Anti-Vaxxers Are Bringing Back Measles -- And The Unnecessary Deaths Of Children
It is just sick that, years after the discovery of vaccines to prevent absolutely horrible diseases in children and others, parents are leaving their children unvaccinated. This puts not only their children at risk for terrible diseases like measles, polio, and smallpox, but the also most immunologically vulnerable, by destroying what's called "herd immunity."
From Brookings Institute's Kavita Patel and Rio I. Hart:
What is herd immunity?Measles is a highly transmissible disease; so transmissible in fact, that 90 to 95 percent of people must be vaccinated in order to protect the entire population, or achieve what is called "herd immunity." This effect is what helps eliminate disease entirely.
When enough people have a vaccine and cannot catch or spread a disease, the pathogen cannot form a functional chain of infection. This means that even if someone cannot receive a vaccine, say a newborn or a child undergoing chemotherapy, they are protected because everyone they come into contact with is immunized. This enables us to defeat strains of disease entirely by denying the strain the chance to spread to new victims. (The Washington Post provides a more exhaustive explanation of this concept here).
While most unvaccinated children have been protected from diseases by the herd immunity of their communities, the most recent outbreak of measles in a California county with a particularly high rate of unvaccinated children shows the potential harm of an anti-vaccine movement.
From The Economist:
In 2008 an unvaccinated boy from San Diego caught measles on a visit to Switzerland, infecting 11 others on his return. ... In December 2014 some 117 people caught measles in an outbreak traced back to two Disney theme parks in Orange County. None died, which was lucky, for measles is a horrible virus. Far more contagious than Ebola or the flu, it kills 146,000 people worldwide each year. It can be caught in a bus, a shop or doctor's surgery two hours after an infected person last sneezed there. Even in the rich world and with the best care, measles can cause brain-damage and deafness, and kills about one in 1,000 of those who catch it. Before vaccines, the disease killed roughly 450 Americans each year, most of them children....Dr Richard Pan remembers his first encounter with measles, as a medical student in Philadelphia in 1991. Nine children died, in part because many poor families could not afford vaccinations. After a medical career in California Dr Pan was elected to the state Assembly as a Democrat in 2010. That year California saw a whooping-cough outbreak that killed ten victims. The problem Dr Pan confronted centred not on the urban poor but on affluent, internet-surfing parents refusing to immunise children. In 2014 he was elected to the state Senate, representing Sacramento. Weeks later measles hit Disneyland. He helped write a law to make parents vaccinate children. Medical exemptions are allowed for children with weak immune systems. Parents who still refuse must homeschool their offspring. The law passed, but not before Dr Pan and allies had endured threats and meetings at which activists blamed vaccines for a "holocaust" of harm.
Now the paediatrician-turned-senator faces a recall campaign. If opponents can gather 36,000 signatures they can force a special election. The anti-Pan coalition is eclectic. One organiser, Aaron Mills, sounds like vaccine sceptics in Europe. A longtime Democrat who works for the state's fire service, he believes that pharmaceutical giants and doctors downplay the risks of vaccines and exaggerate their benefits, probably for profit. Another founder of the recall drive, Katherine Duran, denounces the vaccine law in distinctively American terms. She calls it a "theft of liberty". In her telling, Dr Pan has betrayed his primary duty as a legislator: to defend individuals from government "tyranny".
Reassuringly, most Californians side with the medical consensus. Support for the state's new vaccine laws has been measured at 67% and Dr Pan is likely to survive his recall. High-profile outbreaks have shaken a state slipping into complacency, showing the vaccinated majority that their collective immunity is threatened by the science-averse and the simply selfish.
via @picardonhealth
The Paranoid Morons Known As The Gloucester, New Jersey Police
From Carlos Miller at PINAC -- Photography Is Not A Crime:
New Jersey police are on the lookout for two men caught on video taking pictures of a public school from a public road, asking the public for help in tracking these men down.Gloucester Township police say it is important to find these men because they were involved in "suspicious activity."
What -- taking photos of the school instead of sitting on their asses and Googling it up?
The Gloucester Police Department's Facebook page post:
At 1:20 PM, a younger white male operating a dark sedan stopped on Erial Road and captured photos of the front of the school with a phone. The vehicle appears to have a missing front driver's side hubcap.At 1:30 PM, an older white male operating a small red vehicle, possibly a Ford, drove onto the property and circled the rear lot. The vehicle then drives onto the front lot, the male driver exited the vehicle, and appears to be capturing several photos of the school. An unknown passenger was also observed inside the red vehicle.
If you have any information or can identify the vehicles or the occupants, contact the Gloucester Township Police Department's main number at 856-228-4500, or call our GTPD Anonymous Crime Tip Line: 856-842-5560.
Their Facebook page says "NO COMMENTS." I left one anyway, which will probably be deleted:
Ooh, human beings taking photos in a public place! Google this: "The First Amendment."
(In Los Angeles, we call this "scouting locations.")
The Real Villain In The $750-Per-Tablet Drug Price
Scott Gottlieb writes at the WSJ of the recent brouhaha over Turing CEO Martin Shkreli raising the price of Daraprim, a drug used to treat toxoplasmosis, AIDS, and cancer, $750 from $13.50 a tablet. The real villain here is government and government regulation:
Turing has been attempting to exploit a regulatory failure that is becoming far more prevalent as the Food and Drug Administration knocks older generic medicines out of production and barriers to entry make new generics costlier.Turing bought marketing rights to Daraprim from another company, along with access to a supply of the drug, so it didn't need to do any weighty regulatory work to market the medicine. It rebranded the pill and raised the price. But if another company wanted to compete to sell the same medicine, it would need to apply for a new generic drug approval, by submitting an "Abbreviated New Drug Application" to the FDA.
Filing one of these applications with the FDA used to cost as little as $1 million; today it can run as high as $20 million, sometimes more. This means that old but "niche" drugs may not have competition from other generic entrants, creating an opening for companies to extract windfall profits by driving up the prices of drugs like Daraprim.
The FDA has a backlog of thousands of generic-drug applications. And it takes an average of four resubmissions for a generic application to finally win approval, partly owing to shortcomings in the applications and poor communication between the FDA and generic drug makers. It may well be that competitors to Daraprim are in the FDA's large queue. On average, it takes about 50 months for the FDA to approve a single generic application.
The FDA's recent crackdown on the manufacturing process of prescription drugs has also led to the shutdown of U.S. drug plants. Whatever the merits of the FDA's heightened scrutiny, it has been done with little attention to how this manufacturing capacity would be replaced. The slow approval timelines, combined with closed manufacturing facilities, create temporary drug shortages and monopolies, which can be exploited by shrewd investors.
Other smart posts on this: Walter Olson and Alex Tabarrok, who mentions this:
I've long argued for reciprocity, if a drug is approved in Europe it ought to be approved here.
This should be the case with sunblock. Europeans aren't dropping dead from use of the more protective ingredients, yet because our government has only approved the sale of one of them over here -- Anthelios XL
Competition would surely make it loads cheaper.
Ducky
Quackielinks.
Meet The Tweezers
Mark Rober on the shattering discrimination experienced by people with unibrows:
Guilty Of Reinforcing...Um, Historical Reality?
Andrew Pulver writes at The Guardian that Netflix altered its description of Pocahontas after feminist grievance hunters got panty-bunched over it. The original:
"An American Indian woman is supposed to marry the village's best warrior, but she yearns for something more - and soon meets Capt. John Smith."
The revised:
"A young American Indian girl tries to follow her heart and protect her tribe when settlers arrive and threaten the land she loves."
Now I'm no American Indian scholar, but from what I know of anthropology and biological sex differences, pretty much, it was the rare woman in history who was out there "protecting her tribe" the way tribes are protected: By killing the fuck out of the invaders.
Me? I have superboobs, and I can just point them at dangerous people and rays shoot out and incinerate them.
But Pocahontas? I'm doubting that was one of her charms.
The "Arab Spring": Where Obama Saw Sparkly Purple Unicorns, Putin Saw Reality
Everett Rosenfeld writes at CNBC about Putin's remarks on what idiots were those (like our nitwit President) who supported "democratic revolutions" (in countries that cannot culturally support democracy, due to its running exactly contrary to the totalitarianism commanded by Islam):
"Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster -- and nobody cares a bit about human rights, including the right to life," Putin said through a translator. "I cannot help asking those who have forced that situation: Do you realize what you have done?"The Russian president added that the power vacuum following these revolutions led to the rise of terrorist groups in the region -- including the Islamic State group.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the country is busy committing suicide. A tweet:
@iowahawkblog
RAF airman ordered moved from hospital waiting room; staff says "other cultures" might be offended by his uniform
Lulu
Linkemon.
The Fragile Kittens Known As College Students
Middlebury Campus newspaper editorial calling for a different kind of diversity: "We all agree diversity is important; now we must learn to make room for diversity of opinion." More from the piece:
In her column in this week's Campus, President Laurie Patton stresses the importance of resilience. "Resilience," she writes, "is one of those words we think we know, but we don't necessarily stop to reflect on." Starting this year, she writes, the Middlebury community will "embark on a coordinated effort to reflect on the importance of these qualities and develop programs to enhance them."In addition to the qualities that President Patton attributes to the word, we at the Campus define resilience as how Middlebury prepares students for the world they will face after graduation. This requires the ability to engage with points of view that we disagree with, especially those that offend us or make us uncomfortable.
Some of the aspects of this community that we most pride ourselves on - our promotion of liberal ideals and emphasis on mutual respect and safe spaces - can have the effect of insulating us and stifling a diversity of opinion. The world-at-large is not Middlebury, and we fear we are leaving here unprepared for the "unsafe spaces" that await us.
We Middlebury students have a tendency to plug our ears and avoid listening to dissenting opinions instead of learning from them or challenging them. For example, in 2012, Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science Murray Dry was vilified for taking a legalistic view of affirmative action at a panel designed to showcase a diversity of opinions. A year later, the campus was in uproar over a lecture by University of Pennsylvania Law Professor Amy Wax, some students even opting to hold up signs reading "racist." Similarly, some felt that Middlebury's invitation to Harvey Mansfield last year was an implicit endorsement of his social views, even claiming he invoked feelings of fear. And when Chance the Rapper came to perform, we asked him to censor his most controversial lyrics, and then demanded a forum to debrief how the whole ordeal made us feel.
Developmental psychologist Peter Gray notes that declining student resilience is a problem for colleges, writing at Psychology Today that college personnel everywhere are struggling with students' increased neediness:
Students are increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional crises over, problems of everyday life. Recent examples mentioned included a student who felt traumatized because her roommate had called her a "bitch" and two students who had sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment. The latter two also called the police, who kindly arrived and set a mousetrap for them.Faculty at the meetings noted that students' emotional fragility has become a serious problem when in comes to grading. Some said they had grown afraid to give low grades for poor performance, because of the subsequent emotional crises they would have to deal with in their offices. Many students, they said, now view a C, or sometimes even a B, as failure, and they interpret such "failure" as the end of the world. Faculty also noted an increased tendency for students to blame them (the faculty) for low grades--they weren't explicit enough in telling the students just what the test would cover or just what would distinguish a good paper from a bad one. They described an increased tendency to see a poor grade as reason to complain rather than as reason to study more, or more effectively.
He says parents aren't entirely to blame -- we've become a helicopter society. And I see the "zero tolerance" policies at schools as a major facet of this.
Middlebury via @JonHaidt
Just Like In War, Innocent People Get Their Lives Ruined By The Drug War
"Take a Valium, Lose Your Kid, Go to Jail" is the headline on the Nina Martin ProPublica story about how anti-drug fervor and abortion politics in Alabama have turned an anti-meth-lab law into a weapon against pregnant women.
A woman named Casey Shehi, having a difficult pregnancy, says she took a single valium to sleep -- from a bottle her boyfriend had. When she gave birth, the nurse said she'd had a "positive drug screen for benzodiazapines" -- surely done not at her request but at the meddling state's mandate.As Shehi recounted the story, the maternity nurse told her, "Okay, okay."
By that night, everything really did seem all right. Excited nurses woke Shehi and handed her the baby, swaddled in a light blanket. "They told me: 'He's good, he's clean. You can have him now, no worries.' " Exposure to too much benzodiazepine during pregnancy can sometimes cause newborns to be fussy or floppy-limbed. But occasional, small doses of diazepam (the generic name for Valium) are considered safe. According to the lab report, James had nothing in his system. Shehi said the pediatrician reassured her, "Everything's cool."
The next day, Shehi and the baby went home, and someone from the Department of Human Resources, the state child welfare agency, paid a visit. In recent years, Alabama authorities have been aggressive about removing newborns from the custody of mothers who abuse drugs, typically placing a baby with a relative or foster family under a safety plan that can continue for months or years. The social worker listened to Shehi and Sharpe's story and concluded that theirs wasn't one of those situations. "She said: 'I understand the pain you are in, and I understand what's going on. I won't take the baby away,' " Sharpe recalled.
But one morning a few weeks later, when Shehi was back at her job in a nursing home and the baby was with a sitter, investigators from the Etowah County Sheriff's Office showed up at the front desk with a warrant. She had been charged with "knowingly, recklessly, or intentionally" causing her baby to be exposed to controlled substances in the womb -- a felony punishable in her case by up to 10 years in prison. The investigators led her to an unmarked car, handcuffed her and took her to jail.
Shehi had run afoul of Alabama's "chemical endangerment of a child" statute, the country's toughest criminal law on prenatal drug use. Passed in 2006 as methamphetamine ravaged Alabama communities, the law targeted parents who turned their kitchens and garages into home-based drug labs, putting their children at peril.
Within months, prosecutors and courts began applying the law to women who exposed their embryo or fetus to controlled substances in utero. A woman can be charged with chemical endangerment from the earliest weeks of pregnancy, even if her baby is born perfectly healthy, even if her goal was to protect her baby from greater harm. The penalties are exceptionally stiff: one to 10 years in prison if her baby suffers no ill effects, 10 to 20 years if her baby shows signs of exposure or harm and 10 to 99 years if her baby dies.
And here's the problem:
Yet there's nothing in the statute to distinguish between an addict who puts her baby at grave risk and a stressed-out single mom who takes a harmless dose of a friend's anti-anxiety medication.
Yet, we're throwing mothers in jail on this basis.
The "justice" system has become a corruption system, with the power of law behind it.
Lumpen
Linken prole.
"Wonton ... Disregard"
My favorite bit of this...disaster of a legal brief...composed by a third-year law student.
He's suing Facebook. (He should be suing his English teachers -- any and all of them who gave him passing grades.)
More here.
Are Prisoners Who Make Low Wages Being Exploited?
Interesting article at the Foundation for Economic Education's blog, written by Robert P. Murphy.
The subhead -- "The Prison-Industrial Complex Pinches Rents from Prisoners" -- is a reminder that it's not free to taxpayers to keep people in prison.
Then again, how many people are in prison because of a non-violent drug offense? The government has no business caging people because they wish to consume a plant or sell it to another consenting adult.
Here's an excerpt from Murphy's piece:
Over the summer, critics objected to Whole Foods' participation in a program that used poorly paid prisoners to make expensive cheese for the grocery store's upscale customers, according to Vice:Whole Foods responded to the criticism by saying it sources tilapia and cheese from CCI as part of its mission to support communities, "and that includes the paid, rehabilitative employment of inmates at CCI. They are paid for their work, and learn job skills that can help them contribute to society in meaningful ways upon their release," the company said in a statement.Specifically, even though (according to the Vice article) prisoners may earn as little as 74 cents per day, the participating prisoners can earn more at these private/public jobs than the inmates who perform more traditional tasks such as working in the kitchen or laundry. Just because a job strikes outsiders as horrible and underpaid doesn't mean we should be quick to advocate removing these options.
Prisoners Do Need to Earn Money
Assuming the statistics are accurate, the work experience teaches valuable job skills, which may be things as basic as following a routine and taking instruction from a supervisor. The recidivism rate among the selected prisoners is half that of the general prison population.
One of the worst things the government does to a convict is deprive him of the means of generating a normal income.
More generally, though, all decent people should actively applaud "prison labor" as beneficial to the inmates as well as society at large. If that strikes you as shocking, consider the opposite scenario.
One of the worst things the government does to a convict is deprive him of the means of generating a normal income for the entire time he's locked up. This not only leaves the inmate poorer in the short run, it also sabotages his ability to gain experience in his desired field while he withers away in a cage. Even without the stigma of a prison record, less experience means he is less marketable down the road when he gets out of prison.
Most citizens take it for granted that during a recession, government officials must do whatever it takes to help the unemployed return to meaningful work. And yet, the population directly under government supervision -- namely, prison inmates -- is routinely assigned stultifying tasks like making license plates or picking up litter along the highway. Why not allow prisoners to work in other pursuits that benefit consumers, while gaining marketable skills at the same time?
His conclusion:
Generally speaking, we should applaud programs that allow individuals more options in selling their labor to outsiders. If prison inmates can earn more income and develop marketable skills by working for companies such as Whole Foods, then it helps both consumers and the prisoners themselves.However, the logic of free markets only works to the extent that the relationships are genuinely voluntary, which we cannot guarantee in the context of prison labor. More ominously, if the practice indirectly fuels government policies that swell prison populations, it might, on net, be harmful to liberty.
Linkaanisqatsi
A Fillup Glass original.
Need Your Eye And Your Opinion
Our podcasting network has been wonderfully supportive of my weekly behavioral science-based radio show, and they had a designer do a logo for us.
I would love your thoughts and comments. Please look at the proposed logo at this link.
I thanked the designer and said I would write back with thoughts early next week. I can ask for changes -- in color, in design, etc., or I can just say thanks and go with what she gave us.
The show features the luminaries of behavioral science talking about their books and their work in ways that give us understandable, practical advice for living our lives.
It is not a show about chemistry, but maybe that doesn't matter. Or maybe that does.
Your thoughts?
How To Spend Thousands Of Dollars To Keep Men From Wanting To Have Sex With You
By Giorgio Armani.
Desperately Seeking Hate Crimes
It used to be that knowledge was power.
On college campuses these days, grievance is power. In fact, grievance become a kind of religion, especially in how it leads to the shoving aside of any possibility for rational examination and thought.
Grievance-hunting leads to accusations, and accusations -- of racism, anti-feminist thought, to name a few -- have become a handy way to have unearned power over others...typically, men, and most typically white men...but sometimes, over a whole university population.
Grievance-hunting is also a way for an otherwise un-noteworthy individual to become noteworthy -- through their "oppression."
For example...
Colin Flaherty writes at American Thinker:
When the black studies student saw a piece of string in a tree, she did what any self-respecting black studies student would do: shriek racism.The string looked like rope. And rope means lynching. And that meant within a few minutes of this Tuesday night discovery on the campus of the University of Delaware, the entire university community from the acting president on down was in a full hate-crime panic.
...The acting president called for a rally to condemn the atrocity.
Then students started to wake up. And many knew the rope was not a rope, but a string. And the noose was not a noose.
And the act was not a hate crime. Or even a fake hate crime.
It was just string that held up a paper lantern -- left over from an alumni party in June.
But none of that mattered. The anti-string, anti-hate crime rally went on, as scheduled.
The president did not apologize for perpetrating the hate crime hoax. Instead, she threw the university police under the bus for not figuring it out, then condemned the hate crime which had not happened, if it had happened, which it had not.
More from DelawareOnline.
Previously at U of Delaware: "Please Report to Your Resident Assistant to Discuss Your Sexual Identity--It's Mandatory! Thought Reform at the University of Delaware"
via @adamkissel
Why It's Dangerous To Talk To The Cops -- Even If You're Innocent
Very important and very helpful Ken White post on his law firm's website, with the title, "If I Just Talk To The Police I Can Clear This Up" -- The Dangerous Delusion. An excerpt:
Good people -- honest people -- tend to think "I've done nothing wrong, so if I tell the truth now, I can clear this up." They think "talking can't hurt me because I haven't done anything wrong, and because I won't lie." It would be wonderful if that were true, but it's not.First, you may not know whether you've done anything wrong. There are tens of thousands of federal, state, and local laws. Many of them are obscure. Do you know all of them? If you talk to law enforcement without consulting a lawyer, you may confess to a crime without knowing it.
Second, you probably don't have an eidetic memory. You're capable of remembering things wrong, especially under stress, and especially when talking about complex or distant events. If you tell law enforcement something based on your faulty memory, they may decide that you are lying deliberately, and charge you with making false statements, or use your statement to attack your credibility later when you remember the truth.
Third, law enforcement agents may be questioning you not to investigate and discover evidence, but to trap you. It is routine now -- particularly with federal law enforcement -- for agents to approach a suspect at the close of their investigation, not at the start of it, in hopes of piling more charges onto the prospective defendant. Federal agents will approach a suspect, ask them if they did something, and if they say "no," add a charge of making a false statement onto whatever charges they were already seeking.
Fourth, regrettably, it doesn't matter whether you are telling the truth. It matters whether law enforcement thinks you are telling the truth, or cares. If those FBI agents interviewing you have already made up their minds about the facts of a situation, by talking to them you're only making it easier for them to mount a misguided case against you, or handing them an opportunity to charge you (unjustly) with making false statements.
...Ultimately, consulting a lawyer before you answer law enforcement questions is like wearing a seat belt when you drive. Is it hypothetically possible that in an accident a malfunctioning seat belt could trap you in a burning car, like you've seen on TV, so you die? It's possible. But refusing to wear a seat belt because of that remote, speculative danger is a foolish misapprehension of relative risks. It ignores the far more probable, far more dangerous risk presented by getting into an accident without a seat belt, and it ignores all the ways that a seat belt can dramatically mitigate your risk.
When I tweeted this link, somebody tweeted back:
Especially if you're innocent. If you're guilty, you have incentive to negotiate info for leniency
I tweeted this in response:
Whether guilty or innocent, talking to cops without a lawyer is wise on level of removing your own appendix w/a spoon
I also know never to let cops into my home. And P.S. The hardest drug I do is sauvignon blanc.
Ventrilolinques
Speak silently and be a big stick.
Gouge The Working Man, Austin, Texas Version
Chuck DeVore writes at Forbes:
In Texas, the City of Austin just launched a radio ad campaign to inform the public that, if they charge money to haul away sticks from a neighbor's yard, they'll first need a "Hauler for Hire" license for $100, thank you very much.The $100 license is required for anyone seeking to haul away solid waste of any type--tree limbs, old couches, rocks--from an individual residence. Prior to last November, these services were unregulated by the city, allowing anyone with an old pickup truck to earn a few extra bucks if they were willing to invest some hard work into cleaning up a backyard, then taking the debris to the local landfill.
Whom is the City of Austin trying to protect with this new law? Was there a problem with unregulated stump-haulers? Were neighborhoods being ravaged by unlicensed pickup truck owners charging octogenarian widows $2,000 for taking an old refrigerator to the dump? No.
The amendment in Austin's solid waste services ordinance was subtle--simply striking one line from the existing "Private Collection Service" licensing regime that provided an exemption for "a private collection service that hauls refuse from single family residences only." In other words, garbage truck companies were licensed while the dude with the pickup truck wasn't.
There are now all sorts of onerous requirements made for the guy with the pickup truck, like vehicle requirements and the requirement that they "carry at least $1 million in combined liability auto insurance--more than 10 times the minimum state requirement for financial responsibility."
What this is about, of course, is protectionism for the big trucking companies, and never mind if some guy trying to feed his family by using his muscles and his pickup truck can no longer do that.
Also, I've seen over and over that licensed moving companies will do terribly sleazy things. They tried to do one of the dealies where they won't unload your stuff till you give them a couple more thousand dollars than you agreed on to a friend of mine. Problem: The guy's really high up in the LAPD -- a squad leader. He called out a black and white and was about to have them arrested for extortion. Whaddya know...they started unloading the truck.
via @overlawyered
Absolutely Egregious: Man Jailed For Unpaid Traffic Ticket Gets Ignored Until He Dies In Custody
This is so terrible. The guy -- from a Detroit area suburb -- is off his addiction-treatment meds and in withdrawal, and, at one point, lies under his bed, clawing up at it. What kind of person looks at a human being in this condition and just leaves them in their cage?
During his 17 days in jail, in the final days the horror of his withdrawal, he laid there on the floor for 48 hours, waiting to die -- in a cell that was supposed to be specially monitored.
This guy was not a violent criminal. He lost 50 pounds in 17 days while jailed for an unpaid ticket.
Robby Soave has more at Reason:
Stojcevski was a drug addict, and was taking Methadone, Xanax, and Klonopin to treat his addiction. But without access to these prescriptions, he quickly went into withdrawal while in jail, according to WDIV's expert. Withdrawal caused him to behave irrationally, but jail officials ignored these obvious symptoms and instead placed him in a cell for the mentally unstable. He was stripped naked--so that he couldn't hurt himself--and forced to languish under the unceasing bright lights (the jail doesn't turn them off, even at night).At one point, Stojcevski began fighting with another (naked) inmate, who was then moved out of the cell. Sometime later, completely alone, Stojcevski could be seen reenacting the fight--a clear sign of hallucination.
On his last day of life, the man refused to touch his food and was too weak to get up from the floor.
The DEA's Very Expensive Gardening Program
They're yanking up pot plants in Oregon at a cost to taxpayers of $60 per uprooted plant. Christopher Ingraham writes in the WaPo about their efforts in 2014 (noting that pot remains illegal under Federal law):
The Drug Enforcement Administration spent $960,000 to destroy marijuana plants in that state in 2014 as part of its "Cannabis Eradication Program."...That is a lot when you consider that nationally, it costs the DEA *ahem* $4.20 to eliminate a single marijuana plant under this program.
The DEA has budgeted $760,000 in marijuana eradication funds for Oregon this year, according to KGW. Considering that marijuana is now legal in that state, many Oregonians -- including some members of Congress -- are questioning whether that's a sensible endeavor. They are trying to defund the federal anti-pot program that costs about $18 million a year overall.
...The DEA defends the cannabis eradication program on the grounds that much of the marijuana grows it targets in Oregon and elsewhere are the products of Mexican drug cartel activity.
In Oregon? Um, not a lot of hard evidence for that. As in, "We haven't been able to connect anyone to a major cartel," the Office of National Drug Control Policy said about a connection between cartels and pot grown in California.
Let alone all the way up the coast.
Some law enforcement officials in Oregon are dismantling their marijuana eradication programs, according to KGW's report. "I want to focus on person crimes," one sheriff told KGW. "Child abuse, sex assault, crimes against people."
You want to smoke pot or swig some likker -- fine by me, as long as you aren't operating a lathe next to someone's arm or weaving down the highway.
And it should be none of the government's business which plants, drinks, or products adults wish to put in their bodies. None whatsoever.
Oh, and motivation for the coppers? Muzika, a commenter at the WaPo writes:
In Oklahoma the DEA eradication program is welfare for police. On weekends they put on Black DEA Eradication hats and T-Shirts and go out and pull and destroy Wild Weed that farmers grew during WWII for hemp as a Federal Program and grows wild in Oklahoma now. No THC value, so you cannot get high on it. The cops on the team each average $5,000 a month, during the summer months pulling weed. It goes back to Nixon's war on drugs, then Reagan funded the DEA billions.
Gloppy
Linkie with glop.
Oh, The Horrifying Horrible Horror
The latest in manpussy hair fashion, from my tweet.
The President Stood Up For Free Speech On Campus -- But He Didn't Mean Middle School Campuses
An excerpt from the President's talk at a Des Moines, Iowa, town hall:
The purpose of college is not just to transmit skills. It's also to widen your horizons; to make you a better citizen; to help you to evaluate information, to help you make your way through the world; to help you be more creative.The way to do that is to create a space where a lot of ideas are presented and collide -- where people are having arguments and people are testing each other's theories, and over time people learn from each other because they're getting out of their own narrow point of view and having a broader point of view.
...But it was because there was this space where you could interact with people who didn't agree with you, and had different backgrounds than you, that I then started testing my own assumptions, and sometimes I changed my mind.
Sometimes I realized, "You know what, maybe I've been too narrow-minded. Maybe I didn't take this into account. Maybe I should see this person's perspective."
I didn't blog this because, knowing what I know of the President's thinking, I kind of felt it was bullshit. The guy is no friend to free speech -- well, except for free speech he agrees with...free speech that helps his causes and his party.
Well, it didn't take him long to reveal that his sudden free speech platform was bullshit -- with the blocking of a young conservative activist from seeing or responding to his Twitter feed," conservative YouTube sensation CJ Pearson, a 13-year-old black middle schooler from Georgia."
Way to hear all points of view!
Best tweet on this was by David Burge:
@iowahawkblog
If he had a son, he would look just like this kid he blocked on Twitter
HOAX ALERT: From PJ Media.
WHAT REMAINS THE SAME: President's shitty record on free speech.
GM's Faulty Ignition System: Nobody At GM Is Really Going To Pay
Did those faulty ignition systems leap out of boxes and install themselves in cars?
Daniel Fisher writes at Forbes:
Apparently, there is no Vice President In Charge Of Going To Jail at General Motors GM. We can conclude that from the deferred-prosecution deal the auto manufacturer struck with federal prosecutors, under which it will hand over $900 million in criminal penalties for allegedly failing to disclose faulty ignition systems that may have contributed to the deaths of more than 100 people.The settlement is raising eyebrows, not only because GM will pay less than the $1.2 billion Toyota paid last year to settle similar claims over its reporting of unintended acceleration. It also seems to violate new guidelines the Justice Department announced last week directing prosecutors to indict real humans when they pursue criminal charges against corporations.
Successful lobbying may be the reason no living, breathing executives go to jail for failing to alert the government about GM's failure-prone ignition switches, which could shut off air bags and cause other problems. Federal laws covering the automobile industry don't have the same criminal punch as other laws designed to enforce environmental regulations, or safety and accountability in industries like pharmaceuticals and banking.
...Prosecutor Preet Bharara in Manhattan accused GM of making "materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statements" when it assured consumers and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration its vehicles were safe at the same time as it was investigating whether the switch was defective. Despite widespread reports of failures beginning in 2004, GM didn't notify the NHTSA until February 2014.
Disgusting. I'm guessing the execs on this didn't put their family members in those cars.
Here's the upshot:
So it appears GM will have to suffer through paying a federal monitor to oversee its safety efforts for the next few years and it agreed to pay $575 million to settle some of the civil suits against it. But it doesn't look like the feds will get a perp walk out of this one.
via @overlawyered
Linkie
Kinkie, if you can.
I Identify As An Heiress
I'm hoping for my bank account to experience bloat. Any day now.
The New Meaning Of "Monkey Suit"
The kill shelter operators known as PETA have taken it upon themselves to demand the copyright control (and money from it) of a macaque monkey who pushed the button on a camera on a tripod set up by Brit nature photographer David Slater.
From CBSLA story, "PETA Sues To Give Monkey The Copyright Of Selfie Photos"
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A macaque monkey who took now-famous selfie photographs should be declared the copyright owner of the photos, rather than the nature photographer who positioned the camera, animal-rights activists contend in a novel lawsuit filed Tuesday. The suit was filed in federal court in San Francisco by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It seeks a court order allowing PETA to administer all proceeds from the photos for the benefit of the monkey, which it identified as 6-year-old Naruto, and other crested macaques living in a reserve on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.The photos were taken during a 2011 trip to Sulawesi by British nature photographer David Slater. Through San Francisco-based self-publishing company Blurb, he has published a book called "Wildlife Personalities" that includes the "monkey selfie" photos.
However, the photos have been widely distributed elsewhere by outlets, including Wikipedia, which contend that no one owns the copyright to the images because they were taken by an animal, not a person. Slater, who is exploring legal action against some of those outlets, said he was "very saddened" by PETA's lawsuit because he considers himself an advocate of animal rights.
Last year, the U.S. Copyright Office issued an updated compendium of its policies, including a section stipulating that it would register copyrights only for works produced by human beings. It specified that works produced by animals, whether a photo taken by a monkey or a mural painted by an elephant, would not qualify.
"I Am An Asshole" Hair
Meet the "man bun."
More.
Stop The Knot. "He looks like an onion."
"It wants to be a ponytail when it grows up."
Lurky
Dark alley links.
You Can't Enforce Empathy -- Not On Campus And Not In The Real World
Trying to do that -- through banning "micro-aggressions" and by mandating trigger warnings -- does not engender empathy; it enables authoritarianism.
There's a ridiculous piece in The Atlantic in which Simba Runoyawa argues that "the striving for 'PC culture' on college campuses is actually rooted in empathy."
Which is a huge crapload.
Yes, people like Simba who advocate speech rules, may tell themselves that, but PC culture on campuses legislates power grabs -- unearned power over others by being able to control what they can and cannot say.
These speech rules also set students up to expect a real world that coddles them rather than the reality.
He ends his piece with this:
Critics will argue that political correctness is addicted to shutting out opposing views. That gets it backwards. Only the empathy fostered by the dictates of political correctness can help us productively encounter difference.
There can be no productive difference-parsing if people are forced to shut up. There's only silence and worshipful head-nodding.
I Really Can't Understand This "Other People Should Pay For My Life Choices" Thinking
I'm once again going to say the thing we're not supposed to say: If you want to have children, you should save up for the time off you need. You should also work very hard before you take this leave to see that the business you work for isn't hurt (or hurt very much) by your absence.
It is just amazing that parents expect businesses (and effectively, other co-workers) to pay for their choices.
Yet, Claire Prestwood, interviewed by Diane Lincoln at PBS.org, is yet another mother who is a bit aghast at having to pay for the time she won't be working. In other words, she's aghast that somebody else isn't picking up the tab:
Claire Prestwood: I get the 12 weeks I'm entitled to under the Family Medical Leave Act. So it's all unpaid. And the only opportunity I would have to receive additional paid leave would be to use my vacation time or accrued sick leave. In some cases, we can solicit leave donations within the agency, and colleagues or work friends will donate. So far, I've received two donations, which is fantastic. Any little bit helps.Diane Lincoln: Besides the donated days are you going to use any vacation or sick time?
Claire Prestwood: I've used pretty much all of my sick and leave time already, because when you have a young child, almost all of your paid leave goes to their sick days or any time you need to take off to bring them to the doctor for a regular checkup, so I rarely use sick time for myself. It usually goes to my first child, and I have used all of it this year to take care of her. So when the maternity leave came around for the second time for Declan, I basically was out of leave. So I have to take 12 weeks unpaid.
...Diane Lincoln: Why do you think maternity leave is important?
Claire Prestwood: I think first, women have to heal after they have children. To expect someone to be back at work two weeks after they have a baby is really a high expectation given the lack of sleep and the physical process that your body goes through.
Second is being able to care for your baby. There's no one else except the mother who can really best care for the child in the first two weeks of their life given needs for nursing and bonding and the fact that you're the only human being that baby's really ever known.
Third is if anyone expected me to go back to work two to six weeks after I had a child, I would be the most unproductive employee in the office. I would be exhausted, and I would be worried about my child. It really wouldn't be worth it for me to be in the office or for them to have me there trying to work, because it just wouldn't work well.
What does this tell businesses? If you have a choice between hiring a possible mommy and hiring a man, you should hire the man.
Loogie
Linkie hock.
The Pope Will Help The Poor By Embracing Capitalism
Stephanie Slade writes at reason that Pope Francis, called the "slum pope" and "a pope for the poor," will best embrace his goal of helping people rise out of poverty if he learns a few basic economic concepts and stops "broadly and cavalierly (condemning) the market-driven economic development that has lifted a billion people out of extreme poverty within the lifetime of the typical millennial." Where the Pope goes wrong, for example:
The pope is enamored of the idea of "small-scale food production systems ... using a modest amount of land and producing less waste, be it in small agricultural parcels, in orchards and gardens, hunting and wild harvesting or local fishing." He does not seem to understand that it is mass-market production--including often-vilfiied biotech crops--that has freed millions of people from hunger by allowing us to reap far more food from far fewer resources.Productivity gains have been so great that humanity is on the brink of being able to release enormous tracts of farmland back to nature while feeding more people than ever before, according to researchers at the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University. But resisting such advances out of skepticism or nostalgia can have devastating consequences. Take for example the story of Golden Rice, a genetically modified crop fortified with Vitamin A, whose introduction has been delayed since 2000 by government regulations. The grain has the potential to save up to 3 million poor people a year from going blind, and to alleviate Vitamin A deficiency--which compromises the immune system--in a quarter of a billion people a year. But unwarranted fears of "frankenfoods" have kept Golden Rice from widespread use in the developing world. In a study published last year in the journal Environment and Development Economics, scholars at Technische Universität München and the University of California, Berkeley estimated those delays resulted in the loss of 1.4 million life years over the past decade--and that was just in India.
There are moments when Pope Francis seems to comprehend all this. In his encyclical, he quotes the now-sainted Pope John Paul II that "science and technology are wonderful products of a God-given human creativity," and asks, "How can we not feel gratitude and appreciation for this progress?" But a few short pages later he suggests that "a decrease in the pace of production and consumption" would yet be for the best. The lasting impression is not of a staunch anti-capitalist tirelessly advocating for a well-thought-out alternative to the present system, but of a man confused about how to achieve the things he wants.
Nowhere is that confusion clearer than when Pope Francis discusses the environment, the overarching topic of Laudato Si. To preserve the earth he wants us to live simpler lives, as by the example he's set by eschewing the lavish trappings of the papacy. But he goes further than that, not just calling for individual restraint but also for government enforcement of what amounts to a reduction in overall economic activity. It does not seem to occur to him that this prescription might have adverse effects for the people still struggling to pull themselves out of desperate conditions and into the type of comfortable life he's asking the rest of us to forgo. For the poor, the problem isn't too much consumption, but too little wealth to afford the basic things the First World takes for granted.
Reason's Ronald Bailey writes about what a wonderful thing the Golden Rice could be in his new book, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century
George Will writes about the Pontiff's "fact-free flamboyance":
The saint who is Francis's namesake supposedly lived in sweet harmony with nature. For most of mankind, however, nature has been, and remains, scarcity, disease and natural -- note the adjective -- disasters. Our flourishing requires affordable, abundant energy for the production of everything from food to pharmaceuticals. Poverty has probably decreased more in the past two centuries than in the preceding three millennia because of industrialization powered by fossil fuels. Only economic growth has ever produced broad amelioration of poverty, and since growth began in the late 18th century, it has depended on such fuels.Matt Ridley, author of "The Rational Optimist," notes that coal supplanting wood fuel reversed deforestation, and that "fertilizer manufactured with gas halved the amount of land needed to produce a given amount of food." The capitalist commerce that Francis disdains is the reason the portion of the planet's population living in "absolute poverty" ($1.25 a day) declined from 53 percent to 17 percent in three decades after 1981. Even in low-income countries, writes economist Indur Goklany, life expectancy increased from between 25 to 30 years in 1900 to 62 years today. Sixty-three percent of fibers are synthetic and derived from fossil fuels; of the rest, 79 percent come from cotton, which requires synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. "Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides derived from fossil fuels," he says, "are responsible for at least 60 percent of today's global food supply." Without fossil fuels, he says, global cropland would have to increase at least 150 percent -- equal to the combined land areas of South America and the European Union -- to meet current food demands.
Francis grew up around the rancid political culture of Peronist populism, the sterile redistributionism that has reduced his Argentina from the world's 14th highest per-capita gross domestic product in 1900 to 63rd today. Francis's agenda for the planet -- "global regulatory norms" -- would globalize Argentina's downward mobility.
As the world spurns his church's teachings about abortion, contraception, divorce, same-sex marriage and other matters, Francis jauntily makes his church congruent with the secular religion of "sustainability." Because this is hostile to growth, it fits Francis's seeming sympathy for medieval stasis, when his church ruled the roost, economic growth was essentially nonexistent and life expectancy was around 30.
He stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources. Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation's premises.
SJW Pantiwads Whining About South Park
A NY Post editorial on the recent target of the Social Justice Whingers:
For nearly two decades, "South Park" has lambasted . . . everything. The cartoon's raw satire offends left, right and center; all races and religions -- and atheists, too. But some are just too dense to get it.This week's season premiere slapped "social-justice warriors" -- extremists out to police every word for bias.
PC Principal is a new character.
Kyle gets two weeks' detention for daring to tell a fourth-grader, "I don't think Caitlyn Jenner is a hero" -- which the principal calls "transphobic and bigoted hate speech."Later, PC Principal beats Cartman within an inch of his life for not falling into line.
Enter the "warriors." Culture site Bustle complained the show made it "seem like a bad thing to strive for correct language around transgender issues."
"Comedian" Peter Coffin spent hours tweeting about the unfairness of it all.
Arrest First; Investigate Later: FBI Bumblers Wrongly Arrest Chinese-American Scientist
Matt Apuzo reports for The New York Times:
When the Justice Department arrested the chairman of Temple University's physics department this spring and accused him of sharing sensitive American-made technology with China, prosecutors had what seemed like a damning piece of evidence: schematics of sophisticated laboratory equipment sent by the professor, Xi Xiaoxing, to scientists in China.The schematics, prosecutors said, revealed the design of a device known as a pocket heater. The equipment is used in superconductor research, and Dr. Xi had signed an agreement promising to keep its design a secret.
But months later, long after federal agents had led Dr. Xi away in handcuffs, independent experts discovered something wrong with the evidence at the heart of the Justice Department's case: The blueprints were not for a pocket heater.
Faced with sworn statements from leading scientists, including an inventor of the pocket heater, the Justice Department on Friday afternoon dropped all charges against Dr. Xi, an American citizen.
It was an embarrassing acknowledgment that prosecutors and F.B.I. agents did not understand -- and did not do enough to learn -- the science at the heart of the case before bringing charges that jeopardized Dr. Xi's career and left the impression that he was spying for China.
"I don't expect them to understand everything I do," Dr. Xi, 57, said in a telephone interview. "But the fact that they don't consult with experts and then charge me? Put my family through all this? Damage my reputation? They shouldn't do this. This is not a joke. This is not a game."
His daughter, Joyce Xi, wrote in USA Today:
This is not the America I thought I knew.I did not know FBI agents could wake my family in the early morning and enter our home, point guns at my mother, sister and me, and forcefully drag my father away in handcuffs without real evidence of a crime. I did not know they could then obtain a search warrant to flip through our entire home and seize our belongings, including some of my little sister's things. I did not know the government could restrict my father's freedom for months and force him to fight for his innocence with only false and reckless claims against him.
My father is Xiaoxing Xi, who was charged by the federal government for passing U.S. technology secrets to China. Many labeled him a spy. He faced the threat of 80 years in prison and a $1 million fine. But my father never shared secrets with China. Underlying the FBI's key argument was a blatant factual error -- the technology involved in my dad's communications was not the sensitive technology they claimed it was. World-renowned scientists, and even a co-inventor of the technology, supported the fact that the FBI's incriminating "evidence" was wrong.
...We still do not know why this happened. We do not know why the government started watching my father, and why they arrested him before consulting fully informed experts. This was a surprise my family never could have imagined.
What we need to remake is our perception of law enforcement as intelligent, effective, and well-targeted. I haven't had that impression for a really long time.
What happened to Xi is just the federal version of those SWAT teams that raid the wrong apartment or the home of the granny who lives with her teenaged granddaughter, but didn't know that she needed to have somebody password-protect her Wifi (which somebody hijacked to make some threats).
What seems to happen? They figure, "We've got all this paramilitary equipment and power -- we might as well use it."
Then: "Oh, wait...did we kill you or your dog or ruin your life or kill you? Whoopsy!"
Tucson Police Dept Violates The Privacy Of Anybody Possibly Connected To A Prostitute
Including, oh, her dentist, the next-door neighbor who watches her cat, and maybe her kid's public school teacher.
It's not that I have a problem with prostitution -- any more than I have a problem with two consenting adults making a transaction for one to buy another's car.
However, many people do have a problem with prostitution, and I have a problem with violating people's privacy. And there's a catch -- some people's privacy is more protected than others.
Radley Balko writes in the WaPo:
The Tucson police department is publicizing hundreds of names and phone numbers that appeared in some cellphones confiscated from several massage parlors around the city. Of course, there could be any number of reasons someone's number might appear in the phone of a woman working for a massage business that has been accused of prostitution. She might have her handyman or dentist in her phone. Perhaps her friends are in there. Wrong numbers, too. There may even be a city councilman in there, for completely innocuous reasons.So far, no one whose information was found in the phones has been charged with a crime. That's why at least some local media are refusing to publish the names.
Bizarrely, Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villaseñor confirmed as much when he told the Arizona Daily Star, "The inclusion of information in this list is in no way indicative of involvement in criminal activity."
Best of all, there were cops' names and phone numbers on the list but those have been removed and won't be released until an investigation and appeal process are completed.
How sweet -- concern for protecting the officers' privacy but not the citizens'. As Balko puts it:
So, before releasing the names of hundreds of people who appeared in the phones, the city police checked the names against the city's roster of police officers. They then redacted those names, and released all the others. The police officers' information won't be released until they've had a chance to clear their names through an internal investigation. As for everyone else, well, good luck explaining to your spouse, your kids, your boss and anyone else who might want to know why your name or number appeared in an accused prostitute's cellphone. Sure seems like two-tiered justice to me.
Here's to the local media that have refused to publish the names.
via @overlawyered
Got $2K For A Fraudulent Passport And Docs? You, Too, Can Become A "Syrian Refugee"
Nick Fagge writes for the Daily Mail from the Syrian border:
ISIS fighters and economic migrants are able to buy Syrian identity documents that allow them to hide among refugees travelling to Europe with frightening ease, an investigation by MailOnline can reveal.Our reporter was able to buy a Syrian passport, identity card and driving licence from a fraudster in a Turkish border town this week.
The genuine documents were stolen from Syria when they were blank. The forger added our reporter's picture and gave him the identity of a Syrian man from Aleppo killed last year.
The documents, on sale for around $2,000, would help an asylum claim in Europe.
The forger who sold us the papers, said that they are being used by ISIS fanatics to travel undetected across borders into Europe hidden among tens of thousands of genuine refugees fleeing the terror and destruction.
Once in Europe they can set up sleeper cells or live freely under a new identity without facing the consequences of their brutal past actions.
As the forger chillingly put it: 'ISIS fighters are among the people going to Europe in this way. They are going to wait for the right time to become a fighter for ISIS again.'
The revelation comes as Lebanon warned two in every 100 Syrian migrants smuggled into Europe are ISIS-trained fanatics, with most travelling overland through Turkey to Greece.
How they're doing this:
The passport book MailOnline acquired is genuine, made from a batch seized from one of the many Syrian government offices captured by advancing opposition forces.The forger explained that the militias fighting the forces of Assad make a beeline for government offices when they over-run a town. They know the value of the documents there and steal the passports, papers and even the printers that are used to create identity cards and driving licences.
Lookie
Linkie with a rear window.
Seattle: "Economic Death Wish Capital Of America"
That's how economist @Mark_J_Perry put it, upon reading that a Seattle Council candidate wants 12 weeks of parental leave for all employees. From all businesses, public and private.
I couldn't believe it so I looked at the proposal. And yes, that's what he wants. All businesses, even if you have just one employee, as I do.
Which would absolutely kill me. To lose the woman who edits me for 12 weeks, to have to pay her for those 12 weeks, and to then need to hire somebody new to take her place while she's gone. I couldn't do it financially.
And why should it be on the employer? You want to have children; you want to take time off; you save money up to do it rather than expecting somebody else to cover it.
Jon Grant, the idiot doing this, has a sneaky way to get this past lefty business owners who couldn't afford it, and that's by hiding the cost in high taxes -- especially to businesses doing well.
As Natalie Brand writes at KING5 [annoying autoplay video]:
Companies would be taxed on a percentage of gross receipts of business. Grant's proposal gives an estimate of .43 percent to .83 percent based on business classification."A larger company like Microsoft, or like Amazon, pays a larger portion of the tax that then gets redirected towards smaller businesses," said Grant.
When asked if they expect to encounter resistance from the local business community, Grant and Beach said they believe it will ultimately help business through a healthier workforce.
I'd be healthier if, instead of sitting in my chair and writing seven days a week, somebody sent me on a spa vacation. Should the taxpayers be picking that up?
Power-Mad Cop Lies To Arrest Elderly Black Man Using Golf Club As Walking Stick
This rotten cop, Cynthia Whitlatch, said in the video that William Wingate, 69, swung the golf club at her -- apparently an add-on she brought to her order for him to put the golf club down when he wasn't the scared, kowtowing citizen she'd hoped for.
I love this guy -- his manner and the way he refuses to knuckle under to this abusive cop.
From his clear mystification at her orders and her claim, I think it's clear she's lying. The report lays out more than is in the tape.
The rotten cop, Cynthia Whitlatch, has been fired.
Here, via Turley, is the Disciplinary Action Report against her:
Specification:This discipline is based on your interaction with an individual on July 9,2014 which began while you were on duty, driving a patrol car near Cal Anderson Park. You initiated a Terry stop with the individual based on your stated observation that, as you were driving near a stop sign, you saw a blur of motion out of the corner of your eye and heard a sound you interpreted as metal on metal, and then (as you were in your police vehicle, driving away) you saw a look on his face that you described as "angry, you know, furrowed brow." You drove your car around the block. Although you observed no additional conduct that might be troublesome, you decided to approach and detain the individual pursuant to Terry. In contrast to your OPA and Loudermill statements, the police report you assisted with incorrectly states that you observed the man try to hit your car with a golf club, which sheds light on why your chain of command's initial review of the incident did not discoverfhe depth of the misconduct discovered through the full OPA review.
In your Loudermill meeting, you indicated that a Terry stop was justified because the individual may have assaulted a police officer (you) by swinging his golf club in the direction of your vehicle. 'When you initiated the stop, the 69-year-old man was holding the golf club against the ground. He showed no recognition of you, initially saying "huh?" when you spoke to him, noting that he could not hear you, and asking "what's going on" and "this is my golf club" when you demanded that he to drop the club. You raised your voice and repeatedly ordered him to drop his golf club, told him the golf club was a weapon, and accused him of swinging the golf club at you, which he adamantly denied. He repeatedly asked you to call someone else, noted that he'd been using the golf club for twenty years, and at no point acted in an aggressive or threatening manner towards you or anyone else.
Your behavior towards him during the stop was inappropriately aggressive and unnecessarily escalated the interaction. There were numerous opportunities to assess different tactics and take a softer approach to resolve the incident. This is particularly true once you had observed the individual's lack of threatening demeanor. Despite his non-threatening behavior, you repeatedly chose confrontational options, continuing to make accusations regarding what you claimed to have seen him do, threatening him with arrest, and holding your nightstick in your hand, further escalating the interaction.
You never asked the individual any questions during the Terry stop to determine if he had, in fact, swung the golf club towards you and/or into a stop sign. Despite that, and despite never actually seeing him swing a golf club toward your car or hitting a stop sign, you actively participated in moving forward with an arrest for obstruction and even called the prosecutor days later to push for prosecution of the individual.
Related (on the power-mad, abusive cop theme): Austin Cop Arrests Man For Eating A Hamburger in His Own Parked Car.
Also related -- this cool-ass cucumber eats his oatmeal while an abusive cop tries to own his ass -- all the asswad cop can do is knock on the guy's window for eons. (I love this man.)
Gloopy
Glueylinks.
Why Should You Care About Hillary's Illegal Private Email Address Used For Classified Business?
Andrew Napolitano makes it clear at Reason:
When she became secretary of state, Clinton told the president she wanted to hire her friend Sidney Blumenthal--whom the press has nicknamed "the prince of darkness" and "grassy knoll"--to work as her senior adviser. The president himself blocked the toxic Blumenthal from working for the State Department, whereupon Clinton had her husband's foundation hire him. She then proceeded to engage with him as if he were a senior adviser and to share top-secret emails with him. Blumenthal did not have any national security clearance, and it was a felony for Clinton to share government secrets with him.Why should you care about this?
You should care about this because Clinton is running for president. Yet, she is uniquely unqualified for the presidency because she is the moral equivalent of a common crook.
Like a crook, she breaks the law, lies about why she broke the law, sees no wrongdoing in her ways, and expects to get away with it. Though millions of Democrats have dreamed of her in the White House, and are apparently willing to overlook her crimes, her support is beginning to erode.
How can a person with the morals of a crook be the chief law enforcement officer in the land, the commander in chief of the military, and the repository of more lawful power than any person on the planet? How can she be entrusted with national security secrets in the future when she has failed to safeguard them in the past
Because Blumenthal lacked the government's encryption on his email devices and server, he was hacked by foreign agents. Because he was hacked, Clinton was hacked. Because she was hacked, some of the nation's military, diplomatic, and national security secrets in a dangerous world are now in dangerous hands.
A sailor faces 20 years in federal prison for taking a selfie in front of a radar screen and sending it to his girlfriend, and a courageous Marine who used his Gmail account in an emergency to warn his superiors of the near proximity of an assassin faces 20 years for failing to keep the email about the assassin in a secure venue. Then-CIA Director David Petraeus kept secrets in an unlocked desk drawer in his home, which was guarded 24/7, and he pleaded guilty to failure to safeguard secrets.
Clinton's crimes are far worse, but is she any different legally? Can she get away with her crimes because of her last name? She seems to think so. Last week she apologized for making poor choices-- not crimes, but poor choices. And she has given no coherent legal justification for all this.
Colleges Replacing A Terrible Idea With A Different Terrible Idea, With The Same Result: Due Process Removed From Men
As an "improvement" on the current kangaroo court of determining whether a man (it's almost always a man) accused of sexual assault is guilty, colleges are turning to the "Inspector Javert" model -- the single hired investigator, write two lawyers, Justin Dillon and Matt Kaiser, in the LA Times.
These two favor the disgusting kangaroo court model, in which men are forced to prove their innocence and in which standards of due process are violated in numerous other ways.
Meanwhile, most disgustingly, the government makes it costly for colleges that don't find men guilty:
Finding a student not responsible can result in an expensive inquiry from the Department of Education -- currently 124 schools and counting -- a Title IX lawsuit, or public shaming along the lines of what happened to Columbia University when one of its hearing panels exonerated Emma Sulkowicz's alleged assailant. Hers was the mattress seen 'round the world.To protect themselves, a growing number of schools, including Harvard, Dartmouth, the University of Michigan and Boston College, are turning to the "single investigator" model -- or as we call it, after Victor Hugo, the "Inspector Javert" model. They outsource the entire investigation and, increasingly, the ultimate decision about whether there was a sexual assault, to a single hired gun. Once the outsider decides there was a rape, the school takes the case back and imposes a sanction -- frequently expulsion. Although the student may appeal the decision, reversals are hard to achieve. (Colleges don't make statistics available, so we're basing that judgment on our professional experience.)
The two authors favor the disgusting kangaroo court model -- in which some girl late to poli-sci, with who knows what agenda, is deciding another student's fate.
A hearing model -- in which three people drawn from the university community review evidence and hear live testimony -- is far from perfect. The panelists are often poorly trained and are too quick to believe the more sympathy-inducing party, which is almost always the accuser. Neither side is given any real power to challenge the evidence. They are, in short, often kangaroo courts.But virtually every client we've represented would still take a kangaroo court over Javert.
Well, I'd take death by an overdose of pills over death by hanging, but if I have a choice, I'll take neither.
Accusations of sexual assault belong in one place: the place set up to handle them, known as the criminal justice system, where due process has yet to be removed from men (well, much of the time).
Colleges do a poor enough job of educating students these days. The government needs to lift the Title IX extortion practice and take the sexual assault investigations out of the hands of people who are not trained to do that -- and they should not put them in the hands of hired guns who have a personal financial interest in finding men guilty.
Limpy
Linky with a raccoon with a bum knee.
Affirmative Action In Nobel Prize-Dispensing Didn't Work Out So Well
The former director of Norway's Nobel Institute regrets giving Obama the Nobel in 2009. Meghan Bartlett writes in the Wash Times:
The former director of Norway's Nobel Institute revealed this week that he regrets the committee's decision to give the 2009 Nobel Peace award to President Obama.Geil Lundestad, director at the institute for 25 years, said in his just-published memoir that he and the committee had unanimously decided to grant the award to Mr. Obama just after his election in 2009 more in hopes of aiding the American president to achieve his goals on nuclear disarmament, rather than in recognition of what Mr. Obama had already accomplished.
"[We] thought it would strengthen Obama and it didn't have this effect," he told the Associated Press in an interview.
via @instapundit
Public School Students: The New Inmates
John Whitehead of the Rutherford institute explains that by the time the average kid in America gets through public school, one in three of them will have been arrested:
More than 3 million students are suspended or expelled from schools every year, often for minor misbehavior, such as "disruptive behavior" or "insubordination." Black students are three times more likely than white students to face suspension and expulsion.For instance, a Virginia sixth grader, the son of two school teachers and a member of the school's gifted program, was suspended for a year after school officials found a leaf (likely a maple leaf) in his backpack that they suspected was marijuana. Despite the fact that the leaf in question was not marijuana (a fact that officials knew almost immediately), the 11-year-old was still kicked out of school, charged with marijuana possession in juvenile court, enrolled in an alternative school away from his friends, subjected to twice-daily searches for drugs, and forced to be evaluated for substance abuse problems.
As the Washington Post warns: "It doesn't matter if your son or daughter brings a real pot leaf to school, or if he brings something that looks like a pot leaf--okra, tomato, maple, buckeye, etc. If your kid calls it marijuana as a joke, or if another kid thinks it might be marijuana, that's grounds for expulsion."
Many state laws require that schools notify law enforcement whenever a student is found with an "imitation controlled substance," basically anything that look likes a drug but isn't actually illegal. As a result, students have been suspended for bringing to school household spices such as oregano, breath mints, birth control pills and powdered sugar.
It's not just look-alike drugs that can get a student in trouble under school zero tolerance policies. Look-alike weapons (toy guns--even Lego-sized ones, hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a "threatening" manner, imaginary bows and arrows, even fingers positioned like guns) can also land a student in detention.
Acts of kindness, concern or basic manners can also result in suspensions. One 13-year-old was given detention for exposing the school to "liability" by sharing his lunch with a hungry friend. A third grader was suspended for shaving her head in sympathy for a friend who had lost her hair to chemotherapy. And then there was the high school senior who was suspended for saying "bless you" after a fellow classmate sneezed.
Unfortunately, while these may appear to be isolated incidents, they are indicative of a nationwide phenomenon in which children are treated like suspects and criminals, especially within the public schools.
The schools have become a microcosm of the American police state, right down to the host of surveillance technologies, including video cameras, finger and palm scanners, iris scanners, as well as RFID and GPS tracking devices, employed to keep constant watch over their student bodies.
Making matters worse are the police.
Students accused of being disorderly or noncompliant have a difficult enough time navigating the bureaucracy of school boards, but when you bring the police into the picture, after-school detention and visits to the principal's office are transformed into punishments such as misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers and even prison terms.
In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police are more and more "stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking--sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal's office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse."
Whitehead adds:
It has been said that America's schools are the training ground for future generations. Instead of raising up a generation of freedom fighters, however, we seem to be busy churning out newly minted citizens of the American police state who are being taught the hard way what it means to comply, fear and march in lockstep with the government's dictates.As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, with every school police raid and overzealous punishment that is carried out in the name of school safety, the lesson being imparted is that Americans--especially young people--have no rights at all against the state or the police.
Linky
The eighth dwarf.
9th Grader Arrested In Bomb Scare, Despite Not Making A Bomb
In the latest bit of idiocy in the schools, a Texas 9th grader was arrested for bring a homemade clock to school. 
Avi Selk writes at DallasNews that Ahmed Mohamed -- a kid who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart -- was arrested for bringing a homemade digital clock to school. He'd hoped to impress his teachers.
Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed's circuit-stuffed pencil case.So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. His clock now sits in an evidence room. Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb -- though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it's a clock.
...He kept the clock inside his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward.
"She was like, it looks like a bomb," he said.
"I told her, 'It doesn't look like a bomb to me.'"
The teacher kept the clock. When the principal and a police officer pulled Ahmed out of sixth period, he suspected he wouldn't get it back.
They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he'd never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: "Yup. That's who I thought it was."
..."They were like, 'So you tried to make a bomb?'" Ahmed said.
"I told them no, I was trying to make a clock."
"He said, 'It looks like a movie bomb to me.'"
Dumbass school spokesman:
"It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?"
School officials have been mistaken for competent adults. Now that's some danger that's having real effects on a smart, enthusiastic nerd's future.
He's been suspended for five days -- a punishment that should have been enacted in a more permanent way on school administrators and the idiot cops who enabled them.
He's vowed never to take an invention to school again.
Great! That solved things!
Well, the kid will learn what I realized as a new freshman at the University of Michigan, when I heard the information presented in the pernicious class known as Women's Studies: Do not trust "authority," question everything, and learn your rights and stand up for yours and other people's.
Sex With Robots Degrades Women, Silly Ethicists Claim
At Gizmodo, Kaila Hale-Stern writes:
Robot ethicists Kathleen Richardson of De Montfort University and Erik Billing from University of Skövde are the co-creators of the Campaign Against Sex Robots, which seeks to bring awareness to the issue and proposes a robot sex ban. They compare it to similar campaigns that seek to limit development of "killer" robots. Richardson and Billing believe that sex robots will degrade human relationships and reinforce a view of women as sexual objects.
No word on whether Richardson has tossed any vibrators in the trash.
Dumb LA Times Headline Supposedly About Free Speech
The headline:
Hate speech vs. free speech: UC regents to debate proposal on fighting intolerance
"Hate speech" is free speech and -- whether you agree with it or not -- should be free speech.
It is far healthier to have the hate speech out in the open where it can be questioned and debated than it is to shut people up.
A bit from the piece:
Some Jewish activists say they will press their argument that the statement is far too weak on taking steps against anti-Semitism, while some free speech advocates are expected to contend the principles will chill the rights to free expression.
Even as a young Jewish teen in Michigan -- one who'd met with some nasty stuff from neighborhood Christians -- I understood the value and importance of free speech, and I supported the right of the neo-Nazis to march in Skokie.
Slippy
Wet floor links.
Guess Who's Been Groping Your Children!
The TSA pledges to uncover evildoers -- even though they can't manage to do it within their own ranks.
A TSA thug was just indicted by a federal grand jury on four counts, related to the sexual exploitation of children. From YourHoustonNews:
Christopher Lynn Persky is charged with one count each of production, distribution, receipt and possession of child pornography.According to the criminal complaint originally filed in the case, Persky first came to the attention of law enforcement after an individual identified online as CHRISPYTWEAK had sent images of child erotica to an undercover agent using the chat feature on a known child pornography site. At that time, Persky allegedly provided his full name and further claimed to work for TSA, according to the criminal complaint. He is no longer employed by TSA.
Court documents allege that Persky took sexually explicit photographs of a minor male under the age of 5. According to the complaint, Persky took the images and was to send them to another individual with whom he was communicating in exchange for more images of child pornography.
The criminal complaint further alleges that while at his previous residence in Spring, Persky allegedly took partially nude images of a minor relative's female friend while she was sleeping. Persky also allegedly took photos of a female relative as she was getting out of the shower to show to his online child pornography community.
If convicted, Persky faces a minimum of 15 and up to 30 years in federal prison for the production of child pornography. He further faces a minimum of five and up to 20 years imprisonment for the distribution and receipt allegations, while the possession of child pornography carries a possible punishment of up to 10 years in federal prison.
As for the intelligence level of the pervs groping us at airports, what kind of moron uses his full name on a child porn site and tells you where he works -- for the government! -- by name.
Here's a 6-year-old who was selected for a full grope-down after going through the scanner. (They're joining al Qaeda earlier and earlier these days.)
We also call this "bad touch" by a stranger.
The "Big Net" Approach To Due Process: If You're Accused, We'll Just Assume You're Guilty (Because Some Guy Must Be Guilty.)
No due process for you, college men!
Glenn Reynolds writes at USA Today:
Is Congress waging a war on college men? It's starting to look like it.Last week, Rep. Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat, suggested that even innocent students should be booted from campus if they were accused of sexual assault. According to Polis: "If there are 10 people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all 10 people."
So one of the longstanding traditions of American law -- that it is better to let 10 guilty men go free than to imprison one innocent -- has now been turned on its head. Under the Polis standard, it's basically the other way around.
According to Polis, it's not such a big deal: "We're not talking depriving them of life and liberty, we're talking about their transfer to another university, for crying out loud," Polis said, laughing off the idea that his suggestion would violate due process rights. He is not alone in taking the due process rights of the accused lightly, a widely-backed Democratic senate bill is just more circumspect.
But it's no laughing matter. A student with expulsion for sexual assault on his record will have great difficulty gaining admission to another college, with life-altering consequences. (If you don't believe that, then you don't think that college matters much, which is something I doubt higher education boosters want to maintain.) And even if he succeeds, the expulsion will affect his chances for employment for the rest of his life, too.
It's sick the way Polis acts like such injustice is no big deal -- and, in fact, a good thing.
Reynolds points out the perverse origins of this sickness:
The funny thing is that the law under which all of this is transpiring, the federal Title IX antidiscrimination law, is supposed to prevent the creation of just such a hostile educational environment based on sex. ("No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.") Yet -- seemingly with all calculation -- Jared Polis and his congressional colleagues seem eager to do just that.If any other minority were being treated this way -- and, on college campuses, men are very much a minority these days -- we would not hesitate to call that treatment discrimination, and to assume that it was rooted in prejudice and bigotry. So why has the war on college men gotten a pass?
Linkylinks
As opposed to the other kind.
What Kind Of Man Sees Sex Workers?
And what's the relationship like? Yes, the "relationship"?
Maggie McNeill posts a man's story at The Honest Courtesan. She writes:
One of my readers is a long-time client of whores who's very incensed by the prohibitionists' demonization of men like him; he therefore wanted to write about the various ladies he's seen, and I decided to give him a place to share that.
An excerpt from his words:
About a year after my wifeÂ’'s menopause and plummeting libido ended all sexual activity in my marriage I started seeking sex workers. A professional sex worker was a better solution than an affair; I love my wife and don'Â’t blame her for what happened to her body and her feelings, plus I felt it was safer and saner to see pros than to risk entanglements with amateurs. I don't really crave variety, so I like to find one sex worker I like and continue seeing her until she leaves the business. The following is a description of all the ladies I've loved and learned from.My first was Kate, a single mom in her 40s with a well-paying job in health care administration. But she wanted to send her son to a very exclusive prep school, so she set up a website and began escorting. Her minimum date was 4 hours, and she was by far the best GFE I have ever encountered. Kate was well educated, extremely smart, and very determined; she and I had many long discussions over the years, on a wide range of topics. Eventually her son graduated from the prep school and attended an Ivy League college, majoring in the same branch of science I work in; Kate introduced us and I mentored him, using my connections to make sure he got interviews and opportunities. Once her son was established in his career, Kate married one of her wealthier clients and retired from escorting; she still works in her health care profession and manages a busy social calendar heavy on organizing charitable events. We stay in contact and I count her as a friend.
He talks about other women he's seen, as well. And ends with this:
The control freaks who want to dictate what I and a consenting adult woman can do in her bedroom like to pretend that clients view sex workers as "toilets" or "collections of orifices", but my experience is completely opposite: Their professional services and care help me in countless ways. I'’m happier, less stressed, and more focused when I can have satisfying sex every week or two; I am more productive at work, sleep better, and am more engaged with my friends and family. In fact, I'’m quite certain that my marriage was saved by my decision to seek the services of sex workers; when I'm celibate my judgement becomes impaired and my sexual fantasies and dreams become distorted to the point of being disturbing. Without sex workers I almost certainly would have started an affair, made inappropriate advances, or filed for divorce to get “official” permission to seek partners for sex. Long-term marriage is an economic institution, and my wife and I are healthier, happier, and wealthier than any of our siblings precisely because we remain married while they divorced.
I have two male friends who told me all about seeing escorts -- with equally positive results.
One guy had just gotten divorced but wasn't ready for a girlfriend yet and the other wasn't finding women he was that interested in.
That guy was an ex-boyfriend of mine, still a friend, with the kind of job women drool over in prospective boyfriends/husbands.
He'd call me when women he'd slept with would be pounding on his door at 3 a.m., yelling, "Is that all I was to you...?"
I told him it was unethical to sleep with women he knew would end up wanting more when he would end up wanting less, and advised him to see escorts. And kept advising him to do that until he finally did.
Then he said, "Why didn't you make me do this sooner?" Sigh.
He ended up seeing a highly-educated Brazilian woman regularly and they became really good friends. All in all, it was a great experience for him, and nothing like the seedy affairs you see in bad movies and TV.
Government All Up In Our Healthcare: A Doctor Is Forced To "Fire" Her Patients
Kris Held, MD, blogged a letter she was forced to write to patients, telling them that, very possibly, she could no longer be their doctor (vis a vis their insurance company's in-network requirements), because she will not follow the government's costly and ridiculous mandate to implement a vast book of codes for payment:
Letter my remaining private insurance patients will receive as I am forced to forced terminate all 3rd party agreements as of October 1- the day HHS mandates ICD-10 implementation
Here's some of the text (and note the bits I italicized below -- including grandma getting run over by a reindeer. Yes, of course there's a government code for that):
October 1, 2015, the Department of Health and Human Services of the Executive Branch of the United States federal government requires that in order to bill for services physicians must implement ICD-10, the 10th revision of the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, a medical cataloging system of the World Health Organization that includes 141,000 diagnosis and procedure codes including W56.22 Struck by Orca, initial encounter, V91.07 Burn due to water-skis on fire, V97.33 Sucked into jet engine, X52 Prolonged stay in weightless environment, V95.40 Unspecified Spacecraft accident injuring occupant, and even VO6.00xA for when Grandma gets run over by a reindeer.The costs of ICD-10 implementation are staggering, far outweigh any perceived benefit, and are a vital factor separating financial sustainability from bankruptcy for private medical practices going forward. ICD-10 implementation was fought vehemently and delayed 2 years, but ultimately, money from lobbyists representing hospitals, IT (American Health Information Management Association), and other special interests bought votes and trumped the best interests of America's patients and physicians.
ICD-10 is required for all health care providers, billing agencies, clearinghouses, and payors that transmit patient data electronically (all HIPAA covered entities), not just Medicare and Medicaid.
Government is now virtually extorting physicians in unprecedented fashion. If physicians do not precisely follow government rubrics and implement and comply with everything the Secretary of Health and Human Services says, we are penalized.
I am not implementing ICD-10, because it is nonsensical and doing so does not serve my patients first and is not the best utilization of resources. If I implement this nonsensical, wasteful system, what won't I do?
This is my line in the sand.
Therefore, as of October 1st, I will be unable to submit claims for my services to you to your insurance company, because they will be rejected. I will be forced to terminate my agreement as an "in network" provider with your insurance company.
Just as government has broken its pledge not to interfere with the practice of medicine, it has broken its promise to you, the patient.
On April 16,2015, President Obama signed into law the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA), and soon government will be implementing Alternate Payment Models and Merit-Based Incentive Plans for physicians that are perversely incentivized, such that doctors who follow marching orders from the Secretary of HHS (a non-doctor appointed bureaucrat) will be rewarded monetarily and with a high, publically posted "Composite Performance Score"; those who do not do her bidding so well will be penalized.
Further, if less money is spent on patients, more money is retained to profit the entities that ultimately pay, and thus control, physicians. Initially this will apply to Medicare patients but will be expanded to include all third party insurers.
Think about it- we now have a system whereby you are forced to buy what amounts to prepaid "healthcare" from an "insurance" company that profits by restricting and denying the very care they are paid to provide. You have to pay them. They keep more money when they provide you less care.
This is how government forces single-payer on us -- by making it otherwise impossible for a person like Kris Held to remain a doctor and still feed her children.
Patients can choose to stay with her -- but only if they pay out of pocket and not through the insurance they already pay for.
UCLA Seeks To Revoke Free Speech
UCLA is considering recognizing a "right" to be "free from ... expressions of intolerance," reports Eugene Volokh, a tenured constitutional law professor at UCLA who also blogs at the WaPo.
Here's an excerpt from the disgusting (and rather horrifying) announcement about the September 17 Board of Regents meeting to discuss muzzling those on campus.
Intolerance has no place at the University of California. We define intolerance as unwelcome conduct motivated by discrimination against, or hatred toward, other individuals or groups. It may take the form of acts of violence or intimidation, threats, harassment, hate speech, derogatory language reflecting stereotypes or prejudice, or inflammatory or derogatory use of culturally recognized symbols of hate, prejudice, or discrimination.Everyone in the University community has the right to study, teach, conduct research, and work free from acts and expressions of intolerance.
No, they actually don't. Our right to be intolerant is part of our nation's founding principles, and remains a right today -- despite the desperate attempts of many to muzzle the mean, those who say uncomfortable things and others who offend.
Free speech involves my supporting, demanding, and even celebrating your right to speak like a big, mean asshole -- even if you are a big mean asshole to me.
There are times when free speech crosses into harassment, but this letter is talking about something different.
Here's some of what they're looking to ban:
* Questioning a student's fitness for a leadership role or whether the student should be a member of the campus community on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship, sex, or sexual orientation.* Depicting or articulating a view of ethnic or racial groups as less ambitious, less hardworking or talented, or more threatening than other groups.
* Depicting or articulating a view of people with disabilities (both visible and invisible) as incapable.
Just on that last one, John Callahan, my late quadriplegic cartoonist friend, regularly depicted people with disabilities the way they are -- incapable of doing certain things, often physical things. That's why we call them "people with disabilities" and not, say, "Kobe Bryant clones."
Callahan even poked fun at disabled people. In fact, he made a point of it. Why? Because otherwise disabled people are some protected class -- not one of us. And because it gets people talking.
And here's a bit from Eugene on the "intolerance" point:
1. The policy specifically condemns the expression of particular viewpoints as "intolerant," as having "no place at the University of California," and a violation of others' rights to be "free from ... expressions of intolerance." For instance, articulating a view that people with various intellectual disabilities are incapable of various intellectual tasks, or people with various physical disabilities are incapable of various physical tasks, would be condemned by the authority of the University. ("University leaders will take all appropriate steps to implement the principles.")Articulating a view that there are cultural (or even biological) differences between ethnic and racial groups in various fields -- condemned by the authority of the University, without regard to the arguments for or against the particular assertion. It's just an up-front categorical rule; whatever you want to say along these lines, we don't want to hear it, we don't care what your arguments are, we'll condemn it, and faculty and students have a right not to hear it. Even "depicting" such a view, whatever that means, is "intolerant" and "has no place at the University."
Here's more on what a chill this will put on speech:
2. The policy does say, "This statement of principles applies to attacks on individuals or groups and does not apply to the free exchange of ideas in keeping with the principles of academic freedom and free speech." But what does that mean?"Attacks on individuals or groups," after all, often are free speech, especially recognizing that "attacks" is used here far beyond physical attacks (or threats of violence and speech that falls within the other narrow First Amendment exceptions). Certainly the third and fourth examples given in the "Addendum" are "free speech" under any existing legal definition of free speech, as is the second. Obviously the authors of the proposal have a much narrower view of "free speech" in mind. Likewise with "the free and open exchange of ideas." The authors of the proposal love free and open exchange of ideas, until some ideas they dislike about, say, disabilities are expressed.
We are living in ugly and dangerous times.
Lippy
Snippylinks.
Sweden's Immigration Fantasy And Why Wealthy Arab Oil States Take No Refugees
Margaret Wente writes in The Globe and Mail, per her interview with Tino Sanandaji, himself an immigrant, and now a Kurdish-Swedish economist:
Sweden's fantasy is that if you socialize the children of immigrants and refugees correctly, they'll grow up to be just like native Swedes. But it hasn't worked out that way. Much of the second generation lives in nice Swedish welfare ghettos. The social strains - white flight, a general decline in trust - are growing worse. The immigrant-heavy city of Malmo, just across the bridge from Denmark, is an economic and social basket case.Sweden's generosity costs a fortune, at a time when economic growth is stagnant. The country now spends about $4-billion a year on settling new refugees - up from $1-billion a few years ago, Mr. Sanandaji said. And they keep coming...
Yet Sweden's acute immigration problems scarcely feature in the mainstream media. Journalists see their mission as stopping racism, so they don't report the bad news. Despite - or perhaps because of - this self-censorship, the gap between the opinion elites and the voters on immigration issues is now a chasm. According to a recent opinion poll, 58 per cent of Swedes believe there is too much immigration, Mr. Sanandaji noted. The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats party is now polling at between 20 per cent and 25 per cent.
Sweden is a cautionary tale for anyone who believes that Europe is capable of assimilating the hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants who are besieging the continent, or the millions more who are desperately poised to follow in their wake. The argument that these people are vital to boost the economy - that they will magically create economic growth and bail the Europeans out of their demographic decline - is a fantasy.
Sanadaji borrows from Milton Friedman (on the "open borders" line):
It's really very simple, Mr. Sanandaji explained. You can't combine open borders with a welfare state. "If you're offering generous welfare benefits to every citizen, and anyone can come and use these benefits, then a very large number of people will try to do that. And it's just mathematically impossible for a small country like Sweden to fund those benefits."Meanwhile, Sweden's neighbour, Denmark, has cut the benefits for refugees in half, and has taken out ads in Lebanese newspapers warning would-be migrants to stay home. The Danes don't want to be a moral superpower. They can't afford it.
Nonie Darwish writes at FrontPage.com about some of the reasons wealthy Arab countries are not taking any refugees, and take note of that last one. She's right about this vis a vis Islam's tenets:
* Arab countries lack compassion and action to rescue each other despite the rhetoric of Arab/Islamic unity. Saudi Arabia and Gulf nations never open their borders to poor Muslims in distress. Even Egypt rejected the Darfur refugees who were later forced to go to Israel, which took them.* Oil rich Arab countries make it very difficult for other Arabs to visit except for haj. They are very tribal and refuse to dilute their culture with influx of foreigners. Third world country workers are treated inhumanely and are rarely given permanent residency, citizenship or equal rights as citizens.
* Arabs would rather spend their petrodollars on expanding their influence in the West rather than making life better for their own citizens or supporting other Muslim nations who are financially less fortunate.
* Islamic groups believe that refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan will spread Sharia in Europe, which is the main goal of jihad.
* By clearing the area from the opposition and citizens who are not contributing to the empowerment of ISIS, clears the way for ISIS to expand beyond Syria and Iraq. Europe and America are absorbing the opposition to ISIS, so why stand in the way?
* Life and saving lives and avoiding human tragedy are not more important than jihad in Arab culture.
Also, as I posted yesterday:
The Quran teaches that the disasters which befall communities are a punishment from Allah.
Nice, huh? I'm a post-Jewish atheist, but I can get behind all that Jesus stuff of "feed the poor," etc. What anyone sees who reads at all in Islam -- as I have been doing since 9/11 -- is that Islam is about some pretty ugly stuff. It's basically totalitarianism dressed up as a religion. For a good, quick read on that, check out Howard Bloom's The Mohammed Code
Dead People Do Vote -- In North Carolina
Sometimes, they might even vote twice -- in NC and in another state. At PJ Tatler, Bryan Preston writes that there has been massive voter fraud discovered in NC. For example:
•765 voters with an exact match of first and last name, DOB and last four digits of SSN were registered in N.C. and another state and voted in N.C. and the other state in the 2012 general election.•35,750 voters with the same first and last name and DOB were registered in N.C. and another state and voted in both states in the 2012 general election.
•155,692 voters with the same first and last name, DOB and last four digits of SSN were registered in N.C. and another state - and the latest date of registration or voter activity did not take place within N.C.
...In October 2012, Project Veritas produced video showing a Barack Obama campaign worker helping a voter register to vote in both Texas and Florida.
From the NC legislators trying for election reform:
North Carolina's election reform law guarantees anyone who wants to vote will have that opportunity. It establishes a list of valid government-issued photo IDs -- including driver's licenses, non-operator ID cards, tribal and military IDs and passports -- that voters can present at their polling places. And it allows anyone without a valid photo ID to obtain one at no cost through the Department of Motor Vehicles.Polls have consistently shown that over 70 percent of North Carolinians support requiring voters to show photo ID.
The problem is, per Sarah Childress at Frontline:
Voter ID laws don't address what appears to be a more common source of voter fraud: mail-in absentee ballots.
via @adamkissel
Linkvasser
Some kind of German drink nobody's ever heard of.
Here's An Ethnographer Who's Too Smart To Go Get His Ass Bitten By Giant Bugs
His paper.
13-Year-Old To Be Criminally Charged For Acting Like A 13-Year-Old
The teen years are pretty much the Age of Idiocy. Not always, but a lot of the time. This is partly why there are so many restrictions around teens driving.
Well, a 13-year-old boy in Maryland kissed a 14-year-old girl on a dare and now faces second-degree assault charges.
Robby Soave writes at Reason:
It's of course true that every 14-year-old has the right not to be kissed. I'm not saying the boy's transgression should go unpunished. What I'm saying is this: he should not be charged with assault. He's 13. Thirteen-year-olds do stupid stuff. They screw up. And when the consequences of their actions are as minor as this, it's better to reprimand them in a manner that does not involve the criminal justice system.By all means, give this kid detention. Make him apologize to the girl. Tell his parents to teach him better manners.
But don't charge him with assault. That would be a far greater crime than a stolen kiss.
I hit a girl over the head with a dustpan in third grade. She was supposed to be sweeping up with me and wouldn't do her part, so, CLONK!
Luckily, I only got sent to the principal's office, and he only called my mom, not the cops.
The feelings of shame from this ended my violent streak for good, and without a criminal record. (Now I'm just hostile.)
Germany's Vast Social And Demographic Experiment
Rich Lowry writes in the NY Post about the refugees streaming into Europe:
In Syria alone, about 4 million people have fled the country, and another 7 million have been internally displaced.Refugees and migrants are also coming from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and other hopeless places, adding up to potentially tens of millions of migrants.
The locus of the migrants' hopes, more than anywhere else, is Germany. It is expected to get 800,000 asylum claims just this year.
The government is talking of taking 500,000 migrants annually for the next several years, and Chancellor Angela Merkel calls the crisis "the next great European project." The reaction of the rest of Europe should be, no thanks.
What Germany is proposing is undertaking a vast social and demographic experiment, with the rapid, bulk importation of Muslim immigrants into a country with an aging population.
Other European countries could be forgiven for not being so adventurous. The experience of the French banlieues, home to generations of unassimilated Muslim immigrants, hasn't been a happy one.
Which places aren't taking refugees? Oh, the oil-rich, Muslim Gulf States, of course.
Of course, Islam doesn't help engender charity from Muslims toward the refugees:
Neither is the Islamic community particularly keen on disaster relief, even for Muslim victims. This is because the Quran teaches that the disasters which befall communities are a punishment from Allah.
Ah, yes, ISIS is right there to argue that the little dead boy on the beach deserved his fate.
And no, ISIS is not "un-Islamic." If you read at all in Islam, you will see they are quite Islamic; it's "moderate Muslims" who are not.
via @instapundit
Wendy McElroy Debates -- No, Demolishes -- Jessica Valenti On So-Called "Rape Culture"
Transcript of Wendy's brilliant talk -- very much worth watching -- is here. How much better did McElroy do in the debate -- in presenting the case of truth, fairness, due process, and justice? Well...
"Valenti threatened legal action if the video of her half of the debate was not deleted by Brown University. The full video has since been posted by others."
Cathy Young's excellent piece on Emma Sulkowitz at Minding The Campus, "DID 'MATTRESS GIRL' TELL THE TRUTH? NOT VERY LIKELY":
Sulkowicz's account of her rape strains credulity to the extreme. Sulkowicz accuses Nungesser of an extremely brutal assault that should have left her visibly injured (with bruises not only on her face but on her neck and arms, unlikely to be covered by clothing in August and early September in New York) and in need of medical attention. Yet no one saw anything amiss after this attack, and both Nungesser and Sulkowicz went on to chat and banter on Facebook as if nothing happened. Sulkowicz's claim that she kept up a friendly act hoping to confront him about the rape seems extremely dubious, given the near-psychotic violence she alleges and the lack of any sign of unease or tension in their online conversations. (When I reread these archives recently, I checked the timestamps to see if there were any awkward pauses; there weren't, not even when Nungesser asks Sulkowicz to bring more girls to his party and she replies, "I'll be dere w da females soon.")Is Sulkowicz a "false accuser"? We don't know that. It's possible that something ambiguous happened between her and Nungesser that night--something that she later came to see as coercive and embellished with violent details. But I would say the odds of her account being factually true are very low.
Young lists the many credibility problems with Sulkowitz's account at the link. Actually, they should be called "strain credulity" problems.
Linkstarter
Like firestarter, but without the arson charges.
COEXIST
Photo by Michael Foran, posted under Creative Commons license. His caption for the photo:
The Twin Towers burn on the morning of September 11th, 2001, as seen from the Brooklyn Promenade.
A friend's husband is alive today because she had an early meeting and he had to take the kids to school. There are so many other stories like this -- and tragically, so many that are not.
For more about why Islam is so dangerous to our lives, values, and the continuation of free societies, see the links at the top of thereligionofpeace.com. And no, not all Muslims are dangerous, but the ideology of Islam is.
And see the politically incorrect truth about Islam here, from Muslims leaving it after they read and find out what is actually in the Quran.
*The idea for this post ("COEXIST") came from a Facebook friend, who titled a 9/11 photo the same way.
Just Assume That If You're Male And You're Speaking Or Writing It To A Woman, It's Probably "Misogynistic"
Someone calls me "stunning," and I'll blush a little and say, "Thank you!"
Not 27-year-old UK lawyer Charlotte Proudman.
Proudman sent a Linked In contact request to Alexander Carter-Silk, 57, the London-based head of European law firm Brown Rudnick's intellectual property group. He accepted it -- and -- made the heinous error of calling her photo "stunning."
Which, by the way, I also think it is.
"Charlotte, delighted to connect. I appreciate that this is probably horrendously politically incorrect but that is a stunning picture !!! You definitely win the prize for the best LinkedIn picture I have ever seen. Always interested to understand people's skills and how we might work together."
Oh, the horror. Well, that's how she saw it -- right before she exposed it and her response around the world on Twitter on Tuesday.
From the Daily Beast's Emily Shire:
Proudman replied to him: "Alex, I find your message offensive. I am on LinkedIn for business purposes, not to be approached about my physical appearance or to be objectified by sexist men."The eroticization of women's physical appearance is a way of exercising power over women.
"It silences women's professional attributes as their physical appearance becomes the subject.
"Unacceptable and misogynistic behavior. Think twice before sending another woman (half your age) such a sexist message."
If you're truly a man's equal, and not a little wounded duck looking everywhere for woundings, you say two words: "Thank you" -- or maybe one word, "Thanks!"
What's dismaying about this -- besides, as @Nero pointed out, that she had to take a photo of her computer screen (because she apparently has no idea how to take a screen shot) -- is that there's a 27-year-old woman who had what it takes to become a lawyer, yet is absolutely clueless about the biological sex differences between men and women.
Yes, we notice women's looks more than we notice or care about men's. This is not due to some horrible desire to keep women down but because women's looks (what we consider beauty) meaningfully translate to whether a woman is a healthy, fertile candidate to bear children.
That may not be consciously on our minds, but the interest in women's looks, and beauty, specifically, is part of our psychology -- one that can be a bit of a mismatch with a world where some women grab for the unearned power that comes from making accusations against men.
Oh, and I love this bit from Sarah Vine at the Daily Mail:
Perhaps Mr Carter-Silk was being a bit racy. Perhaps he should not have commented on her photo (although I can see why he did: she's an attractive woman who's clearly made a huge effort to look her most enticing); but if Ms Proudman thinks she's doing anything other than indulging in a show of self-promotion at his expense, she's deluding herself.And if you want proof, I shall leave you with a quote from an interview she gave to a newspaper yesterday. Yes, Ms Proudman, so shy and retiring she could not even bear to suffer a compliment from a colleague -- but perfectly willing to be interviewed by a newspaper.
'My partner gets messages asking if he wants a job at hedge funds, I get propositions from men asking me out. I want a public apology.'
One thing's for certain, Ms Proudman. You've sure got the public's attention. Job done.
How Kids Manipulate Parents
A prof friend used this to illustrate "parent-offspring conflict" for his ev psych students, but it's much funnier than that maybe makes it sound:
Complete Scarlett O'Hara mode.
Linky Riccardo
Lucy's hillbilly relative.
Yoohoo, American Feminists...I Know You're Busy Protesting Catcalls And All...
In Iran, an already-jailed female cartoonist could her 12-year prison sentence extended because she was seen shaking her male lawyer's hand.
Matilda Battersby writes in the Telegraph/UK:
An Iranian artist currently serving more than 12 years in prison for criticising the government now faces further charges of "indecency" for allegedly shaking her male lawyer's hand.Amnesty International reports that Atena Farghadani, 29, who was jailed after she depicted Iranian government officials as monkeys and goats in a satirical cartoon, may face a longer sentence amid claims over the handshake.
Charges of an "illegitimate sexual relationship short of adultery" have been brought against Farghadani and her lawyer Mohammad Moghimi amid allegations he visited her in jail and shook her hand - which is illegal in Iran.
Farghadani was sentenced to 12 years and nine months in prison earlier this year following the publication of her cartoon which was drawn in protest at plans by the Iranian government to outlaw voluntary sterilisation and to restrict access to contraception.
What Kind Of Country Are We Becoming? Title IX Being Used To Punish Free Speech On Campus
That is, when it isn't being used to deny men on campus due process.
In the free speech-denying vein, North Carolina's Greensboro College forced all incoming freshman to attend a play on sexual assault and then, after some heckled the thing, promised to identify and punish them.
Blake Neff writes for The Daily Caller:
The college says it has launched an investigation under Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in education."Under our new Sexual Misconduct policy, the comments that have been reported qualify as sexual harassment," said college president Lawrence Czarda in a campuswide email. "The college is pursuing a formal complaint of sexual misconduct against the students and is working to identify them. Upon results of the investigation, those found responsible will face disciplinary consequences." What sort of consequences the students could face is unclear, but the school's penalties for sexual harassment go all the way up to expulsion.
What's truly offensive is that, under Greensboro's sexual harassment policy, that this heckling is considered a sexual harassment and not just rude, per this bit from their definition of what sexual harassment is:
3. such conduct has the purpose or effect of interfering with an individual's academic or professional performance, or of creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive employment or educational environment.
"Offensive"? Who's to say what "offensive" is?
And has the "effect of interfering..."? What if I tell a dirty joke and you overhear it, and you happen to be emotionally fragile and stay in bed and cry for a month?
This is a terrible -- and pernicious -- set of standards. It will likely take a few lives ruined -- probably mostly (or entirely) male lives -- before there's some sort of overturning in court of Title IX being applied this way, and the same goes for these principles which are so antithetical to those this country is supposed to stand for.
This country we live in has been the United States of Civil Liberties since its founding, compared to any other country in the world. Now, tragically and disgustingly, it's starting to veer in the direction of the USSR.
Thugs With Badges On The Oklahoma Highways: Stay Off Interstate 40 If You'd Like To Retain Your Money And Property
You've probably seen Westerns with stagecoach robberies. Well, that's happening today, except it's cars being robbed, and it's the police doing the robbing -- under the cover of law.
This isn't supposed to be how America works, but increasingly, it is. We're a land of laws -- used by those paid to enforce the laws in ways that serve them and their interests and do anything but protect the rights and interests of the citizenry.
You're especially in danger of this -- of being robbed of any cash you're carrying (and possibly your car and your property) -- if you drive on Interstate 40 through any one of 12 Oklahoma counties.
Over a five-year span, $6 million has been seized there by law enforcement -- $4 million of which was seized without any criminal charges even being filed, reports Melissa Quinn at The Daily Signal:
The American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma analyzed records regarding cash seizures that took place in a dozen counties along Interstate 40, which bisects the state. According to the ACLU of Oklahoma's findings, law enforcement agencies seized $6 million in cash from property owners through civil asset forfeiture from 2009 to 2014. Of the money seized, just $2 million came from property owners who were charged with a crime.The ACLU of Oklahoma's findings come as the state prepares to debate reforms to its civil asset forfeiture laws. Civil asset forfeiture is a tool that gives law enforcement the power to seize property and cash if they're suspected of being connected to a crime.
In recent years, law enforcement agencies have come under fire for "policing for profit," which describes a trend of police using civil asset forfeiture to pad agency budgets.
Yes, we've given the fox the key to the henhouse. And wouldn't you know it, they're busy, busy, busy eating chicken breakfasts, lunches, and dinners.
Lurchy
Bobby and weavy links.
Oopsy, Anti-Discrimination Law Used By The "Wrong" People
Male kinda people -- to stop and punish a "Women in Tech" group from discriminating against them.
Maya Kosoff reports at Business Insider:
Men's rights activists are using an anti-discrimination law from the 1950s to kneecap women in tech events, Yahoo News' Alyssa Bereznak reports.Chic CEO, a website for female entrepreneurs, offers business advice to women and organizes networking events.
At one of these events last year, two men showed up, having paid the $20 registration fee on Chic CEO's website. The men tried entering but were turned away.
The men, Allan Candelore and Rich Allison, filed a complaint with the National Coalition for Men president Harry Crouch.
"I have been a plaintiff in a number of discrimination lawsuits because I have been discriminated against a number of times," Candelore, one of the defendants, told Yahoo News via email. "I am hoping for a day when everyone will be treated equally, discrimination will end, and I don't have to file another discrimination lawsuit."
This was actually enough to shut down the event and Chic CEO, reportedly costing them $510K, according to website TheMarySue.
Popehat explains the law's unintended consequences:
California's Unruh Civil Rights Act, a 1959 law named after a powerful California politician, was a precursor to the federal 1964 Civil Rights Act. It prohibits businesses from discriminating against folks based on specified attributes, currently including sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, or sexual orientation. It is, by design, a very broad and flexible tool, and has repeatedly been interpreted to protect groups and classes beyond those listed explicitly. Defendants found liable can be ordered to pay up to three times the actual damages the defendant suffers (and no less than $4,000), and can be ordered to pay the plaintiff's attorney fees. A losing plaintiff can't be ordered to pay a winning defendant's attorney fees, with certain narrow disability-law exceptions.
TheMarySue moans:
There's a special kind of insult in taking an anti-discrimination law intended to protect marginalized people and twisting it to "protect" those least in need of protection. It's sad, to be honest, that men's rights activists (ughh) can exploit something like that to effectively shut down organizations and companies like Chic CEO trying to improve female representation in tech and other industries.
More from Popehat:
Here's the thing: if you only wake up to how broken the system is when it's abused by one of your ideological enemies, you're a vapid partisan hack. The legal system -- including, but not "only" or "especially" civil rights laws -- is a tool of extortion, deceit, and thuggery. I've seen nothing in my 21 years as a lawyer to make me think that civil rights plaintiffs are any more likely than other plaintiffs to abuse the system....If you're only irritated by this when a group of Wrong People target a group of Right People, you're not to be taken seriously.
Personally, I am for the right of free association -- to decide that you want to have a group of all men or all women or all black people, Jews, or Chinese. However, this is not what the law says, and as long as the law forces men to admit women, sorry ladies, the penis people cannot be denied entry to your whine sessions about how "marginalized" you are.
By the way, I find that women who accomplish things in the world, like people who accomplish things in the world, do not complain that the world is stacked against them; they figure out how to overcome any obstacles and just do it.
Victimhood Culture Involves An Appeal To "Daddy"
It's an administrative daddy, but a daddy nonetheless.
I keep posting about what I see as a change in feminism -- how women now demand to be treated as eggshells, not equals.
Jonathan Haidt posts at The Righteous Mind about a paper by two sociologists, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, explaining why this clamor about microaggressions is being heard on American college campuses as of late:
In brief: We're beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don't need to earn it. They foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There's no more dueling.Campbell and Manning describe how this culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized. It is the very presence of such administrative bodies, within a culture that is highly egalitarian and diverse (i.e., many college campuses) that gives rise to intense efforts to identify oneself as a fragile and aggrieved victim.
...The key idea is that the new moral culture of victimhood fosters "moral dependence" and an atrophying of the ability to handle small interpersonal matters on one's own. At the same time that it weakens individuals, it creates a society of constant and intense moral conflict as people compete for status as victims or as defenders of victims.
Read Haidt's excellent article in The Atlantic, coathored with theFIRE.org's Greg Lukianoff, "The Coddling of the American Mind," about how trigger warnings are hurting mental health on campus.
It's kind of amazing what a full circle American feminism has come -- to the point where women need and administrative daddy -- the government as patriarch -- to handle their affairs.
Remember women fighting for independence?
via @ThaddeusRussell
Lippy
Brattylinks.
But What If All The Flight Attendants Are Muslim?
If you can't perform your job due to your religion, shouldn't you quit your job? If you are, say, a Christian who refuses to conform to the duties of your office? Or...
There's a story about a Muslim flight attendant who supposedly was fired because she refused to serve alcohol to passengers, per how, in the 21st Century, she practices a superstitious belief system (sans evidence that there actually is an "Allah") -- one that has, among its many tenets, a prohibition against alcohol.
From the AP:
A Muslim flight attendant for ExpressJet says she was wrongly suspended from her job last month because she refused to serve alcohol to passengers, citing her religious beliefs.Charee Stanley, a Detroit-based flight attendant for ExpressJet, filed a discrimination complaint Tuesday with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The airline had agreed to give Stanley a religious accommodation, saying she could work out an arrangement with the other flight attendant on duty so they could serve alcohol instead. She was suspended only after a colleague complained, said Lena Masri, an attorney with the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Stanley, 40, has worked for the Atlanta-based airline for nearly three years and during that time converted to Islam, Masri said. Stanley approached a supervisor in June after learning that her faith forbids not just consuming alcohol but also serving it.
Supposedly, the co-worker complained about the alcohol and more. Whether this actually happened over the alcohol or what it happened over remains to be seen. (Anything can be told to the press these days.)
However, imagine if the airline had an all-Muslim flight attendant crew. Coming from Detroit, for example, this could eventually happen. What then -- tell the passengers to get their own? Or that they can't have certain beverages because it interferes with the flight attendants' religion?
Imagine if the airline tried to hire people based on religion. There's a discrimination suit!
The Good News: Bike Helmets Reduce Head Injuries In Kids!
The bad news? According to a new study, reported by Steve Stewart-Williams on PsychologyToday.com, injuries are reduced "mainly because kids are less likely to bother getting on their bikes if they have to put on a helmet first."
More bad news:
The reduction in bike-related head injuries is almost perfectly matched by an increase in head injuries from other wheeled sports - skateboarding and the like.
The paper, by economists Sara Markowitz and Pinka Chatterji, can be read here.
It's Islam That Makes Countries Nervous About Accepting The Refugees
JD Rucker writes at Soshable.com:
From the Islamic State, al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, and independent terrorist organizations, it's an unfortunate reality that there are those who are likely mixed in with the suffering refugees who see this crisis as an opportunity to infiltrate other countries, spread their doctrines, and commit jihad....Cyprus and others have pushed for a safer humanitarian course. Unfortunately, protecting their own culture and citizens is resulting in a humanitarian crisis. Those who are most affected are the vast majority of innocent Muslims who truly want to escape hardship and build a new life with no intention of hurting anyone.
...Those crying about the "bigotry" that comes with countries preferring Christian refugees over Muslim refugees need to understand the risks associated with each group. It isn't just the fact that there are much fewer Christian terrorists than there are Muslim terrorists. It's the history of the Muslim faith that has many governments cautious. Many countries in the Middle East and other places in the world once held a Christian majority. Syria once held some of the most robust Christian communities in the world before Islam spread, converting or pushing out those of non-Muslim faith.
Dinky
Wee little links.
Every Male Drone Pilot Is A Pedophile!
It is just idiotic paranoia and illogic driven from both the helicopter parenting of children and the idea that to be male is to be criminal that people decide that there's something pervy going on any time a man is near, looking at, or using a camera around children who are not his own.
This sort of ugly thinking gets passed on to one's kids.
Here's an example of it -- a man flying a drone who is accused of taking video of girls playing soccer...which he is not.
Michael Archambault posts at Petapixel:
Jonathan Hair is a drone pilot and aerial photographer from Detroit, Michigan, who recently ran into a confrontation while flying his drone at a public field. Hair, who has been working with radio-controlled planes, helicopters, and multi-rotor aircraft for the last twenty years, was confronted by a man who suspected that Hair was recording a girl's soccer game, suggesting that he was a pedophile. Hair stood his ground, responding in a professional manner and capturing the entire confrontation in the 5-minute video above.
via @TimCushing
But Why Should Anybody Get Jail Time For Soliciting A Prostitute?
An 87-year-old man, who isn't ready to pack up the sexparts just yet, got arrested in Grand Rapids, Michigan when the prostitute he solicited turned out to be an undercover cop posing as a prostitute.
First of all, this low-hanging fruit policing should not be going on. It is none of the government's business if two consenting adults want to trade money for an old table -- or, sorry, can't resist, want to trade money for one blowing the other on the old table.
But, as Barton Delters writes for MLive.com:
GRAND RAPIDS, MI - The 87-year-old man police say was soliciting an undercover cop posing as a prostitute will not be prosecuted."What would be the purpose in prosecuting him? " Kent County Prosecutor William Forsyth said Tuesday, Sept. 1. "He wouldn't and shouldn't go to jail and 87 years without involvement in the criminal justice system has, in my opinion, earned him a pass."
Howard Arthur Klein, likely the oldest person ever charged with this crime, was arrested by Grand Rapids Police around 10 p.m. June 26, near Broadway Street NW and Leonard Avenue, not far from his home.
...Klein faced a maximum of 93 days in the Kent County Jail if convicted.
"I could see no compelling reason to continue to prosecute Mr. Klein on the ticket he was issued for accosting and soliciting," Forsyth said. "He is 87 years old with absolutely no criminal record. In addition, I am told he struggles to some degree with dementia."
What I want to know is why you're prosecuting other people and possibly throwing them in jail?
P.S. You go, grandpa!
via ifeminists
Everything Must Be Renamed
One nation, triggered right and left and then some...
Great George Will piece in the NY Post on all the PC violations everywhere:
We have a new national passion for moral and historical hygiene, a determination to scrub away remembrances of unpleasant things, such as the name Oklahoma, which is a compound of two Choctaw words meaning "red" and "people."Connecticut's state Democratic Party has leapt into the vanguard of this movement, vowing to sin no more: Never again will it have a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner.
Connecticut Democrats shall still dine to celebrate their party's pedigree but shall not sully the occasions by mentioning the names of two slave owners.
The Washington Post should join this campaign for sanitized names, thus purging the present of disquieting references to the past.
The newspaper bears the name of the nation's capital, which is named for a slave owner who also was -- trigger warning -- a tobacco farmer. Washington, DC, needs a new name. Perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt, DC.
She had nothing to do with her husband's World War II internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were native-born American citizens.
...So, let us move on.
To Massachusetts perhaps, which should furl its flag. Massachusetts' flag shows a Native American holding a bow and arrow, a weapon that reinforces a hurtful stereotype of Native Americans as less than perfectly peaceful.
This is liberalism's dilemma: There are so many things to be offended by, and so little time to agonize about each.
Doglink
Sometimes, as I watch my dog, I see the beauty of just being able to crawl under a chair.
My First Thought Was That She Should "Identify" As An Asshole
First-person ooze in the Charlotte Observer, "The struggle to be taken seriously in the age of subtle sexism."
An excerpt:
I identify as female. I am apparently a conventionally attractive student-athlete at UNC-Chapel Hill. I grew into my ears a few years back. I have lighter eyes and darker skin, and with the exception of a bit of an eyebrow discrepancy, my face is generally symmetrical.Writing this now, I feel my stomach drop. In a culture that regularly exploits sexuality, it's ironically unacceptable when women openly acknowledge it themselves. But hear me. The following is a string of subtle and routine occurrences that make me feel less human and should take their rightful place among the larger narrative of sexism in contemporary America.
When I wake up at 6 in the morning for practice, I put on spandex that will ride up and allow my legs to chafe. I know this is because I don't have a thigh gap like most of the distance runners on my cross-country team. I eat an easily-digestible carb and make a note of the calorie count.
After "a good early-morning chafe," as I call it, I change into dry workout clothes, this time being careful not to wear too much "Carolina gear." I do this so as not to give my professors and peers another reason to discount me...
Oh, the horror...the horror.
Loved this comment on the story:
William Saunders
"Identifies as male" "identifies as female"? You know, you can have a DNA test done and it will tell you which gender you are so you won't be confused.
This guy, too:
Taff Zickefoose
I'm a 46 year old male and have also been a 'victim' of everything this sad pathetic girl gas described. It's called life. Deal with it.
P.S. I "identify" as extremely wealthy.
via @AsheSchow, @CathyYoung63, @EsotericCD
Christmas Future For Obamacare
Laura Donnelly writes in the Telegraph/UK that thousands of cancer patients will be denied treatment -- common drugs for breast, bowel, prostate, pancreatic and blood cancer will no longer be funded by the British National Health Service, in the wake of big cutbacks:
More than 5,000 cancer patients will be denied life-extending drugs under plans which charities say are a "dreadful" step backwards for the NHS.Health officials have just announced sweeping restrictions on treatment, which will mean patients with breast, bowel, skin and pancreatic cancer will no longer be able to receive drugs funded by the NHS.
In total, 17 cancer drugs for 25 different indications will no longer be paid for in future.
These drugs were paid for out of a special fund:
The Cancer Drugs Fund was launched in 2011, following a manifesto pledge by David Cameron, who said patients should no longer be denied drugs on cost grounds.Since its launch four years ago it has benefitted more than 50,000 patients, who received treatment which NHS rationing bodies had refused to pay for.
But now the fund's budget is massively overspent.
...Drugs which will no longer be funded include Kadcyla for advanced breast cancer, Avastin for many bowel and breast cancer patients, Revlimid and Imnovid for multiple myeloma, and Abraxane, the first treatment for pancreatic cancer in 17 years.
Breast cancer charities said they were particularly concerned about Kadcyla, currently prescribed to around 800 women a year, which has been shown to extend life by an average of six months, with fewer side effectives than any alternatives.
Samia al Qadhi, Chief Executive at Breast Cancer Care, said: "This devastating decision will mean shattered hopes for thousands of women who could have been helped by these drugs.
"It is completely unacceptable that, in 2015, this inflexible system is blocking access to life-extending treatments, like Kadcyla. Treatments that could give people valuable extra time with their loved ones, and help them continue to contribute to society for many months or even years.
De facto death panels -- (I predict!) coming eventually to an America near you.
By the way, I now only have sub-standard care, ever since the government got all up in our healthcare. It's the same HMO that provided me with excellent and affordable care for decades. It's just that in the wake of Obamacare passing, my premium became unaffordable and then I got a deductible so high that when I go to the doctor, I tell them that I can't actually afford any treatment beyond a photocopied sheet of exercises to do.
The reality of "affordable" health care: It isn't affordable, it isn't healthy, and it sure fucking isn't care.
No, Kim Davis Is Not In Jail For Refusing To Violate Her Religion
For any commenters who've recently come out of a long coma, Davis is the Rowan County, Kentucky clerk who defied a judge's order that she resume issuing Kentucky marriage licenses and was jailed for contempt of court. As Walter Olson puts it at Cato:
She had stopped doing so on the grounds to have her name go on a marriage license for a same-sex couple, as state law now prescribes following Obergefell, would run counter to her religious feelings.
And here, Walter nails it:
Kim Davis purges the contempt if she either carries out her public duties or quits her public office. So she is not in jail for refusing to violate her religion, unless her religion requires her to keep her public job (cool religion!).
In fact, as I saw somebody say on Twitter, she's in jail for -- basically -- demanding that everyone conform to her religious beliefs.
More from Walter:
A curious argument making the rounds posits it as somehow relevant that marriage law changed after Davis won elected office, supposedly upsetting her reliance on expectations of what duties she would be called on to perform. That's not really a legal question, in the sense of casting any doubt on whether she is expected to follow the laws of Kentucky and the United States in current form if she wants to hold office. It's more like a union shop steward's argument -- "you can't change my job duties unless you bargain with me first."...Davis's defenders also have a point worth bearing in mind as we go forward: the traditional civil contempt power of the Anglo-American courts does generate many harsh, disturbing results. As defense lawyer Scott Greenfield has written, "calling the jailing of a person 'civil' doesn't mean they put curtains on the cell windows." Targets of civil contempt orders remain in jail - sometimes for a remarkably long time - if they remain obdurate on principle or simply fail to satisfy a judge that compliance is impossible. Dads get jailed for trying to see their kids more often than a court order permits. To me, among these disturbing outcomes, pressure to resign a public office rates fairly low on the scale. But they all could benefit from overdue discussion.
Modern Love And Modern Yawn
First with the Modern Yawn: Papers are in trouble these days, and yet, my hometown paper, the LA Times, publishes this "L.A. Affairs" piece, a dull travelogue through unremarkable dates with unremarkable men that is remarkable only in how it really has no ending.
What's especially remarkable is how, in a town filled with writers -- many of them truly talented -- the LA Times repeatedly publishes such dullness in this "L.A. Affairs" space. (On a side note, "manifest" as a verb, a popular form of woowoo-speak used by the author, should be some sort of word crime.)
Contrast the above with this week's column in the same genre in The New York Times, "Modern Love." This week's, "My Father's Last Romance," happens to be by a friend of mine, Bob Morris. (But that has nothing to do with why I think it's good -- and I suspect you'll see that with some ease.)
Bob's recently published (and moving) memoir: "Bobby Wonderful: An Imperfect Son Buries His Parents."
Yorkie
Hot barking links.
But What If Girls WANT To Play With Barbies?
Sarah Knapton reports at the Telegraph/UK that the new president of the British Science Association, Dame Athene Donald, has said girls should stop playing with Barbies and be given Lego or Meccano instead to prevent them growing up believing that science and engineering are only for boys:
Dame Athene Donald, Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge University, said that toys for little girls were dominated by themes of 'love and magic,' which reinforced gender stereotypes.Speaking before her inaugural address as the new president of the British Science Association (BSA), Dame Athene said: "We need to change the way we think about boys and girls and what's appropriate for them from a very early age. Does the choice of toys matter? I believe it does.
"We introduce social constructs by stereotyping what toys boys and girls receive from the earliest age. Girls toys are typically liable to lead to passivity - combing the hair of Barbie, for instance - not building, imagining or being creative with Lego or Meccano.
"You can see that boys (toys) ads are dominated by power and battle whereas girls seem to be able to get through life on love and magic. I'm sorry, I don't think that will get them very far and whereas I am no fan of battles the idea that active behaviours is to be encouraged.
Girls looking for work experience were also likely to find themselves in hairdressing salons while boys went to the "local garage", she said.
"This isn't good for either sex," said Dame Athene.
Why not?
I had Barbies but I wasn't very interested in them. (Not surprisingly, perhaps, I have never been interested in having children.) But many or most girls seem to be interested in dolls and in simulating mommyhood. Even girl chimps seem to be, per the research of Richard Wrangham and Sonya Kahlenberg that I linked here.
Can someone please explain to me why we should push girls to be car mechanics and boys to be hairdressers and, as Dame Athene suggests, shove girls into engineering?
Slippers
Comfortable, fuzzy old links.
Teen Charged With Sexually Exploiting A Minor -- Himself
And he'll be charged as an adult.
Unbelievable story from Robby Soave at Reason:
A North Carolina 17-year-old caught in a sexting scandal faces charges of sexually exploiting a minor that could land him in jail for up to 10 years, since the law considers him an adult. But one of the minors he supposedly exploited is himselfÂ--which raises an obvious question: how can a teen be old enough to face adult felony charges, but not old enough to keep a nude picture of himself on his phone?Unfortunately, that's the Kafka-esque nightmare in which Fayetteville-area high schooler Cormega Copening finds himself after exchanging private nude photos with his girlfriend--with whom he is legally allowed to have sex, but not to sext.
...Copening and his girlfriend--now identified as Brianna Denson--are like other teenagers in that they have more than a passing interest in sex. Indeed, when they were 16, they exchanged racy sexy photos via text message. Denson sent pictures to Copening, and Copening sent pictures to Denson. It appears that no one else saw the pictures until local authorities searched Copening's phone and discovered them.
Why did they search his phone? It's not clear, but local news reports claimed that it had nothing to do with the sexts themselves. The Cumberland County Sheriff's Office did not respond to a request for comment. According to fayobserver.com, there is no record of a search warrant being issued for Copening's phone.
Both teens were charged with sexual exploitation. Denson pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was given 12 months of probation.
Copening, however, is still facing two counts of second-degree sexual exploitation and three counts of third-degree exploitation. As Ricochet's Tom Meyer points out, the third-degree charges--which constitute a majority of the total charges--actually stem from the pictures Copening had of himself. The implication is clear: Copening does not own himself, from the standpoint of the law, and is not free to keep sexually-provocative pictures, even if they depict his own body.
Tim Cushing wrote about this at TechDirt and noted:
There is nothing about this case that isn't tragically stupid. At worst, the officers should have considered the context, the consensual nature and the lack of age discrepancy and did what the charging detective recommended -- sending the teens home to their parents. If any discipline was needed for these actions, it's well within the remand of their respective legal guardians, not the state that has decided people of a certain age aren't allowed to own any part of themselves until the government says its OK.
The problem with having laws on the books and having them be expansive is that they can -- and often will -- be used, and against people who show no danger to society.
A Guardian piece by Flic Everett gets it right in the headline and subhead:
Don't criminalise sexting teenagers - mistakes are part of growing up: It's wrong that police added a 14-year-old to a criminal database for sending a naked image of himself. He's not a sexual abuser, simply a boy who made an error.
How amazing that this needs to be said.
(Eek, A Gun!) In The Land Of The Helicopter Parented, An Independent, In-Charge Kid Is Bizarre And Worrisome To Cops
It used to be that an 11-year-old had a lot of responsibility. An 11-year-old in pioneer days probably knew how to use a rifle and defend the home front.
These days, now that kids are treated like fragile knickknacks, a kid who's raised like the 11-year-old of yore is seen as something to wonder and worry about.
Take this story about the 11-year-old kid who shot a home intruder, defending himself, his 4-year-old sister he was apparently babysitting, and his family's home.
At The Blaze, Dave Urbanski reports:
An 11-year-old boy fatally shot a suspected intruder who tried to enter his North St. Louis County home Thursday afternoon while he was alone with his 4-year-old sister, police told KMOV-TV.The boy fired one shot that hit the suspected home intruder in the head, KDSK-TV reported. He died at the scene, police said. KTVI-TV reported his age as 16.
...Police said they're trying to determine why the children were home alone and why the boy had access to the gun, KTVI reported.
Perhaps because his parents decided that he's mature and responsible enough to 1. Babysit his sibling (which I was doing for mine well before age 11), and 2. Handle a gun (which I did at age 8, though it was a BB gun).
Samuel L. Jackson On Guns And Gun Control
In the wake of the Newtown shooting, Jackson told the LA Times' Steven Zeitchik, that he doesn't think an abundance of guns is the problem nor is more gun control the answer:
"I don't think it's about more gun control," said Samuel L. Jackson, who stars as a conniving house slave in Quentin Tarantino's upcoming revenge fantasy "Django Unchained." "I grew up in the South with guns everywhere and we never shot anyone. This [shooting] is about people who aren't taught the value of life."Parents and role models who emphasize that value, he said, will accomplish more than legislators reducing the number of firearms.
Besides, anybody who wants a gun can get one in the hood, same as they can buy smack and all sorts of other illegal stuff.
Puffy
Lip-collagenned links.
Slacktivism Seems To Have Paid Off For ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease)
Slacktivism gives people the sense they are doing something -- making a difference -- yet with very little effort.
But Nicholas Kristof writes in The New York Times that one example of slacktivism -- the Ice Bucket Challenge to combat deadly Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS) -- may have worked:
Scientists studying A.L.S. have reported a breakthrough that could lead to therapy, not just for A.L.S. but for other ailments, too. And they say the money raised in the ice bucket challenge was crucial.The breakthrough, published in Science, was summarized thus: "TDP-43 repression of nonconserved cryptic exons is compromised in ALS-FTD."
Got it?
Here's a translation: The research focused on a protein called TDP-43 that in some circumstances is linked to cell death in the brain or spinal cord of patients. The scientists found that inserting a custom-designed protein allowed cells to return to normal.
"That becomes our therapeutic strategy," said Philip Wong, a professor at Johns Hopkins University whose lab conducted the research. He said the research team was now testing gene therapy strategies in mice to see if these can halt A.L.S. symptoms.
If it works in mice, the following step would be to seek to conduct a clinical trial in humans, he said.
The researchers are also hoping the therapy will work for a common cause of mental deterioration, frontotemporal dementia, and for inclusion body myositis, a progressive disease that leads to muscle weakness.
It may also lead to a diagnostic test for Alzheimer's.
For the people who did the Ice Bucket Challenge -- the social media-postable action selfie with the momentarily painful addition of ice water and the annoyance of having to change clothes -- combined the illusion of doing something with the ability to show it off to the world. Stunt volunteerism with minimal effort.
And how much is it really about the cause? From Wikipedia:
Focus on the stunt rather than donations American stunt performer and TV personality Steve-O questioned the campaign, suggesting that celebrities' videos generally forgot to share donation information for ALS charities, and that the initial $15 million in funds was insignificant, given the star power of the celebrities participating. He noted that, of the videos he viewed, only Charlie Sheen and Bill Gates mentioned that the point is to donate money.[119] A similar criticism was made by Jacob Davidson in Time Magazine[120] and by Arielle Pardes in Vice.[91]
Then again, it raised the bucks for the research. A lesson in exploiting ego and social media for fundraisers. (Best to kick it off with a celebrity doing the first bit of slacktivism.)
My favorite useless slacktivism is petition-signing. Few petitions ever do a thing or matter.
"It's Racist!" Isn't As Sticky As Taylor Swift Video Critics Would Have Liked
The multi-culti police are right there on the job to cry racism when what they're really complaining about is an attempt at historical realism.
At The Blaze, Oliver Darcy links to the director Joseph Kahn's statement about the Taylor Swift video he helmed, shot to seem like it's a love story that takes place on the set of a movie in Africa in 1950:
"Wildest Dreams" is a song about a relationship that was doomed, and the music video concept was that they were having a love affair on location away from their normal lives. This is not a video about colonialism but a love story on the set of a period film crew in Africa,1950.There are black Africans in the video in a number of shots, but I rarely cut to crew faces outside of the director as the vast majority of screentime is Taylor and Scott.
The video is based on classic Hollywood romances like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, as well as classic movies like The African Queen, Out of Africa and The English Patient, to name a few.
The reality is not only were there people of color in the video, but the key creatives who worked on this video are people of color. I am Asian American, the producer Jil Hardin is an African American woman, and the editor Chancler Haynes is an African American man. We cast and edited this video. We collectively decided it would have been historicially inaccurate to load the crew with more black actors as the video would have been accused of rewriting history. This video is set in the past by a crew set in the present and we are all proud of our work.
There is no political agenda in the video. Our only goal was to tell a tragic love story in classic Hollywood iconography. Furthermore, this video has been singled out, yet there have been many music videos depicting Africa. These videos have traditionally not been lessons in African history. Let's not forget, Taylor has chosen to donate all of her proceeds from this video to the African Parks Foundation to preserve the endangered animals of the continent and support the economies of local African people.
Here's the vid:
P.S. She also wears fur in the video, and there's nobody standing on the red carpet with cans of paint to throw on her, and nobody in the video is driving a Prius, the official car of Hollywood. Just a guess, but probably because these things also did not happen in 1950.
Splinky
Name for the brother on a TV show I never watched. Or this.
Obama's Pretend Jewish Morality On The Iran Deal -- Might Fool Lefty American Jews, But Not The "We Grew A Pair" Israeli Ones
David Harsanyi writes at The Federalist about Obama's bullshit contention that pro-Iranian policies align in some way with the tenets of Jewish faith--"a claim he makes nearly every time he is forced to allay the fears of a Jewish publication or group." Harsanyi rightly deems this "preposterous."
In The Forward, Obama tells us that he is a follower of his own fictitious philo-morality:These are hard issues, and worthy of serious debate. But you don't win the debate by suggesting that the other person has bad motives. That's I think not just consistent with fair play; I think it's consistent with the best of the Jewish tradition.1 - You don't win the debate. Nearly every poll shows a majority oppose the deal.
2- There has been no "serious"--or at least, consequential--debates surrounding the Iran deal. There's been a lot theatre. Now that Bob Casey has signed on, nearly every Senator supposedly weighing the deal have backed Obama. (No one liked being called a traitor, after all.) It's always been inevitable that congress would be unable to overcome a veto. Republicans haven't done anything tangible to stop the deal. In fact, though Obama wasn't going to permit any genuine checks and balances to get in the way of his empowering Iran, the GOP leadership helped him by putting the imprimatur of law and order on the deal.
3 -Obama's claim that questioning the motivations of the opposition is outside the boundaries of fair play and "Jewish tradition" is a pretty odd when one considers the tone of his entire presidency--but, more specifically, when we scrutinize how often he has schmeared the intentions of the Iran-deal opponents. Obama advocates has reliably painted opponents as a gaggle of traitorous #warmongers. The president himself claimed that opposition was unduly influenced by money and lobbyists and, at the same time, making common cause with the radical Islamists. Is that a reflection of fair play within the Jewish tradition?
4 -Most important, what Jewish tradition is Obama talking about? He never says. Is it the now-broken, centuries-old unwelcome tradition of sitting around powerlessly and praying that nothing horrible will happen? That is essentially the argument for this Iran deal.
Israeli Jews are the "We grew a pair" Jews of the Western World. They have to be, because without that, they're dead -- thanks to Muslims who demand that they be slaughtered, in keeping with their religion's demand. (This is why there can never be peace or land-sharing -- as there is in Israel with the Druze and Christian Arabs.)
I Defend Your Right To Speech Revealing That You Are A Despicable Person -- And We All Should
Houston #BlackLivesMatter supporter Monica Foy tweeted something truly terrible -- a tweet reflecting her apparent support for the cold-blooded murder of Sheriff's Deputy Darren Goforth. 
From Breitbart's Brandon Darby:
Foy deleted the tweet after numerous individuals began criticizing her on the social media platform. Immediately prior to the offending tweet, Foy tweeted her support for #BlackLivesMatter. Her Facebook account shows that she studies English literature at Sam Houston University.
On Twitter, people (@aleykhat is one) started hammering the school, demanding that they do something about her speech.
Unfortunately for civil liberties, Sam Houston State University, per campus free speech defenders theFIRE.org, isn't so hot on free speech.
If Foy used the wifi at school to tweet her message, she's probably in some trouble. (SHSU "Internet Usage Policies" as of September, 2014):
All individuals are accountable for their actions relating to SHSU information technology resources. Direct violations include the following: ... Intentionally accessing, creating, storing or transmitting material which SHSU may deem to be offensive, indecent or obscene (other than in the course of academic research or authorized administrative duties where this aspect of the research or work has the explicit approval of the SHSU official processes for dealing with academic ethical issues).
I think she's horrible to have tweeted that -- and I also think she deserves our strong support of her free speech.
People coming after her on Twitter, demanding that the college take action, are the antithesis of do-gooders. We all need to support the free speech of assholes and truly terrible people. That's how the speech of all of us remains free.
In short, I not only defend your right to say absolutely terrible things -- I celebrate it.
And finally, a word from @ClarkHat and @BlazerMc88:
Slippy
Linky with wet floors.
Two College Presidents Advocate For The Coddle Experience
I know Barry Glassner and like him as a human, but I'm dismayed by the LA Times op-ed he co-authored with Morton Schapiro. Both are college presidents. Barry was a former USC sociology prof who wrote The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things
Well, now the wrong thing we're afraid of is ever offending anyone. And anyone and everyone on college campuses is ready to step up and claim to be offended -- by just about anything and everything. It seems to me to have become a means of having status -- victim status -- and being "special" because of it.
The first problem with their op-ed is that they mush in examples of racist scrawlings on posters and cocktail party flubs -- "You don't look Jewish" (which I've gotten a lot) -- with the "trigger warnings" and "micro-agressions" now rolling back campus thought and speech.One of us watched a brilliant young African American woman who had been highly engaged on campus and in her course work, an "A" student, recoil from her classes and her classmates after returning to her dormitory one afternoon. There, in the place she had come to consider her home halfway across the country from where she grew up, she was confronted with racist slurs scrawled on posters she had put up as part of a job she held on campus to help cover expenses.
Less traumatic but nonetheless deeply upsetting are those little comments that haunt us all -- when someone compliments an Asian American from Ohio on his "good English" or orders drinks from an African American guest at a cocktail party. Both of us, when we were younger, were told that we didn't "look Jewish." If such remarks don't wound us to the core, why is it that we remember them for a lifetime?
I dealt with a lot of Jew hatred growing up. I remember the lady, Mrs. M., who, uh, complimented my mother, "You're not like other Jews..."
But this sort of remark has nothing to do with a professor putting out a trigger warning syllabus every time they want to assign "The Great Gatsby."
And that practice -- and the culture behind it -- is killing free speech and free inquiry on campus, and, as Greg Lukianoff points out, hurting people's ability to debate in general in this country.
Key line from Glassner and Schapiro's piece:
And we've both heard from counseling staff about students who were victims of sexual and other abuse who experienced setbacks after being exposed to course materials without having been given an opportunity to prepare themselves psychologically.
As I've said here before: If you are this fragile, the institution you belong in is not one of higher learning but the sort of place where the kind nursie will bring you another tray of blocks.
(This sort of thinking -- that students must be coddled -- leads to this sort of idiocy.)
Related: Schapiro should spend less time writing op-eds about how students should be coddled and more time advocating for free speech and free inquiry (over "branding!") at Northwestern.
The Most Embarrassing Hillary Clinton Emails
From Nick Gillespie at Reason.
Meanwhile, from the Wash Times, Stephen Dinan and S.A. Miller write:
The Obama administration is increasingly finding classified information in former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails, declaring secret material in nearly 3 percent of the batch released late Monday night....Mrs. Clinton said she used her own server and email address because it was more convenient to set up a central one for both personal and business use.
Federal law required that any official business on nongovernmental accounts be forwarded to an official account so it could be stored for archival purposes, but Mrs. Clinton did not do that until late last year, nearly two years after she left office, and only after she was prodded by the committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.
She has said she now wants all the emails to be made public. She initially said she did not traffic in classified material from the account, but has since clarified that she meant none of the information was classified at the time.
She turned over about 30,000 emails in paper form in December, forcing the State Department to spend months processing them to get them back into a digital format. Her attorney said she then discarded 32,000 messages she deemed personal that were sent from the same account, then wiped the server clean.
(UPDATED -- to delete faked email...grrr. See comments.)
Pink
Don't plink...
