Horrible: Nail Salon Owner Sues For Return Of Life Savings Seized By DEA Agents At Airport
And guess what: Chances are, he'll never see a dime of it. And he's probably already spent money trying to get it back.
Tim Cushing writes at TechDirt about yet another crime by government thugs against a citizen -- one they have no evidence was engaged in any wrongdoing.
The victim is Vu Do, owner of two nail salons in New York City. He had nearly $44K taken from him by DEA thugs at JFK -- money he said took him over 20 years to save up.
The guy must have a bozo as his lawyer, because there's an error in his complaint -- saying that he didn't know there's a federal regulation against carrying more than $5K in cash. Well, there isn't. And though there's a reporting requirement if you're taking more than $10K in or out of the country, there isn't one when you're traveling within the United States, as Do was. As Cushing notes:
The complaint points out that Do has run two legitimate businesses in NYC for several years, and not once has he been arrested or even charged for violations of controlled substances laws.Nevertheless, the DEA took all of Do's money under the assumption that he's involved in the drug business, despite being more than willing to let him go without even a citation. Do had planned to take his money to California to help his financially-struggling siblings out, but ran into the DEA first.
We should change the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty to something along these lines:
Give me your tired, your poor; let them work their asses off for decades to make good in America; and then steal their money from them and laugh at them when they ask, "Hey, what about 'innocent till proven guilty'?"
Answer: Sorry, Bub -- you've got to spend tens of thousands of dollars (or more) proving that the money wasn't earned through drug sales.
Not surprisingly, Do, an immigrant (I'd guess, and maybe not so hot in the speaking English department), didn't quite figure out the legal game on this in time:
According to this chart, Do has no shot at reclaiming his money. He had a certain amount of time to challenge this seizure (until April 30, according to the DEA's administrative seizure notice) and his June 17 lawsuit falls well outside that time limit. Not being "timely" is pretty much an instant loss.If so, that's 20 years worth of savings headed towards ensuring the DEA has the funding to keep seizing cash from travelers. Despite its best efforts, an actual drug trafficker will occasionally stumble into the agency's sticky grasp, inadvertently legitimizing the whole crooked program. I can't imagine the DEA looks forward to encounters with actual criminals, seeing as it involves arrests and a whole bunch of additional paperwork. Cash is king. And as long as asset forfeiture programs remain in effect, government agencies will prefer the easy busts of "guilty" money over the more legitimate effort of removing criminals from the streets.
I predict -- just a guess here -- that somebody this is done to will snap, violently, and this will be what ends up bringing an end to this asset theft aka "forfeiture" by the government.
It's just so disgusting. I want to go find Do and tell him, "This is not what this country's about."
Except...yes it is.
"We're From The Government, And We're Here To Give You Diabetes"
Wowee moment, reading a piece in JAMA -- the New England Journal of Medicine -- "The 2015 US Dietary Guidelines: Lifting the Ban on Total Dietary Fat."
It's about the "Dietary Guidelines for Americans," released every five years by the US Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services.
For decades, based on distortions by Ancel Keys and others that were put forward as science, the government has been telling Americans to eat a high-carb, lowfat diet -- precisely the diet that causes the insulin secretion that puts on fat. It is also a diet absent of healthy fats and nutrients you need for proper brain and body function, and to protect you against disease.
Well, the authors of this JAMA article, Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, DrPH, and David S. Ludwig, MD, Ph.D., marvel at the difference in recommendations in the 2015 report, which the secretaries of Ag and DHHS will consider in the coming months:
In the new DGAC report, one widely noticed revision was the elimination of dietary cholesterol as a "nutrient of concern." This surprised the public, but is concordant with more recent scientific evidence reporting no appreciable relationship between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol1 or clinical cardiovascular events in general populations.2A less noticed, but more important, change was the absence of an upper limit on total fat consumption. The DGAC report neither listed total fat as a nutrient of concern nor proposed restricting its consumption. Rather, it concluded, "Reducing total fat (replacing total fat with overall carbohydrates) does not lower CVD [cardiovascular disease] risk.... Dietary advice should put the emphasis on optimizing types of dietary fat and not reducing total fat." Limiting total fat was also not recommended for obesity prevention; instead, the focus was placed on healthful food-based diet patterns that include more vegetables, fruits, whole grains, seafood, legumes, and dairy products and include less meats, sugar-sweetened foods and drinks, and refined grains.
With these quiet statements, the DGAC report reversed nearly 4 decades of nutrition policy that placed priority on reducing total fat consumption throughout the population. In 1980, the Dietary Guidelines recommended limiting dietary fat to less than 30% of calories. This recommendation was revised in 2005, to include a range from 20% to 35% of calories. The primary rationale for limiting total fat was to lower saturated fat and dietary cholesterol, which were thought to increase cardiovascular risk by raising low-density lipoprotein cholesterol blood concentrations. But the campaign against saturated fat quickly generalized to include all dietary fat. Because fat contains about twice the calories per gram as carbohydrate or protein, it was also reasoned that low-fat diets would help prevent obesity, a growing public health concern.
The complex lipid and lipoprotein effects of saturated fat are now recognized, including evidence for beneficial effects on high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides and minimal effects on apolipoprotein B when compared with carbohydrate.3 These complexities explain why substitution of saturated fat with carbohydrate does not lower cardiovascular risk.1,2 Moreover, a global limit on total fat inevitably lowers intake of unsaturated fats, among which nuts, vegetable oils, and fish are particularly healthful.1,2 Most importantly, the policy focus on fat reduction did not account for the harms of highly processed carbohydrate (eg, refined grains, potato products, and added sugar)--consumption of which is inversely related to that of dietary fat.
...The limit on total fat presents an obstacle to sensible change, promoting harmful low-fat foods, undermining attempts to limit intakes of refined starch and added sugar, and discouraging the restaurant and food industry from providing products higher in healthful fats. It is time for the US Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services to develop the proper signage, public health messages, and other educational efforts to help people understand that limiting total fat does not produce any meaningful health benefits and that increasing healthful fats, including more than 35% of calories , has documented health benefits. Based on the strengths of accumulated new scientific evidence and consistent with the new DGAC report, a restructuring of national nutritional policy is warranted to move away from total fat reduction and toward healthy food choices, including those higher in healthful fats.
I think I'll go eat a celebratory rasher of bacon!
via @DrEades
Schlinky
Deli links.
DEA License Plate Tracking Is An Assault On The Liberty Of All Of Us
The government should not be tracking my license plate, as I have done nothing criminal, nor is there any reason to believe I have. Yet, welcome to "mission creep." An LA Times editorial:
The military calls it "mission creep" -- sending troops out for one purpose, then adding to their marching orders over time. This kind of metastasis is innocuous in some contexts, but not so benign when the government is collecting information about innocent people going about their daily lives. A perfect illustration is the Drug Enforcement Administration's expansive license-plate tracking program that privacy advocates brought to light this week. What began as an effort to confiscate guns and cash from drug traffickers heading to Mexico has reportedly expanded into a general purpose surveillance tool for law enforcement agencies that treats millions of ordinary Americans as potential suspects....Defenders of plate-tracking argue that it's not technically an invasion of privacy for the government (or anyone else) to keep an eye peeled on the public streets. And yet the same argument could be used to justify local police filming residents whenever they pull out of their driveways, analyzing and retaining a record of every trip they make. After all, if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about, right? Except possibly being asked to explain why you attended a perfectly legal gun show, which the DEA once contemplated using plate-readers to surveil. There doesn't appear to be any limit on how the data may be used, and in the case of private companies' plate-tracking, few if any limits on how the long the information can be retained.
Being out in public should not be a reason for your government to collect information on your behavior. The ability to do it is far too easily translated into doing it, and we need to object to this now -- before there's technology spread and it's just too hard to turn back the clock (or pull down the cameras). It makes it even harder when private companies end up running the cameras, as they have in the situation with red light cameras in Los Angeles.
Freedom Of Speech Is A Cherished Value In The US -- As Long As You Don't Speak Too Freely
Fabienne Faur writes at AFP:
Washington (AFP) - Freedom of speech is a cherished US value -- one heralded this week after the deadly attack on Charlie Hebdo -- but commentators have questioned why there is no obvious equivalent to the French weekly on American newsstands.If Charlie Hebdo wanted to be published on "any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn't have lasted 30 seconds," New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote Friday in a piece titled "I am not Charlie Hebdo."
"Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down," Brooks wrote.
There's No Special Snowflake Parking Exemption For Religion
The fire trucks needing to get through to some guy with a heart attack aren't going to get through better if you illegally double parked because you're Muslim and it's Ramadan.
Kaitlyn Schallhorn writes at The Blaze, some Muslim cab drivers seem to be shocked and irate that officers actually enforced the parking codes.
Hundreds of cab drivers parked illegally in New York City received tickets on Friday while they were inside a mosque praying during Ramadan.According to the New York Post, one police officer was seen doling out at least 100 tickets outside of the Islamic Cultural Center on the Upper West Side to cab drivers who double parked while they were inside praying.
..."This is a special prayer time, a time for religion. We double park here every Friday and they [allow it], but today they gave us all tickets, almost 100 cabs," cab driver Mohammad Zaman told the New York Post.
"I can't help but to think they are being prejudiced," he said. "They don't understand. We have to be here."
Maybe, snowflake, you need to park downtown and carpool or -- wow, here's an idea -- take a cab.
Wink
Link with one eye.
We've Come So Far -- To The Point Where Holding Somebody's Hand Can Be A Sex Crime
Government is so often in the business of unintended consequences -- or, perhaps these consequences were somebody's dream all along. This is a model law that Judith Shulevitz is writing about in The New York Times -- but one that really follows along the lines of many universities' standards under Title IX for "affirmative consent":
Deliberations about affirmative consent are going on right now at the American Law Institute. The more than 4,000 law professors, judges and lawyers who belong to this prestigious legal association -- membership is by invitation only -- try to untangle the legal knots of our time. They do this in part by drafting and discussing model statutes. Once the group approves these exercises, they hold so much sway that Congress and states sometimes vote them into law, in whole or in part. For the past three years, the law institute has been thinking about how to update the penal code for sexual assault, which was last revised in 1962. When its suggestions circulated in the weeks before the institute's annual meeting in May, some highly instructive hell broke loose.In a memo that has now been signed by about 70 institute members and advisers, including Judge Gertner, readers have been asked to consider the following scenario: "Person A and Person B are on a date and walking down the street. Person A, feeling romantically and sexually attracted, timidly reaches out to hold B's hand and feels a thrill as their hands touch. Person B does nothing, but six months later files a criminal complaint. Person A is guilty of 'Criminal Sexual Contact' under proposed Section 213.6(3)(a)."
Far-fetched? Not as the draft is written. The hypothetical crime cobbles together two of the draft's key concepts. The first is affirmative consent. The second is an enlarged definition of criminal sexual contact that would include the touching of any body part, clothed or unclothed, with sexual gratification in mind. As the authors of the model law explain: "Any kind of contact may qualify. There are no limits on either the body part touched or the manner in which it is touched." So if Person B neither invites nor rebukes a sexual advance, then anything that happens afterward is illegal. "With passivity expressly disallowed as consent," the memo says, "the initiator quickly runs up a string of offenses with increasingly more severe penalties to be listed touch by touch and kiss by kiss in the criminal complaint."
The obvious comeback to this is that no prosecutor would waste her time on such a frivolous case. But that doesn't comfort signatories of the memo, several of whom have pointed out to me that once a law is passed, you can't control how it will be used. For instance, prosecutors often add minor charges to major ones (such as, say, forcible rape) when there isn't enough evidence to convict on the more serious charge. They then put pressure on the accused to plead guilty to the less egregious crime.
I loved this comment by Query in The New York Times:
This is a power play by people who know nothing about power other than their desire to have the power to force their vision of sexual exchanges on others through totalitarian state power, totalitarian because it superciliously uses the state to inject into ALL the most intimate adult relationships their own weird ideology, completely unrooted in biology, psychology, or sanity. The heart has its reasons reason does not know so.Mind your own damn business. Take responsibility.
It is pathetic that this perverted nonsense is taken seriously in the name of rape. It is a perfect storm example of why american contempt for the academic and the intellectual and the professor is justified and the Emperor's New Clothes remains relevant. The ALI isn't what it was. It is like the founder's grandson running the business into the ground.
"It's Pretty Tough To Be Successful In A Nation Where The President Says He Doesn't Like Rich People"
A very interesting video from CBN says the wealthy are hitting the exits in France. And not just the wealthy. The wealthy, the young, the entrepreneurs.
If they happen to speak a foreign language, they'll leave, reports Anne-Elizabeth Moutet (who became very unpopular for her piece on the departing).
And P.S., as a businessman in the video warns, we Americans are following in France's footsteps with Obamacare and our growing welfare state.
Scoobielinks
Doooo a few.
Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist Tim Hunt's Accuser's Main Accomplishment Seems To Be Lying About Her Accomplishments
Guy Adams writes for The Daily Mail about a British academic -- Connie St. Louis, pictured at the link -- whose account of what Sir Tim Hunt supposedly said at a conference led to his being "unceremoniously hounded out of honorary positions at University College London (UCL), the Royal Society and the European Research Council (ERC)." He was also attacked in the world press and on social media, and seems to be going through a good deal of pain over this -- as is his scientist wife.
But St. Louis's account, it turns out, has not been corroborated by others, and now there's an anonymous leaked account with a transcript of what Hunt "really said."
Crucially, it presented a very different take to the one which had been so energetically circulated by Connie St Louis.The report began by confirming that Sir Tim had joked about falling in love with women in laboratories and 'making them cry'.
However, it said he'd prefaced those comments with an ironic introduction, joking that they would illustrate what a 'chauvinist monster' he was.
The report then revealed the existence of an entire second half of the controversial toast.
In it, Sir Tim was said to have told his audience that his remark about 'making them cry' was, indeed, an ironic joke.He purportedly said, 'now seriously . . .' before going on to speak enthusiastically about the 'important role' women scientists play. He ended by joking that his largely female audience should pursue their trade, 'despite monsters like me'.
The report's author added: 'I didn't notice any uncomfortable silence or any awkwardness in the room as reported on social and then mainstream media,' going on to describe the speech as 'warm and funny'.
All of which, for quite understandable reasons, sparked further angry debate. Supporters of Sir Tim felt he had been vindicated. Among them was Professor Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, who said the leaked memo's contents showed Sir Tim to be 'the reverse of a chauvinist monster'.
If this account is true, Connie St. Louis's actions are yet another example of unaccomplished women using supposed "crimes" by men to gain unearned power over them and status in the world that they would never have otherwise.
In her case, this seems utterly understandable, considering how her "career" falls apart under the slightest scrutiny:
Perhaps, therefore, we should ask two other related questions: who exactly is Connie St Louis? And why, exactly, should we trust her word over that of a Nobel laureate?A good place to start is the website of London's City University, where St Louis has, for more than a decade, been employed to run a postgraduate course in science journalism.
Here, on a page outlining her CV, she is described as follows:'Connie St Louis . . . is an award-winning freelance broadcaster, journalist, writer and scientist.
'She presents and produces a range of programmes for BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service . . . She writes for numerous outlets, including The Independent, Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, BBC On Air magazine and BBC Online.'
All very prestigious. Comforting, no doubt, for potential students considering whether to devote a year of their lives (and money) to completing an MA course under her stewardship. Except, that is for one small detail: almost all of these supposed 'facts' appear to be untrue.
For one thing, Connie St Louis does not 'present and produce' a range of programmes for Radio 4.
Her most recent work for the station, a documentary about pharmaceuticals called The Magic Bullet, was broadcast in October 2007.
For another, it's demonstrably false to say she 'writes' for The Independent, Daily Mail and The Sunday Times.
Digital archives for all three newspapers, which stretch back at least 20 years, contain no by-lined articles that she has written for any of these titles, either in their print or online editions. The Mail's accounts department has no record of ever paying her for a contribution.
Much more of this sort of thing at the link, including her claiming membership in the "Royal Institution":
Again, very prestigious. Or so it seems, until a spokesman for the Royal Institution told me: 'Anyone can be a member. It's simply a service you pay for which entitles you to free tickets to visit us and gives you a discount in our cafe.'It's like having membership of your local cinema or gym.'
Why would someone include such a thing on their CV?
'Actually, that's a bit of a problem,' the spokesman added. 'We have heard of a few people using membership on their CV to imply that they have some sort of professional recognition or qualification. But it means nothing of the sort. It's very, very odd to see this on a CV.'
Andrew Sullivan On Gay Marriage
In a post on the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, he quotes Hannah Arendt:
Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs."
And he quotes himself from 1996:
Homosexuality, at its core, is about the emotional connection between two adult human beings. And what public institution is more central--more definitive--of that connection than marriage? The denial of marriage to gay people is therefore not a minor issue. It is the entire issue. It is the most profound statement our society can make that homosexual love is simply not as good as heterosexual love; that gay lives and commitments and hopes are simply worth less. It cuts gay people off not merely from civic respect, but from the rituals and history of their own families and friends. It erases them not merely as citizens, but as human beings.
And he added in his Friday post:
We are not disordered or sick or defective or evil - at least no more than our fellow humans in this vale of tears. We are born into family; we love; we marry; we take care of our children; we die. No civil institution is related to these deep human experiences more than civil marriage and the exclusion of gay people from this institution was a statement of our core inferiority not just as citizens but as human beings.
And here, Sullivan's 1989 essay making the "conservative case for gay marriage."
Bubba
Linka with a bit of inbreeding.
Is That An Airpocket In Your Butt...?
Don't be embarrassed about farting at the end of sex. It's like in Japan, burping after a meal. It's a sign you really enjoyed the "meal."
Of Course There Is: Supremes Say There's A Constitutional Right For Same-Sex Marriage
From NBC's Pete Williams (autoplay video at link):
The majority opinion in the 5-4 decision was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy."No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were," Kennedy wrote. "As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death."
Kennedy went on to speak directly to the type of criticism that often comes from conservatives in pushing back against marriage equality.
"It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves," Kennedy said. "Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization's oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right."
A total of 36 states now permit gay couples to get married, covering roughly 70 percent of the US population. Today's ruling means the bans must end in the other 14 states -- Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas.
Some sweet photos from same-sex marriages here. Tell me why these people should have been prohibited from getting married.
Policing The Outrage Police
I like to make fun of them when possible. So, when I overheard a black friend, a barista, saying something to somebody, "That's a white lie..."
...I seized the opportunity (pretending horror): "That's racist!"
He laughed and came back with his version -- that when a friend of his orders black coffee, he'd say (pretending horror), "What do you mean by that?!"
There needs to be more of this. The way to police the outrage police is by showing what bullshit ridiculousness is their manufactured outrage.
The Massive Civil Liberties Problem With "Affirmative Consent"
TheFire.org's Joseph Cohen gets it -- in his piece about New York's push to pass a campus sexual assault bill:
The most troubling aspect is the bill's mandate that colleges and universities adopt policies requiring that students accused of sexual assault prove that they obtained the affirmative consent of their partners. No one disputes that consent is required for sexual interactions to be lawful. But an affirmative consent standard will result in judicial procedures that focus less on whether the individuals involved actually consented to the sexual activity and more on whether they can prove it.Providing evidence that proves parties reached agreement is straightforward when it comes to interactions governed by contract or other legal documentation. That proof, however, is usually absent when it comes to sexual activity. (BDSM, prostitution, and other contractual agreements about sex may be exceptions.) So when considering sexual activity between college students, if someone is accused of failing to obtain affirmative consent for sex, he or she is unlikely to be able to produce any evidence suggesting that he or she did, in fact, receive consent. What evidence would be sufficient to establish that consent had been freely given, and is that evidence likely to exist? In practical terms, this means that the accused is presumed guilty and is unlikely to be able to prove his or her innocence.
Oh, and by the way, "Consent to any sexual act or prior consensual sexual activity between or with any party does not necessarily constitute consent to any other sexual act."
While that statement would be uncontroversial in a system where the accuser was required to prove the lack of consent, when the accused bears the responsibility of proving consent, as is the case under this law, that language in essence is a requirement that the accused be able to prove repeated agreements to engage in each separate act.
There's more:
Another disappointing aspect of the "bill of rights" is a provision that allows reporting students to have the right to "be free from any suggestion that the reporting individual is at fault when these crimes and violations are committed, or should have acted in a different manner to avoid the violations." This is certainly an appropriate instruction to provide to first responders, so as not to chill victims from bringing forward meritorious claims. But this bill doesn't say who must avoid suggesting that a reporting individual is at fault. Does a student witness violate this rule if he or she tells an investigator that the reporting student initiated the sexual activity, or should have consumed less alcohol? If so, the provision seriously distorts the fact-finding process--and arguably raises First Amendment concerns, to boot.But perhaps the most counterproductive provision in the bill of rights is the one that leaves the decision as to whether to disclose a crime or violation in the hands of the reporting student. While complainants should always maintain agency over whether they want to cooperate with a law enforcement investigation, it is dangerous to leave law enforcement in the dark about serious accusations of violent behavior--not least because, if the charge is true, the victim may be under pressure from the perpetrator to keep the police out of it. And let's not forget that if most sexual assaults are committed by a handful of repeat offenders, as data suggests, the failure to report meritorious claims of sexual assault to the police increases the risk of future assaults.
In sum, this legislation is an unwelcome development for people who believe in fundamental fairness--one that doubles down on the failed policy of steering sexual assault complaints away from law enforcement and into amateur campus tribunals that are ill-equipped to handle such serious matters. New York's approach will probably not reduce the prevalence of sexual assault on campus, but it will likely lead to more unjust punishments.
Olink
Martini, dry.
"We're From The Government And We're Here To Release Your Sex Secrets To The Chinese"
Bill Gertz at Free Beacon writes about the massive data breach at the government's Office of Personnel Management:
Damage from the OPM attack appears to be increasing.On Capitol Hill Wednesday, OPM Director Karen Archuleta revealed that as many as 18 million Social Security numbers contained in a database on federal security clearance holders appear to have been compromised. She declined to comment when asked if the total number of federal workers who were victimized in the OPM hack could be as many as 32 million.
OPM's official estimate of the total number is that 4.2 million current and former federal workers were victims of the cyber attacks that was discovered in April and appears to have been carried out since at least December.
So far, two OPM databases were breached, a central personal network and a separate security clearance database used to check the backgrounds of federal employees involved in classified work. That database involves millions of people who are questioned about security clearance renewals or new clearances.
What kind of secrets got released? Shane Harris writes at The Daily Beast:
A senior U.S. official has confirmed that foreign hackers compromised the intimate personal details of an untold number of government workers. Likely included in the hackers' haul: information about workers' sexual partners, drug and alcohol abuse, debts, gambling compulsions, marital troubles, and any criminal activity.Those details, which are now presumed to be in the hands of Chinese spies, are found in the so-called "adjudication information" that U.S. investigators compile on government employees and contractors who are applying for security clearances. The exposure suggests that the massive computer breach at the Office of Personnel Management is more significant and potentially damaging to national security than officials have previously said.
Three former U.S. intelligence officials told The Daily Beast that the adjudication information would effectively provide dossiers on current and former government employees, as well as contractors. It gives foreign intelligence agencies a roadmap for finding people with access to the government's most highly classified secrets.
I Also Don't Want To Know About Your Poop
Tweeted:
@NYTmag How #LiveTweetYourPeriod challenges gender bias on social media. http://nyti.ms/1MT2XJa
Really? Really?!
Jenna Wortham writes in New York Times Magazine about the hashtag #LiveTweetYourPeriod -- now, apparently in frequent use:
On the surface, this seems like little more than communal commiseration, but to me, it felt like something bigger: a microprotest against a modern paradox. Social media is saturated with images of hypersexualized women, but these are rarely considered as scandalous as content that dares to reveal how a woman's body actually functions. The hashtag came to my attention a few weeks after Rupi Kaur, an artist and poet, posted images on Instagram of a woman, fully clothed, with what appear to be menstrual stains on her pants. Soon an Instagram user or moderator flagged it as objectionable, and the post was quietly deleted. Which is precisely what Kaur expected to happen. She reposted the images with a note about Instagram that included the phrase "Their patriarchy is leaking."
Oh, please. Research on disgust confirms what we already know -- that we are grossed out by leakage of bodily fluids. It's an adaptation for avoiding disease.
Also, tweeting about your yicky bodily functions does not "challeng(e) gender bias": it says that you, as a woman, feel you are so useless and worthless as a human being that your best pathway to power and attention is going public about your bodily fluids.
I felt the same about the embarrassingly ridiculous play, "The Vagina Monologues," by the way.
Wortham continues:
These two campaigns exist in separate but parallel universes, each highlighting gender bias as it exists on social media. Why is it that Facebook users are mostly fine with certain kinds of imagery (bikini-clad spring breakers, say) but often offended by others (a mother breast-feeding her child)?
What bullshit. Some people are offended by the breast-feeding; some are not. It tends to connect with their feeling about naked boobage, not the fluid coming out of it.
We're all offended by poo, boogers, and other bodily fluids. We evolved to be this way, and exist because our ancestors were the ones to avoid those things -- avoiding disease spread by bodily fluids in the process, and the death that would very likely have followed.
No, everything is not about "the patriarchy."
My favorite response:
@micnews #LiveTweetYourJockItch
via @CHSommers
It's The Arbitrary EXCLUSION Of Black Children From Special Ed That Would Be Racist
And idiotic and just plain awful: Denying black children the programs they need simply because of the numbers -- because they are 1.4 times more likely to be placed in special ed than children of other races.
Critics claim that this high number reflects racial bias in the schools.
Education researchers Paul L. Morgan and George Farkas explain in The New York Times that this is not the case. In fact:
Our new research suggests just the opposite. The real problem is that black children are underrepresented in special-education classes when compared with white children with similar levels of academic achievement, behavior and family economic resources.The belief that black children are overrepresented in special education is driving some misguided attempts at policy changes. To flag supposed racial bias in special-education placement, the United States Department of Education is thinking of adopting a single standard for all states of what is an allowable amount of overrepresentation of minority children.
If well-intentioned but misguided advocates succeed in arbitrarily limiting placement in special education based on racial demographics, even more black children with disabilities will miss out on beneficial services.
...The last thing we need is to compound these widespread disparities in disability diagnosis and treatment by making school officials reluctant to refer black children for special-education eligibility evaluations out of fear of being labeled racially biased.
Nobody ever, ever wants to look at a huge cause of black poverty and the psychological and social problems that ensue: Black women in huge numbers (perhaps 70 percent) having children with no daddy in the picture.
via @redcirclearmy
Yoohoo
Link who?
She's A Working Dog, Much Like A Sheepdog
Only her job is to cure everything wrong with the world, at least for a few minutes, by sleeping with her little snout on my face or neck. All the better if a tiny paw is resting there, too. (This is Aida, my wee Chinese Crested, with slightly Elvis hair due to bedhead, from one of our between-writing jags naps the other days.)
How Obamacare Bones The Young
And it's not just Obamacare that's doing it. There are all sorts of ways in place to bribe the older voter with younger Americans' money.
Grace-Marie Turner, at Forbes, quotes and references from Disinherited: How Washington is Betraying America's Young, by Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Jared Meyer of the Manhattan Institute:
"Politicians in Washington are taking from the future earnings of young people, many of them not old enough to vote, to pay for services for their parents and grandparents, who do vote," they write. The result is a "future of decreased opportunity" for adults under age 30, many of whom "have given up on finding work and are leaving the labor force."Furchtgott-Roth and Meyer focus on the huge tax burden young people face in financing the nation's burgeoning debt, driven largely by New Deal and Great Society entitlement programs, as well as the cost of the regulatory state, the failure of our educational system, and the mountain of college debt young people face today.
They single out the Affordable Care Act as a new direct hit on young people.
Young adults are harmed in a number of ways by ObamaCare, they explain. They must purchase expensive health insurance covering a long list of "essential health benefits" that few want or need. Failure to comply triggers federal financial penalties.
Buying this expensive insurance puts undue financial burden on those struggling to find a job in this weak economy and, for many, paying off expensive college loans.
But the discrimination against the young doesn't end there. The health care law also requires them to pay more for their health insurance so older people can pay less through a federally-imposed system of insurance pricing rules.
"In 2014, 27-year-old males saw their premiums rise an average of 91 percent because of the law. In contrast, premiums for the average 64-year-old rose only 32 percent," they write.
And for most young people, buying this expensive insurance makes little economic sense. "People under 30 spend on average $600 a year on medical costs," they explain, yet "a typical 27-year-old would have to spend $2,513 [out of pocket on medical costs] before getting any benefits [from insurance]. No rational person would buy such a product."
Hey, Arne Duncan, Why Only Go After "For Profit" Colleges?
At Chronicle, Andy Thomason writes about the U.S. Education Department's gainful-employment rule "to Protect Students from Poor-Performing Career College Programs," as a government press release puts it:
To protect students at career colleges from becoming burdened by student loan debt they cannot repay, today the U.S. Department of Education is announcing regulations to ensure that these institutions improve their outcomes for students--or risk losing access to federal student aid. These regulations will hold career training programs accountable for putting their students on the path to success, and they complement action across the Administration to protect consumers and prevent and investigate fraud, waste and abuse, particularly at for-profit colleges."Career colleges must be a stepping stone to the middle class. But too many hard-working students find themselves buried in debt with little to show for it. That is simply unacceptable," U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said. "These regulations are a necessary step to ensure that colleges accepting federal funds protect students, cut costs and improve outcomes. We will continue to take action as needed."
To qualify for federal student aid, the law requires that most for-profit programs and certificate programs at private non-profit and public institutions prepare students for "gainful employment in a recognized occupation." Under the regulations finalized today, a program would be considered to lead to gainful employment if the estimated annual loan payment of a typical graduate does not exceed 20 percent of his or her discretionary income or 8 percent of his or her total earnings. Programs that exceed these levels would be at risk of losing their ability to participate in taxpayer-funded federal student aid programs.
They throw in the bit about public institutions, but I'm guessing this is meant to be an attack on for-profit colleges -- which nobody is being herded into at gunpoint, as far as I know.
Are they really going to tell a girl who's going to the State U and majoring in Tibetan Feminist Social Justice that it's a no-go for loans? Or tell the funder they can't give her a loan? (Countless college programs would disappear.)
Thomason reports that a judge just rejected a challenge to this rule by the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities:
The lobbying group's lawsuit was the highest hurdle remaining for the proposed rule, which will judge career-oriented programs on their graduates' ability to repay their student loans. The rule is slated to take effect on July 1....The group's second challenge, to a revised rule, used many of the same arguments, asserting that the department had exceeded its authority in issuing the rule and that the rule was capricious and arbitrary.
...The final rule, which was released last fall, is expected to cause 1,400 programs, 99 percent of them at for-profit colleges, to be put at risk of losing eligibility for federal student aid.
Also from Thomason's piece:
Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, said the court's ruling "was not a great surprise" because after the first rule was thrown out on legal grounds, "the department went to great lengths to make its regulation legally bulletproof."Mr. Hartle, whose organization has endorsed proposals to eliminate a number of Education Department regulations, including this one and the proposed college-ratings system, said he was not sure if the regulation would achieve the results its backers want. "No one really knows what the impact will be," he said.
"It will create burdens for institutions," he said, referring to the extra administrative and reporting requirements for many community colleges that offer career-focused certificate programs. Few such programs were predicted to fail any of the gainful-employment tests because those colleges don't charge as much as for-profit colleges do. But community colleges are still required to administer the rule. And he said, "it may or may not provide information that will influence student decision making."
Now, let's play a fun game: Predict The Unintended Consequences!
via @NealMcCluskey
Linka
Binka, bottle of ink...
Why Mandated Paid Maternity Leave Is Bad For Women
It's the obvious -- as Abigail R. Hall puts it at Independent.org:
What people forget is that paid maternity leave is not free. It is costly to employers. Even if a woman does not get paid during her time off, her employer loses her labor services, holds her position open until she returns, and may have to pay overtime wages to cover her lost work hours. Mandating paid maternity leave would only increase these costs by the amount of a woman's wages.Firms cannot ignore these costs. If any employee fails to generate more revenues than expenses, that employee is not a good investment. This is particularly important when considering mandated paid leave because it would raise the cost of employing all women of childbearing age. If an employer that believes a female applicant will cost him thousands of dollars down the line in maternity leave, she may no longer be a good investment.
Obviously, this will make it more difficult for young women to find jobs, and some will be forced out of the labor market. Women who do find jobs will be offered lower pay because their employers will reasonably believe they are likely to cost more in the future.
So younger women will face discrimination--understandably so, as they're more expensive than men or women past child-bearing age. If a male and female are equally productive, but employing the woman will cost $15 per hour over the term of her employment because of likely maternity leave, while the man will cost only $10 per hour, it makes sense to hire the man! It's not that the employer is a misogynist or unfriendly to families. It's just basic economics.
Hillary Clinton vowed to fight for this in a campaign video. Bernie Sanders wants to "give" 12 weeks of paid leave:
...if an employee has a child, is diagnosed with cancer or any other serious medical condition. "Simply stated it is an outrage that millions of women in this country give birth and then are forced back to work because they don't have the income to stay home with their newborn babies." Sanders co-sponsored the Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act, a bill by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).
How fair is it that one category of employee -- parents -- gets some generous paid leave for their priority, having children, while other employees (like single employees) does not? And why should your employer pay for your choices, whatever they are?
Parents should save up for time off, just like a single employee might save up for a sabbatical or a boat. Wow, am I equating children with boats? Well, not exactly, but you pay for your choices; don't force others to pay for them.
As Hall puts it, it ultimately makes young women less desirable as employees than men. I didn't work for big companies long, but had I done so, and had I moved from one to another, I might have somehow made it clear that I had no intention of being a mommy. (Then again, people lie, and maybe recruiters and people doing the hiring have been burned before -- having a new hire come in and...boom!...announce three months in that they're pregnant and will soon be on maternity leave.)
Supremes Say Government Scumbags Can't Steal From Farmers
Damon Root writes at reason about a case I've blogged about a number of times -- the raisin farmers who had part of their crop stolen by the government each year per the 1949 "Marketing Order Regulating the Handling of Raisins Produced from Grapes Grown in California."
This was done to reduce the supply of raisins on the market, increasing the price.
The government was allowed to take their raisins -- with no compensation for the farmers -- and do what they wanted with them: give them away free to schools, sell them for foreign export -- and then use the proceeds to fund its operations. (Ilya Somin explained at Volokh that they would "sometimes" get some money for this.)
Well, good news:
In a decision issued today in Horne v. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the USDA's raisin confiscation scheme as an unconstitutional violation of the Fifth Amendment."The reserve requirement imposed by the Raisin Committee is a clear physical taking," observed Chief Justice John Roberts. "Actual raisins are transferred from the growers to the Government. Title to the raisins passes to the Raisin Committee." That is a textbook example of an uncompensated government taking of private property, Roberts held, and it therefore must fall under the plain text of the Fifth Amendment.
Somin notes:
The ruling also calls into question a number of other similar agricultural cartel schemes run by the federal government. In addition to property owners, consumers of agricultural products are likely to benefit from the decision, if these cartel schemes can no longer operate. Freer competition between producers in these agricultural markets will increase the amount of goods sold, and thereby lower prices. Lowered food prices are of particular benefit to poor and lower-middle class consumers, who generally spend a higher proportion of their income on food than the affluent do.
"We're from the government and we're here to protect you -- from eating and earning a living!"
Links With Hot Sauce
Spice me.
You Can't Say That!
That's what many would like to have become of academic freedom.
You don't have to agree with Peter Singer's views -- or what seems to have been a joke by Nobel Prize winning scientist Tim Hunt -- to feel they should not lose their jobs over them.
(It would be another thing entirely if Singer were found to be killing babies out back behind his office or Tim Hunt were denying women places in the lab or promotion.)
The same goes for using charges of creating a "hostile work environment" simply for one's speech (written or spoken), as was the case with Northwestern film prof Laura Kipnis.
Here's the story on Singer, who's having disability activists demand his ouster from Princeton. Kate Hardiman writes for TheCollegeFix:
Protests have been launched against Princeton University bioethics professor Peter Singer, with disabled individuals and their advocates calling for the resignation of the scholar who openly argues that "killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all."A recent protest around the Ivy League campus blocked traffic and caused a stir, with activists in wheelchairs and others standing holding signs stating "Terminate Peter Singer" and "Every Life Matters." The group, several dozen in all, also chanted: "Hey Hey, ho ho! Singer's got to go!"
Protests are fine, including protests demanding a professor's resignation or firing. That's free speech.
What's wrong is what University College of London did to Hunt -- terminating a professor simply because you find his thinking and speech deplorable. The deplorable views are part of what should be -- and used to be -- free speech and free inquiry on campus.
An advocate for euthanasia, infanticide, physician-assisted suicide and embryo experimentation, Singer outspokenly champions his own brand of medical "ethics" that many members of the disabled community find objectionable. Moreover, in his book "Unsanctifying Human Life," Singer writes that some members of our species, specifically the disabled, should not even be classified as human.And in April Singer argued that it is "reasonable" for government or private insurance companies to deny treatment to severely disabled babies under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.
The problem is, when the government is in charge of your care, that's the sort of thing that can eventually happen. Not now. But eventually.
Bedhead, Bedpaw, And Bedtail
Gratuitous dog photo. Aida, my wee Chinese Crested.
I Hear Rude People (But Sometimes, When You Tell Them, The Response Is Polite)
Always nice when the person blasting you out of your house with his car stereo, when politely alerted regarding that, says, "I'm so sorry -- I didn't really think of that. I'm leaving now. Sorry!"
...Instead of, "Fuck you! If you don't like it, why don't you move?"
My personal favorite of those who have done this was the woman -- one of the nearby bar's lovely customers -- blasting music out of her brand new blue Mercedes convertible late one night, feet from our houses.
When I pointed out all the houses and apartments directly across the street, and asked her to please be considerate of those of us who live in them, who need to go to sleep to be up for work, her response:
"This not a neighborhood; This a club!"
As I write in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," there's a reasonable presumption that the sounds you hear in your house are house sounds. Hear and feel in your spine, that is, in some cases.
Oh, and by the way, noise pollution can be poisonous. Robert Sapolsky echoes this in a NYT piece on workplace incivility and its health costs by Christine Porath:
Robert M. Sapolsky, a Stanford professor and the author of "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers," argues that when people experience intermittent stressors like incivility for too long or too often, their immune systems pay the price. We also may experience major health problems, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and ulcers.Intermittent stressors -- like experiencing or witnessing uncivil incidents or even replaying one in your head -- elevate levels of hormones called glucocorticoids throughout the day, potentially leading to a host of health problems, including increased appetite and obesity.
More from Sapolsky here:
All vertebrates respond to stressful situations by releasing hormones, such as adrenalin and glucocorticoids, which instantaneously increase the animal's heart rate and energy level. "The stress response is incredibly ancient evolutionarily," Sapolsky said. "Fish, birds and reptiles secrete the same stress hormones we do, yet their metabolism doesn't get messed up the way it does in people and other primates."To understand why, he said, "just look at the dichotomy between what your body does during real stress--for example, something is intent on eating you and you're running for your life--versus what your body does when you're turning on the same stress response for months on end for purely psychosocial reasons."
In the short term, he explained, stress hormones are "brilliantly adapted" to help you survive an unexpected threat. "You mobilize energy in your thigh muscles, you increase your blood pressure and you turn off everything that's not essential to surviving, such as digestion, growth and reproduction," he said. "You think more clearly, and certain aspects of learning and memory are enhanced. All of that is spectacularly adapted if you're dealing with an acute physical stressor--a real one."
But non-life-threatening stressors, such as constantly worrying about money or pleasing your boss, also trigger the release of adrenalin and other stress hormones, which, over time, can have devastating consequences to your health, he said: "If you turn on the stress response chronically for purely psychological reasons, you increase your risk of adult onset diabetes and high blood pressure. If you're chronically shutting down the digestive system, there's a bunch of gastrointestinal disorders you're more at risk for as well."
In children, the continual release of glucocorticoids can suppress the secretion of normal growth hormones. "There's actually a syndrome called stress dwarfism in kids who are so psychologically stressed that growth is markedly impaired," Sapolsky said.
Studies show that long-term stress also suppresses the immune system, making you more susceptible to infectious diseases, and can even shut down reproduction by causing erectile dysfunction and disrupting menstrual cycles.
"Furthermore, if you're chronically stressed, all sorts of aspects of brain function are impaired, including, at an extreme, making it harder for some neurons to survive neurological insults," Sapolsky added. "Also, neurons in the parts of the brain relating to learning, memory and judgment don't function as well under stress. That particular piece is what my lab has spent the last 20 years on."
The bottom line, according to Sapolsky: "If you plan to get stressed like a normal mammal, you had better turn on the stress response or else you're dead. But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, like a Westernized human, then you are more at risk for heart disease and some of the other leading causes of death in Westernized life."
This is why rudeness isn't just an annoyance to be ignored.
Looopy
Froootylinks.
"Who The Hell Shoots A Lab?"
A cop, that's who. This is the slaughtered Lab, Miller, with Emma Muzzi. 
The question in the header is a response from @SigSpace to my tweet:
@amyalkon
Terrible. & how horrible when "better" option is telling your child that her doggy, gunned down by cop, was run over
It was my comment on a retweet of this:
@ChuckRossDC
Miss. family's yellow lab was on a leash, but a cop shot it twice anyway.
His story, from The Daily Caller, was that Tyler Muzzi, about to head into work, saw a man lurking outside a neighbor's house. He called the neighbor to alert him, and the neighbor called the cops. The Muzzi's say the family's dog, Miller, was restrained on a line in the backyard when a Cleveland cop shot him:
Cleveland's police chief later admitted that the officer knew Miller was restrained but that he was still within his rights to shoot...."Tyler walked back inside and heard two gunshots," Bethany Muzzi described on Facebook. "Thinking the [suspect] got away he went outside and all of the officers were standing around casually and said 'hey man is that your dog?'"What do you think?
"Apparently the investigator had arrived and walked back to the backyard without asking the other officers whether or not there was a dog."What do you think?
She said that as the investigator walked up, Miller ran over to him. Feeling threatened, the investigator shot Miller, Muzzi said.
...After Miller was shot, the officers stood around Miller as he whimpered, according to the Muzzis. Tyler Muzzi ran inside to get towels to wrap around the dog to take him to the vet. An hour after dropping Miller off, the vet called back saying that the bullets had severed his spine and that he would have to be put down.What do you think?
...The investigator who shot Miller was placed on administrative leave. The Muzzis say they are considering suing the police department. In the meantime, they've struggled to explain to their young daughter what happened to Miller.What do you think?
"We told her he was run over," Bethany Muzzi wrote to friends [on] Facebook. "We wanted to preserve her innocence in knowing that policemen are here to protect us. (Which we strongly believe!)."
More here.
Oh, and by the way, Labs are often used as therapy dogs for children with autism and others because of their kind temperament. From Wikipedia:
Although they will sometimes bark at noise, especially noise from an unseen source ("alarm barking"), Labradors are usually not noisy or territorial. They are often very easygoing and trusting with strangers and therefore are not usually suitable as guard dogs.
via @RadleyBalko
Advice Goddess Free Swim
It's Saturday night, and I'm a little tired, so you pick the topics. I'll post more on Sunday.
P.S. One link per comment or my spam filter will eat your post.
Pro Tip For False Accusers: If You're Going To Lie About Being Raped, Remove Your Fitbit
Jim Treacher at The Daily Caller links to a story by Brett Hambright at LancasterOnline, with a woman complaining that she was raped by a stranger at midnight:
Police officers acting on a 9-1-1 dispatch found overturned furniture inside an East Lampeter Township home on March 10.A knife and bottle of vodka also were found at the home where a woman claimed she was raped by a stranger at midnight.
Further investigating - including a review of a Fitbit activity tracker - showed the scene was staged and 43-year-old Jeannine Risley knowingly filed a false report, police allege.
...The [Fitbit], which monitors a person's activity and sleep, showed Risley was awake and walking around at the time she claimed she was sleeping.
Also, snow on the ground revealed no bootprints or any signs of anyone walking outside the home, according to the affidavit. The hard-surface floor in the bedroom also showed no evidence of bootprints.
The woman is from St. Petersburg, Florida, and is married. Hambright said she'd been traveling to Lancaster County, in Pennsylvania, twice a month for work.
Your prediction as to why? Having an affair and needing to cover it up? Seeking attention -- in general or from her husband?
On a positive note, there was no specific man falsely accused here -- but a "suspect" very well could have been brought in.
via @CHSommers
Delivery-Sharing
Amazon is developing a new app that would have regular people -- as opposed to formal delivery services -- delivering its packages.
Greg Bensinger writes in the WSJ:
In its ceaseless quest to speed delivery, Amazon.com Inc. wants to turn the U.S. into a nation of couriers.The Seattle retailer is developing a mobile application that would, in some cases, pay ordinary people, rather than carriers such as United Parcel Service Inc., to drop off packages en route to other destinations, according to people familiar with the matter.
As envisioned, Amazon would enlist brick-and-mortar retailers in urban areas to store the packages, likely renting space from them or paying a per-package fee, the people said. Amazon's timing for the service, known internally as "On My Way," couldn't be learned, and it is possible the company won't move ahead, the people said.
An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment.
The service could give Amazon more control over the shopping experience and help contain shipping costs that grew 31% last year, faster than revenue. It also might give the retailer negotiating leverage with the largest carriers.
People in the WSJ comments grumbled about how the deliverers could steal your package, but the reality is, Amazon can verify them the same way other sharing economy companies do, and if anything's taken, they can easily replace it.
Woof
Twice-pawed links.
Today's Relationship News
Suspected boyfriend crime results in acquittal.
Oh, and I guess it would be only fair to say that he was using the scissors to cut the plastic to Sous Vide the salmon he was making for my dinner.
Still, I do my part in the kitchen -- which involves turning on the Sous Vide as he's on his way so it'll be up to temperature when he arrives.
Snotty, Entitled Jezebel Blogger Pitches A Hissy When Tattoo Artist Refuses Her Command
Jezebel blogger Jane Marie doesn't get that you don't just wave your hand and command an artslave to hop to it.
Great David French post at NRO, via Instapundit:
The following exchange took place between Jane Marie (the blogger) and Dan (the tattoo artist):Dan: "And then you want your daughter's name... on your neck?" Shakes head left to right.Me: "What."
Dan: "Not gonna happen."
Me: "Wait, what? Why?"
Dan: "It'll look tacky. It's just tacky."
Me: "Wait, you're telling me what will look tacky on me? Don't I get to decide that?"
Dan: "A neck tattoo on someone without a lot of tattoos is like lighting a birthday candle on an unbaked cake." Stunning analogy, right?
I wonder: Does Dan know what an analogy even is? And then suddenly I'm fighting back tears because, as Dan has already correctly assessed, I'm just a feeble-minded, hysterical girl. And then I ask the next thing that pops into my head.
Me: "Would you say this to a guy?"
Dan luh-hiterally paused, looked askance, and said with a slight nod, unconvincingly, "Yeah."
Fighting back tears over a denied neck tattoo? Yes, you are hysterical. Racing immediately to the sexism as the reason for your frustration? Yes, you do write for Jezebel. When Dan asked if he could get started working on other tattoos, her response was as gracious as expected: "Are you f**king kidding me? I'm not going to give you money after that, let alone have you touch me or put art on my body!" Then she wrote her post, where she shamed the tattoo artist and the tattoo parlor by name and attached mocking photos of examples of his work.
Love this little self-important sneer from her:
I wonder: Does Dan know what an analogy even is?
Well, he was smart enough to refuse your bratty ass.
And French found this reply from a tattoo artist at InkedMag:
This week blogger Jane Marie of Jezebel put tattooer Dan Bythewood "ON BLAST" for refusing to ink her neck. The reason Bythewood turned down the tattoo was because Marie is barely inked and so Bythewood was following the traditional tattoo honor code. As the population of tattooed people continues to grow we are happy to add to our community but hope that our new brothers and sisters respect the soul and traditions of tattooing.Chief among our traditions is that quality tattoo artists are the custodians of the craft. What they say goes. Also, how dare she admonish him for refusing the tattoo on any grounds? A tattoo is a collaborative effort between the artist and the wearer, if the artist doesn't want to take on a piece then he or she needn't feel pressured. Tattoos are in a sense fashion. Cut-rate tailors will alter any dress to please a client but couture designers have the right to refuse clients whose wishes don't work with their aesthetic and don't want their name on the outcome. There is a saying that a tattoo artist is only as good as the latest piece in their portfolio and so if Bythewood had accepted the tattoo, Marie's piece would be in his record.
Blythewood's response, in part, at InkedMag:
"I was targeted by a blogger via Jezebel.com who would like to see me out of business. The reason? I refused to tattoo her neck, as I regularly do when asked by a sparsely tattooed or un-tattooed customer. Where she really got it wrong is assuming that I refused her service for sexist reasons, even after I informed her that I refuse neck tattoos on men and women weekly. Her misguided attempt to make this a feminist issue is a disservice to true feminism. It trivializes it in a wolf cry and makes slanderous assumptions of my character (just ask my mother, three big sisters, three beautiful nieces, and all of my wonderful female friends).
No, The Nationally Recognized Teacher Wasn't Removed From Class For, Say, Tearing Off All Of His Clothes Or Molesting A Student
No, he did something truly horrible -- quoting from Mark Twain. (And, no, not even the passage with the "n-word.")
From the LA Times story by Zahira Torres about the allegations of misconduct against LA Unified teacher Rafe Esquith:
Rafe Esquith, a longtime educator at Hobart Boulevard Elementary School who has written several books on teaching and received multiple awards for his work, has not been allowed to return to school since district officials launched an investigation in March.Three months later, L.A. Unified officials have not clearly outlined the allegations against the popular teacher, said his attorney Mark Geragos. But Geragos said he learned that the investigation stemmed from a complaint by another teacher after Esquith read to a class a passage from "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain.
The passage, which is much longer, includes this section: "The duke and the king worked hard all day, setting up a stage and curtain and row of candles for footlights. ... At last, when he'd built up everyone's expectations high enough, he rolled up the curtain. The next minute the king came prancing out on all fours, naked. He was painted in rings and stripes all over in all sorts of colors and looked as splendid as a rainbow."
Esquith was initially sent to a district administrative office, where instructors report to after they've been removed from their classrooms over allegations of wrongdoing. He is now home waiting for the results of the district's investigation. The teachers union has criticized these so-called teacher jails, saying that instructors typically aren't informed of the charges against them and that they are barred from their classrooms for far too long.
Geragos said the district shared the information with the state, which has already cleared Esquith.
"When you quote Mark Twain you go to teacher jail, your reputation is trampled on and ignorant bureaucrats assume the role of judge and jury in the face of a baseless allegation which has already been found meritless by the California Teacher Credentialing Committee," Geragos said. "Sadly, it is the students, their families and the community that suffers."
Clumpy
Links with lumps.
On The Expectation That A Man Will Behave Exactly Like A Woman
A man is not "rude" because he doesn't talk about his feelings, even if you find it easy (and necessary) to talk about yours. 
There's a whole chapter in this -- on how people who are dating often mistake sex differences for evidence of rudeness (in large part, because of feminist denials of sex differences) -- in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck."
Charleston Church Shooting
Even sicker, from the Independent UK -- Charleston "police say gunman prayed with victims 'for almost an hour' before opening fire."
A 5-year-old survived by "playing dead." Imagine your 5-year-old needing that skill at that point in his or her life.
"At least nine people--six women and three men--were killed in the mayhem. That count reportedly includes State Sen. Clementa Pinckney, who also acted as the church's pastor. According to an NAACP official interviewed by the Post and Courier, the shooter told one female survivor 'he was letting her live so she could tell everyone else what happened.'"
"Pinckney is survived by his wife, Jennifer, and two children, Eliana and Malana."
An image of this horrible person who gunned all of these praying people down has been released:
The suspect has been identified: Dylann Storm Roof. If a witness statement is correct, this was motivated by racial hatred.
And from Patrick Brennan at NRO:
It's hard to overstate the symbolic significance of the Charleston church where a man killed nine people last night in a horrific massacre. The church, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, is the most historic black parish in Charleston, and the oldest black church, apparently, south of Baltimore. Indeed, just a few years after its founding, in 1822, it was investigated for its role in planning for a slave rebellion which, had authorities not infiltrated it, could have been the most ambitious the U.S. ever saw.
Roof has been apprehended.
Affirmative Action For Our Money -- As The Country Goes More And More Broke
Gotta get somebody with a vagina on one of our country's pieces of paper money, thinks the oddly zombie-like Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew. (Side note: What did he do with all the people in D.C.?)
Yeah, that should be our priority. Our country is beyond deep in debt, but we're hanging a brand new set of curtains on our money supply. As a commenter at the WaPo wrote:
i wonder if future historians will note the irony that as the federal reserve destroyed the dollar by printing trillions of themWhich vagina person will appear on our money is unclear. Adorably (and I do not actually mean that), Lew wants your suggestions! (Is this the USA or a segment on the Today show?)
From the Ylan Q. Mui and Abby Ohlheiser WaPo story on this:
"Young girls across this country will soon be able to see an inspiring woman on the ten dollar bill who helped shape our country into what it is today and know that they too can grow up and do something great for their country," Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who introduced a bill in April to get a female face onto American currency, said in a statement. "Make no mistake, this is a historic announcement and a big step forward."
No, it's insulting to have a potentially lesser person on the dollar bill with the big requirement that she be more of a woman in our country's history than other women were.
As another commenter at the WaPo wrote:
Name one woman whose accomplishments shaped American history more than Alexander Hamilton. There isn't one. Sorry if that's because women have been held back by the culture. Wait another 100 or so years, and maybe someone will come along who wasn't something stupid like first lady or who only had one teeny moment of fame in the front of a bus or something.
Lew video via @JoshBarro
Eugene Volokh Plans To Keep On "Microaggressing"
From a blog post by Eugene Volokh, here are two things I believe from the University of California's list of microaggression examples for professors and others in university classrooms to avoid:
[Microaggression Examples:] "I believe the most qualified person should get the job.""Affirmative action is racist."
They define "Microaggressions" as "brief, subtle verbal or non-verbal exchanges that send denigrating messages to the recipient because of his or her group membership (such as race, gender, age or socio-economic status)."
UCLA law prof Eugene Volokh blogs in the WaPo on where he stands -- and with the chill this puts on the free speech of non-tenured faculty:
Well, I'm happy to say that I'm just going to keep on microaggressing. I like to think that I'm generally polite, so I won't express these views rudely. And I try not to inject my own irrelevant opinions into classes I teach, so there are many situations in which I won't bring up these views simply because it's not my job to express my views in those contexts. But the document that I quote isn't about keeping classes on-topic or preventing presonal insults -- it's about suppressing particular viewpoints. And what's tenure for, if not to resist these attempts to stop the expression of unpopular views?But I'm afraid that many faculty members who aren't yet tenured, many adjuncts and lecturers who aren't on the tenure ladder, many staff members, and likely even many students -- and perhaps even quite a few tenured faculty members as well -- will get the message that certain viewpoints are best not expressed when you're working for UC, whether in the classroom, in casual discussions, in scholarship, in op-eds, on blogs, or elsewhere. (Remember that when talk turns to speech that supposedly creates a "hostile learning environment," speech off campus or among supposed friends can easily be condemned as creating such an environment, once others on campus learn about it.) A serious blow to academic freedom and to freedom of discourse more generally, courtesy of the University of California administration.
A "hostile learning environment" is not what is created by free speech; it's created by an environment in which it is banned. This is an environment in which you can be condemned for not being able to predict which opinion of yours will offend some person -- some person sniffing like a truffle-hunting pig for comments that give them an ouchie.
Licky
How many links does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?
Going Dolezal
I identify as fabulously wealthy and having servants, a Bel Air mansion, and a helipad. (Please, no landings before 8 a.m. It scares the peacocks.)
The Government Should Stay Out Of My Stomach And Yours
Wave bye-bye to the sprinkles atop your frozen yogurt!
Now they're banning trans fast -- specifically, trans fat-containing partially hydrogenated oils. Walter Olson blogs at Overlawyered:
Pushed by a lawsuit, the Food and Drug Administration has followed through and banned the use of trans fats in processed food: producers have three years to phase out the substance. I've got a new piece at Cato making a few basic points: the move is sheer paternalism, it's setting a precedent (against voluntary consumer assumption of even small risks) that activists are eager to roll out against other ingredients like salt and sugar, it's not popular with the public (this poll finds a plurality, not majority, going along, while this one finds majorities opposed). And voluntary consumer adjustments (trans fat consumption is down by an estimated 85 percent) have already cut Americans' average daily intake to half of what the American Heart Association recommends.Then there's the sadly ironic history of the whole subject: trans fats were avidly promoted at the time by the same sorts of public health activists and government nutritionists who now push for a ban.
Ridiculous move by government. I've eaten very low carb since March of 2009 -- against the bad and unscientific advice by government (to eat a high-carb, lowfat -- and unhealthy!) diet.
Eating against the government's unscientific, bad advice, I have the health stats of an elite athlete -- while spending much of the day in a chair, weeping over a keyboard (uh, writing).
I generally avoid eating anything with flour in it, but if I decide to have a trans fat-containing cookie at a party, it's none of the government's damn business. Or should be none of the government's damn business.
Walter Olson also blogs at Cato:
The public is also perfectly capable of recognizing and acting on nutritional advances on its own. Trans fats have gone out of style and consumption has dropped by 85 percent as consumers have shunned them....Even if you never plan to consume a smidgen of trans fat ever again, note well: many public health advocates are itching for the FDA to limit allowable amounts of salt, sugar, caffeine, and so forth in food products. Many see this as their big pilot project and test case.
25 Years On The Sex Offender Registry For Consensual Sex
We should be very careful about whose lives and potential we squelch with the criminal "justice" system. But we are anything but.
A 19-year-old computer science major had consensual sex with a girl he met over the Internet, via the HotOrNot app. She told him she was 17 -- and her profile said the same -- but she was actually 14. Lenore Skenazy writes at reason:
In addition to registering as a sex offender, Anderson will spend five years on probation, during which time he will not be allowed to live in a home where there is internet access or a smart phone. He will obviously have to change his major. And he is forbidden to talk to anyone under age 17, except his brothers.
Nobody involved wants the kid convicted:
Does anyone thinking treating him this way is necessary to keep kids safe? Anderson and his family certainly don't.Neither does his supposed underage victim. The girl readily admitted that she lied about her age, and in this WSBT-TV interview her mother admitted that Anderson "didn't do anything my daughter didn't do." Everyone agrees the encounter was completely consensual. The only reason the police became involved at all is because the girl suffers from epilepsy, and when she didn't come home as quickly as expected her mom worried and called the cops for help.
In this excellent South Bend Tribune article, the mom told a reporter that she didn't just ask the judge for leniency, "we asked him to drop the case."
But court records show that Berrien County District Court Judge Dennis Wiley (who once jailed a woman for 10 days over Christmas because she cursed while paying a traffic ticket in the county clerk's office) paid none of the participants any mind. At sentencing he told Anderson, "You went online, to use a fisherman's expression, trolling for women to meet and have sex with. That seems to be part of our culture now: meet, hook up, have sex, sayonara. Totally inappropriate behavior. There is no excuse for this whatsoever."
There may be some hope because of a problem with the original plea deal.
But check out how little justice there is in this country as of late. 20 states allow defendants to use she lied about her age as a part of their defense.
But in the other 30, you can turn to your would-be hook-up and say, "'Look I want to see a passport or driver's license,' and I'd say that's pretty diligent of you," says Grabel. But if the I.D. is fake and she is actually underage, you can still be convicted of statutory rape.Let's hope Michigan makes that change. In the meantime, Judge Wiley should realize that just because you met someone online does not mean you are a depraved fiend who deserves 25 years on the Sex Offender Registry.
IKEA: A Big Stupid Bully Of A Company
The website IkeaHackers.net starts with IKEA products. It's about getting creative with products you BUY at IKEA. In other words, it is essentially free advertising for IKEA. Not even essentially.
But IKEA has mucked that up by going after the site with a bogus trademark claim -- bogus, but one Jules, who started the site, cannot afford to fight.
Cory Doctorow explains at BoingBoing:
Trademark law is surrounded by urban legends. Trademark does not create the legal right to stop people from making factual uses of a mark ("Ikeahackers" is a site for people who hack Ikea furniture). And while there is a very slim chance of trademarks being "genericized" through a failure to police, this risk is grossly overstated by trademark lawyers (quick, name three modern, active trademarks that have been genericized through a lack of policing), and in any event, you can get the same benefit from offering a royalty-free license as you get from threatening a lawsuit. Finally, trademark is not copyright: there is no parody "defense" (nor is one needed), there is no fair use, there is no need for any of that stuff.
Here's how the dimwitted assholes at IKEA bullied Jules:
Long story short, after much negotiation between their agent and my lawyer, I am allowed to keep the domain name IKEAhackers.net only on the condition that it is non-commercial, meaning no advertising whatsoever.I agreed to that demand. Because the name IKEAhackers is very dear to me and I am soooo reluctant to give it up. I love this site's community and what we have accomplished in the last 8 years. Secondly, I don't have deep enough pockets to fight a mammoth company in court.
Needless to say, I am crushed. I don't have an issue with them protecting their trademark but I think they could have handled it better. I am a person, not a corporation. A blogger who obviously is on their side. Could they not have talked to me like normal people do without issuing a C&D?
IKEAhackers.net was set up in 2006 and truly not with the intent to exploit their mark. I was a just crazy fan. In retrospect, a naive one too. It is not an excuse but that was just how it was when I registered IKEAhackers. Over the last 8 years the site has grown so much that I could not juggle the demands of a full time job and managing IKEAhackers. It also costs quite a bit to run a site this large. Since IKEA® does not pay me a cent, I turned to advertising to support myself and this site.
You really couldn't get stupider as a company. This is a site by and for people who shop at IKEA -- to the point where they are making new things out of the idea furniture and products.
We in this economy who run websites that are not, oh, Walmart.com, need the little bit of ad revenue we get to pay us some minimum for our work and help us stay afloat.
If I were a trademark lawyer, I'd take this guy's case pro bono, and I hope an actual trademark lawyer feels the same way.
Lippy
Mouthylinks.
Pearl-Clutching Over Violent Video Games: "In Which The Left Becomes The Religious Right"
Mytheos Holt writes at TheFederalist about the recent hyperventilations by Anita Sarkeesian, Jonathan McIntosh, and others over the violence in the trailer for "Doom" -- an enhanced reworking of the classic 1995 computer game.
In short, there's "Discomfort with the Dark Side of Human Nature."
Holt makes the point -- as have others, backed up by research -- that video games provide an outlet for evil:
If the "Doom" trailer is anything, it's evidence that people don't mind being crooked timber, and in fact celebrate things that give them a safe outlet for their more crooked tendencies, rather than trying to destroy them. Moreover, that the game explicitly pits the player against demons suggests players prefer to see their crookedness channeled toward heroism, and actually celebrate more ancient heroic virtues as a means of compensating for the urge toward violence. The "Doom" trailer, in short, seeks to make peace with the human proclivity toward violence even as it turns it against sin, rather than try to write both out of existence. For its efforts, it gets cheers. With good reason. Like "Hatred" before it, it's a humanistic game.For Leftist ideologues like Sarkeesian and McIntosh, the game is a reminder that their ideology is forever cut off from human nature, and that their utopian vision of a world without urges toward violence will always ultimately be chainsawed by reality before being drowned in a storm of unapologetically humanistic gunfire.
via @Popehat
The Criminalization Of Medicine
Seething drug warriors hot for their next bust are the reason so many people in pain can't get adequate meds to ease their suffering.
Harvey Silverglate writes in the WSJ:
Last month a federal jury in Boston acquitted pain-relief specialist Dr. Joseph Zolot and his nurse-practitioner Lisa Pliner of overprescribing oxycodone, methadone and fentanyl. This prosecution shows why drug warriors need either to clarify the currently indecipherable line between treating pain and unlawfully feeding drug addicts' habits, or get out of the business of policing and terrorizing physicians. Unfortunately, the government uses legal ambiguity for tactical advantage and will not readily clarify the lines it expects doctors to follow at their peril.Dr. Zolot and Ms. Pliner were indicted in 2011 for their treatment of six patients between 2004 and 2006. They faced lengthy, consecutive sentences of up to 20 years for each count if convicted. Prosecutors alleged that the two providers recklessly dispensed narcotic painkillers without legitimate medical purpose and were, in effect, dealing. The two pleaded not guilty, maintaining that their prescription practices were proper, and that they were not responsible for their patients' subsequent abuses. The jurors unanimously agreed.
...The prosecutions of Drs. Hurwitz and Zolot, nurse Pliner and others have ramifications that extend beyond the medical professionals unlucky enough to be caught in the DEA's web. Doctors are increasingly afraid to prescribe certain drugs to patients who might seriously need them.
According to a 2005 survey conducted by USA Today, ABC and Stanford University Medical Center, only half of chronic pain sufferers, including cancer patients, report that their doctors are adequately relieving their pain. "It's a criminalization of medicine," Ms. Pliner told one Boston reporter after the trial, adding that she was afraid, at least for now, to work as a nurse practitioner.
A big part of convictions they do get seems to be prosecutorial extortion. Silverglate continues:
Yet Dr. Zolot's acquittal should not give the medical community much comfort. It is probably an aberration, attributable to the Boston prosecutors' failure to "flip" a witness. The government failed to convince nurse practitioner Pliner to testify against her boss in exchange for favorable treatment. Ms. Pliner believed that Dr. Zolot was a conscientious and caring doctor and that neither of them had done anything wrong.Experienced criminal-defense lawyers have endless stories of their clients being offered favorable deals, even immunity from prosecution, if they would provide incriminating testimony against higher-ups. The problem, as Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz often told his criminal-law students, is that this practice teaches witnesses "not only to sing, but also to compose."
...One lawyer in the Zolot case attributed the two defendants' sticking together to the fact that the two shared a special kinship: They were Soviet refuseniks who came to America as political refugees and met in this country:. "Both have a healthy mistrust of the government."
As should we all.
America's Weird (And Insane) Tax System
Carly Fiorina and her husband are richer than most of us, but that really doesn't explain -- in any sane way -- why, as Josh Barro puts it in The New York Times:
Mr. and Ms. Fiorina had to file taxes in no fewer than 17 states in 2013, many of them with only the most tenuous connection to the Fiorinas or their financial interests. In 11 of those states, their tax bill was less than $250.Of course, the Fiorinas make more money than most people, about $2.5 million in 2013, which is a major reason they were taxed in so many states. But the tax rules that cause the Fiorinas to have around a 1,000-page stack of state income tax returns also hit many Americans with more moderate incomes, requiring them to file multiple state income tax returns.
In the Fiorinas' case, consider Michigan. The Fiorinas do not live or work in Michigan. They do not own a business or income-producing real estate there. Ms. Fiorina did not collect speaking fees from Michigan in 2013. But the Fiorinas do invest in a variety of funds, which generate income in a variety of places, including $946 in 2013 that was attributable to Michigan. So, the Fiorinas had to file a tax return there, which was 58 pages long, and reflects a liability of $40, which they paid.
And then they got the money back.
The Fiorinas' home state of Virginia gave them a tax credit of $40, fully offsetting the Michigan tax bill, because Virginia had already taxed the same income Michigan taxed. That's how the American system of state income taxes generally works: Your home state taxes you on all your income; states where you don't live tax you on the income you earned in those states; then, because some of your income has been taxed twice, your home state credits you back -- but only up to the amount of tax you paid on that income in your home state.
And people wonder why it's so hard for so many to make money these days. It's often keeping the money after the government gets done with you that's the problem.
Minkie
Furry in a hurry. Links, that is.
Black Like Me
Wonkette headline:
Rachel Dolezal Quits NAACP, Will Continue Fight For Her People, Whoever They Are
"Apparently, The DA Has Never Purchased A Bag Of Potato Chips"
The tough-on-deodorant-manufacturers! OC DA goes after AXE, via Unilever, its parent company, for supposedly deceptive packaging because the actual product doesn't fill the package top to bottom.
(My deodorant stick doesn't go to the bottom of the deodorant package -- is that company next?)
From AbnormalMuse.com:
According to a report out of The Orange County Register, prosecutors have accused the company of using "false bottoms, false sidewalls, false lids or false coverings" which "serve no legitimate purpose and mislead consumers as to the amount of product contained in the containers." The report is silent on whether prosecutors obtained the desired AXE effect when "testing" out the company's body sprays....Pending court approval, Unilever has agreed to cease using the "misleading" packaging and pay $750,000 in civil penalties to Orange County, plus $24,000 to cover the costs of the DA investigation. In addition, Unilever will buy Sunday inserts with $3 coupons in several dozen California newspapers. In other words, the County gets three quarters of a million dollars. The "deceived" consumer gets the opportunity to buy another AXE product at a $3 discount. So, it sounds like "everyone", i.e. Orange County, comes out winners.
At Overlawyered, where I saw this, Walter Olson blogs:
The Orange County district attorney's office under Tony Rackauckas is emerging as an Overlawyered favorite, having knocked an impressive $16 million out of Toyota in the sudden-acceleration affair even though the cars in question do not suddenly accelerate, of which $4 million went to a locally influential tort attorney; the office has also kept mum about arrangements it has with tort attorneys. And of course Rackauckas's office has lately been embroiled in one of the nation's most prominent scandals of prosecutorial abuse (with retaliation angle).
He also notes that this "slack fill" lawsuit is one of a bunch of lawsuits filed against companies -- a fertile financial hunting ground. And yes, click on "one" -- and there's the deodorant example.
And commenter Dave Twigg at Overlawyered notes:
I guess the DA's office figures if it works in criminal law, why not in civil law?. By threatening prolonged pretrial jail-time and/or hefty legal fees and/or hefty fines, the judicial system has convinced millions to plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit. Why not use the same tactics to extort millions from corporations and local businesses...oh wait a minute, extortion of local business by local gov't and 'security' forces has been going on for more than a century. A Deal I Can't Refuse! ;~)
"It's Easy To Want To Protect The People You Agree With"
Their speech and their academic freedom, that is. And then never mind about anybody else. In fact, off with their heads.
The headline here is a quote from medical bioethicist Alice Dreger, with whom I just gave a science-based talk at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference on how researchers can protect themselves from ideologues who go after their work based on being offended about the findings.
Dreger, like me, is firmly for free speech of people with whom she disagrees. She also has been an outspoken and tireless activists on a number of fronts. (She just doesn't shut up -- and that's a compliment.)
She just posted a piece, "Wondering If I'm the Next Tim Hunt." She writes about Hunt's situation:
I'm disturbed by where this went. Losing multiple positions over one dumb set of remarks?The mob that thinks this is a good idea seems to be composed largely of people I generally respect: feminist, pro-science, publicly-engaged. But I feel like they're not thinking about this clearly.
Let me admit my biases here: The last couple of months have been rough for me. In just the last couple of weeks I published two articles that pissed off a whole lot of people on the science-y left, including one for WIRED on gender nonconforming children, and another for New Statesman on vaccine politics. These have each generated a number of calls for my head from people on the pro-science left.
...In the last twenty-four hours, I've been asking myself an interesting question: What if Hunt's remarks, rather than being purely glib sexist stupidity, actually did represent an ideology he held? What if he genuinely believed that females are bad for science?
Would we then worry a little more about academic freedom--about his right to hold an unpopular view and still be a member of the academic community?
You know what? It's easy to want to protect the people you agree with.
Here's what some university down the road from mine has formally decided:
"Of course, the ideas of different members of the University community will often and quite naturally conflict. But it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. Although the University greatly values civility, and although all members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community."I want to work at a place like that. I'll bet Tim Hunt does, too.
Alice's excellent new book -- Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science
Alice and I are both strong supporters of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (we each independently talked about it in our talks), and there's more need than ever, sadly, on campuses, for their defense of those who have their First Amendment rights violated.
Butter
Delinkcious.
Hillary Clinton's Income Hypocrisy: Share The Earnings With The Workers! (Unless You're Hillary Clinton)
David Rutz writes at Free Beacon of an exchange between Fox News's Chris Wallace and Hillary Clinton flack Karen Finney over Clinton's condemning "the income gap" for others -- while pocketing huge speaking fees.
Wallace:
"She talked about the fact that the 25 top hedge fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in the country combined," he said. "What about the fact that, until recently, she was making $250,000 for a one-hour speech when the average American makes $45,000 for working for a year."
Rutz's piece continues:
She's making money and believing in the importance of closing the income gap," Finney said."I know!" Wallace said. "Maybe the hedge fund managers believe in it too, so I just wonder why she's saying it's somehow wrong for the hedge fund managers to make so much money but it's okay for her to make $250,000 an hour."
"It's about what you do with that money," Finney said. "It's about CEOs making the money and then not sharing those profits with their workers."
Wallace asked her if Clinton was sharing that money with her, and Finney just laughed.
Is Tim Hunt Really A Seething Chauvinist Who Thinks Female Scientists Should Be Forced To Work In The Broom Closet Across The Hall?
Here's what Tim Hunt said:
"Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry."
He did say this:
"I'm in favor of single-sex labs."
But looking at all of this, it could be seen as a man lamenting his own difficulties with women -- or even if he is in favor of single-sex labs, couldn't somebody discuss or debate this with him instead of immediately packing him off to the guillotine?
We're a little quick to use social media as a means to assess -- or rather "assess" -- a person and then make some some speedy determination about how they should be punished.
Robin McKie writes for the Guardian about Nobel winner Tim Hunt's speeding "prosecution" via social media and the subsequent firing from an honorary position from University College of London. (Other organizations followed in dismissing him.)
Sitting on a sofa with his wife, Hunt tries to explain why he made the remarks that got him into trouble while Collins groans in despair as he outlines his behaviour. Hunt had been invited to the world conference of science journalists in Seoul and had been asked to speak at a meeting about women in science. His brief remarks contained 39 words that have subsequently come to haunt him."Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry," he told delegates.
"I stood up and went mad," he admits. "I was very nervous and a bit confused but, yes, I made those remarks - which were inexcusable - but I made them in a totally jocular, ironic way. There was some polite applause and that was it, I thought. I thought everything was OK. No one accused me of being a sexist pig."
Collins clutches her head as Hunt talks. "It was an unbelievably stupid thing to say," she says. "You can see why it could be taken as offensive if you didn't know Tim. But really it was just part of his upbringing. He went to a single-sex school in the 1960s. Nevertheless he is not sexist. I am a feminist, and I would not have put up with him if he were sexist."
Hunt may have meant to be humorous, but his words were not taken as a joke by his audience. One or two began tweeting what he had said and within a few hours he had become the focus of a particularly vicious social media campaign. He was described on Twitter as "a clueless, sexist jerk"; "a misogynist dude scientist"; while one tweet demanded that the Royal Society "kick him out".
The next morning, as he headed for Seoul airport, Hunt got an inkling of the storm that was gathering when BBC Radio 4's Today programme texted requesting an interview. He recorded a clumsily worded phone message. "It wasn't an interview. It was 1am British time and I was just asked to record a message. It was a mistake to do that as well. It just sounded wrong."
After Today was broadcast, and while Hunt was still flying back, Collins was called by University College London. She is a professor and a former dean there, while Hunt was an honorary researcher.
"I was told by a senior that Tim had to resign immediately or be sacked - though I was told it would be treated as a low-key affair. Tim duly emailed his resignation when he got home. The university promptly announced his resignation on its website and started tweeting that they had got rid of him. Essentially, they had hung both of us out to dry. They certainly did not treat it as a low-key affair. I got no warning about the announcement and no offer of help, even though I have worked there for nearly 20 years. It has done me lasting damage. What they did was unacceptable."
Should he really be out of a job? From Science Media Centre:
I had questions, mainly revolving around whether or not Tim Hunt is a chauvinist. Does he actually discriminate against his female colleagues? Does he seriously propose segregated labs and has he ever tried to implement this? Does he refuse to employ young women in his lab because they might cry when he appraises their work? And critically, will removing Tim Hunt from his positions at UCL, the Royal Society and the ERC also remove a barrier to the progress of women in science and advance that cause. I asked around but none of those giving interviews or tweeting seemed be able to answer me. Worryingly for me, the question of whether this scientist deserved this global vilification seemed irrelevant.I then called scientists who know him and something interesting happened. They said they had not witnessed any gender bias in him. Some specified the exact opposite. That Tim is a fantastic supporter of young scientists, including women. The organiser of a national competition for young scientists told me that he had never been anything but fantastic, especially with the young women, and is really dedicated and generous with his time. Another eminent woman wrote: "among scientists who know him, Tim Hunt is regarded as a good man and an excellent scientist. He is renowned for his willingness to engage, especially with students, and has done a great deal to promote the careers of young people, including women."
I then decided to call Tim himself. I asked him why he called himself a chauvinist and if he believes he is one. He insisted again that it was intended to be a silly joke and that he prides himself on treating everyone he works with respect and kindness, and believes he has achieved that over his career.
So does it actually matter whether Tim Hunt is a real sexist or just made sexist remarks? Dorothy Bishop, who issued one of the most humane and intelligent comments about the affair, thinks it doesn't: "I feel that personal liking for the man should not blind us to the damage he has done, especially to the Royal Society's push for greater diversity. In one short speech he has set back the cause of women in science."
Fair point. At a time where women are still underrepresented in areas of science and ridiculously hard to find at the top, news of crusty old dinosaurs reinforcing tired old stereotypes is enough to make anyone despair, let alone those women and institutions who have been fighting to put this image of science behind us. But there is huge difference between slamming his comments as out of date, and calling for his head on a plate. Surely we cannot celebrate the fact that an excellent scientist known for doing much to promote scientific careers for young men and women will no longer occupy three important positions? Has this advanced the cause of women in science? I fear not. The very real issues which women in science face at each stage of their careers are not being addressed by tokenistic gestures and a rush to judge.
A female scientist posts at Daily Kos:
The issues that Sir Hunt brought up are real issues. At our Women in Science meetings we discussed similar issues of gender-related tensions in the lab. Female graduate students sometimes feel their relationship with their male adviser is very different from the relationship said adviser has with his male students. Falling in love in the lab is not unheard of, to put it mildly. That women tend to be more sensitive and brought to tears more easily is also nothing to be ashamed of. Bringing these issues up as one person's experience, in a light-hearted way, is not something that I see as an attack. And yet, somehow it turned into just that.And this is what bugs me (sorry for the pun, I am an entomologist) as a woman scientist. That female scientists, perhaps without seeing the whole remark in context, immediately see an attack instead of a joke, or an opportunity to bring these issues up and discuss them with the seriousness they deserve.
Instead, they lash out a counter attack with the #DistractinglySexy tag. It makes me feel as if they are so insecure in their abilities as scientists, that they're afraid one man's comments will show the world "what they're really like". Now some might take my words out of context and say that I think women are lesser scientists than man. And that's what, I think, was done to the Nobel laureate.
I don't know Sir Tim Hunt personally, but he is married to a scientist and has worked and published with women scientists. Which makes me doubt he feels women scientists do not deserve respect.
It would be interesting to hear from women scientist who had worked with him. Maybe he is a dirty old man who thinks women should get out of the lab. I just don't see it in his remarks.
Goofy
Links with big red clown shoes.
"Orange Like Me!" (From The "Everything Is Racism" Department)
A high school girl who apparently rather liberally applied bronzer from Claire's -- turning her skin a very deep and very unattractive brownish orange -- was accused of racism for it. As if she were trying to mimic blackface. (As if more than three students currently in high school actually know what "blackface" refers to.) 
EagNews's Viktor Skinner reports:
SHORELINE, Wash. - A picture of a white female Shorewood High School student with a bad tan and the cutline "do you think this is my color" caused so much racial strife the district is putting stickers over the image.Officials with the Shoreline School District issued a formal apology for the yearbook photo of a pouting white teen with a dark, obviously fake complexion after the image circulated on social media and offended many people. Some claim the picture resembles blackface, and the backlash against the teen has been relentless, King 5 reports.
"There have been some pretty mean comments. Some people have actually been telling her to go kill herself," junior Case Macklin told the news site.
"I know she didn't mean it to be offensive," Macklin told KREM 2. "She didn't mean blackface like in an offensive way, she just meant it like she had a bad tan."
"She was just snapchatting back and forth with her friend and put a whole bunch of Claire's bronzer on," said junior Trevor Corwin. "It wasn't meant to be offensive."
In fact, the student herself took to Twitter to clear the air. She explained she wasn't being racist, but poking fun at her own bad tan from the salon and apologized. It didn't matter, her comments only drew more scorn.
Once there's a witch burning in progress, there's no turning back for, you know, that reasoning thingie.
Thug-ocracy -- All About Protecting The Power, And Screw The Children
Lenore Skenazy writes at reason about the latest in nosy neighbor paranoia and where it led:
One afternoon this past April, a Florida mom and dad I'll call Cindy and Fred could not get home in time to let their 11-year-old son into the house. The boy didn't have a key, so he played basketball in the yard. He was alone for 90 minutes. A neighbor called the cops, and when the parents arrived--having been delayed by traffic and rain--they were arrested for negligence.They were put in handcuffs, strip searched, fingerprinted, and held overnight in jail.
It would be a month before their sons--the 11-year-old and his 4-year-old brother--were allowed home again. Only after the eldest spoke up and begged a judge to give him back to his parents did the situation improve.
...Here is the law: "A person who willfully or by culpable negligence neglects a child without causing great bodily harm, permanent disability, or permanent disfigurement to the child commits a felony of the third degree."
I first heard of Cindy's case last week when she wrote to me at Free-Range Kids. Her email explained:
The authorities claim he had no access to water or shelter. We have an open shed in the back yard and 2 working sinks and 2 hoses. They said he had no food. He ate his snacks already. He had no bathroom, but the responding officer found our yard good enough to relieve himself in while our son sat in a police car alone. In his own yard, in a state, Florida, that has no minimum age for children to be alone.The children were placed in foster care for two days while the state ran a background check on a relative who was willing to take them in. "Our first choice was my mother," said Cindy. "But she lives in another state and so the kids would have been in foster care even longer until they cleared her." The parents decided to have them placed with a slightly problematic in-state relative instead.
They'll get their kids back -- a judge allowed it after their 11-year-old pleaded with him -- but they're still in legal hot water and there are all sorts of conditions on them.
For what? For exercising what used to be thought of as parental judgment.
And sorry, but leaving a kid in his own backyard to play basketball is not child neglect. It's part of the wildly safe and easy life people live in 2015 in the American suburbs.
Lippy
Mouthylinks.
Are Your Nipples Pale And Lackluster?
Yes, there's such a thing as "nipple rouge." And -- scroll down -- there's also nipple jewelry, because men are so often uninterested in the unadorned naked breast.
On the bright side, there's less surface to cover than if you were an orangutan.
White Woman Develops A Black History
It's harder to get jobs and positions that give preference to African Americans if you're actual white as Wonder Bread, which is what this woman, Rachel Dolezal, appears to be. While holding the presidency of the local NAACP chapter and having put on her application for the citizen police ombudsman commission that she's of black African American descent. And having represented that she's African American in numerous venues.
From Jeff Humphrey and Melissa Luck at KXLY.com -- and you have to see the video at the link:
On the NAACP Spokane Facebook page, a picture was posted earlier this year showing Dolezal and an African-American man. In the post, he's identified as Dolezal's father. KXLY4's Jeff Humphrey asked Dolezal about that claim Wednesday afternoon."Ma'am, I was wondering if your dad really is an African-American man," Humphrey asked.
"I don't understand the question," Dolezal answered. "I did tell you [that man in the picture] is my dad."
"Are your parents white?" Humphrey asked. At that point, Dolezal removed the microphone, ended the interview and walked away.KXLY4 was interviewing Dolezal Wednesday about several hate crimes she's reported over the last several years. Most recently, Dolezal said she received a packet of hateful letters and pictures at the NAACP post office box in North Spokane. That crime led to rallies of support outside Spokane City Hall.
Police are still investigating, but say in reports that whoever placed the mail must have had access to the box, as it was not processed through the regular mail. Dolezal denied any implication that she was responsible.
Dole out racial preferences and people are likely to take advantage of them. (Though you really don't expect anybody but a black person to be running the local NAACP chapter -- same as you don't expect the lady running the local Hadassah chapter to be Christian and Chinese.)
UPDATE: Dolezal's parents, who are black like Jennifer Aniston, speak.
Got A Penis? You're Guilty. Even If You're Not. Even If You're Actually The Victim
In the new victim feminism-driven world order, being male means you should consider yourself luck you aren't already in jail. (Leave your balls on that chair by the door, then crawl into the room and sit on the floor considering your shameful male privilege -- and P.S. even worse if you're a white man. Hisssss!)
That probably sounds like an exaggeration. And it is -- a little. But not that much of one, considering how Amherst College just expelled a male student for the crime of...uh, wait -- being sexually assaulted while he was blacked out drunk.
The thing is, the female student reported him for assaulting her. And never mind that the evidence is on his side of things. The college gave him the boot.
Well, now he's suing, and Ashe Schow in the WashEx lays out what happened:
Doe accompanied the accuser (who was Doe's girlfriend's roommate) to her dorm room. The accuser performed oral sex on a blacked out Doe (Johnson notes that even the Amherst hearing found Doe's account of being blacked out "credible"). Doe leaves. The accuser then texted two people: First, a male student she had a crush on -- whom she invited over after a heavily flirtatious exchange earlier in the evening. Then, a female friend.The accuser said during her hearing that she only texted one friend to help her handle the assault as she felt "very alone and confused." But her texts with her female friend give no indication of an assault. Rather, the accuser texted her friend "Ohmygod I jus did something so fuckig stupid" [sic throughout]. She then proceeded to fret that she had done something wrong and her roommate would never talk to her again, because "it's pretty obvi I wasn't an innocent bystander."
She also complained that the other man, who had come over after the alleged assault, had taken until 5 in the morning to finally have sex with her.
The accuser found herself friendless after the encounter, when her roommate discovered what she had done.
Between the encounter with Doe and the accusation -- nearly two years later -- the accuser developed new friends. And as it happens, these new friends were all "victims' advocates."
Check out the Kafkaesque ruling -- reported by K.C. Johnson at MindingTheCampus:
It ruled that while Doe likely was "blacked out" during the oral sex, "[b]eing intoxicated or impaired by drugs or alcohol is never an excuse." Since AS said she withdrew consent at some point during the sexual act, and since Doe couldn't challenge that recollection, the panel was at least 50.01 percent inclined to believe the accuser's tale.
This is now what stands in for due process and justice on college campuses.
Sending your son to college? Besides the cost of his education, textbooks, food, and housing, I suggest you provide him with a hooker fund. Yes, the safe way for young men to have sex on campus is now by time-sharing an escort. (Think of it as expulsion insurance.)
via @RobbySoave
Minkie
Furrylinks.
How ADA-For-The-Web Regulations Could Kill This Website
So few people understand how laws passed can be used -- and easily misused. Stretched into something they were never supposed to be (or not what they were said to be about, anyway).
For example, Title IX was supposed to be about allowing girls equal participation in school sports. The Obama admin has turned it into a system of campus kangaroos courts removing due process from men accused of sexual assault.
Next in line for strrretching is the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Walter Olson has been following the Obama administration's apparent intent to publish new interpretations of it, and he linked to Hans Bader's writeup at CEI:
Can websites be forced to change to accommodate the disabled -- by using "simpler language" to appeal to the "intellectually disabled," or by making them accessible to the blind and deaf at considerable expense?Generally, the First Amendment gives you the right to choose who to talk to and how, without government interference. There is no obligation to make your message accessible to the whole world, and the government can't force you to make your speech accessible to everyone, much less appealing to them. The government couldn't require you to give speeches in English rather than Spanish to reach a larger number of listeners. And the Supreme Court once noted that the poem Jabberwocky is protected by the First Amendment, even though it makes no sense to most people.
But now, the Obama administration appears to be planning to use the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to force many web sites to either accommodate the disabled, or shut down. Given the enormous cost of complying, many small web sites might well just go dark and shut down. The administration wants to treat web sites as "places of public accommodation" subject to the ADA, even though they are not physical places. Courts used to reject this argument when it was made just by disabled plaintiffs, but now that the Justice Department is making it, too, some judges are beginning to buy it, opening the door to trial lawyers surfing the web and sending out extortionate demand letters to every small business whose web site is not accessible to the blind (or perhaps too hard to understand for the mentally-challenged).
Bader gives some examples from Walter Olson, from his testimony to Congress, of awful changes that would ensue, like that amateur publishing would become "more of a legal hazard." They'd go after websites like mine, that make a few shekels from Amazon links and a few more from Google ads. I need this money to supplement the money that's fallen out of newspaper writing; also, I love the people who comment here and the discussion that goes on. It's what keeps my eyes pried open at 11 p.m. when I need to post a blog item half an hour after I should have gone to bed for my 5 a.m. book- and column-writing wakeup time.
Also, added in the morning, after waking up worrying about this all night -- making something "accessible" for a tiny minority could ruin it for everyone.
And what sort of understanding do we really owe people? I don't do well with complex physics and I have limited attention for things I don't understand that don't grab my interest enough to figure them out. Should physics websites dumb themselves down for Amy Alkon's brain? How many scientific websites will be brought down by disabled people going around to them like the quadriplegic lawyer in the wheelchair filing profit-making suits and closing classic hamburger stands and other businesses in California over ADA claims?
Also from Olson's testimony:
Many widely used and highly useful features on websites would be compromised in functionality or simply dispensed with for reasons of cost, delay or cumbersomeness. To take but one example, a small town newspaper or civic organization might feel itself at legal risk if it put audio or video clips of the city council meeting online without providing text translation and description. Such text translation and description are expensive and time-consuming to provide. The alternative of not running the audio and video clips at all remains feasible, however, and that is the alternative some will adopt.
Bader continues:
The defenders of expansive ADA interpretations say that the government's compelling interest in eradicating discrimination against the disabled overrides any competing First Amendment rights. If this frightening argument is accepted, states that have disabled-rights laws even broader than the ADA -- like public-accommodation laws that apply to private clubs and associations -- will eventually try to impose their restrictions on the web sites of small non-profit groups, using such laws to silence non-profits because of their inability to design their web sites to accommodate every conceivable disability.
What this is is an attempt to disable free speech and to make our country increasingly authoritarian and unfree. Basically, it's a form of "Think of the children!" Except adult citizens are the children and one particular party is the answer. (Which isn't to say I'm a fan of the Republican party, either.)
This is yet another way for some to have unearned power over the rest of us -- to bully us into muzzling ourselves because we cannot afford the lawsuits filed against us.
Wonderful -- Marlon Brando, The Real Deal
Marlon and I got to be friends in a weird way -- via an AOL chat room in the early 90s and then via email and IM -- but one that allowed him to see that I could be trusted as a real friend, which I was. (I had no idea who he was for many months, until I told him I'd be offline for a freelance job in LA, and we ended up meeting and hanging out and then becoming offline friends, too.) More about this in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck."
This, below, is a new documentary about Marlon -- Marlon as the people who knew and loved him saw and heard (and probably also some of the Marlon that those who were frustrated and angry with him saw and heard).
Basically, this is Marlon talking as Marlon (meaning not on bullshit Hollywood interviews about films). It's from recordings collected from friends and all over the place. This is not some trash documentary.
Avra and Austin, from Marlon's estate, whom I know and trust, were very involved, and I tried to get them some audio but I couldn't find it. (I had old answering machine tapes with messages from Marlon, but I still have no idea what I did with them.) Twins researcher Nancy Segal, however, did give them a voicemail message from Marlon -- no idea whether it made it into the film, though.
And I have to say, he'd leave the most marvelous and hilarious answering machine messages. He was hilarious and brilliant and an emotional savant in a way really nobody I've ever met was. And he was a good friend and believed in me as a writer before anybody did.
Brannylinks
There's an 18-inch-man in there somewhere.
You're Flying "Economy," Not "Asshole"
From my book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck."
"Get Off My Lawn! I Mean, Campus!": The Angry Old Man In The Body Of The Politically Correct College Student
That's the perfect tweet from "Peat Moss" aka @DrinkerOfScotch (I like him already) to describe the attitude to the indignant little twats (too many college students these days) who are actually the embodiment of some stiff, angry, highly conservative old man.
Nick Gillespie has a piece at Reason. The headline says it all:
Today's College Students[*] Aren't Just Politically Correct, They're Tediously Insisting on Didactic Art Too: [*] Not all students, of course, but this Huffington Post author who admonishes Jerry Seinfeld.
An excerpt via Mediaite from Seinfeld's appearance on Seth Meyer's late-night show, in which he explains why he won't do appearances on campus:
When Seth Meyers noted that there are more people than ever now who will "let you know you went over the line" in comedy than ever before, Seinfeld agreed."And they keep moving the lines in, for no reason," Seinfeld said, citing the uncomfortable feeling he now gets from his audience when he tells his joke about people who scroll through their phone like a "gay French king."
"Are you kidding me?" he asked. "I could imagine a time where people say, 'Well, that's offensive to suggest that a gay person moves their hands in a flourishing motion and you now need to apologize.' I mean, there's a creepy PC thing out there that really bothers me."
Nick explains the new environment on campus -- entirely contrary to the one I experience in the 80s at the University of Michigan, where people would bare their breasts to protest anything short of the sidewalk, but where alternate points of view were allowed to survive (not squashed in campus kangaroo courts):
Let's also point out that the actual problem with campus political correctness--which seeks not simply to enforce ideological or political orthodoxy but to shut down debate and discussion via overt acts of censorship and sustained campaigns to delegitimate as racist, sexist, classist, whatever free expression and inquiry--attaches to students and faculty that are hounded into administrative hearings and/or silence.
Anthony Berteaux, one of these newly minted angry old men has "An Open Letter to Jerry Seinfeld from a 'Politically Correct' College Student" on the HuffPo, in which he shows how extensively he just doesn't get it. Gillespie quotes precisely the right part of this long-winded wrongheadedness:
Yes, Mr. Seinfeld, we college students are politically correct. We will call out sexism and racism if we hear it. But if you're going to come to my college and perform in front of me, be prepared to write up a set that doesn't just offend me, but has something to say.
Gillespie:
To my mind, this sort of formulation is, as Seinfeld's Kenny Bania might put it, the worst. There is nothing more conservative than insisting that entertainment be didactic and serious--that it have "something to say." That is the impulse that underwrote not just leftists influenced by the Frankfurt School--who saw mass media and frivolity as a means of controlling the masses--and reactionaries such as former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett and Attorney General Janet Reno, who wasted hours of everyone's time denouncing rap music and "violent" cable TV during the 1980s and '90s. If you believe that everything from pop songs to standup comedy needs to have deep meaning, you can't let any opportunity pass without insisting that it all send the "right" message.
Yes, the kids on campus are the neo-angry old men demanding more authoritarianism.
The actual old people these days, the ones removing their bras and protesting something, and then letting other people speak without sending them before some Kafkaesque court proceeding, they're the cool, open, "live and let live" types.
Scummy Lawmaker Calls For Raise In The Minimum Wage While Paying His Interns Nothing
Internships like this usually can only go to kids whose parents have means, because what kid from a poorer family can work for free?
Jack Spencer writes at MichiganCapitolConfidential:
Sen. Gary Peters, D-Michigan, is a proponent of increasing the minimum wage for low-skill, limited-experience workers. Unless, that is, they work for him.Earlier this year, Peters joined with 32 of his colleagues to co-sponsor a bill that would hike the federal minimum wage mandate to $12 an hour by 2020.
"Nobody who works full time in this country should have to live in poverty, but that is the brutal economic reality for millions of families across the country right now who can't make ends meet in the face of stagnant wages and increased costs of daily necessities," Peters said in a news release touting the legislation.
However, Peters' office participates in internship programs in which young people work without pay for Congress. These unpaid internship positions are offered on the basis that they are an opportunity to gain experience.
via @reasonpolicy
Finally: Military Trades "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" For "Don't Ask Gays To Act Differently From Straights"
And Armed Forces members who've spent years or even decades hiding the most basic part of a person's life -- their partner -- are able to behave just like straight people with partners are.
Rowan Scarborough writes at the Wash Times that Brigadier General Randy S. Taylor introduced his spouse at a Pentagon event -- but it was his husband, Lucas:
"My husband Lucas is sitting up front here," Gen. Taylor said of the man in the same row as Mr. Carter, Army Secretary John McHugh and other senior officials. He said Lucas has subjugated his own career to support the general's frequent moves over an 18-year relationship."We bet everything on my Army career," said Gen. Taylor, whose 27 years of service spanned an outright ban on gays, then "don't ask, don't tell" and finally, the ban's lifting in 2011.
...Mr. Carter spoke of his commitment to equal rights, but gave no hint of whether the administration will drop the ban on transgenders and transexuals wearing the uniform.
"We need to be a meritocracy," he said. "We can't afford to close ourselves off to any body .... We must start from a position of inclusivity."
Brutus
Caesar salad of links.
Competency Test For Teachers Ruled Racist Because Minorities Get Lower Scores
From Blake Neff at LibertyUnyielding, these questions ruled discriminatory by Judge Kimba Wood, are not tests of whiteness but of this sort of thing:
One sample question from the test asked prospective educators to identify the mathematical principle of a linear relationship when given four examples. Another asked them to read four passages from the Constitution and identify which illustrates the notion of checks and balances. In addition to factual recall, the test also checked basic academic skills, such as reading comprehension and the ability to read basic charts and graphs.Nevertheless, this apparently neutral subject matter contained an insidious kernel of racism, because Hispanic and black applicants had a rate of passing that was respectively 54% and 75% the success rate of white candidates.
Once their higher failure rate was established, the burden shifted to New York to prove that LAST-2 measured skills that were essential for teachers and therefore was justified in having a racially unequal outcome. While it might seem obvious that possessing basic subject knowledge is a key skill for a teacher, District Judge Kimba Wood said the state hadn't met that burden.
"Instead of beginning with ascertaining the job tasks of New York teachers, the two LAST examinations began with the premise that all New York teachers should be required to demonstrate an understanding of the liberal arts," Wood wrote in her opinion, according to The New York Times.
There's more:
A lawsuit, once again being heard by Wood, is already pending, with the plaintiffs arguing that there is no clear evidence strong literacy skills are essential for a teacher.
First of all, this is insulting to blacks and Hispanics who have worked hard, are smart, and do well on these tests -- out of having a basic knowledge of math, science, and English.
Also, who does this "affirmative action" hurt? Kids who will have teachers who are clueless about the basics. Who will those kids be? Very likely minorities, who are less likely to have parents who can afford to send them to private school.
Good going, Kimba!
TSA: "Multiple Layers" Of Failing To Identify Terror Links
A DHS report released on June 4 found that the TSA, while busy, busy, busy groping your granny's breasts, failed to identify 73 aviation workers with "links to terrorism."
And here's how great government is at accomplishing things. Why didn't they identify them? Well, perhaps because "TSA is not authorized to receive all terrorism-related information under current interagency watchlisting policy."
From the report:
TSA had less effective controls in place for ensuring that aviation workers 1) had not committed crimes that would disqualify them from having unescorted access to secure airports areas, and 2) had lawful status and were authorized to work in the United States. In general, TSA relied on airport operators to perform criminal history and work authorization checks, but had limited oversight over these commercial entities. Thus, TSA lacked assurance that it properly vetted all credential applicants.Further, thousands of records used for vetting workers contained potentially incomplete or inaccurate data, such as an initial for a first name and missing social security numbers. TSA did not have appropriate edit checks in place to reject such records from vetting. Without complete and accurate information, TSA risks credentialing and providing unescorted access to secure airport areas for workers with potential to harm the nation's air transportation system.
...TSA did not perform recurrent criminal records checks similar to its terrorism vetting due to current law and FBI policies. TSA depended on 467 commercial airports and air carriers to verify credential holders' criminal histories through a limited review process, and relied on the credential holders themselves to report disqualifying crimes to the airports where they worked. Further, TSA had to deny thousands of credentials to individuals because it could not verify their lawful status, even though airports represented that these individuals had passed the airports' own work authorization verification.
They should stick to what they're good at -- violating innocent Americans' bodies and civil liberties, stealing items from passengers' luggage, smuggling drugs and guns, and failing to spot weapons sent through by testers.
When Title IX Stopped Being About Equal And Started To Be About Oppression
Jessica Gavora writes in the WSJ about the elasticity of Title IX, meaning about how it's been strrrrretched from its original intent to end discrimination on the basis of sex (in schools receiving fed funding):
As long as Title IX's victims were wrestlers or swimmers from low-revenue men's sports that were jettisoned to achieve participation-parity with women's sports, nobody much cared. But now that the law is being turned into a tool to suppress free speech on college campuses, even liberals are starting to cry foul.A tipping point was reached earlier this year when a Northwestern University film professor and feminist, Laura Kipnis, dared to criticize new Title IX regulations governing campus sex. The regulations, promulgated in the name of preventing a "hostile environment" for women, broadly defined sexual harassment as "any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature." An unwelcome touch or comment was grounds for a Title IX investigation, with college administers forced to be police, judge and jury in allegations of sexual harassment from offensive speech to rape.
In February Ms. Kipnis wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education that the new rules infantilize women by encouraging them to "regard themselves as such exquisitely sensitive creatures that an errant classroom remark could impede their education." Instead of preventing a hostile environment, she wrote, such rules instead have created an atmosphere of "sexual paranoia" that is spinning out of control. "In the post Title IX landscape," she noted, "sexual panic rules. Slippery slopes abound."
For her candor about the overreach of Title IX, Ms. Kipnis was hit with . . . a Title IX investigation. In an argument that would have made Joseph Stalin blush, two Northwestern students charged that Ms. Kipnis's criticism of Title IX violated Title IX. The university launched an investigation and subjected Ms. Kipnis to what she has called an "inquisition."
The idiocy is the blanket notion that laws and rules are protections. The more laws and rules you have, the more abuse you are likely to have, subject to another law -- the law of unintended consequences.
WSJ commenter Stephen Graham on the initial ugly use of Title IX:
I don't care at all about sports, but I care about fairness--that's why I hate Title IX. When I was in college, I saw our wrestling team at Bucknell disappear due to Title IX. Apparently football was considered a sport, but the cheerleaders that cheered at those games didn't count as being athletes. So something had to be cut, even though anyone could attest to how easy it was for girls to get involved if they so chose.I was angry, and I even wrote an article for a friend's publication explaining why. I didn't know this until today, but apparently Bucknell agreed with me, because they along with Marquette and the National Wrestling Coaches Association sued the DoE in 2002. They lost. Fortunately for Bucknell wrestlers, they got a multi-million dollar donation from an alum so that they could re-instate the sport without expending college funds, and they've been back ever since.
I suppose I should feel inspired by his generosity. But a triumph of money over legality feels...cheap.
Linkiemama
Haute.
Miracle In Venice
Yes, there exists in my house a plant that not only has failed to commit suicide but has flowered.
Lee Siegel: The "I Can Have It All (And I Deserve It All And Shouldn't Have To Pay For It)" Syndrome
Lee Siegel -- in the news some years back for sockpuppetry -- writes with pride in The New York Times about defaulting on his student loans:
As difficult as it has been, I've never looked back. The millions of young people today, who collectively owe over $1 trillion in loans, may want to consider my example.It struck me as absurd that one could amass crippling debt as a result, not of drug addiction or reckless borrowing and spending, but of going to college. Having opened a new life to me beyond my modest origins, the education system was now going to call in its chits and prevent me from pursuing that new life, simply because I had the misfortune of coming from modest origins.
Am I a deadbeat? In the eyes of the law I am. Indifferent to the claim that repaying student loans is the road to character? Yes. Blind to the reality of countless numbers of people struggling to repay their debts, no matter their circumstances, many worse than mine? My heart goes out to them. To my mind, they have learned to live with a social arrangement that is legal, but not moral.
Maybe the problem was that I had reached beyond my lower-middle-class origins and taken out loans to attend a small private college to begin with. Maybe I should have stayed at a store called The Wild Pair, where I once had a nice stable job selling shoes after dropping out of the state college because I thought I deserved better, and naïvely tried to turn myself into a professional reader and writer on my own, without a college degree. I'd probably be district manager by now.
Or maybe, after going back to school, I should have gone into finance, or some other lucrative career. Self-disgust and lifelong unhappiness, destroying a precious young life -- all this is a small price to pay for meeting your student loan obligations.
Some people will maintain that a bankrupt father, an impecunious background and impractical dreams are just the luck of the draw. Someone with character would have paid off those loans and let the chips fall where they may. But I have found, after some decades on this earth, that the road to character is often paved with family money and family connections, not to mention 14 percent effective tax rates on seven-figure incomes.
Les's answer? Free money for college for everyone (free, as in, other people pay for children who are not theirs).
Instead of guaranteeing loans, the government would have to guarantee a college education.
Oh, and why is college now so expensive? Because government has vastly upped the price with their student loan guarantees.
I didn't have student loans, but I also wasn't allowed (by my parents, who paid for college) to go to a "small, private liberal arts college." (No, the world is not your oyster and the sooner you realize there are limitations -- and find creative ways around them instead of whining about them -- the better.)
They told me I could go, at the in-state price, to the University of Michigan. I did that for three years. When I wanted to go to NYU, which I did (and graduated from) for my final year, I wrote my way to a scholarship. My parents paid what it would have cost for me to go to Michigan, and I paid the rest by working after class at a jingle house a few days a week and working all weekend making copies for graphic designers at a place called The Stat Store.
Siegel has what I see as an absurd sense of entitlement vis a vis his desire to go to the perfect school and have others pay for it.
By the way, I wanted to go to graduate school for film, which my parents found hilarious. Due to their thinking that way, I did what countless now-professional filmmakers have done. No, not enter USC's grad film school, but make films and videos and work my ass off as a production assistant for Robert Altman and others (including making sure nobody parked on 67th Street in the middle of the night as my big job on "Hannah and Her Sisters."
I used a video I made when I was at NYU to get a job at an ad agency with the best production department in New York, Ogilvy & Mather, so I could learn and get paid. After I left full-time employment at Ogilvy (because my goal was never to be in advertising), I made short films for them, produced commercials for Mad Dogs and Englishmen (some adorable O&M expats), and made three short films for Comedy Central. And then, giving free advice on the street corner kind of took off, and I became an advice columnist.
But I was a writer not because I went to writing school but because I wrote. And then when you write and you get edited, you learn, and you write more and you suck less.
The notion that you must take the formal path is just bullshit.
I'm reminded of when Rick Barrs and Jack Cheevers needed to hire a new film critic after Pulitzer winner Peter Rainer went to New York Magazine. They put out the word and Rick got 700-some letters. They ended up choosing Gregory Weinkauf, who was then working as a near-slave at a talent agency, who had zero experience writing film criticism, but was a great writer and thinker. His first year in, he won an LA Press Club Award for his work.
The bottom line: You don't need to go to writing school to become a writer. You need to write your ass off and maybe take a couple of classes with teachers like Samantha Dunn. What's that cost? A few hundred dollars? You can earn that in a couple of weekend working at a photocopy store like I did.
Munchkin
Shortylinks.
The New Turbo PC
I feel for people like Bruce Jenner who, as a little kid, snuck into his sister's closet to try on her dresses. But this notion that commonly understood language, like that describing the female genitalia, is a form of, I guess, war against people not born with vaginas is a bit much. It's part of the general push toward authoritarian speech-chilling on campuses and beyond, where teams (sometimes into the thousands or more) go social media bully on those who use "unapproved" speech.
From an Elinor Burkett piece in The New York Times:
In January 2014, the actress Martha Plimpton, an abortion-rights advocate, sent out a tweet about a benefit for Texas abortion funding called "A Night of a Thousand Vaginas." Suddenly, she was swamped by criticism for using the word "vagina." "Given the constant genital policing, you can't expect trans folks to feel included by an event title focused on a policed, binary genital," responded @DrJaneChi.WHEN Ms. Plimpton explained that she would continue to say "vagina" -- and why shouldn't she, given that without a vagina, there is no pregnancy or abortion? -- her feed overflowed anew with indignation, Michelle Goldberg reported in The Nation. "So you're really committed to doubling down on using a term that you've been told many times is exclusionary & harmful?" asked one blogger. Ms. Plimpton became, to use the new trans insult, a terf, which stands for "trans exclusionary radical feminist."
...Let me get this right: The word "vagina" is exclusionary and offers an extremely narrow perspective on womanhood, so the 3.5 billion of us who have vaginas, along with the trans people who want them, should describe ours with the politically correct terminology trans activists are pushing on us: "front hole" or "internal genitalia"?
Call the vagina what you want (and I do have to say, "front hole" is kind of sexy-dirty), but don't bully people who want to call it what they want, as if they've committed some sort of speech crime against you by not speaking in the most "inclusive" way possible.
P.S. The "neuroscientist" she quotes is an idiot and should be out of a job. Brain-based sex differences show up in children's behavior in early infancy, and they show up in chimps as well (like how Richard Wrangham and Sonja Kahlenberg's research finds that girl chimps will often play with stick as if they're dolls -- and not because they saw it on Saturday morning TV).
The Power Of Mirth In Keeping A Relationship Alive
I never thought I'd be with anybody for more than about two years. (I'm easily bored.) But to my surprise (and delight), Gregg and I have been together for almost 13, and I can't imagine not wanting to be with him.
One thing that makes a huge difference is the humor and another is the surprise -- which happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky and her colleagues find is essential.
Here's a bit of surprise and mirth -- Gregg's additions to the boiled-down copy of Tinbergen's Four Questions that I have pinned to my bathroom wall. The facial hair came first; the party hat got added last night. (Just noticed it this morning.) 
Here's an idea from my column (referencing and inspired by Lyubomirsky's research) on adding surprise to your relationship -- taking turns planning date night each week so one of you will always be surprised:
The good news is, about 40 percent of your happiness is within your control, through how you think and activities you can do (like date night). The bad news on the good news is something called "the hedonic treadmill," which is not a new form of torture at the gym. It's researchers' cute name for how we quickly adapt to both positive and negative changes in our lives and pop right back to our baseline level of happiness or mopeyness. This means it might not be enough to drag your weary, bleary parental cabooses out to dinner every Wednesday night. Sure, that's better than sitting home fretting that your kid won't get early admission to Harvard, but research by positive psychologists Dr. Kennon M. Sheldon and Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky finds that variety -- "a continual stream of fresh, positive experiences" -- is key in increasing and sustaining happiness.So, you need to go out on a variety of date nights -- changing up your activity every week and taking turns planning it so one of you will always be surprised. Lyubomirsky talked on my radio show about having Grandma babysit her toddler overnight and taking off with her husband to a hotel just a few miles from their house. (If you can't afford babysitters, or Grandma's six states away, trade babysitting with friends with a kid around the same age.) You don't have to do anything elaborate or expensive. You can borrow a Wii and ski the Swiss Alps from your living room rug, have a picnic dinner and then ride the Ferris wheel, or just go get hot dogs and make out in the car.
Slurpee
Linkee with brain freeze.
Bullies Knock Around Kid With Cancer; Kid With Cancer Suspended For It
The zero sense policies continue their march, this time in New Jersey, where a kid with cancer who's been bullied got beaten up and ("allegedly," per the Frank Camp My9nJ story) left unconscious on a school bathroom floor:
The teen is undergoing treatment for cancer, and has allegedly been called "cancer boy," and been the subject of bullying since he came to the school last fall.The incidents came to a head when he was found on a bathroom floor, beaten and allegedly unconscious.
Incredibly, the teen was then suspended by the school for "being party to the fight."
NBC New York reports that Julia Morales [the bullied kid's mom] is seeking "a criminal and civil rights investigation against several school officials, as well as State Education Commissioner David Hespe, who she claims ignored her pleas for help."
Along with the bullies, any administrator involved in this decision should be suspended -- or, ideally -- expelled.
Diet Coke "A Weapon"? Not According To Someone Who Claims To Have Been A Passenger On The Flight
The story by Robert Spencer at JihadWatch:
31-year-old Tahera Ahmad, who serves as the Muslim chaplain at Northwestern University, claimed over the weekend that she was discriminated against because a United Airlines flight attendant allegedly refused to give her a full can of unopened Diet Coke. When asked for an explanation as to why she had been refused her unopened Diet Coke, the flight attendant allegedly told her that the Coke can could be used as a "weapon on the plane," Ahmad stated in a Facebook post. After she complained, a passenger told her, "You Moslem you need to shut the f--k up," according to Ahmad's recounting of what happened on board. Ahmad's Facebook page was taken down this afternoon.Without any evidence (but for her firsthand account) that the incident ever occurred, many in the mainstream media have taken to reporting on Ahmad's account as a case of "Islamophobia."
Here's the counterpoint to Ahmad's claim, post at FlyerTalk.com by ComeFlyWithMe33:
This lady is not telling the truth I was actually on this flight on Friday evening from ORD to DCA. I have been a reader of this forum for a long time but seeing this all over the news made me sign up so I could tell you what really happened here and hopefully stop this liar in her tracks. I was sitting close enough to her to hear everything that was said. The flight attendant came up to the lady (I believe she even took her order first in the entire cabin as she was seated in the bulkhead 7d) and took her order. She ordered a coke zero and a hot green tea with a Splenda. The flight attendant handed her a full diet coke with a cup on top and then told her that the green tea would take a few minutes and she would get it to her ASAP. The lady said very rudely and condescending to the FA that she ordered a coke zero and basically pushed the soda back to the flight attendant. The FA said she was sorry and attempted to find a coke zero for her (which she did not have many of) and told her that she could only give her a portion of the can not the full can. This is when the lady in question started to freak out and told the FA "What do you think I will use this as a weapon?! Why can't I have the whole can? I think you are discriminating against me. I need your name...." The lady just kept yelling to her "I need your name... I am being discriminated against." This is when a few passengers told her to calm down and one guy told her to "shut her mouth and she is being ridiculous over a can of coke". No one ever said anything anti-Muslim to her at all. She was the one who started screaming discrimination when she did not get what she wanted. The FA asked her numerous times if she would like anything else when the lady just basically pushed her away with a hand in her face. The lady then got onto her phone with her credit card and paid for the internet so she could start spinning this story on social media and she was never in tears. This person is a liar plain and simple and is just pulling the discrimination card.
via @GatewayPundit
Mirthy
Gigglylinks.
Beautiful
The burka toss:
Why Is Avoiding Government Surveillance A Crime?
Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic says we should shift from looking at creepy Dennis Hastert's case -- being accused of the crime of "structuring," meaning withdrawing less than $10K at a time to avoid government scrutiny -- and look at this another way:
Imagine that a documentary filmmaker like Laura Poitras, whose films are critical of government surveillance, is buying a used video camera for $12,000. Vaguely knowing that a report to the federal government is generated for withdrawals of $10,000 or more, she thinks to herself, "What with my films criticizing NSA surveillance, I don't want to invite any extra scrutiny--out of an abundance of caution, or maybe even paranoia, I'm gonna take out $9,000 today and $3,000 tomorrow. The last thing I need is to give someone a pretext to hassle me."*That would be illegal, even though in this hypothetical she has committed no crime and is motivated, like many people, by a simple aversion to being monitored.
...Think of applying the same logic in another context.
What if the government installed surveillance cameras on various streets in a municipality and then made it a crime to walk along a route that skirted those cameras?
Of course, Hastert may also have committed more serious offenses. The current charges could be motivated by a desire to prosecute him for sex crimes. But that dodges the issue.
...If the state can decide that specific, legal behavior will trigger scrutiny by federal law enforcement and that any attempt to avoid that scrutiny is illegal, even if no other crime is proved, everyone's privacy and freedom from unjust arrest is undermined.
via @Overlawyered
Ladies, The Problem Of Gatekeepers Is Not Solved By Whining That There Are Gatekeepers
Feminism has become specialsnowflake-ism, with women demanding cushy landings in the workplace.
Ashe Schow writes at the WashEx that Elissa Shevisky, who helped launch the current uproar over sexism in tech, is now sorry and says her initial essay was "deeply flawed":
In 2013, Elissa Shevinsky wrote an article titled "That's it, I'm finished defending sexism in tech." The article was based on her concerns that a major tech expo would open with a presentation with an app called "Titstare," which, as the name implied, allowed users to take photos of themselves staring at women's breasts....She concluded her article by writing that one of the solutions to the problem was to get more women in tech.
Her article received 40,000 views and was shared around the web, helping to spark a debate about the lack of women in the tech industry, a debate with the notable accomplishment of making a grown man -- a comet scientist -- cry on live TV because the shirt he was wearing offended some.
...Shevinsky now thinks there is a more positive solution to the issue of sexism in tech.
"I think the more important meaning is to actively choose a path that's yours -- for women to create their own companies and their own infrastructures, to actively seek out people and create places that are a fit for them," Shevinsky said. "Women are martyring themselves trying to change the existing culture, and it's miserable for everyone."
When asked what she would say to those who would accuse her of telling women to go elsewhere, Shevinsky explained that she wanted a free-market approach to reforming the tech industry.
..."So let's go build companies that don't require gatekeepers to say 'yes,'" Shevinsky said.
I don't do well in the corporate environment. I did okay, back when I worked in a corporation, but I do better in a more entrepreneurial system: Solution? Leave corporate America and go entrepreneurial. Which I did.
It just seemed more sensible than trying to bend corporate America to my will.
Murky
Cloudylinks.
Sick: White Male Poet Wonders Whether White Men Should Stop Writing
The question, which seems to be real (because of the SJ hurt-i-ness within), showed up on a blog, "The Blunt Instrument," and the particular blog item is substitled, "...On Publishing And Privilege":
I am a white, male poet--a white, male poet who is aware of his privilege and sensitive to inequalities facing women, POC, and LGBTQ individuals in and out of the writing community--but despite this awareness and sensitivity, I am still white and still male. Sometimes I feel like the time to write from my experience has passed, that the need for poems from a white, male perspective just isn't there anymore, and that the torch has passed to writers of other communities whose voices have too long been silenced or suppressed. I feel terrible about feeling terrible about this, since I also know that for so long, white men made other people feel terrible about who they were. Sometimes I write from other perspectives via persona poems in order to understand and empathize with the so-called "other"; but I fear that this could be construed as yet another example of my privilege--that I am appropriating another person's experience, violating that person by telling his or her story. It feels like a Catch-22. Write what you know and risk denying voices whose stories are more urgent; write to learn what you don't know and risk colonizing someone else's story. I genuinely am troubled by this. I want to listen but I also want to write--yet at times these impulses feel at odds with one another. How can I reconcile the two?
Next logical question: Should white men stop living?
via @CathyYoung63
The Muzzling Of Speech In Academia: A Liberal Professor Speaks
There's a thuggery exhibited by the Social Justice mob that's putting a chill on learning and speech in academia and dumbing down a college education.
"Edward Schlosser" (the pseudonym of a college prof), writes at Vox:
Now boat-rocking isn't just dangerous -- it's suicidal This isn't an accident: I have intentionally adjusted my teaching materials as the political winds have shifted. (I also make sure all my remotely offensive or challenging opinions, such as this article, are expressed either anonymously or pseudonymously). Most of my colleagues who still have jobs have done the same. We've seen bad things happen to too many good teachers -- adjuncts getting axed because their evaluations dipped below a 3.0, grad students being removed from classes after a single student complaint, and so on.I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to "offensive" texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students' ire and sealed his fate. That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad, texts ranging from Upton Sinclair to Maureen Tkacik -- and I wasn't the only one who made adjustments, either.
I am frightened sometimes by the thought that a student would complain again like he did in 2009. Only this time it would be a student accusing me not of saying something too ideologically extreme -- be it communism or racism or whatever -- but of not being sensitive enough toward his feelings, of some simple act of indelicacy that's considered tantamount to physical assault. As Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis writes, "Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated." Hurting a student's feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.
He explains:
This new understanding of social justice politics resembles what University of Pennsylvania political science professor Adolph Reed Jr. calls a politics of personal testimony, in which the feelings of individuals are the primary or even exclusive means through which social issues are understood and discussed....The press for actionability, or even for comprehensive analyses that go beyond personal testimony, is hereby considered redundant, since all we need to do to fix the world's problems is adjust the feelings attached to them and open up the floor for various identity groups to have their say. All the old, enlightened means of discussion and analysis --from due process to scientific method -- are dismissed as being blind to emotional concerns and therefore unfairly skewed toward the interest of straight white males. All that matters is that people are allowed to speak, that their narratives are accepted without question, and that the bad feelings go away.
So it's not just that students refuse to countenance uncomfortable ideas -- they refuse to engage them, period. Engagement is considered unnecessary, as the immediate, emotional reactions of students contain all the analysis and judgment that sensitive issues demand. As Judith Shulevitz wrote in the New York Times, these refusals can shut down discussion in genuinely contentious areas, such as when Oxford canceled an abortion debate. More often, they affect surprisingly minor matters, as when Hamsphire College disinvited an Afrobeat band because their lineup had too many white people in it.
It's an ugly environment that's developed, and few are standing up against it.
I just gave a talk at the recent Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference about how to deal with it when groups of ideologues go after researchers -- not because their science is bad but because their ideas are threatening.
Part of it involved telling researchers that they're a group, too, and they need to stand together. Somebody on campus -- or some group of somebodies -- needs to start standing up against all this squashing of learning, free inquiry, and freedom of speech. And I'm not talking about theFIRE.org or formal organizations. I'm talking about people free speech means enough to to speak up on its behalf.
The Crime Of Unapproved Cheering At A High School Graduation: Cops Actually Issue Arrest Warrants
The violators at a Mississippi high school graduation ignored the school superintendent's request not to scream and to "hold your applause," not a request like "hold your gunfire."
And in this America we are finding hard to believe as of late, the violators -- those who cheered -- have had the cops issue warrants for their arrest.
From Houston's CBS station:
Senatobia Municipal School District Superintendent Jay Foster filed "disturbing the peace" charges against four people who yelled at graduation, WREG-TV reports. Miller and Henry Walker were two of the four Senatobia High School graduation ceremony attendees who were asked to leave for cheering on their 18-year-old daughter, Lanarcia Walker, as she crossed the stage."He said 'you did it baby', waived his towel and went out the door," Walker said of a brief video showing Henry exiting the ceremony as he cheered.
"When she went across the stage I just called her name out. 'Lakaydra'. Just like that," Ursula Miller explained to WREG what she shouted to her niece at the ceremony.
..."A week or two later, I was served with some papers," Miller told WREG.
Superintendent Jay Foster filed "disturbing the peace" charges against the people who yelled at the ceremony. Arrest warrants were issued with a possible $500 bond that the family members say is ridiculous. Foster declined to do an on-camera interview with WREG but vowed to maintain order at the school's graduation ceremonies.
"It's crazy," Henry Walker said. "The fact that I might have to bond out of jail, pay court costs, or a $500 fine for expressing my love, it's ridiculous man. It's ridiculous...Okay, I can understand they can escort me out of the graduation, but to say they going to put me in jail for it. What else are they allowed to do?"
Okay, you could say they acted like assholes, but being an asshole should not be an arrestable offense.
Molten
Lavalinks.
President's "Confidence" In TSA Really About Something Other Than TSA
What kind of ass thinks there's reason to be confident when, if the tests were real, 95 percent of the explosives and weapons would have gotten through on planes?
Jordan Fabian writes at The Hill:
President Obama has confidence in the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) despite the ease with which undercover agents were able to smuggle explosives into airports, the White House said Tuesday."The president does continue to have confidence that the officers of the TSA do very important work that continues to protect the American people," press secretary Josh Earnest said.
As Glenn Reynolds explains:
I suspect that Obama's mostly confident that the unionized TSA workers will vote Democratic. Which is their real reason for existing anyway.
Naturally, from the story at The Hill, there's a pretense of doing something about our pretend security:
The report prompted Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to remove the agency's acting director, Melvin Carraway, who had led the TSA since the beginning of the year.
...As if this guy had anything to do with the fact that pretend cops in faux cop suits who'd otherwise be clerks in a mall or the grocery store are doing nothing but slowing down and pissing off Americans at the airport.
Receipts Are For Little People!
New Jersey nobleman/governor Chris Christie has a quarter-million dollars of expenses that he has no receipts for, writes Mark Lagerkvist at Watchdog.org:
Details of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's $82,000 spending spree at NFL games remain a mystery - despite a release of expense account receipts by the governor's office.Receipts for Christie's purchases at New York Giants and Jets home games during the 2010 and 2011 seasons are missing from 597 pages of receipts New Jersey Watchdog obtained through an Open Public Records Act request.
The governor's office does not have documentation for more than $247,000 in expenses - two-thirds of the $360,000 Christie has spent from his state expense allowance since he took office in 2010, according to a New Jersey Watchdog analysis.
...As New Jersey Watchdog previously revealed, Christie's debit card was used 58 times during the 2010 and 2011 seasons to charge $82,594 to Delaware North Sportservice, operator of the food and beverage concessions at MetLife Stadium. The expenses did not include his free use of luxury boxes, traditionally available to governors at the state-owned venue.
To avoid embarrassment, Christie turned to the New Jersey Republican Committee. The committee reimbursed the state in early 2012 for Christie's bills at MetLife, plus additional charges the governor racked up at Izod Center. Since then, he has refrained from using his expense account at sporting venues.
This is in addition to his $175K-a-year salary.
via @reasonpolicy
Title IX Anti-Discrimination Law Turned Into Tool For Discrimination
Merely exercising her free speech rights led to a Kafkaesque chain of events for Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis, writes Glenn Reynolds in USA Today:
Feminist professor Laura Kipnis of Northwestern University published an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education in February, decrying "sexual paranoia" on campus and the way virtually any classroom mention of sex was being subjected to an odd sort of neo-Victorian prudery: "Students were being encouraged to regard themselves as such exquisitely sensitive creatures that an errant classroom remark could impede their education, as such hothouse flowers that an unfunny joke was likely to create lasting trauma. ... In the post-Title IX landscape, sexual panic rules. Slippery slopes abound."This article sat poorly with campus activists, who in response reported her for sexual harassment, on the theory that this article (and a follow-up tweet -- yes, that's right, a tweet) somehow might have created a hostile environment for female students, which would violate Title IX as interpreted by the Education Department. Because, you see, female students, according to feminists, are too fragile to face disagreement. And they'll demonstrate this fragility by subjecting you to Stalinist persecution if you challenge them, apparently.
At least, that's what happened to Kipnis, who describes what she calls her Title IX inquisition in a lengthy essay [sadly, subscribers only] in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Friday.The university's investigators wouldn't tell her who made the charges or even, for some time, what the charges were, which is typical of these Kafkaesque proceedings. While Kipnis was allowed to bring a faculty "support person" to her hearing, "support person" was not allowed to speak. After the hearing, a Title IX complaint was filed against the speechless "support person."
Reynolds adds:
At Reason, Robby Soave pointed out that bureaucrats whose power comes from an outrageously expansive reading of Title IX have expanded that interpretation to include a claim that "criticizing Title IX violates Title IX."Title IX, as its simple language provides, was intended to open up colleges to women, not to empower a Stalinist bureaucracy to torment people who don't toe the feminist line. Congress needs to haul some Department of Education bureaucrats up for hearings, then rewrite Title IX to make clear that it doesn't grant the kind of sweeping powers over academic expression that educrats have seized. Despite what they might think at the Department of Education, 1984 was written as a cautionary tale -- not an instruction manual.
Duckie
If it quacks like a linkie...
"Drug War" Task Force Even Made Off With Her Vibrator
David Edwards writes at Raw Story, "Michigan cops legally rob 'every belonging' from medical marijuana patient" -- yet another "asset forfeiture" (aka cops as legalized thieves) story:
Medical marijuana user Ginnifer Hency told a group of Michigan lawmakers last week that a drug task force raided her home and kept 'every belonging' she owned -- including her vibrator -- even after a judge dismissed the charges against her....Hency explained that her neurologist had recommended medical marijuana to treat pain associated with multiple sclerosis. She is also registered in the state of Michigan as a caregiver for five other patients, giving her the ability to distribute medical marijuana.
Hency said that the six ounces in her locked backpack were in compliance with Michigan medical marijuana laws when a drug task force raided her home with four children present.
"They took everything, even though I was fully compliant with the Michigan medical marijuana laws," she said. "They charged me with possession with intent to deliver, even though I'm allowed to possess and deliver."
A St. Clair County judge dropped the charges against Hency, but for 10 months law enforcement officials have refused to give back her belongings.
"They have had my stuff for 10 months, my ladder, my iPad, my children's iPads, my children's phones, my medicine for my patients," Hency noted. "Why a ladder? Why my vibrator, I don't know either. Why TVs?"
"The prosecutor came out to me and said, 'Well, I can still beat you in civil court. I can still take your stuff,'" Hency recalled, adding, "I was at a loss. I literally just sat there dumbfounded."
Yes, we've got the state robbing MS patients now -- in the name of stopping consenting adults from putting plants in their bodies. Plants that are legal in the particular state when a person is licensed to have these plants. As Hency was.
Re-read this: "They charged me with possession with intent to deliver, even though I'm allowed to possess and deliver."
We are now living in a sinister country in which you have rights on paper but not in practice.
You could be next -- on any manner of trumped-up charges.
TSA Thuggos Prove They Provide Pretend Security
The TSA failed 95 percent of undercover security tests. (They couldn't catch al-Zawahiri if he crawled up their asses and yodeled.)
"Grievance Feminism": What Feminism Has Become
At CampusReform.org, in a piece by Mariana Barillas, Christina Hoff Sommers describes college campuses increasingly dominated by what she calls "grievance feminism":
Sommers said that many modern students have come to regard a "grim feminist worldview as incontrovertible truth and most seem to be unaware that there is a reasonable, empirically based argument contrary to what they believe," describing first and second wave feminism as "great American success stories" that "led, for the most part, to the liberation of women."..."I think this movement is not really about protecting vulnerable students. I think it is a way to assert power and control over others. It is a way of asserting your cause without having to offer evidence and argument" and to instead "shame people, intimidate them, and silence them," Sommers said.
Sommers said that even liberal professors are "terrified" of some of these developments and they are "not used to challenging the politically correct Left." She said that some of the professors she has talked to told her they were "scared they would say something that would make a student uncomfortable."
This is not the mark of freedom but of authoritarianism, which is what much of feminism has become.
Loosey
Gooseylinks.
How To Remake America As The Soviet Union
A tweet from David Burge:
@iowahawkblog
Patriot Act: the law that mandated cavity searches and spying on every American to solve the problem of Saudis students overstaying visas.
On the way to the ev psych conference in Missouri, at LAX, Jacqueline Tirre is the TSA thug who groped me (per her nametag) -- after intimidatingly just leaving my computer and possessions to sit there on the metal detector off-ramp, claiming they didn't have personnel to get it.
Tirre had just come up to man the gate to the metal detector (which, by the way, the morons didn't send me through), and was the one to search me -- after standing there and ignoring my calls for a supervisor.
Other TSA thugs similarly ignored me and my calls for a supervisor and for someone to watch my possessions.
So my stuff was just out there a long time, with no one to watch it or see that, say, my computer didn't get knocked off the belt by all the travelers coming through while I stood to the side waiting for Queen thug to decide she'd take a grope break and feel me up.
This absolutely seems like an intimidation move for anyone who opts out of the scanner.
I bent over, jailhouse search-style, and Tirre, a squat little middle-aged white woman with oddly applied lipstick (beyond the parameters of her lips), ordered me to not bend over like that.
Let's be clear on this: This little turd of a woman earns money for violating the bodies and rights of American citizens who have given no reason for anyone to believe they are doing anything criminal.
And as I've posted here before, anyone who is smart enough to make it in this blog's comments section is smart enough to figure out how to get something onto a plane without going through the TSA gropefest.
Back to what went down (heh) at LAX, Tirre -- disgustingly -- touched my hair (as if I could hide C4 in hair pulled tight to my head), felt in my waistband, and grazed my labia -- this fellow stood guard. 
What did he think I was going to do, make a break for it; run for my gate? Or is it that he just likes to watch women be forcibly felt up?
Yes, this scumbag earns money, as does Jacqueline Tirre for violating my body and my Fourth Amendment rights in a meaningless pretense of security -- one that really is obedience training for the American public, so we will be docile as our rights are yanked from us.
Again, the way you stop terrorism is through probable cause-based policing, using highly trained intelligence officers, long before anyone gets to the airport. It is not hiring a bunch of people who would otherwise be working in the mall and giving them faux cop costumes.
The Echo Chamber Of Online Feminism
Former "ladyblogger" (icko term used by the author) Amanda Hess writes at Slate:
Meanwhile, every ladyblogger is placed under an insane expectation to agree with all of the others. "Online feminism has more and more rules lately," Jezebel editor Emma Carmichael told the Longform podcast last year. "There are only so many things you can say." Feminism is an amorphous concept, which can make it seem like a big tent--every feminist defining the movement for herself. But it can also function like an invisible electric fence--nobody knows how far she can stray before she gets zapped. I have been called "bad PR for feminism" by a feminist sympathizer and "a voice of reason inside the feminist movement" by an anti-feminist commentator, but I've come to see "feminist writer" as a dig regardless of the context in which it's lodged. To me, a great writer investigates her subjects with skepticism, reports them with nuance, and delights in surprise. An effective activist succeeds in the opposite way: She flattens complex ideas into slogans, cultivates loyalty to her cause, and skips the inconvenient details. I get why an activist might own feminist, but why would I agree to reduce my worldview to a single word?
My take on that? Appealing to the feminist mob is a career move for those who can't think and write about anything else.
The New Animal Rights Army: They'll Decide Whether You're Treating Your Animal "Correctly" -- And Maybe Kidnap It If They Think You're Not
An excerpt from a piece at BedlamFarm, "The New Animal Rights Army: Enabling Lawlessness, Cruelty, Injustice, And The Death Of Privacy":
On a farm in Northern California, a woman on thousand acre cattle farm trained her Australian Shepherds to patrol the perimeter of her ranch, she trained them to push the cows back when they got too close to the road. She credited them with saving more than a score of animals in less than a year.Last October, she became concerned when the three dogs failed to come home at the usual time, they were gone all night. In the morning, she received a call from the police. Someone driving by saw the dogs out in the field, stopped their car, leashed them, got them into their car, and took them to a private home. They called the police, and under new laws regulating the car of animals, the police must investigate all accusations of animal abuse.
The police came to the woman's farm, issued a ticket for animal cruelty and abandonment. She was stunned that her working dogs had been taken away. She called the people who seized the dog and they told her she was guilty of abuse for letting her dogs run free in an open field on a warm day and would not return the dogs.
The people who took the dogs, said the police, patrol farms and private homes looking for animal abuse and cruelty to report.
A court hearing was scheduled for six weeks later. A veterinarian testified to the dog's excellent care and health, the rancher pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of neglect in order to end the ordeal and get her dogs back, she paid a $700 fine and $1,000 in boarding fees and other fees to the "rescue" group. Because she pleaded guilty to the one misdemeanor, she has been entered into a state and national animal abuse registry for life, and can never adopt a dog from an animal shelter. She has adopted many homeless dogs in her life and treated them well. Her name on the registry can be found online by anyone - I found it in seconds. It can never be removed.
In her state, there is a statute of limitations on rape accusations, there is none on charges of animal cruelty.
The police would not reveal the name of the people who informed on her in secret, she was only told the name of the rescue group and the address where she could send a check.
There are other stories like this at the link about people who seem to have cared fine for their animals but fell astray of what animal rights fundamentalists deem "correct" treatment of animals.
BedlamFarm continues:
Their can be no rights for animals if there are none for humans, no movement on behalf of animals is moral or just if it enables people to jeer at law and decency and human dignity. A just society would seek out the people who stole the rancher's dogs, who killed the homeless man's dog, who took the pony operator's life and livelihood from her without cause. They ought to experience the horror of being charged with numerous counts of human cruelty and abuse, their photos paraded on television, they ought to be shamed and humiliated, fined and hauled into court before their friends and families, their resources drained, their work taken from them.
Kippers
Links as little fish.
