the science-based and funny "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," (only $10.90 at Amazon!).
Orders help support my writing and all the work I do to put out this show and are much-appreciated! (Also, along with positive reviews in the WSJ and other publications, Library Journal gave the book a starred review: "Verdict: Solid psychology and a wealth of helpful knowledge and rapier wit fill these pages. Highly recommended.")
Women Now Demanding To Be Treated As Eggshells, Not Equals
Camille Paglia gets it right on sexual harassment, from Playboy from 1995:
"[You can't have] the Stalinist situation we have in America right now, where any neurotic woman can make any stupid charge and destroy a man's reputation. If there is evidence of false accusation, the accuser should be expelled. Similarly, a woman who falsely accuses a man of rape should be sent to jail. My definition of sexual harassment is specific. It is only sexual harassment-by a man or a woman-if it is quid pro quo. That is, if someone says, "You must do this or I'm going to do that"-for instance, fire you. And whereas touching is sexual harassment, speech is not. I am militant on this. Words must remain free. The solution to speech is that women must signal the level of their tolerance-women are all different. Some are very bawdy."
Actually, a law professor with an evolutionary orientation, Wayne State's Kingsley Browne, argues that men shove each other around with language; it's a form of exercising dominance.
And if women are actually men's equals, their response to language isn't filing suit -- or trying to bring down a man's career through social media because he makes a joke.
In fact, Browne points out, men using language to shove women around the same way they do to other men involves treating women equally.
It used to be that women marched around claiming that they weren't fragile little dollies; that they could handle what men could. Now just the opposite is the case. Women get men fired over jokes overheard at conferences.
In 2008, Rebecca Solnit sniveled in the LA Times that men won't "let her" talk. Me? I just talk. Nobody stops me. Not even by trying to sue me for $500,000 (though I did have help from a man, First Amendment lawyer Marc J. Randazza, on that one).
I've also been writing here about the awful injustice done to Bora Zivkovic. Many science writers who proudly proclaim themselves skeptics unquestioningly swallowed the notion that Zivkovic was guilty of harassment.
Here's an example of his "crimes." While out for a drink with his wife and one of the women who later accused him, he bought a rose for his wife. He then asked the seller for one for the woman (who was standing beside him at the time), saying he'd also take one for his (heh heh) "concubine."
Say that to me and I'll laugh; I won't file charges against you. It wouldn't even occur to me. (I suspect that women who think this way are those who have not accomplished much in the world and realize that their only source of power -- and, especially power over men -- is the unearned power they can have through sexual harassment charges.)
If this sort of crack is something you can't take, you are not men's equal or anything close. You don't belong in the workplace; you belong at home where your biggest challenge is getting the brownies out of the oven without overcooking them.
Playboy quote via @instapundit
World War II Hero At Lincoln Memorial
Moving photo, tweeted by presidential historian Michael Beschloss.
As I tweeted back to him:
@amyalkon
@BeschlossDC Thanks. Important to be mindful that this weekend isn't just about beer, hotdogs, and a day off.
The First Generation That Comes With Its Own Fainting Couch
Peggy Noonan in the WSJ (but link is to PatriotPost so non-subscribers can read) gets it right about the mewling for "trigger warnings" and emotional safety on campus:
What in your upbringing told you that safety is the highest of values? What told you it is a realistic expectation? Who taught you that you are entitled to it every day? Was your life full of ... unchecked privilege? Discuss.Do you think Shakespeare, Frieda Kahlo, Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes and Steve Jobs woke up every morning thinking, "My focus today is on looking for slights and telling people they're scaring me"? Or were their energies and commitments perhaps focused on other areas?
I notice lately that some members of your generation are being called, derisively, Snowflakes. Are you really a frail, special and delicate little thing that might melt when the heat is on?
Do you wish to be known as the first generation that comes with its own fainting couch? Did first- and second-wave feminists march to the barricades so their daughters and granddaughters could act like Victorians with the vapors?
Everyone in America gets triggered every day. Many of us experience the news as a daily microaggression. Who can we sue, silence or censor to feel better?
Finally, social justice warriors always portray themselves -- and seem to experience themselves -- as actively suffering victims who need protection. Is that perhaps an invalid self-image? Are you perhaps less needy than demanding? You seem to be demanding a safety no one else in the world gets. If you were so vulnerable, intimidated and weak, you wouldn't really be able to attack and criticize your professors, administrators and fellow students so ably and successfully, would you?
Are you a bunch of frail and sensitive little bullies? Is it possible you're not intimidated but intimidators?
This is how I see it -- that it's a way to have unearned power over men, as well as women who do not think or speak in "approved" ways.
Inky
Splotchylinks.
A Far Bedder Deal
I have one of these mattress plusher-uppers, and I love it. It's basically cloud-sleep, and unlike a featherbed, it has this elastic compression "sock" attached all the way around so it stays in place. And now it's on substantial sale at Amazon -- just today. It's the
Extra Plush Rayon Bamboo Fitted Mattress Topper, Queen Size
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!
Soldier On What Would Have Happened If He Used Email Like Hillary Clinton Did
At IJ Review, Chad Longell writes that his ass would have been chewed grass:
If I had discussed classified missions, on a compromised server, with someone who did not hold a security clearance, the consequences would be harsh and career ending, far different from the protected status Clinton has enjoyed thus far.A senior intelligence analyst for the Army discussed the matter further with IJReview, enumerating the standard punishments that await those who disseminate classified information. Due to the sensitive nature of the analysts' work, they had to speak on condition of anonymity.
"There are no limits for the consequences that can be imposed on those who disclose classified information," the analyst told IJReview, "Depending on the severity, punishments can range from large fines to heavy prison sentences. At the very least, you will lose your security clearance for life and never be able to work in the public sector again."
While not the same situation, the analyst then described the fate of a colleague who was found to be leaking classified information:
"Every device that he owned that could transmit data was seized. Then he was detained, tried and found guilty. His clearance was stripped from him and he spent 2 years in jail. He was also fined $20,000. This person will never work in anything other than retail for the rest of his life."These strict consequences for releasing classified information are a daily reality for anyone inside the U.S. government. We are held to the highest of standards, and we should be.
It is disheartening that those in positions of power who abuse these rules are held to a different standard than the common soldier.
How Much Is That Obamacare Doggie In The Window?
Maybe double the price it was last year, if you live in New Mexico. Peter Suderman writes at reason of premium increases for Obamacare plans:
It looks increasingly like insurance premiums for many of the most popular plans sold through Obamacare's exchanges are on track for significant hikes next year. Earlier this week, I noted reports of requests for double-digit premium hikes--in some cases more than 30 percent--in dominant plans for the states of Maryland, Oregon, and Tennessee, as well as smaller but still significant hikes in a few other states. Today, The Wall Street Journal adds another, reporting that New Mexico's biggest individual market insurer is requesting a 51.6 percent increase in premiums for the coming year.The primary reason for all of these giant hikes is the same, according to the Journal: "high medical costs incurred by people newly enrolled under the Affordable Care Act." As noted in a previous post, Moda Health, which insures about 100,000 people Oregon, says that its costs exceeded its premium revenue by 61 percent.
...In any case, it goes back to what has been one of the chief worries about Obamacare for a long time--whether enough younger and healthier individuals will sign up for coverage to offset the higher costs incurred by older and sicker beneficiaries. So far, it looks like they're not, or at least not in numbers sufficient to support current premiums. And that's why it looks more and more like significant premium hikes are on the way, at least in some states, for some of the more popular plans.
Why is it that voters seem so incapable of doing the most rudimentary math?
Lurky
Linky hanging around smoking, out by the Dumpster.
Government Built That! (How Government Policy Created Black Ghettos)
At NPR's Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviews Economic Policy Institute research associate Richard Rothstein, who studies the history of residential segregation in America.
"We have a myth today that the ghettos in metropolitan areas around the country are what the Supreme Court calls 'de-facto' -- just the accident of the fact that people have not enough income to move into middle class neighborhoods or because real estate agents steered black and white families to different neighborhoods or because there was white flight," Rothstein tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross."It was not the unintended effect of benign policies," he says. "It was an explicit, racially purposeful policy that was pursued at all levels of government, and that's the reason we have these ghettos today and we are reaping the fruits of those policies."
Some of the highlights from the interview:
On how the New Deal's Public Works Administration led to the creation of segregated ghettosIts policy was that public housing could be used only to house people of the same race as the neighborhood in which it was located, but, in fact, most of the public housing that was built in the early years was built in integrated neighborhoods, which they razed and then built segregated public housing in those neighborhoods. So public housing created racial segregation where none existed before. That was one of the chief policies.
On the Federal Housing Administration's overtly racist policies in the 1930s, '40s and '50s
The second policy, which was probably even more effective in segregating metropolitan areas, was the Federal Housing Administration, which financed mass production builders of subdivisions starting in the '30s and then going on to the '40s and '50s in which those mass production builders, places like Levittown [New York] for example, and Nassau County in New York and in every metropolitan area in the country, the Federal Housing Administration gave builders like Levitt concessionary loans through banks because they guaranteed loans at lower interest rates for banks that the developers could use to build these subdivisions on the condition that no homes in those subdivisions be sold to African-Americans.
Related: How welfare ruined the black family.
via Reason Foundation's Manny Klausner
Linked Inane
I want somebody to endorse me on Linked In for professional basketball or working on an oil rig. Or both, if you're feeling generous.
Updated: Love this. I tweeted this yesterday and somebody followed through. 
(I guess they don't have a "professional basketball" category, so he did the best he could.)
Asian Groups File Fed Complaint About Policy Of "Diversity" Over Merit At Harvard
Yamiche Alcindor writes at USA Today about a policy at Harvard of keeping Asians out in favor of "diversity":
A coalition of Asian-American groups filed a federal complaint against Harvard University on Friday alleging the school engaged in "systemic and continuous discrimination" against Asian Americans during its admissions process.More than 60 Chinese, Indian, Korean and Pakistani groups came together for the complaint, which was filed with the civil rights offices at the justice and education departments. They are calling for an investigation into Harvard and other Ivy League institutions that they say should stop using racial quotas or racial balancing in admission.
"We want to eliminate discrimination of Asian Americans, and we want procedural justice for all racial groups," Yukong Zhao, one of the chief organizers and a guest columnist with the Orlando Sentinel, told NBC News. "All racial groups should be treated equal."
...Robert Iuliano, Harvard University General Counsel, said in a statement that the university uses a "holistic admissions process" that is "fully compliant with federal law" to build a diverse class. He added that over the past decade the percentage of Asian American students admitted to Harvard College has increased from 17.6% to 21%.
"We will vigorously defend the right of Harvard, and other universities, to continue to seek the educational benefits that come from a class that is diverse on multiple dimensions," Iuliano said.
They aren't keeping the rich kids out to let the poor kids in, are they? "Sorry, Mr. Captain Of Industry. The fact that you put a wing on the hospital is immaterial..."
Bumpy
Rocklinky road...
Way To Miss The Elephant-Sized Problem: Man's Healthcare Problem Caused By Irresponsibility, Not Obamacare Or Republicans
A man looks everywhere but the mirror for responsible parties after he develops bleeding in his eyes and a partly detached retina due to diabetes, and then finds the healthcare costs unaffordable. It's Obamacare! No, it's the eeeevil Republicans!
But whoopsy, there's this little bitty tucked into the Greg Sargent WaPo story on his plight:
Lang, 49, a self-employed Republican handyman who has never bought insurance...
Grownups do not gamble and hope it turns out okay and then snivel when it doesn't, which is to be expected.
That is...grownups who are not robots and can't go to Fry's and get a $37 new hard drive if something goes wrong, and grownups who do not take regular sponge baths in the Fountain of Youth.
I've had healthcare -- an HMO -- since I left a big company I worked for in my early 20s. I've paid for this out of pocket ever since, though I would have preferred to put that money to trips to Paris and fabulous new boots.
I realized, when I was in New York after college, that it wouldn't be right of me to gamble and then leave it to my parents or the public to pay for me if something went terribly wrong. So I paid up, got into a system while I was young and healthy so I'd be in. Not that that matters anymore, thanks to Obamacare letting all the irresponsible people in at the same price as those of us who've been forking over for all these years.
via @charlescwcooke
Married Pastor Dad's Grindr Pix Posted, Revealing That He's A Top Who Likes To Cuddle
Bob Johnson writes for the Saginaw News that a Lutheran pastor resigned his position (and "repented") after a gay website -- Queerty -- posted a story with his Grindr pix:
EXCLUSIVE: Grindr Screenshots Reveal Antigay Pastor Is A Top Who Likes To Cuddle
Oops, except he's also a married father of five.
Why is a married father of five married to a woman?
Probably, in large part, because the church forces people to deny they're gay (with social shaming and exclusion and sometimes a family never speaking to a gay member again).
From Queerty:
Until 2 p.m. on Monday, the 'Our Church Staff' section of St. John's Lutheran Church and School's website described Reverend Matthew Makela as an associate pastor who enjoys, "family, music, home improvement, gardening and landscaping, and sports."Screenshots obtained by Queerty from a source who asked that his name be withheld shed light on some of the Reverend's other favorite past times -- namely nude make out sessions and sex with other men.
...Of course, how someone behaves between the sheets is really nobody's business but his own, except when he's actively doing damage to others. We've seen it time and time again. The lawmaker who spends his days fighting against gay rights and his nights cruising for bottoms, or the ex-gay activist who isn't quite as ex-gay as he'd like everyone to believe.
Which brings us back to Makela. The married father of five from Midland, Michigan doesn't just preach Jesus' love and help with bake sales. He also uses his position of authority and respect in his community to broadcast his self-loathing view on same-sex attraction.
"It's A Mistake" Or "It's Complicated," As Opposed To "It's Rape!"
You might call this personal responsibility feminism. It's getting rarer these days.
Cathy Young writes in the WaPo:
There was the time when, 19 and naïve, I was guilt-tripped into entirely unwanted physical intimacies with a much older married man. And the time, three or four years later, when I went to visit an on-and-off long-distance boyfriend and quickly realized that it was over for me--but he assumed we were still on, and I didn't have the nerve to say no to sex. And the time I told a man, "Look, I'm not going to sleep with you," and it was taken as "try again in a couple of hours."When they happened, my view of these encounters ranged from "a mistake" to "it's complicated." It still does--even though, these days, we are encouraged to reinterpret such experiences as sexual violations.
...Was I a victim? Even in the first incident, in which the man knowingly pressured me into something I didn't want, I could have safely said no. Consent for bad reasons is still consent; despicable behavior is not always criminal. (Getting guilt-tripped into giving money to a freeloading friend is not robbery.) In the second instance, it would be an infantilizing insult to deny my responsibility for a mutual misunderstanding. In the third, what happened was not only consensual but wanted; my initial "no" was sincere, but it was mainly an attempt to stop myself from acting on an attraction against my better judgment.
...Ultimately, ensuring that sexual consent is always free of pressure is an impossible goal. Consent advocates already fret that even an explicit "yes" may not be given freely enough. A series of educational campus posters includes the warning that "if they don't feel free to say 'no,' it's not consent"; a Canadian college campaign cautions that consent is invalid if it's "muted" or "uncertain" rather than "loud and clear."
This advocacy creates a world where virtually any regretted sexual encounter can be reconstructed as sexual assault (unless the person who regrets it initiated it while fully sober) and retroactive perceptions of coercion must always be credited over the contemporaneous perceptions of consent--even though we know that human memory often "edits" the past to fit present biases.
In theory, this regime is gender-neutral. Yet real-life cases like the one at Occidental show a strong presumption--openly acknowledged by a dean at Duke--that in a heterosexual encounter, it's the man who must gain consent and bear the blame if both are intoxicated. Whether cloaked in traditional chivalry or feminist rhetoric, it's still a paternalistic double standard.
She calls the "quest for perfect consent" "profoundly utopian," and she's right. If you can't say no because you, say, lack self-respect, the answer is working on your self-respect, not having the guy in your dorm who finally wore you down thrown into some campus kangaroo court on an accusation of rape.
Owl
Owl be linkin' you.
Feminism Built That!
Catherine Rampell writes in the WaPo that women on Capitol Hill are having a hard time getting one-on-one time with their bosses.
"There was an office rule that I couldn't be alone with the congressman," one anonymous staffer reported.Another: "I was not allowed to staff my boss at certain events without another male staffer present -- because I was a woman."
And another: "My former boss never took a closed-door meeting with me in the span of working for him, off and on, over a 12-year stretch. Even when I was in a position of senior leadership."
Rampell calls this behavior a "deliberate inequity." I call it prudent, vis a vis the feminism-driven witch hunts that have deposed men in workplaces, at conferences, on campus, and elsewhere -- sometimes for as little as a joke.
ICYMI: My recent New York Observer piece on sex differences and what ignoring them gets women, "Science Says 'Lean In' Is Filled With Flawed Advice, Likely to Hurt Women."
Wanted: Head-Severers.
The good news, according to a report on Yahoo, is that applicants will be exempt from the usual entrance exams for government-employed beheaders.
Yes, Saudi Arabia is looking for a few good executioners so they won't fall behind on beheadings -- as well as "amputations" (hand-severing of thieves, for example). From AFP:
Riyadh (AFP) - Saudi Arabia advertised vacancies for eight executioners Tuesday after beheading nearly as many people since the start of the year as it did in the whole of 2014.The civil service ministry said that no qualifications were necessary and that applicants would be exempted from the usual entrance exams.
It said that as well as beheadings, the successful candidates would be expected to carry out amputations ordered by the courts under the kingdom's strict version of Islamic sharia law.
Amputation of one or both hands is a routine penalty for theft. Drug trafficking, rape, murder, apostasy and armed robbery are all punishable by death.
Most executions are carried out by beheading, but a few are carried out by firing squad, stoning or crucifixion.
All are carried out in public and video footage sometimes appears on the Internet despite a ban on filming.
via @walterolson
Cufflinks
It had to come to this.
"Eek, Men Might Discover They're Victims Of Paternity Fraud!"
Panties are bunching in the UK over drugstore Boots' decision to stock a £30 paternity testing kit.
In the Telegraph, the purported "family values" arguments are flying fast and furious. Laura Donnelly reports:
Darren Jamieson, founder of pressure group CSA Hell, which assists parents with problems over child maintenance, believes the sheer temptation of over-the-counter paternity tests could in itself poison a faltering relationship."It seems very wrong to me that you can walk into Boots and buy something that can split up a family unit," says the father-of-three. "That's bad news for the couple and for the child; whatever the result is, the mistrust generated by asking for these tests could do irreparable damage."
...Dr David Jones, Director of the Roman Catholic Anscombe Bioethics Centre, believes companies should not be able to profit from revelations which could tear families apart, and leave children without a father figure. "It is irresponsible to leave these decisions to the free market and not think about the consequences for children and families. The whole idea of taking a paternity test shows a breakdown of trust, and even if the test is positive, the trust has been damaged."
If I were a man, I'd do this when the kid's too young to know what I'm doing with ye olde swab.
Against Feminism's Victimist-Industrial Complex: "You Cannot Build Justice For Women On Injustice For Men"
In November of 2104, Wendy McElroy debated Jessica Valenti at Brown University. An excerpt from McElroy's statement:
The treatment of rape needs to move away from what has become the status quo assumption of feminist orthodoxy, away from rape as an expression of culture, and toward holding a small number of individuals absolutely responsible for their options. "Men" or "women" as a category do not rape - individuals do. And yet this idea runs counter to the whole idea of the rape culture. When you speak of a rape culture, you're saying rape is so widely accepted that it is a cultural norm. In short, it is a defining aspect of society.And certainly there are cultures in which that definition fits. There are parts of Afghanistan, for example, where women are married against their will, they are murdered for men's honor, they are raped. And when they are raped they are arrested for it, and they are shunned by their family afterward. Now that's a rape culture.
But that is not North America. It doesn't resemble North America. Here rape is a crime that is severely punished. Even an accusation of sexual harassment can ruin someone's career and their lives.
A few days ago I saw a sight that made me just wither inside. A man who had - a scientist behind the Rosetta comet landing - wept in apology on TV because after the biggest achievement of his life, he basically was hounded because he wore a shirt that a female friend of his had made that showed cartoon super heroines on it. And he was made to weep in apology on TV rather than revel in an incredible accomplishment.
Who had the power there? Did he have the power there? Feminists came and said that he basically should be excoriated and he wept on TV. It was a terrible sight. It was a cruel sight.
...The organization A Voice for Male Students recently issued - listed - 42 lawsuits brought by students against universities for violating their rights in hearings. The real figure is closer to 50. And there will be more. And there will be a Supreme Court challenge. Believe me. A common response to such criticism is that the hearings are not legal proceedings and though this is technically true I find it disingenuous. The hearings actually operate in a legal grey zone.
...The so-called non legal hearings can impose penalties as draconian as any court. A student can be expelled with the word "rapist" permanently in his file, tens of thousands of debt. He may have no prospect of getting a license to be a lawyer or a doctor...or whatever else he dreamed of. He is effectively barred from many other unlicensed professions - what university of quality is going to accept him? His reputation is destroyed. And having spoken to some of the men bringing lawsuits against their universities, I know the extraordinary pain they go through, then and now, and probably will for the rest of their lives.
And, yet, for the sake of argument, let me grant that hearings are not legal proceedings. The fact that an adjudication is not legal does not release people from the professional and moral responsibility to be fair. There is what we must do and, then, there is common decency. Common decency is a debt that you owe to every other human being - whether they are male or female, whether they are black or white, whether they are gay or otherwise.
Flinks
Flying links.
Feminism Delicious
(a la "Soy Delicious" -- though we should note that nobody every has to call steak "steak delicious," because it actually is.)
A tweet:
@sexypitabread
I accidentally said "pastryarchy" instead of "patriarchy" and now I have a vision for a better world
"Lean" Whichever Way Works For You: (Woman Gets Tired Of Being Seen As A Failure Of Feminism Because Her Husband Is The Breadwinner)
This is a female reader's Facebook post (reprinted here with permission) in response to my piece for the New York Observer -- "Science Says "Lean In" Is Filled With Flawed Advice, Likely To Hurt Women."
In that piece, I explain why Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's advice in her best-selling book, "Lean In," is unrealistic and may even backfire on women who take it. Caroline K. responded:
This is what I wrote when sharing your text on a group:Isn't this great, that this is starting to be heard? My occasion to tell you about my own story.
When I was a teenager, I learnt that gender is a social construct. I wanted to be a Sheryl Sandberg. Then I accidentally got pregnant at 20, kept my baby, stayed with the father...discovered who I really am and we had 3 more. It was a shock for me: I LOVE CARING FOR BABIES AND OTHER PEOPLE!
I sometimes get tired of being seen as a failure of feminism because my husband is the breadwinner, I stayed home 10 years and I don't have a big position. But: I have as much money as he has, I am a vet, am doing a masters, I write, I have cared for 4 adult children and hundreds of other people...and most of all, I AM HAPPY!
The negative side is I had to go through an «inner battle» trying to accept I am absolutely not the type of person to live the life of a career woman. I had to research the topic in some positive psychology, philosophy, evo. psych, neuro-endocrinology, neuroscience...
Now I try to use my talents and strenghts to care for others...and to share knowledge and reflexion through my masters memoir on the exact topic of your article. And I write!
Thanks!
Caroline K., you aren't a failure of feminism; it's feminism that's failed for not supporting your choice to have children as much as my choice to not have them.
The Economy: Is There A "Great Reset" Underway -- To Far Lower Wages?
We who write and create things for a living sure feel that.
In The New York Times, economist Tyler Cowen uses that Richard Florida term as he explores how lower wages are seeming to be the thing in many areas and industries. "Don't be so sure the economy will return to normal" is the upshot:
Well before the recent recession, many colleges and universities realized that they could not afford so many full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members, and they began to increase their reliance on lower-paid adjuncts. Few institutions fired large numbers of full-timers suddenly, because that could have left them understaffed if trends reversed. Longstanding protections of tenure were also a constraint. Instead, many administrators added modestly to the number of adjunct faculty members, sometimes over decades, relying on retirement and attrition to manage the shift in a relatively smooth manner.That evolution reflects a more general principle: Institutional rigidities don't permit adjustments to occur all at once, but by studying continuing changes we may be able to peer around a corner and see where a sector is headed.
Such processes are scary because we may be watching the slow unfolding of a hand that, in its fundamentals, has already been dealt.
There are signs that a comparable story may apply to the American economy more broadly.
In manufacturing, for example, Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, Caterpillar and Navistar (formerly International Harvester) all pay many of their new workers much less. In some of these two-tier structures, the new wage may be as little as half the old one. In addition to this rapid change, the companies also seem to be reducing the ranks of highly paid workers through slow attrition.
Here is another change that might be a broader sign of a pending reset: A heavy burden of adjustment in the overall labor market is being borne by the young. Wages for the typical graduate of a four-year college have dropped more than 7 percent since 2000, and the labor force participation rate of the young has been falling. One consequence is that young people are living at home longer and receiving more aid from their parents. They also seem to be less interested in buying their own homes.
All of these factors could indicate that our economy is evolving into one that will offer far less favorable long-run wage prospects.
Sphinx
Links with a cat's head on top.
Fabulousness And Frugal Fabulousness
Thank you to the woman who bought this fabulous, wide-brim sunhat XL Head Wide Blue Madagascar Hat with Ruffles
I have a big head. This would fit, and it's fabulous.
And the person who bought this probably went through my Search Amy's Amazon
Deal of the Day for today -- up to 20 percent off on select Perky Pet hummingbird feeders. Another tempting one. These little creatures are amazing to watch.
And here's something I would love to have -- a sewing machine with a lot of stitches so I can cut off Salvation Army cashmere sweaters into cropped sweaters and then sew crazy stitches in hot pink around the neck and bottom and sleeve ends. SINGER 7256 Fashion Mate 70-Stitch Computerized Free-Arm Sewing Machine with Automatic Needle Threader
Another deal -- 63 percent off the ALLPOWERS 10000mAh Solar Panel Charger with iSolar Technology for iPhone, iPad, Samsung and other 5V USB devices
And finally, here's what I actually did buy yesterday, the Kindle of David Sloan Wilson's new Yale Press book, Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others (Foundational Questions in Science)
Thank you to all who shop through my links! Truly appreciated!
Tonight's "Science News You Can Use" Radio, 7- 7:30 pm PT
Tonight's catch?
Cohosts Amy Alkon and Dr. Jennifer Verdolin discuss "Sluts and Swingers of the Human and Animal Kingdom" (and where do you fit in?).
Join us for an enlightening show laying out the science on casual sex and multiple partners, and how to manage in this sexual Wild West.
Listen live at 7pm PT or pick it up afterward in podcast -- at this link.
We Lost The Iraq War Before We Ever Got There, And Jeb Bush Needed To Say So
It's what I said over and over on this blog about 9/11 and the Iraq invasion that followed -- basically that when one guy or set of guys robs a bank, you don't just willy-nilly go pick up another guy, who had nothing to do with that, and make him pay so somebody pays.
Also, attempting to export democracy to people whose culture is totally inhospitable to it is a fool's errand.
Jeb Bush got all mealy-mouthed about this but -- surprise! -- even National Review's Andrew McCarthy is talking like I was on the Iraq War, to the point that he notes, as I did, that it was Iran that that was the greater problem for our security.
Money quote:
There was overwhelming support for the proposition that Saddam Hussein's regime should be ousted. There was little public appetite for an experiment in Iraqi democracy-building.
More:
The United States was attacked on September 11, 2001, by a global jihadist movement that was aided and abetted by state sponsors and that was not confined to a country or two. Our national interests were to eradicate the jihadists' capacity to project power and eliminate their state sponsors -- especially regimes likely to supply them with weapons. Chief among those regimes was Iran; further down the chain was Iraq.For a democracy such as ours to be successful in fighting wars, there must be public support for the war aims. There was overwhelming support for the proposition that Saddam Hussein's regime should be ousted. There was little public appetite for an experiment in Iraqi democracy-building -- especially once it was clear that we would not be "hailed as liberators" and that the venture would be prohibitively expensive.
The bipartisan public consensus that developed prior to the invasion was that Saddam's regime was an unacceptable threat to American national security in a post-9/11 environment. Regardless of whether one now believes that conclusion was flawed, there never was a consensus that American national security hinged on Iraq's post-Saddam political stability and evolution. It demonstrably did not: Iraq's Islamic culture did not want Western liberalism, and there is neither logical nor empirical support for the conclusion that Country A's being a democracy renders Country B safer from jihadist terror - indeed, jihadists thrive on exploitation of the freedoms available in Western democracies.
President Bush initially defined "victory in Iraq" as "helping the Iraqi people defeat the terrorists and build an inclusive democratic state," such that Iraq would be "peaceful, united, stable, and secure, well integrated into the international community, and a full partner in the global war on terrorism."
Most of those goals were fanciful and immaterial to the promotion of American national security. That is the most important lesson learned. Yet, Jeb Bush reaffirms his brother's dubious linkage of our security and Iraq's. On Wednesday, he opined that Iraq demonstrates the need to "have a strategy of security," and that, while this broke down for a time, his brother had "solved that mess with the surge and created when he left a much more stable Iraq."
Meanwhile, here's how our government shits on the members of the military who were exposed to a toxic chemical in Iraq.
Digging Around In My Archives: Who Really Hates Femalekind?
One of my column openings from way back when:
While militant feminists smell a global conspiracy against womankind whenever some poor schlub compliments a female coworker on her new hairdo, they've long ignored some of the most virulent (and obvious) women-haters in the world: makers of ladies' clingy knitwear.To be fair, there are a number of women over the age of 15 who can pull off a form-fitting knit dress. One is Kate Moss. The other is Kate Moss.
Lout
Oaflinks. Which are not like cufflinks. Or bran-based cereals.
If We're Going To Do The Death Penalty, Let's DO The Death Penalty -- Loud, Bloody, and Ugly
So, Tsarnaev was given the death penalty -- by lethal injection.
I'm not for the death penalty, but as long as we have it, I think we make a mistake by doing it all no muss/no fuss.
As I posted previously, "If We're Going To Have Executions, They Should Be Bloody."
In that post, I explain that I think Judge Alex Kozinski was right. He's quoted by columnist E. Montini in the Arizona Star:
"Whatever the hopes and reasons for the switch to drugs (for executions), they proved to be misguided. Subverting medicines meant to heal the human body to the opposite purpose was an enterprise doomed to failure. Today's case is only the latest in an unending effort to undermine and discredit this method of carrying out lawful executions..."Whatever happens to Wood, the attacks will not stop and for a simple reason: The enterprise is flawed. Using drugs meant for individuals with medical needs to carry out executions is a misguided effort to mask the brutality of executions by making them look serene and peaceful--like something any one of us might experience in our final moments...
"But executions are, in fact, nothing like that. They are brutal, savage events, and nothing the state tries to do can mask that reality. Nor should it. If we as a society want to carry out executions, we should be willing to face the fact that the state is committing a horrendous brutality on our behalf...
"If some states and the federal government wish to continue carrying out the death penalty, they must turn away from this misguided path and return to more primitive--and foolproof--methods of execution. The guillotine is probably best but seems inconsistent with our national ethos. And the electric chair, hanging and the gas chamber are each subject to occasional mishaps.
"The firing squad strikes me as the most promising. Eight or ten large-caliber rifle bullets fired at close range can inflict massive damage, causing instant death every time. There are plenty of people employed by the state who can pull the trigger and have the training to aim true.
"The weapons and ammunition are bought by the state in massive quantities for law enforcement purposes, so it would be impossible to interdict the supply. And nobody can argue that the weapons are put to a purpose for which they were not intended: firearms have no purpose other than destroying their targets. Sure, firing squads can be messy, but if we are willing to carry out executions, we should not shield ourselves from the reality that we are shedding human blood. If we, as a society, cannot stomach the splatter from an execution carried out by firing squad, then we shouldn't be carrying out executions at all."
I Think This Ad Is Funny: 11 Out Of 10 Feminists Disagree
Did the Borg come swallow the sense of humor of much of the western world?
A bus company had this ad: 
I'm amused. Then again, I can afford to be amused, since I'm not a shell of a person whose only source of attention is being outraged.
Not surprisingly, however, USA Today's Lori Grisham reports that panties were bunched [annoying autoplay video]:
"The slogan of 'ride me all day for £3' whilst being a little tongue in cheek was in no way intended to cause offense to either men or women and, if the advert has done so then we apologize unreservedly," the company wrote in a statement that they tweeted. "There has certainly been no intention to objectify either men or women."The posters were removed from the buses within 24 hours because of complaints, according to reports.
Can someone explain why this is offensive to "either men or women"?
As for this -- "There has certainly been no intention to objectify either men or women" -- how totally pathetic that we can't "objectify" for a laugh. Men or women -- or hermaphrodites.
Oh, and from Wikipedia (link just above), I like this guy:
Alan Soble questions the widely held Kantian view according to which human dignity is something that people have. He argues that objectification is not inappropriate. Everyone is already only an object and being only an object is not necessarily a bad thing. ...He writes (quoted from his book, Pornography, Sex, and Feminism:The claim that we should treat people as 'persons' and not dehumanise them is to reify, is to anthropomorphise humans and consider them more than they are. Do not treat people as objects, we are told. Why not? Because, goes the answer, people qua persons deserve not to be treated as objects. What a nice bit of illusory chauvinism. People are not as grand as we make them out to be, would like them to be, or hope them to be.
Hear fucking hear.
P.S. Welcome to France! (It's an ad for a dining guide.) 
Oh, and my version of the ad with a hot guy: "Ride me like a pony, all day, for £3."
Plinks
Wishful thinking well links.
Science Says "Lean In" Is Filled With Flawed Advice, Likely To Hurt Women
This is my piece for the New York Observer on why Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's advice in her best-selling book, "Lean In," is unrealistic and may even backfire on women who take it.
If you are inclined to share it -- which I would truly appreciate! -- please do it from the Observer share buttons on the left side on their site (so it gets credited for the "most read" list.)
Your thoughts and comments on the piece?
Was Anyone Under The Impression That George Stephanopoulos Is Impartial?
Andrew Stiles writes at the Free Beacon:
ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos donated $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation in recent years, records show. The contribution is publicly available information, but the host had not previously disclosed it to ABC viewers, despite taking part in on-air discussions about the Clinton Foundation and its controversial relationship with foreign donors.Stephanopoulos, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, confirmed the donation to POLITICO's Dylan Byers after the Free Beacon contacted ABC News for comment. The host, who acknowledged making two donations of $25,000 between 2013 and 2014, issued a statement of apology for failing to disclose his contributions.
"I made charitable donations to the Foundation in support of the work they're doing on global AIDS prevention and deforestation, causes I care about deeply," Stephanopolous said. "I thought that my contributions were a matter of public record. However, in hindsight, I should have taken the extra step of personally disclosing my donations to my employer and to the viewers on air during the recent news stories about the Foundation. I apologize."
ABC News issued a statement of support for Stephanopoulos, while acknowledging that he should have disclosed the donations.
And actually, it was really $75K.
Sorry...does anyone, even anyone with money, really...oopsy...forget forking over $75K?
It's not like when I leave a dollar in my computer bag pocket.
The thing is, well, there's this from the article:
Stephanopoulos's recent coverage of the topic has been challenged by critics who question his objectivity as a longtime Clinton aide.
I don't question his objectivity. I assume that he -- along with other newsheads -- lacks it, unless there's a good deal to show otherwise.
Excerpt Of The Funniest Passage In Scientific Writing That I Have Ever Read
It's from a book chapter, "The Interface Theory of Perception: Natural Selection Drives True Perception To Swift Extinction," by cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman. It's in the book Object Categorization: Computer and Human Vision Perspectives, edited by Sven Dickinson, Michael Tarr, Ales Leonardis and Bernt Schiele. (Cambridge University Press.)
A bit from Hoffman's chapter:
Introduction
The jewel beetle Julodimorpha bakewelli is category challenged. For the male of the species, spotting instances of the category desirable female is a pursuit of enduring interest and, to this end, he scours his environment for telltale signs of a female's shiny, dimpled, yellow-brown elytra (wing cases). Unfortunately for him, many males of the species Homo sapiens, who sojourn in his habitats within the Dongara area of Western Australia, are attracted by instances of the category full beer bottle but not by instances of the category empty beer bottle, and are therefore prone to toss their emptied "stubbies" unceremoniously from their cars. As it happens, stubbies are shiny, dimpled, and just the right shade of brown to trigger, in the poor beetle, a category error. Male beetles find stubbies irresistible. Forsaking all normal females, they swarm the stubbies, genitalia everted, and doggedly try to copulate despite repeated glassy rebuffs. Compounding misfortune, ants of the species Iridomyrmex discors capitalize on the beetles' category errors; the ants sequester themselves near stubbies, wait for befuddled beetles, and consume them, genitalia first, as they persist in their amorous advances.Categories have consequences. Conflating beetle and bottle led male J. bakewelli into mating mistakes that nudged their species to the brink of extinction. Their perceptual categories worked well in their niche: Males have low parental investment and thus their fitness is boosted if their category desirable mate is more liberal than that of females (as predicted by the theory of sexual selection, e.g.,). But when stubbies invaded their niche, a liberal category transformed stubbies into Sirens, 370 milliliter amazons with matchless allure.
Blinky
Linky with a sty in one eye.
Rethinking "Snarly Does It"
Queen Of All Media
Gratuitous dog photo from yesterday, taken just before one of our power naps.
Aida has a job, and it is putting her little snout on my neck when we sleep. It makes me feel -- if just for a few minutes -- that everything is right in the world.
Sorry, I know -- not possible with your Great Dane; not if you'd like to continue breathing beyond your nap.
Hey, Cops And School Administrators: A Cotton T-Shirt Does Not Shoot Bullets
Or even peas.
It's an inanimate object. It's just a form of expression.
Yes, this is actually a mini-lecture that seems to be necessary for West Virginia cops and school officials.
Jared Marcum, a 14-year-old student, was suspended and arrested for wearing an NRA-logo shirt with an illustration of a hunting rifle and the words "NRA: Protect Your Right."
Law prof Jonathan Turley blogs:
Marcum was stopped by school secretary Anita Gore, who instructed him to turn the shirt inside our or face suspension from school. Another teacher David Burroway agreed the shirt violated the dress code and pulled him to the principal's office by his arm, according to the lawsuit. He was told to turn the t-shirt inside out and protested. An argument ensued. Now at this point, I believe that the teacher is wrong to deny this small act of free speech, but I also believe that Marcum is wrong to get into an argument with a teacher. He should have complied or, better yet, asked to see the principal. However, at most this is a simple question for a teacher-parent meeting and not a matter for the police. It seems that the teacher allowed this to escalate in the lunchroom and Marcum should have been more respectful.The family is now seeking $200,000 in compensatory damages and $250,000 in punitive damages for alleged violations of Marcum's First and 14th Amendment rights. The school's own dress code will be the foundation for the lawsuit because the tee-shirt will be defended as not having violent or threatening image. It could offer an interesting point of analysis for free speech. Gun ownership is a constitutionally protected individual right. Would a tee-shirt proclaiming the need to protect free speech be viewed as violent if it showed the minutemen or an image from the French Revolution?
...Despite the public outcry over the completely irrational and abusive application of zero tolerance rules, administrators and teachers continue to apply them blindly. If you do not have to exercise judgment, you can never been blamed for any failure. Conversely, even when the public outcry results in a reversals, teachers and administrators never seem punished with the same vigor for showing no judgment or logic in punishing a child.
By the way, the kid's shirt doesn't seem to violate the school's dress code policy:
Logan County Schools' dress code, which is posted on the school system's website, prohibits clothing and accessories that display profanity, violence, discriminatory messages or sexually suggestive phrases
It displays none of those things. And the kid knew the code and tried to talk sense to the zero sense/zero tolerance adults, who were having none of that. I admire him for standing up for his rights -- to the point of arrest and suspension -- while only 14.
Oh, and nice that the kid can read and think, even if administrators and cops in charge of him can't.
All The City Council Ladies: Austin City Council Brings In Purveyors Of Bad Science To Prepare Them For Female Majority
A few of those people who speak with authority -- without portfolio -- gave a little talking to to the staff who regularly interact with the City Council in Austin, Texas, after a majority of women were elected to it.
As the headline on the Austin Statesman article by Lily Rockwell reads:
As women take majority on Austin City Council, staff warned to expect more questions, longer talks
The advice-giver is Jonathan K. Allen, and here's a bit of his advice, fresh out of crap "science" written by Dr. Louann Brizendine and others (though I don't know where he picked it up -- off what bit of pavement where he perhaps also found a dropped quarter):
Women ask lots of questions. He learned a valuable lesson on communicating with women from his 11-year-old daughter, who peppered him with questions while they were on the way to volleyball. "In a matter of 15 seconds, I got 10 questions that I had to patiently respond to," Allen said. Allen says female City Council members are less likely to read agenda information and instead ask questions. He says it's tempting to just tell them to read the packet, but "my daughter taught me the importance of being patient" even when they may already know the answer to the question.
Here, from my column, is the actual science:
The notion that men are mute lunks while women go around yapping like Yorkshire terriers, a claim made by self-help authors including UCSF neuropsychiatrist Dr. Louann Brizendine (in various editions of "The Female Brain") just isn't supported by the research. In 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology, Scott O. Lilienfeld and his co-authors note that when psychologist Dr. Janet Hyde crunched the data from 73 controlled studies, she found only a tiny overall difference in male and female talkativeness. And when psychologist Dr. Matthias Mehl and his colleagues gave 396 college students portable audio recorders to walk around with, they found that both men and women spoke about 16,000 words a day.
Where men and women do seem to differ is in emotional expression. There's a lack of conclusive research in this area, but it's clear that men have feelings -- deep feelings. They just don't always communicate them in a slew of words. Many seem to walk the talk -- showing their feelings instead of speaking them.
The city also brought along Dr. Miya Burt-Stewart, who owns a business development and marketing firm, to offer some training, and her session touched on the "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" philosophy:
Openly acknowledge gender differences. Burt-Stewart says the author of the "Men are from Mars" book says men act on facts, women act on emotion. She also share such insights such as "Men have egos, women have wish lists," and that men are more likely to use a "dominating" management style than women, who use a "compromising" style. Men think women ask too many questions, Burt-Stewart said, and women often don't feel included. Men like acknowledgement, women want to be part of a team. Men, typically, communicate less often than females, she said.
Wrong again. See above.
Gotta love somebody who quotes John Gray as an authority on anything other than how to write a book that sells into the bajillions.
In fact, research on sex differences by psychologist Joyce Benenson, among others, finds that it is men who are the team players while women form dyads (groups of two). Men are likewise the cooperators and are okay with other men being the top dog whereas women tend to get insulted if any one woman has more power.
The article writer does no better on the science, but she's not professing to be science-based; she's just a journalist groping around trying to find a quote from some person with a Ph.D.
Fluffy
Furry links.
Turns Out "She Was Asking For It!" Is Sometimes Acceptable To The PC -- Depending On Who "She" Is
Bret Stephens has a terrific column defending Pamela Geller up at the WSJ. An excerpt:
Ms. Geller has been denounced from Fox News to Comedy Central as a provocation artist who needlessly and knowingly put people's lives in danger."This is problematic to me, because I wonder whether this group that held this event down there to basically disparage and make fun of the prophet Muhammad doesn't in some way cause these events," commented Chris Matthews. "Well, not the word 'causing'--how about provoking, how about taunting, how about daring?"
Taunting. Daring. In other words, asking for it.
Ms. Geller's outrage is that she disapproves of political Islam in about the same way Bill Maher does, except that her politics skew right while his go left. Therefore she's a vicious hatemonger whereas he's an amusing freethinker, if sometimes a bit outré. Ms. Geller also seems to think that the appropriate response to violent Islamist histrionics is abrasive public derision, a view shared by the late editors of Charlie Hebdo. But so far not many people are je suis-ing Pam Geller, apparently because mocking Muhammad is acceptable only if you're also mocking Jesus, Moses and Buddha.
The higher criticism of Ms. Geller is that, while her constitutional rights are not in question, her judgment and wisdom are. I happen to think that Ms. Geller's substantive contribution to the great foreign-policy debates of our time is roughly equivalent to Pat Benatar's contribution to the Western musical canon, but that's beside the point. Every healthy society needs gadflies, who contribute more with their sting than with their buzz. Ms. Geller is one of those gadflies.
In particular, Ms. Geller is hammering home the point, whether wittingly or not, that the free speech most worth defending is the speech we agree with least. That's especially important when the enemies of free speech--in this case, Muslim fanatics--are invoking the pretext of moral injury to inflict bodily harm. A society that rejects the notion of a heckler's veto cannot accept the idea of a murderer's veto simply because the murderer is prepared to go to greater extremes to silence his opponents.
Hear, hear.
As I said recently on Twitter, the First Amendment is the "Welcome, Assholes!" amendment. (Nobody needs it for art shows of smileyfaces.)
Could This Stereotype Please Be True?
Luke Ford tweeted something:
@lukeford
Another example of how Jews have undermined America. http://fb.me/4291dGhNm
My wishful thinking tweet-back:
@amyalkon
@lukeford I'm told we Jews also own the banks. Could you please point me to my pile of money? I seem to have lost my way.
Newsflash For "Triggered" College Students: The Adult World Is Not One Big, Extra-Cushy Couch
At Chronicle, in the wake of all the "trigger warnings" everywhere, Todd Gitlin gets it right on what a college education is supposed to be -- disturbing:
No one ever promised that the truth would be comforting. History, Western and otherwise, is (among other things) a slaughterhouse. The record of civilization is a record of murder, rape, and sundry other brutalities. As for the discomfort that may be occasioned by the discovery -- even the shock -- of this record, discomfort is the crucible of learning. The world is disconcerting. The proper way to begin understanding it is to accept the unwritten contract of university education: I am here to be disturbed.
Where did this epidemic of thin-skinnedness come from? Gitlin's not sure.
I suspect it's a collision of feminism and other politically correct isms and helicopter parenting.
We live in America at a time of more physical ease than any other time in history, and what do we do? We use the extra time we have to gnash about how awful everything is.
Gitlin writes:
Intriguing is the annual UCLA Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) survey of freshmen. It's national, and it spans more than 40 years. Last year's survey found that incoming students' "self-rated emotional health dropped to 50.7 percent (rating themselves as 'above average' or 'highest 10 percent' compared to people their age), its lowest level ever and 2.3 percentage points lower than the entering cohort of 2013." When HERI first asked students to rate their emotional health, in 1985, the proportion who said either "above average" or "highest 10 percent" was 63.6 percent. Either first-year students are reporting more honestly, or they're feeling more troubled.
Your thoughts?
Linky Moore
Stew it up here.
I Love This Woman!
The headline at the Oliver Darcy piece at The Blaze:
Woman Writes Blistering Open-Letter to Inconsiderate Airline Passenger: 'My Nose Was Assaulted by a Putrid Smell of Death and Decay'
My favorite bit: 
Lefty Academia Invents A Brand New Kind Of "Violence"
Great piece by Liberal Left Behind on Dr. Jade Schiff's po mo word games to shut down speech of those who don't speak in "approved" victim feminist ways. The quotes are from Schiff's letter to the editor about Christina Hoff Sommers' speaking at Oberlin and a colleague who wasn't quite strident enough in equating physical violence with spoken "violence" (and absolutely absurd and dangerous concept):
Dr. Schiff is acknowledging that saying words and raping a man or a woman in the bushes at knifepoint are two different things. But they're not as different as we might think:While Copeland recognizes violence in the offenses, the letter writers highlight violence in responses to victims. We might call the latter "discursive violence" because it attacks victims' experiences and their descriptions of and reactions to those experiences.
Here's the main thrust of the article. Dr. Schiff accuses Dr. Sommers and people like her of a brand new kind of violence. "Discursive violence." So now there's "domestic violence," "random acts of violence" and "discursive violence." The appropriation of the word "violence" is troubling and she knows that she's performing a rhetorical magic trick. We're all against violence (unless we're Salon writing about the Baltimore riots), so we will distrust Dr. Sommers because, deep down in our minds, we see that she has been accused of violence. Very slick, Dr. Schiff.
We should also be troubled by Dr. Schiff's assertions that "attacking victims' experiences" and "reactions" is a form of violence. What consequences does this have for law enforcement officers who are duty bound to gather facts that will later be considered by a judge or jury? What does this mean for those judges and juries? The authoritarian left keeps pushing for "personal testimony" to be synonymous with "truth" in the same embarrassing manner as someone reporting a Bigfoot sighting.
Without lifting a finger, discursive violence rejects theses experiences as inarticulate, unintelligible and illegitimate in the public sphere.
It's interesting to point out the irony; Dr. Schiff claims that personal experiences should be trusted inviolate...in a letter concerning the personal experiences of Dr. Sommers.
Copeland himself points in this direction (though he likely meant it metaphorically) when he refers to "the unspeakable horror of sexual assault." What makes it unspeakable, in part, is a public sphere that excludes, marginalizes or derides it.
In an entertaining act of either womansplaining or ventriloquism, Dr. Schiff clears up what her colleague was unable to say. Dr. Copeland's opinion, 99.9% in line with hers, was not good enough. It is not enough to point out that sexual assault is an "unspeakable horror"-which it is, of course-but we must also bring the discussion back to the reason Dr. Sommers should not be allowed to speak in the first place: her research and her claims may or may not be correct, but they undermine radical feminism and must therefore be expunged from the public record.
...Yes, my friends, I am a liberal left behind because I want to come into contact with ideas with which I disagree. I want to be offended at times; such emotions protect me from the cognitive dissonance that will cripple many of those Oberlin protesters when they get into the real world. Most of all, I abhor violence-real violence-and believe that rhetoric should be met with more rhetoric, not Orwellian accusations and a chorus of fingers-in-our-ears "la la la I can't hear you." No matter how much privileged academics wish to redefine words, opposing ideas will never be the equivalent of actual violence.
How Is This Not Theft -- Under The Cover Of A Badge?
The latest "asset forfeiture" story -- which describes how government thugs can take your money if they make up some reason you might have gotten it illegally -- involves a young guy from Michigan, 22-year-old Joseph Rivers.
His relatives had given him $16,000 in cash to go out to LA to make a music video. DEA agents stopped his train in Albuquerque and asked Rivers -- the only black person in his train car -- to search his bags. Big mistake -- probably because he knew he'd done nothing wrong, he let them.
Joline Guttierez Kruger writes in the Albuquerque Journal News:
In one of the bags, the agent found the cash, still in the Michigan bank envelope."I even allowed him to call my mother, a military veteran and (hospital) coordinator, to corroborate my story," Rivers said. "Even with all of this, the officers decided to take my money because he stated that he believed that the money was involved in some type of narcotic activity."
Rivers was left penniless, his dream deferred.
"These officers took everything that I had worked so hard to save and even money that was given to me by family that believed in me," Rivers said in his email. "I told (the DEA agents) I had no money and no means to survive in Los Angeles if they took my money. They informed me that it was my responsibility to figure out how I was going to do that."
Other travelers had witnessed what happened. One of them, a New Mexico man I've written about before but who asked that I not mention his name, provided a way for Rivers to get home, contacted attorneys - and me.
"He was literally like my guardian angel that came out of nowhere," Rivers said.
Sean Waite, the agent in charge for the DEA in Albuquerque, said he could not comment on the Rivers case because it is ongoing. He disputed allegations that Rivers was targeted because of his race.
Waite said that in general DEA agents look for "indicators" such as whether the person bought an expensive one-way ticket with cash, if the person is traveling from or to a city known as a hot spot for drug activity, if the person's story has inconsistencies or if the large sums of money found could have been transported by more conventional means.
"We don't have to prove that the person is guilty," Waite said. "It's that the money is presumed to be guilty."
Do you have "guilty" money in your wallet?
Oh, and at the end of the piece, there's this:
Five days before Rivers' encounter in Albuquerque, Gov. Susana Martinez signed into law a bill that bars state and local law enforcement from seizing money or property under civil asset forfeiture. The law takes effect in July.But the new state law won't supersede the federal law, meaning federal agencies such as the DEA are still free to take your cash on arguably the flimsiest of legal grounds.
There's a crowdfunding page to try to replace Rivers' money.
via @overlawyered
Goober
Pealinks.
Pandora Listening Accidents
New-age music makes me want to reach out and beat someone to death with a dreamcatcher.
Achingly Dull LA Times Dating Column
It's one of a "submit your story!" feature called, boringly, "LA Affairs." An excerpt from this one, titled "Third time's the charm for two artists online."
I sent Pj a message saying I was looking for new friends and that he seemed cool. Almost immediately he sent me a message. We chatted a bit about his art studies, my writing and the tattoo of Totoro (the title character in Hayao Miyazaki's animated movie) I'd recently gotten on my ankle. Unfortunately, our conversations eventually fizzled out, mostly because I wasn't really ready to talk to anyone who could actually be someone to me.A year and a half later, Pj's profile popped up on my list again. My situation was much the same, except this time I was recovering from an interminable crush on a friend who was wrong for me. Pj and I exchanged longer messages for a couple of weeks. We meant to meet up, and he texted me now and then, but it just never happened.
...As we talked, Pj looked at me through those round glasses, his smile twitching under his thick beard. I felt that spark, that pull toward him. It ultimately turned out that we had more than enough in common where it mattered. We fell in love, quickly and wonderfully. Somehow, in the immense, traffic-laden city of Los Angeles, we'd managed to find -- again and again -- the right person.
We've been together for a while and continue to brave L.A. congestion to spend time with one another. Sometimes we even collaborate artistically, creating unique and interesting projects, and soon we hope to live together, removing the last bit of distance that separates us.
Are you really boring? Maybe they'll publish you, too! Here's their submissions guide.
What's With The Assumption That Business Owners And Workers Should Make Similar Amounts?
Andrew Keen writes at the WSJ that the sharing economy is a great deal for employers and a bad one for workers:
The sharing economy is actually doing the opposite of generating good jobs; it is generating huge inequality between the owners of the platforms and the precariat that sells its labor on them. This new economy--with its reliance on the huge returns demanded by venture-capital investment--can't create good jobs. The vertiginous valuations of startups like Uber ($40 billion) and Airbnb ($20 billion) rest upon these companies treating workers as autonomous contractors without intrinsic economic rights.
I repeat the headline: What's with the assumption that business owners and workers should make similar amounts? So what if it's "generating inequality."
At the same link, Rachel Botsman writes:
The sharing economy is empowering millions of people to unlock the value of their time, skills and talents to make money in ways and on a scale never possible before. It is providing good jobs, but not in the way "good jobs" are traditionally defined....First are the "flexers," the stay-at-home parents, retirees, students, people with disabilities and others for whom the conventional demands of nine-to-five jobs aren't an option. The flexibility and autonomy offered by the sharing economy allow this group to be in the workforce.
Next are those who can't find a traditional job in a tough market. The sharing economy isn't the complete answer to unemployment, but it can be a savior for many by providing an indispensable way to generate some independent income.
The third group, the "pros," have made a full-time job from one or more sharing platforms. By providing brand, marketing, support and distribution services, sharing platforms have enabled these independent professionals to expand their businesses in ways that weren't possible before.
Perhaps the most interesting category of providers is people with traditional full-time jobs seeking to earn extra income. I recently met an Airbnb host who had used the money she was making renting out two spare bedrooms to kick-start her textiles business on Etsy. Turned down by a bank for a starter loan, this was the only way for her to fund her passion. She isn't alone. Economic impact studies by Airbnb found that more than 10,000 of its hosts have used rental income to support themselves while launching a business. The sharing economy is enabling individuals to take entrepreneurial risks they wouldn't have taken otherwise, the effects of which aren't yet known.
She adds this:
It is true that benefits like health insurance and sick pay are being decoupled from the employment contract.
Sick pay is not part of my employment or any freelancer's, unless you pay for some pricey insurance. Health "insurance" is not, either -- and shouldn't be an expected part of one's employment. That it has been -- that health care has not been paid by individuals but has been a largely covert cost for decades is something I suspect has caused healthcare rates to rise just as massive availability of student loan dollars seems to have caused education costs to skyrocket.
via @AClassicLiberal
Lip Service
I came upon this in my travels and rather loved it:
"I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce." --J. Edgar Hoover
"Chlamydia Only" Education
UPDATE: Per llamas, it seems the real problem here may be school officials lying about the number of cases to parents. But the "abstinence" program issues below are still a problem in places with those programs.
Meg Wagner writes at the New York Daily News about the quaint unicorns and rainbows idea of sexuality of those behind abstinence-only programs -- and where one of these programs ended up landing 1 in 15 students at a West Texas high school:
An abstinence-only high school in a tiny Texas town is battling a colossal chlamydia epidemic.District officials are rethinking their approach to sex education after 20 of Crane High School's 300 students tested positive for the sexually transmitted disease.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called the outbreak a health issue at "epidemic proportions," KFOR reported.
..."We do have an abstinence curriculum, and that evidently ain't working," superintendent Jim Rumage told the TV station.
From Guttmacher Institute:
• There is no evidence to date that abstinence-only-until-marriage education delays teen sexual activity. Moreover, research shows that abstinence-only strategies may deter contraceptive use among sexually active teens, increasing their risk of unintended pregnancy and STIs.• A 2007 congressionally mandated study found that federally-funded abstinence-only programs have no beneficial impact on young people's sexual behavior.
My take on the subject? 
Please buy my book at Amazon or B&N.
Guppies
Fishylinks.
No Reason To Shut Up: Because Islam Commands Muslims To React Violently To Free Speech -- And Some Do
Mohammed slaughtered those who mocked him, including teenaged poets, and Islam calls for death for those who insult Mohammed or Allah.
Really disgusting Kathleen Parker column in the WaPo contending that Pamela Geller "sullied" and "abused" the principle of free speech.
On the contrary, Geller used it to defend the continuation of free speech by showing Muslims who follow the dictates of islam -- like that free speech is not allowed, blasphemers will be slaughtered, and so will apostates and homosexuals -- that they cannot change us from a constitutionally-driven country to one under Sharia or de facto Sharia law.
An excerpt from Parker's column:
Not since Westboro Baptist Church's "God Hates Fags" message and Florida pastor Terry Jones burning the Koran has the principle of free speech been so sullied and abused.Waging a one-woman crusade against the Muslim world, Geller says she wanted to draw a line in the sand and demonstrate to terrorists that, when it comes to free speech, America bows to no one. Okay, we get your point. It's an American point, actually.
And Geller's contribution to these protections and our unwavering dedication to its preservation is, exactly, what? A taunt. Shouldn't one at least aspire to some originality? It's been done. And each time, the result is the same. You haul out a picture of Muhammad; "they" haul out a fatwa. Cat puts out cheese; mouse gets eaten. What does one expect?
When the Westboro Baptist Church puts on one of their vile demonstrations, gays and lesbians protest; they don't gun them down. This allows Westboro to continue their vile demonstrations, which is as it should be in a country guided by the Constitution and not the fear borne of violence.
Those who seek to impose the terrorism that Islam commands to silence us need to see that there's a whole country here filled with lots of Pam Gellers. The ones who would serve us to keep quiet are people like Kathleen Parker, quick to capitulate to the terroristic thuggery of fear-spreading as a means to shut free people up.
Related: Terrific (and surprising) Salon column by Jeffrey Taylor, "The left has Islam all wrong: Bill Maher, Pamela Geller and the reality progressives must face."
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE, Tonight, 7-7:30 pm PT: Dr. Jennifer Jacquet On The Power Of Shame -- New Uses For An Old Tool
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
Dr. Jennifer Jacquet turns to science to explain and rehabilitate shame -- an essential tool for stopping freeloaders and exploiters and cultivating better behavior, even in a society of strangers.
Her book we'll be discussing is "Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool."
Listen at showtime at this link.
Available immediately afterward in podcast at the link (and subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher).
And please support my continued writing and work on this site and this show by buying a new copy (only about $10) of my science-based book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck."
First Amendment Summer School: No, There's No "Hate Speech" Exception
About Pamela Geller, there are all these people writing that sure, there's a First Amendment in this country...and then they add that "but..."
Eric Erickson writes at NOLA.com:
Amazingly, the American media and much of the American left spent vastly more time attacking Pamela Geller than the jihadists who tried to kill her. Echoing Islamic radicals, members of the press whose careers depend on the First Amendment now insist there be restrictions on the First Amendment.More specifically, when Catholics protested a satanic black mass in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe's editorialists wrote that the Catholics just needed to get over it and not let themselves be trolled. When Rudy Giuliani attempted to shut down an art exhibit of the Virgin Mary painted in dung, the New York Times extolled the virtues of free speech and creativity. Now, while advertising tickets to the "Book of Mormon" play, the New York Times is running editorials attacking Pamela Geller and demanding respect for Islam.
CNN's Chris Cuomo, who never misses an opportunity to show how dumb he is, took to Twitter to claim "hate speech" has no protections under the First Amendment. Cuomo, in addition to being Mario Cuomo's son, which is his chief and only real claim to advancement in society, is a lawyer. Luckily for America, the United States Supreme Court disagrees with Cuomo.
In 1992, the Court held that burning a cross in a black family's yard could be prosecuted, but not as hate speech because, unlike what Cuomo claimed, hate speech is still speech and therefore protected under the first amendment. In 2011, the Court held that the Westboro Baptist Church could protest military funerals. Again, they may be offensive, but their speech is protected.
To the American media, burning a cross in a black family's yard is free speech; protesting a military funeral is free speech; but saying homosexuality is a sin in the Bible should force re-education, and drawing Mohammed should get you thrown in jail.
Constitutional law professor Eugene Volokh clears things up on his WaPo blog:
I keep hearing about a supposed "hate speech" exception to the First Amendment, or statements such as, "This isn't free speech, it's hate speech," or "When does free speech stop and hate speech begin?" But there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Hateful ideas (whatever exactly that might mean) are just as protected under the First Amendment as other ideas. One is as free to condemn Islam -- or Muslims, or Jews, or blacks, or whites, or illegal aliens, or native-born citizens -- as one is to condemn capitalism or Socialism or Democrats or Republicans.
And about physical threats:
Indeed, threatening to kill someone because he's black (or white), or intentionally inciting someone to a likely and immediate attack on someone because he's Muslim (or Christian or Jewish), can be made a crime. But this isn't because it's "hate speech"; it's because it's illegal to make true threats and incite imminent crimes against anyone and for any reason, for instance because they are police officers or capitalists or just someone who is sleeping with the speaker's ex-girlfriend.
Lumpy
Gravylinks.
Is There Really A Significant Problem With Interspecies Sex Acts In New Jersey?
On Thursday, a bill that would outlaw bestiality went forward in committee in the New Jersey Senate.
From CBSLocal Philly:
The bill would make bestiality a fourth-degree crime, punishable by up to 18 months in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. The penalties would be upgraded if the animal dies.The measure arose after animal cruelty charges were dismissed against a former Moorestown police officer who was accused of engaging in a sex act with five cows in 2006.
At A Certain Point, You Just Have To Call The Rude Adult Shit's Mother
My prime writing hours were ruined today. I typically wake up at 5 a.m. -- best brain time -- because I am working on a very hard chapter in my next book, plus I have my columns to write, radio show to prep, and a talk to write for the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference.
Unbelievably, after shoving myself into bed at 10:30 pm, I was awakened from a deep sleep by loud voices at 2:48 a.m. Now, I live in an old house with really thick wooden doors inside. The noise was audible through two thick interior doors (both shut) and one exterior door.
It was a loud outdoor backyard party -- still going at almost 3 a.m. -- thrown by the rude soap opera actress next door. She does this with some frequency. And sure, have a party, but take it indoors when it gets late -- or super-late.
What an assboil.
Clearly, since I've asked her numerous times not to be more considerate, it is of no interest to her that there are other residents all around her house -- feet from her backyard. (One is an elderly lady -- about a foot from her yard -- who probably can't afford to risk the conflict of speaking up.)
So, sick of these rotten, rude awakenings, I did a little Googling, figured out her mom's name, and left her a message at her interior design business about her daughter's rotten behavior, asking her to do something about it. ("Sure, have a backyard party, but when it gets really late, take it inside so you don't wake neighbors feet away," was some of the gist of it, along with saying, "Surely, you didn't raise your daughter to be so inconsiderate...did you?")
Here's hoping the message will be conveyed and will have some sort of impact -- and that mommy isn't as inconsiderate, self-absorbed, and rotten a person as her daughter.
Hilarious: Oberlin College Choir Responds To Christina Hoff Sommers Controversy
Satirical song: "Please keep me from the real world..."
Here's the original letter to the editor at The Oberlin Review with the feminist freakout about Sommers' visit.
Robby Soave writes at reason:
"It was so over the top--it was pure performance art."That was feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers' take on the student-activists who prefaced her talk at Oberlin College on Monday with an appeal for anyone who felt unsafe to seek sanctuary in the designated "safe space."
Why would students have had cause to feel unsafe? What was so threatening to their physical and mental well-being? Was there an axe murderer wandering the campus that evening? No, just Sommers--a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute known for expressing classically-liberal, freedom-inclined views on gender issues.
...Sommers thinks at least some of the students who heard her speak were surprised to learn that she wasn't the monster the activists had made her out to be.
"My talk is liberal: pro-women, pro-feminism, pro-social-justice," she said. "I bet a lot of people in that room agreed with me."
But many others were somehow convinced that Sommers' presence was making them unsafe. Ironically, the campus police reached the opposite conclusion: if anyone was unsafe, it was Sommers. Thus, she was given a police escort during her time at Oberlin.
A professor of dance writes in another letter to the editor:
I was appalled by last week's letter to the editor, titled "In Response to Sommers' Talk: A Love Letter to Ourselves" (The Oberlin Review, April 17, 2015). Published three days in advance of Christina Hoff Sommers' public lecture at Oberlin, it read in part: "By bringing her to a college campus laden with trauma and sexualized violence and full of victims/survivors, the Oberlin College Republicans and Libertarians is choosing to reinforce this climate of denial/blame/ shame that ultimately has real life consequences on the well-being of people who have experienced sexualized violence."Presumably, the signatories to this letter would have preferred that OCRL rescind their invitation to Ms. Sommers. That -- I'm pleased to report -- did not happen. The sponsors of this event did not surrender to intimidation. But when it comes to words that might offend a victim of rape, nothing Ms. Sommers said Monday evening can compare with the following sentence in last Friday's letter: "Her talk is happening, so let's pull together in the face of this violence and make our own space to support each other." What I find highly objectionable about this statement is its irresponsible use of the word "violence." Anyone who conflates the distinction between constitutionally protected speech and rape or other forms of sexual violence is doing a tremendous disservice to those who have experienced the unspeakable horror of sexual assault.
Sincerely, -Roger Copeland Professor of Theater and Dance
Eek..."White Appreciation Day"! (Remember When America Had A Sense Of Humor?)
Now the PC police go after any joke or bit of poking fun more controversial than "Why did the chicken cross the road?"
At 9News Colorado, Kevin Massey and Whitney Wild write about an event I find rather hilarious -- a "White Appreciation Day" from the Hispanic owners of a Colorado restaurant [annoying autoplay video]:
What started as a joke is now on the calendar. Edgar Antillon and Miguel Jimenez recently purchased Rubbin Buttz BBQ on Broad Street. On June 11, they plan to offer a 10-percent discount to all white customers, and no one else."We have a whole month for Black History Month," Antillon said. "We have a whole month for Hispanic Heritage Month, so we thought the least we could do was offer one day to appreciate white Americans."
The men expect they might receive backlash and say they realize there's a history of racism in the America.
"It's a perpetuation of racism," Weld County civil rights activist and community organizer Ricardo Romero said. "It's wrong. If you're going to give a discount, give it to the whole community."
There could be legal repercussions as well, according to Jennifer McPherson of the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies.
"If someone felt like they were being discriminated against, they could come to the civil rights division and file a complaint in our office, and we would investigate that," McPherson said.
America! Stay home under your bed, because everything is against the law!
via ifeminists
Linkberger
Some (apparently) terrible type of cheese I've never had.
Paying For Hookers And Gambling? That's What Taxpayers Are For!
Eric Katz writes at govexec.com that Pentagon employees gambled and got their poles waxed on the taxpayer dime )(and yes, it's possible -- but probably unlikely -- that some of those were women seeing male prostitutes):
A not-yet-released Defense Department investigation has found civilian and military employees used government charge cards to make more than $1 million in purchases at casinos and to pay for escorts, according to an internal reportThe Pentagon's inspector general, as first reported by Politico and confirmed by a department official, found Defense employees used the cards for gambling and "adult entertainment" in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, New Jersey. The IG initiated the review in 2014 in accordance with the 2012 Government Charge Card Abuse Prevention Act.
In the one-year period beginning July 1, 2013, Defense cardholders made 4,437 transactions totaling more than $950,000 at casinos using their government cards. Employees made an additional 900 transactions totaling nearly $100,000 at "adult entertainment establishments." The Pentagon said this represented a small fraction of the total transactions on department-issued cards, coming to less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the charges.
via @instapundit
Doggie Druid
"Pull my sweater on already, willya?" says the photovictim.
Of Mice And Mice: Classic Lit Deemed Too "Depressing" For Fragile American Teens
Welcome the Wussified States of America, where helicopter parents seek to save their fragile little hothouse-raised chickies from reading John Steinbeck's "Of Mice And Men."
Conor Swanberg writes at IJ:
The Great Depression is part of our nation's history. So why would an Idaho committee seek to ban one of the greatest books written about that time period?John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" is under fire from a Coeur d'Alene committee which says the book is too dark and depressing for teens to read.
I learned about life from reading. I learned, for example, how good we have it -- or rather, used to have it -- back in the days when in America, unlike in the USSR, cops didn't ask for your papers unless they had some pretty good reason to believe you'd committed a crime.
I also learned how cruel people can be to each other -- and how good they can be. I used to bring home a laundry basket of books every week from the Farmington Hills Public Library. Other than Helter Skelter, which my parents kept me from reading, I read whatever I wanted. This was a good thing. Including all the horrible stuff I read about -- which is (unless you're under the wing of your parents until you're 70) -- stuff that happens in real life.
Literature and books in general prepared me for that. Thanks, books! Thanks parents who didn't curtail my reading like these idiots in Coeur d'Alene!
Lorakeet
Links with birdie feet.
The Drug War Killed Probable Cause In Baltimore
Bill Keller at The Marshall Project interviews David Simon, the creator of Baltimore-based "The Wire." An excerpt:
BK: What do people outside the city need to understand about what's going on there -- the death of Freddie Gray and the response to it?DS: I guess there's an awful lot to understand and I'm not sure I understand all of it. The part that seems systemic and connected is that the drug war -- which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American city -- was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police department. Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war. ...
Probable cause from a Baltimore police officer has always been a tenuous thing. It's a tenuous thing anywhere, but in Baltimore, in these high crime, heavily policed areas, it was even worse. When I came on, there were jokes about, "You know what probable cause is on Edmondson Avenue? You roll by in your radio car and the guy looks at you for two seconds too long." Probable cause was whatever you thought you could safely lie about when you got into district court.
Then at some point when cocaine hit and the city lost control of a lot of corners and the violence was ratcheted up, there was a real panic on the part of the government. And they basically decided that even that loose idea of what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to mean on a street level, even that was too much. Now all bets were off. Now you didn't even need probable cause. The city council actually passed an ordinance that declared a certain amount of real estate to be drug-free zones. They literally declared maybe a quarter to a third of inner city Baltimore off-limits to its residents, and said that if you were loitering in those areas you were subject to arrest and search. Think about that for a moment: It was a permission for the police to become truly random and arbitrary and to clear streets any way they damn well wanted.
On race:
BK: How does race figure into this? It's a city with a black majority and now a black mayor and black police chief, a substantially black police force.DS: What did Tom Wolfe write about cops? They all become Irish? That's a line in "Bonfire of the Vanities." When Ed and I reported "The Corner," it became clear that the most brutal cops in our sector of the Western District were black. The guys who would really kick your ass without thinking twice were black officers. If I had to guess and put a name on it, I'd say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.
...What the drug war did, though, was make this all a function of social control. This was simply about keeping the poor down, and that war footing has been an excuse for everybody to operate outside the realm of procedure and law. And the city willingly and legally gave itself over to that, beginning with the drug-free zones and with the misuse of what are known on the street in the previous generation as 'humbles.' A humble is a cheap, inconsequential arrest that nonetheless gives the guy a night or two in jail before he sees a court commissioner. You can arrest people on "failure to obey," it's a humble. Loitering is a humble. These things were used by police officers going back to the '60s in Baltimore. It's the ultimate recourse for a cop who doesn't like somebody who's looking at him the wrong way.
His own crew members would get picked up for DWB -- Driving While Black -- while going home from the set:
We'd wrap at like one in the morning, and we'd be in the middle of East Baltimore and they'd start to drive home, they'd get pulled over. My first assistant director -- Anthony Hemingway -- ended up at city jail. No charge. Driving while black, and then trying to explain that he had every right to be where he was, and he ended up on Eager Street [the location of the notorious Baltimore City Detention Center]. Charges were non-existent, or were dismissed en masse. Martin O'Malley's logic was pretty basic: If we clear the streets, they'll stop shooting at each other. We'll lower the murder rate because there will be no one on the corners.
The upshot:
By the standard of that long list, Freddie Gray becomes almost plausible as a victim. He was a street guy. And before he came along, there were actual working people -- citizens, taxpayers -- who were indistinguishable from criminal suspects in the eyes of the police who were beating them down. Again, that's a department that has a diminished capacity to actually respond to crime or investigate crime, or to even distinguish innocence or guilt. And that comes from too many officers who came up in a culture that taught them not the hard job of policing, but simply how to roam the city, jack everyone up, and call for the wagon.
via @WalterOlson @CatoInstitute
The United States Of The Pathetically Outraged
Violence against an emoji lost the Houston Rockets' social media manager his job.
Yes, really.
Ben Dreyfuss writes at Mother Jones that this tweet -- with the tiny gun emoji aimed at the tiny horse emoji -- ultimately killed the Rockets' Chad Shanks' employment: 
As Dreyfuss put it:
The internet being the stupid place that it is, a thousand crybabies immediately began to cry. Oh pray for the emoji horse! How dare the stupid Twitter account joke about horse slaughter! Wah wah wah!...Is merely mentioning the reality that horses are shot when they are lame outrageous? If you are outraged by the fact that horses are shot when they are lame, be outraged about the fact that horses are shot when they are lame, not someone remarking on the fact that horses are shot when they are lame.
A commenter explains for the outrage spewing:
AAAbond (Dan Wohl)
Uh, it's a visual metaphor (or just a regular one if you consider emoticons as written language). The Rockets were about to 'put down' the other team (not really kill them, though; you can relax now).
Another explains for sports know-nothings like me:
DRoseDARs
The Dallas Mavericks' mascot is... a horse. The emoji gun is being held to the head of... a horse.
Dreyfuss insightfully observed about the outraged:
Outrage allows people to define themselves in opposition to something, which is much easier than defining yourself on your own.
Yep. That's pretty much the deal.
Moo Shoe
Links with sole -- and extra MSG.
"I Don't Have My Vagina With Me"
Love that!
It was a response to "I don't have a condom with me" on a sex ed assignment.
The assignment was a fill in the blanks dealie on "Objections to Condoms" -- filled out by a 14-year-old girl, who ended up getting suspended over her answers.
Man Left In Cell For Five Days Without Food Or Water; DEA Agents Get Reprimands, Short Suspensions
Daniel Chong was almost a Drug War casualty, and agents who forgot him in a holding cell for five days get off with gentle wrist slaps.
Timothy M. Phelps writes for the LA Times:
Obama administration officials and lawmakers are calling for greater accountability and tougher disciplinary procedures at the Drug Enforcement Administration after the agency imposed only light punishments on agents who forgot a San Diego man in a holding cell, leaving him without food or water for five days and nearly killing him.Daniel Chong, a UC San Diego student, was detained in 2012 for what he was told would be five minutes after he was swept up in a drug bust at a friend's house, where he had been smoking marijuana. Instead, agents forgot about him. Chong, who was 23 at the time, drank his own urine to stave off dehydration until he was found, delirious and suffering from severe breathing problems, according to a report last summer by the Justice Department Office of the Inspector General.
...Chong, who was never charged with a crime, was kept in total isolation with his hands handcuffed behind his back in a windowless cell with no bathroom. Midway through the ordeal, someone turned off the light in his cell, leaving him in darkness. Chong periodically shouted for help and, at some point, slipped out of one of his handcuffs.
After he was found, Chong was hospitalized for four days. He and his lawyers said at a news conference last summer that he underwent intensive therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. The DEA paid Chong a $4.1-million settlement.
Last month, the DEA's Board of Professional Conduct issued four reprimands to DEA agents involved in the incident and a five-day suspension without pay to another. The supervisor in charge at the time received a seven-day suspension.
Gene Iredale, a San Diego lawyer who represents Chong, said the punishments were insufficient.
"In a situation where someone goes over four days without food and water and almost dies, some reprimands and a couple of brief suspensions are not proportionate to the danger that was caused by this misconduct," Iredale said. "I cannot accept that the head of the agency was powerless to ensure there would be appropriate punishment meted out. It may be that the regime of Miss Leonhart created a culture of unaccountability."
Here are the DEA sex parties in Colombia that we taxpayers footed the bill for:
Agents who participated in these parties got suspended for just one to 10 days. Even in the case of violence against one of the prostitutes.
More and more, being a cop is a way to be a law-violating thug with immunity from prosecution.
The Kind Of Firefighters I Want: More Qualified, Not "More Women!"
There's sense in the letters to the editor section of the LA Times:
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti wants more of the city's firefighters to be women, a difficult goal made clear by the fact that the four women in this year's training class have been eliminated. ("Second straight LAFD recruit class is all male after women exit," April 29)If a female trainee can't meet the physical requirements, which exist for safety reasons, too bad. In fact, The Times might want to look at the rate at which women leave the active roster of the Los Angeles Fire Department for early disability or are given cushy desk jobs.
Firefighters need to be in the field for 20 or 30 years to be cost effective. Slanting the playing field doesn't create equality, but it is unfair to those who easily meet the physical requirements.
I would love to be a supermodel, but alas, I don't meet the physical standard. Oh well. If a female can meet the LAFD standard, excellent. If not, too bad, but it isn't discrimination.
Trudi Reynolds, Malibu
From the Ben Welsh LA Times story linked above:
Despite repeated calls from City Hall for reform, the percentage of female LAFD firefighters remains at slightly less than 3% -- the same as in 1995. Numbers are just as low across the country."It's heartbreaking," said Capt. Tamara Chick, president of a group representing female firefighters at the LAFD. "Every time one of these women gets hurt or gets fired or quits, it breaks your heart."
Why is it "heartbreaking"? Why should I care whether there are firefighters with vaginas?
If there's a fire in my house, I just want firefighters who are strong enough to haul my ass out. If they can do that, I don't care whether they're men, women, or creatures from space with one big purple eye.
More sense -- from the LAT comments section (though it seems autocorrect was out drinking at the bar):
retiredengineer23
i retired after 31 years as a firefighter, i proctored scores of exams, at the absolute height of a woman's ability they barley can pass the agility exam,most fail with men scoring 40%higher.What will these gals be like in their 40s when they barley passed in the 20;s
Its time to stop this pathetic politically correct fashion show, they have altered the 35 foot ladders so gals can use them, however now it takes twice as long to extend one.Unlike the LA Marathon no fire scene gives women a 10 minute headstart on the men
Lurky
Linky hiding behind the couch.
Why Did The LA Cop Cross The Road? To Give You A $197 Ticket For Something No Reasonable Person Would Suspect Is Illegal
I once got a ticket in Santa Monica -- early in the morning, before any cars were out (and in fact there might as well have been tumbleweed blowing through the intersection), for rollerskating through a red light.
Okay, so that's a clear violation, but I saw that the road was car-free, and I'm an adult with working eyes, so I made the adult decision that it would not be unsafe to cross -- instead of ceremoniously waiting at the corner for nothing to happen, no cars to come by, and then crossing.
Well, in downtown LA, cops are writing loads of tickets for a violation I bet most of you have no idea is a violation. I sure didn't.
Catherine Saillant writes in the LA Times:
The raised red hand flashes as Eduardo Lopez darts into the crosswalk outside L.A.'s 7th Street Metro station.In one fluid movement, Los Angeles Police Officer Robert Lockhart fires up his black and white motorcycle and rumbles across Hope Street toward the 22-year-old college student, initiating a confrontation -- a symbol, perhaps, of emerging tensions as the balance of power between walkers and drivers shifts in L.A.'s newly revitalized downtown.
Lopez says he was running for a bus to make his first class at Glendale Community College and didn't hear Lockhart's order: "Don't go."
Unmoved, Lockhart hands him a $197 ticket.
Over the next two hours, Lockhart will write up at least eight more pedestrians who violate "21456" -- cop-speak for the vehicle code section that makes it illegal to step into a crosswalk after the red hand starts flashing and the countdown has begun.
What a bunch of bullshit. It should be for me to judge whether I can make it across before the light stops flashing; it shouldn't automatically be illegal.
And it's absolutely disgusting that this garners a $197 ticket -- which disproportionately ruins the lives of the poor.
Steve Lopez, in the LA Times, writes about the effect of this ticket on Eduardo Lopez and his family:
Lopez was guessing his troubles would cost him $80 or $90, which would have been bad enough. But he was off by a mile.It was a $197 whack.
"I was in shock," said Lopez, who wondered again why the officer couldn't have given him a warning instead of a ticket that's nearly one-third of his family's monthly rent, which he contributes to. "I didn't know how I was going to pay for it or what I was going to do."
...Eduardo had to take time out of another busy day to go to court and ask if he could pay off his debt by doing community work. No, he was told. He has until April 27 to pay up, unless he tries to fight it, with no guarantees except that he'd eat up more of his valuable time.
He could turn to his older brother, Eduardo told me, but asking him for help is a last resort. The rent is coming due, and Miguel has to cover the bulk of the $712 payment, even as he's saving to buy his first used car.
Fortunately for Eduardo, two readers who saw Saillant's story offered to help Lopez out.
"It tugged on my heart that this sum could be a hardship for a student," wrote one.
A grateful Lopez, who has saved $45 so far toward the ticket, has been in touch with both readers. He was checking his mail last week, hoping they might be able to help him before his bill comes due.
And check this out -- a comment at LA Times, showing how politicians and their unaffordable projects escalate the price of a ticket:
jerome79
SURPRIZE!!!! The actual BASE fine for jaywalking is only $25. The rest of the nearly 200 dollars comes from penalty assessments (another $50) etc which mount up to a total 800% of the original fine.A close assessment of a red light violation with a base of $100 but a final total of nearly $500 can be found here
More complicated than I thought - here's a breakdown with a pie chart of the Jaywalking fee.
If Reading Classic Literature Is Such A Problem For You, You Need Years Of Intense Psychological Help
This piece in the Columbia Spectator was a group effort -- by Kai Johnson, Tanika Lynch, Elizabeth Monroe, and Tracey Wang:
During a forum hosted by the Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board on Literature Humanities last semester, a student shared an experience with an audience of instructors and fellow students. This experience, she said, came to define her relationship to her Lit Hum class and to Core material in general.During the week spent on Ovid's "Metamorphoses," the class was instructed to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault. As a survivor of sexual assault, the student described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape throughout the work. However, the student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text. As a result, the student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation. She did not feel safe in the class. When she approached her professor after class, the student said she was essentially dismissed, and her concerns were ignored.
Ovid's "Metamorphoses" is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.
The MAAB, an extension of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, is an advocacy group dedicated to ensuring that Columbia's campus is welcoming and safe for students of all backgrounds.
Again, as Greg Lukianoff points out in Unlearning Liberty, we have gotten to the point where we conflate emotional and physical safety.
Students need to feel safe in the classroom, and that requires a learning environment that recognizes the multiplicity of their identities.
College as nursery school.
I can't help but feel this sort of plea for coddling is really just a disguised plea for attention from those who are unable to earn it.
A commenter on the post writes:
Gullah posted on May 1, 4:15pm
Oh Precious! Precious? My precious little snowflake, speaking as a black man who has been around the block more than a few times, all of you need to grow up and get over it. You re not the center of the universe, none of us has a right to not be offended in a democracy and if you can't handle it repair to your padded room with your lollipops, Valium and whatever other pacifier makes you happy or better still make an appointment with a shrink. We are all always going to be offended by something. Using 'feeling safe', 'respect', and 'trigger-warnings' are just treads in a rope to lynch free speech.
UPDATE: Let's pretend somebody actually is debilitated by reading Ovid; that it isn't just a way to gain attention and unearned power over others.
Rather than avoidance, a practical way to deal with trauma is "exposure therapy" -- under a professional's care, slowly and repeatedly being exposed to the thing that terribly upsets or terrifies you so you can function again.
Fourth-year U of Washington Med Center psychiatric resident Sara Roff suggests this at Chronicle:
As a psychiatrist, I nonetheless have to question whether trigger warnings are in such students' best interests. One of the cardinal symptoms of PTSD is avoidance, which can become the most impairing symptom of all. If someone has been so affected by an event in her life that reading a description of a rape in Ovid's Metamorphoses can trigger nightmares, flashbacks, and panic attacks, she is likely to be functionally impaired in areas of her life well beyond the classroom. The solution is not to help these students dig themselves further into a life of fear and avoidance by allowing them to keep away from upsetting material.I am also skeptical that labeling sensitive material with trigger warnings will prevent distress. The scientific literature about trauma teaches us that it seeps into people's lives by networks of association. Someone who has been raped by a man in a yellow shirt at a bus stop may start avoiding not only men, but bus stops and perhaps even anyone wearing yellow. A soldier who has seen a comrade killed by a roadside explosive device may come to avoid not just parked vehicles, but also civilians who look like the people he or she saw right before the device exploded. Since triggers are a contagious phenomenon, there will never be enough trigger warnings to keep up with them. It should not be the job of college educators to foster this process.
It would be much more useful for faculty members and students to be trained how to respond if they are concerned that a student or peer has suffered trauma. Giving members of the college community the tools to guide them to the help they need would be more valuable than trying to insulate them from triggers. Students with unusually intense responses to academic cues should be referred to student-health services, where they can be evaluated and receive evidence-based treatments so that they can participate fully in the life of the university.
One of the most important treatments for PTSD is exposure therapy, which helps patients unlearn the associations between traumatic events and triggers so that they can start functioning again. Narrative therapies also provide exposure by encouraging patients to tell their stories over and over again, allowing them to find a less central place for the event in their personal history so that they can start to rebuild their lives.
One of my biggest concerns about trigger warnings is that they will apply not just to those who have experienced trauma, but to all students, creating an atmosphere in which they are encouraged to believe that there is something dangerous or damaging about discussing difficult aspects of our history.
What We Miss When We Have Political Correctness- And Greed-Driven "Security Theater" Instead Of Probable Cause-Based Policing
I get searched -- disgustingly groped -- about every time I take a plane, apparently because big boobs are a sign that one spent the summer in ISIS training camp.
Yet, who isn't getting -- or rather wasn't getting -- a harder look from the costumed mall cops at the airports? That's right -- one of the two dumbshit terrorists who thought it would be smart to try to gun people down in Texas. (I think even the kittens are armed there.)
Valerie Richardson writes in the Wash Times [with annoying autoplay]:
Elton Simpson, one of the Mohammed art-contest gunmen killed Sunday in Texas, dodged federal efforts to place him on the no-fly list and pin terrorism charges on him earlier this decade, receiving instead probation and a $500 fine.Simpson was found guilty in 2011 of making a false statement to FBI investigators regarding his plans to travel to Africa, for which he received three years' probation, a $500 fine and another $100 charge, according to court documents posted online on the website scribd.
The documents show that an FBI informant recorded hundreds of conversations with Simpson in which they discussed his Muslim religion, his interest in jihad and his desire to travel to South Africa and then Somalia.
And even if you don't put the guy on the no-fly list (the judge didn't find sufficient cause for it), jeez...should he maybe get a little more scrutiny at the airport than Amy Alkon?
The truth is, by putting our resources in to pretend security -- searching me and countless other Americans as if there's reason to believe we are guilty -- we fail to put our resources and energy into actual security. And actual security involves highly trained intelligence officers doing probable cause-based policing.
The people currently manning our airports -- like Sharonda Juana Walker, a TSA "lead" who groped me at LAX -- appear to me to be the best and brightest...mall food court workers. Sharonda -- per her sneer to me that I should take the bus (if I had issues with her big gropey hands all over me) -- is clueless that VIPR teams are also searching people who take the bus.
Dumpy
Lumpylinks.
Al Sharpton Endorses Yet Another Terrible Obama Admin Idea: Federalize The Police
Glenn Reynolds in USA Today is all over the unintended consequences that are practically jumping out of their little desks, demanding to be called upon:
The idea behind federal supervision of local police forces is that it will make them more accountable. Instead of a bunch of presumptively racist, violent hicks running things on a local level, we'll see the cool professionalism of the national government in charge.There are (at least) two problems with this approach. The first is that federal law enforcement, especially in recent years, hasn't exactly been a haven of cool professionalism. The second is that no law enforcement agency is very good at policing itself, meaning that a national police force is likely to be less accountable, not more.
...To believe that a federalized approach to policing would be an improvement over the current system, you'd have to ignore an awful lot of misbehavior by federal law enforcement lately. There's the scandal with the Secret Service and hookers just before Obama's trip to Colombia. There's the entirely separate scandal with the Drug Enforcement Agency and hookers (hookers paid for by Colombia drug lords, no less).
The list goes on. And on. My favorite bit from his piece is in the list of FBI misconduct and how their lab was allowed to convict people based on bogus forensic evidence (and then not admit the problem for years, letting many potentially innocent people rot in jail).
In one case, a man, Santae Tribble, spent 28 years in prison after FBI analysts said that a single hair found at a crime scene was one of his, when in fact it came from a dog.
And then, why federalizing police is terrible for civil liberties and more:
The third problem with unifying police authority under a national umbrella is that it's much more prone to political abuse by the party in power. As we've seen with the IRS -- which, interestingly, shows little interest in frequent White House visitor Al Sharpton's unpaid taxes -- federal bureaucrats are all too willing to serve the interests of their political masters even when doing so violates the law. Putting most law enforcement in the hands of diverse state and local authorities helps limit the potential for abuse. Putting everything under federal control, on the other hand, magnifies it.Instead, if we're really serious about increasing law enforcement accountability, we should end civil service protections for federal employees, while outlawing public employee unions. We should also abolish governmental immunity for federal, state, and local employees, forcing them to face civil lawsuits for illegal behavior, just as the rest of us must do.
In other words, the answers here are decentralization and accountability -- a practice that Al Sharpton seems virulently allergic to.
Note To Dumbshit Terrorists
Hello? It's Texas. Everyone is armed.
Your Vagina Is Not A Voting Tool
Brendan O'Neill writes at reason about the double-cringe-worthy line a woman used in a magazine piece to talk about Candidate Hillary:
"I intend to vote with my vagina."
Yicko!
O'Neill continues:
Let's leave aside the unfortunate image conjured up by that sentence ("You can hold a pencil with that thing?!") The bigger problem with such unabashed declarations of "vagina voting" is that they confirm the descent of feminism into the cesspool of identity politics, even biologism, and its abandonment of the idea that women should be valued more for their minds than their anatomy.Kate Harding, the vagina voter in question, isn't only going to vote with her vag--she's also going to tell everyone about it. "I intend to vote with my vagina. Unapologetically. Enthusiastically... And I intend to talk about it," she wrote in Dame.
She thinks Hillary would be a great president because she "knows what it's like to menstruate, be pregnant, [and] give birth."
So you're going to pick your leader on the basis of her biological functions, the fact she's experienced the same bodily stuff as you? Imagine if a man did that. "I'm voting for Ted Cruz because he knows what it's like to spunk off. And he knows the pain of being kicked in the balls." We'd think that was a very sad dude indeed. Why is it any better for a female commentator to wax lyrical about voting on the basis of her biological similarity to a candidate rather than any shared political outlook?
Increasingly, when I think of feminism, I think of fifth-raters struggling to become fourth-rate.
Equality? That'll be a steep haul from where today's feminists are -- mired in victimism and the politics of looking at a candidate's pee-pee to see whether it matches theirs.
There Is No Free Speech In Islam
So-called "moderate" Muslims are Muslims who are not practicing Islam as it is commanded to be practiced by the Quran, which is said to be the eternal word of Allah and unquestionable by anyone. But for the fact that there are so many of us "infidels" (dirty "kuffar") all around the planet, speaking (and cartooning) freely, those Muslims would likely be on the death lists of more orthodox Musilms.
In USA Today, UK-dwelling Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary explains:
Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people's desires....Muslims consider the honor of the Prophet Muhammad to be dearer to them than that of their parents or even themselves. To defend it is considered to be an obligation upon them. The strict punishment if found guilty of this crime under sharia (Islamic law) is capital punishment implementable by an Islamic State. This is because the Messenger Muhammad said, "Whoever insults a Prophet kill him."
Islamic "tolerance"? I believe Molly Norris, who called for the "Draw Mohammed Day" is still in hiding.
Denis MacEoin writes at Gatestone Institute about the Islamic erosion of free speech in the West:
Criticism of Islam and everything else will -- and should -- continue, produced by courageous writers and journalists. Certainly, we know how many times politicians in the United States and Europe have delusionally tried to persuade us that Islamist violence "has nothing to do with Islam."There have been many attacks and murders already. Perhaps the best known of these -- until the Charlie Hebdo murders -- was the murder of Dutch film-maker, Theo van Gogh, on November 2, 2004. Van Gogh had directed a short film called Submission, written by Muslim dissident Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had worked extensively in women's shelters in the Netherlands, where she had observed that most of the women were Muslim. Van Gogh's killer, a 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri, now serving a life sentence, has described democracy as utterly abhorrent to Islam. (This view, for anyone who cares about the continuation of the West, is held by many Muslims. For them, democracy, made by man, is illegitimate, compared to shari'a law, made by Allah, and therefore the only form of government that is legitimate.) In court, Bouyeri said that 'the law [shari'a law] compels me to chop off the head of anyone who insults Allah and the prophet."
The threat of murder has become ever more real. It is no longer possible to dismiss death threats from Muslims as the work of "lone wolves," "deviant personalities," or attention seekers. It is the use of death threats that has given radical Muslims the power to deter most writers, film-makers, TV producers, and politicians from tackling Islamic issues. The threat of calling people "racist" as a tool for suppressing critical voices has cast a dark shadow over normal democratic life. Some have died for free speech about Islam; others have faced ostracism, imprisonment, flogging and the loss of a normal life. [7]
Salman Rushdie lives under constant guard. Molly Norris, an American artist who drew a cartoon of Mohammed and proposed an "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," has lived in hiding since 2010. On advice from the FBI, she changed her identity and cut off all links with family and friends. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders has been tried for "hate speech," barely acquitted, and is now being tried for "hate speech" again.
These are just a few of the casualties who have paid a heavy price for their willingness to treat Islam as any of us might treat other subjects or other faiths. No Christian scholar will be tried for arguing that the Gospels contain contradictions, no Reform Jew will be arraigned for criticism of ultra-Orthodox beliefs, no politician will be brought before the law for denouncing the ideologies of Communism or Fascism. You can say that Karl Marx was misguided or that a U.S. president is terrible, and on and on, without dreading for a moment an assassin's footfall or being locked up for your remarks.
MacEoin takes note of the double standard:
It is also necessary to ask, if Geert Wilders and others are being accused of hate speech, then why isn't the Koran -- with its calls for smiting necks and killing infidels -- also being accused of hate speech?
Just to be clear, I'm against "hate speech" laws, but the guy has a point.
Loopy
Drinkylinks.
Tonight's "Science News You Can Use" Radio, 7- 7:30 pm PT
Tonight's catch?
Amy Alkon & Dr. Jennifer Verdolin: How heartbreak is adaptive and how science can help you heal.
Listen live at 7pm PT or pick it up afterward in podcast -- at this link. (You can also find us at iTunes and Stitcher.)
Welcome To Witch Burning 101
I took a survey yesterday related to an event I'd been to and I was dismayed to see a question asking for a rating about "personal safety and freedom from harassment." A bit from my response:
A good deal of academia is turning into a witchhunt against men with a concomitant infantilization of women. Yes, there can sometimes be harassment in academia -- and in any field. But there's also a tendency to call just about any form of male sexuality (short of eunuchhood) harassment. Even jokes.
Government As Bank Robber: IRS Seizes $107K From Biz Owner For Making Too Many Small Cash Deposits
Disgusting. Hard-working convenience store owner Lyndon McLellan was accused of "structuring" deposits -- depositing less than $10K at a time, supposedly to get out of IRS reporting requirements (for deposits of $10K and more).
About how he earned $107K over 10 years, selling soft drinks, cigarettes, and hot dogs:
"Took 13 years to get it and less than 13 seconds to take it away."
An Institute for Justice video:
As the text with a Vox story about this notes:
The agency hasn't charged McLellan with any crime, but under controversial civil asset forfeiture rules the burden of proof is on him to prove he didn't violate the "structuring" laws.
Yes, he now has to fight the government to get his money back. With zero evidence that he's guilty of anything other than working hard to earn an honest living.
Also from the Vox story:
The New York Times points out that business owners can have legitimate reasons for keeping their cash deposits under $10,000. For example, some store owners have insurance policies that only cover cash losses up to $10,000.It won't be easy for McLellan to get his money back. Many forfeiture targets don't bother to contest seizures under civil forfeiture laws because legal fees would exceed the value of what was taken. But with IJ's help, he might be able to recover the money the IRS took from him.
The IRS declined to comment on the case, citing taxpayer privacy laws.
Check out how the government engages in legalized thuggery -- also from the NYT piece linked above (written by Shaila Dewan):
During a congressional hearing in February, Representative George Holding, a Republican from North Carolina, referred to Mr. McLellan's case, saying no crime other than structuring had been alleged. "If that case exists, then it's not following the policy," John Koskinen, the commissioner of the I.R.S., said.But the prosecutor on the case, Steve West, was unmoved. Notified of the hearing by Mr. McLellan's lawyer at the time, he responded with concern that the seizure warrant in the case, filed under seal but later given to Mr. McLellan, had been handed over to a congressional committee, according to an email exchange provided to The New York Times by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm that has taken over the case.
"Your client needs to resolve this or litigate it," Mr. West wrote. "But publicity about it doesn't help. It just ratchets up feelings in the agency." He concluded with a settlement offer in which the government would keep half the money.
Why, how generous.
Loutish
Ill-behaved links.
Racism In Rioting: Whose Business Do You Direct The Rioters To Destroy?
Ron Nixon writes in The New York Times of (awww!) gang members -- Crips and Bloods -- coming together to drive rioters to non-black-owned businesses:
He described how he and some Bloods members stood in front of stores that they knew were black-owned business, to protect them from looting and vandalism. He said they made sure no black youths, or reporters, were injured by rioters.Instead, he said, they pointed the rioters toward Chinese- and Arab-owned stores.
Ugly.
And very likely the stores of immigrants, who came to this country with nothing.
via @overlawyered
Home Schooling Is A Way To Educate Children, Not Murder Them And Get Away With It
At least the pandering lawmaker in Michigan, Stephanie Chang, who's trying to inject the government into home-schooling in the wake of the murder of two children isn't naming it "Stoni and Stephen's Law."
Michelle Blair, the horror show of a "mother" of these two kids, 13 and 9, had them removed them from Detroit public schools two years ago. She claimed they were being home-schooled. They were home -- dead in a freezer for two years before their bodies were discovered.
Those of us with more sense than a houseplant understand that this is a horrible but rare occurrence.
Izzy Lyman writes for WatchDog.org:
A bill that would create a registry of Michigan home-schoolers has been dubbed, by a Detroit News' house editorial, as "extremely intrusive."State Rep. Stephanie Chang, D-Detroit, introduced legislation, earlier this month, that would mandate that home-schoolers provide their names and ages, as well as the address of their parent or guardian, to the superintendent of the school district in which they live. The home-schooled student would also have to be seen, at least twice a year, by a doctor, licensed social worker, physician's assistant, school counselor, teacher, audiologist, or by a friend of the court official.
The Great Lakes state is known for its laissez-faire home education laws. At present, the annual registering of a home school to the Michigan Department of Education is voluntary, and home-schooling parents are not required to initiate any contact with the state. According to one guess estimate, about three percent of Michigan's school-age population learns at home.
As Lyman writes, it's "an alternative education community that is known for academic excellence and positive civic endeavors."
And Chang is engaging in the sort of pandering to voters that seems like she's doing something worthwhile. "FOR THE CHILDREN!!"
And regarding the use of the anger over these kids' deaths to try to get a law passed, as Radley Balko writes about laws named after crime victims:
Anger is a bad reason to make public policy. New laws, especially laws with serious criminal sanctions, demand careful consideration: Will the law actually address the problem it is intended to address? Is it enforceable? What are some possible unintended consequences of this law? Could it be abused by police and prosecutors?Laws named after the victims of brutal crimes make it difficult to ask these questions, especially for politicians, who aren't exactly known for taking bold stands against an angry public. When you put Caylee Anthony's name on a bill, you imply that anyone who opposes the bill -- even for good reasons -- is indifferent to the death of its namesake, or at least isn't as concerned about it as you think they ought to be. That's not a formula for an honest discussion of the bill's merits.
Riots Don't Work
Megan McArdle writes at Bloomberg:
But regardless of justification, rioting is incredibly destructive, mostly in the neighborhoods where the rioters live. In my own city, Washington, D.C., the major retail corridors that were destroyed in the 1968 riots have only really begun to recover in the last five years (and one of them still hasn't). Who suffered because of that? The store owners, obviously, and their insurers. But the people who suffered most grievously were the mostly black people who lived in those neighborhoods.
Instapundit notes:
The question to ask isn't who suffered from the riots. It's who benefited.
Limpy
Linky with a sprained whatsis.
Deelz!!
40 percent off select keyboards, including iPad keyboards, at Amazon
This one -- a little foldable iWerks number (regular $79.99; on sale for $31.99 -- 60 percent off) -- works with your phone or iPad: iWerkz Universal Foldable Bluetooth Keyboard
A review from Amazon for the little folding iWerks:
All ups and no downs What? A review that's 100% positive? Yep. This little keyboard was what I was looking for, even though I didn't know I was looking for it. I saw an ad and bought on a whim. Didn't realize how much I would use this thing.
1. It folds into a something the size of my hands. Put both hands flat together. That's about the size of this. It fits into my purse, no prob.
2. Once folded you put it into the hard case to protect. And this hard case also serves as a stand for my iPad. Does it actually hold up my iPad? Yep. It has a little pop-out slider for phones as well.
3. It pairs fast. Both my phone and my iPad paired within 2 seconds.
4. Charge lasts for...well...I don't know. Going on 2 weeks now.
5. Types well. It takes about 10 minutes to get used to the gap in the middle, but then you're flying. Has a feel more like an Apple keyboard than a Windows one.
6. OK - there's one "down". I see it online now for an average of about $10 less than I paid. So that sucks.
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!
"I'm In Charge -- And I'm Clueless"
That's basically what the Secretary of Homeland Security said about the Fourth Amendment and whether he thinks the government can bulk-collect your personal data without a warrant.
Secretary Jeh Johnson's exact words in response to Rand Paul's grilling on that subject?
"That is beyond my competence as the Secretary of Homeland Security to answer in any intelligent legal way." - Secretary Jeh Johnson
The video is seven-some minutes but the exchange is right at the beginning.
College Today: "As If They Are Raising Human Veal"
Nick Gillespie has it right at the Daily Beast on the ever-increasing infantilization of college students with "trigger warnings" and all:
But really, what the fuck is wrong with kids these days and, more important, the supposed adults who look after them? They act as if they are raising human veal that cannot even stand on their own legs or face the sunlight without having their eyeballs burned out and their hearts broken by a single deep breath or uncomfortable moment. I'm just waiting for stories of college deans carrying students from class to class on their backs.As a first-generation college student way back when, one of the very greatest things about college was engaging with ideas and attitudes that were different than what you already knew. Attending Rutgers in the early '80s, you could walk from one end of the centuries-old College Avenue Campus to the other and encounter screaming matches over divesting the stocks of companies that did business in South Africa, whether Nicaragua was already a Soviet satellite, and the supposedly self-hating theology of Jews for Jesus.
Hardly a week went by, it seemed, without a public demonstration for and against the burgeoning gay rights movement, a protested showing of the anti-abortion movie Silent Scream, and debates over how great and/or evil Ronald Reagan actually was. The whole idea of college was about arguing and debating, not shielding ourselves from disagreements.
Even as it seemed to be an all-you-can-eat buffet of exotic new ideas, outrages, and attitudes, it wasn't paradise, and I shudder to think of the insensitivities that were taken for granted by the privileged and internalized by the oppressed of the day. Nobody wants to return to the days when campus was segregated by race, gender, and lest we forget, class.
But the way students and especially administrators talk about college today, you'd think parents are paying ever-higher tuition so their children can attend a reeducation camp straight out of China's Cultural Revolution. It's as if college presidents, deans, and the ever-increasing number of bureaucrats and administrators and residence-life muckety-mucks walked away from Animal House firmly believing that Dean Wormer was not only the hero of movie but a role model. At all costs, order must be enforced and no space for free play or discord can be allowed!
It gets better and better. From NRO (National Review Online -- though it sounds like it's from National Review of the Onion):
Campus Group Apologizes to Students 'Triggered' by Anti-Microaggressions Exhibit
Protecting Guilty Officers Against Telling A Damning Story
It turns out there's a police tenure system that keeps bad cops on the job by delaying the questioning of the officer long enough that he or she has ample time to piece together a less damning story. Walter Olson writes at Cato:
The problems of the teacher tenure system, especially in big cities where powerful unions defend members against dismissal, are familiar enough. Less well known is the newer, parallel-and arguably more alarming-rise of police and prison-guard tenure under what are known as Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights (LEOBR or LEOBOR) laws.Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, for example, has blamed Maryland's LEOBR law for frustrating the investigation into the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. Maryland's law provides that after an incident superiors cannot question an officer without the presence of a lawyer of the officer's choosing, and that officers have 10 days to line up such representation. Critics say that by the time those suspected of misbehavior have to commit to a story, they will have had ample opportunity to consult with others about what to say. Most of the officers present have cooperated with the investigation of Gray's death, the city says, but at least one has not.
...Prison and jail guards are often covered by these laws as well, and scandals of corrections administration (the state-run Baltimore jail had a huge one in which the Maryland LEOBR was implicated) are often hard to investigate because of the law's barriers. Union contracts often add further layers of insulation from discipline. In its coverage of abuse allegations at New York's notorious Attica prison, for example, the New York Times reported, "Under their union contract, corrections officers are obligated to answer questions only from their employers and have the right to refuse to talk to outside police agencies. State Police investigators attempted to interview 15 guards; 11 declined to cooperate."
Declined to cooperate? Declined to cooperate?! Like it's a fucking tea party, and they just weren't feeling up to attending?
Oh La Link
French toasted.
