Toast Is Sexist
This was my tweeted response to a Cathy Young tweet:
@CathyYoung63
Just came across a Tumblr blog that referred to Mozart's Don Giovanni as "an MRA."I can't even
Yes, everything is an attack on women. Orange juice, bacon, car doors, ferrets, cat memes.
I do have to point out an opera-related favorite (and no, I'm not referring to this because it's "sexist" but because the subject amused the fuck out of me): Tamas David-Barret's Mating Strategies in Mozart's Figaro, which I heard him present at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference at !!sexist!! !!racist!! Mizzou this past May.
The abstract:
Since its first performance in 1786, Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro, written in close cooperation with opera's librettist Da Ponte, has inspired a wealth of research in musicology and cultural studies. We study the social relationships of this opera using an evolutionary framework. The protagonists are analysed with respect to biologically-relevant individual traits like gender, social status and reproductive value and via the dyadic ties of sexuality, kinship and friendship. We argue that The Marriage of Figaro displays the major human male and female mating strategies with regards to long and short-term relationships. The biological relevance of the dense social network may explain part of this opera's popularity across centuries, together with its musical, dramaturgical, and overall aesthetical qualities.
This Is Healthcare "Reform"?
Philip Dorsey has a terrific long read at Forbes about the mess Obamacare has made of his healthcare situation -- and that of so many people.
It's how it's worked for me, too. As I put it, after having pretty wonderful, affordable care from an HMO for decades, I now have a big deductible. This means, yes, I still have healthcare; I just can't afford to use it.
Colonscopy? Uh, can't afford that. I took the mail-in poop test and passed and hope that's good enough.
And luckily, I've been able to manage my bum knee with exercise, Glucosamine Chondroitin MSM (which, per a Cochrane report, can take six months to start showing effect), and krill oil 1,000s, which Dr. Michael Eades has found effective for pain relief -- after a few weeks.
Because I sure as fuck can't afford any kind of surgical intervention -- not that I want that. (Iatrogenesis and all, dudes.)
The new plans had a deductible that applied very broadly to services formerly covered with a small fixed co-payment, such as doctor visits, x-rays and cat-scans....The out-of-pocket maximum would increase over 80% compared to my second terminated plan; so in the very situations when insurance is needed most, it would pay less of the bills for both in- and out-of-network care. The deductible also would increase by over 35%. Although in my prior experience such deductible increases had led to huge savings in premiums the new law had somehow vacuumed up all the premium savings and then some. I also would again lose some preventive care coverage, as my PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) blood test for cancer was no longer fully covered, but instead subject to the high deductible as well as the coinsurance percentage. As with my employer plan the prior year, I would be paying more for a lot less coverage.
...I am a middle-aged early retiree who does a little freelance writing in retirement. I am the kind of person this law should have helped. Nancy Pelosi said it would help freelance writers along with photographers and artists. Perhaps I'm not sufficiently grateful for the government's efforts to look out for the welfare of early retirees and freelancers such as myself, but I'd appreciate it greatly if the federal government would just stop doing me all these wonderful favors before I end up bankrupt, which could happen even now if I suffer from a serious health problem that requires the kind of quality insurance that I am now legally prohibited from buying.
As I noted in the summary of my serial health coverage terminations one of the striking aspects of the Obamacare three-year phase-in was my loss of coverage for routine preventive care. For many years I've been accustomed to having full coverage of regular eye exams. In fleeing from my former employer's greatly shrunken yet more expensive coverage in 2013 these exams became subject to a high deductible and coinsurance, causing me to delay my most recent eye exam for months until my deductible was reached. With the implementation of the coverage regulations of 2015 I was forced out of my group plan and into the new individual market where I would lose such preventive care coverage entirely.
I wondered how my preventive care coverage could be disappearing under what was supposed to a reform law. After all Obama and Biden had committed themselves to reform that would serve the goals of "promoting prevention and strengthening public health to prevent disease." Nevertheless, when I looked at the contract for my current policy purchased on the new health insurance exchange, I found the federal government's fingerprints on my degraded coverage for routine preventive care:
Preventive services are not subject to Cost-Sharing (Copayments, Deductibles or Coinsurance) when performed by a Participating Provider and provided in accordance with the comprehensive guidelines supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration ("HRSA"), or if the items or services have an "A" or "B" rating from the United States Preventive Services Task Force ("USPSTF")......Although the government may not have expressly required the degrading of my coverage, the hidden taxes of Obamacare, perhaps combined with either market forces or regulations limiting premium increases, created a strong and foreseeable business reason for insurance companies to abandon or reduce coverage for a variety of preventive care services not specifically required just to save money. Before Obamacare I needed no mandates of coverage, but now my preventive care apparently has been "crowded out" by the government taxes and regulations.
...The loss of coverage for routine preventive care after massive regulations were imposed reminds me how things can go awry when we surrender our freedom and allow the government to place the most important decisions in our lives in the hands of people who just don't care about what becomes of us as much as we do. I was far better off and had more useful health insurance coverage when there were no federal mandates governing my insurance, when I was offered choices of more robust coverage, and when I was the one who decided what forms of routine preventive healthcare I needed.
...Kaiser Family Foundation statistics say premium increases have been modest in recent years, but most people understand that when a box of cereal gets smaller its unit cost goes up even if the price stays the same, and, similarly, health insurance has become far more expensive as coverage has shrunk drastically, even if the Obamacare shell game has in some cases kept much or even all of the increased cost from showing up in premiums.
He asks an important question -- with his old disability insurance situation mirroring what I went through when I bought into Kaiser HMO in my 20s. Now getting in when I was young and healthy is meaningless -- I'm paying for all those who gambled and went without.
Why couldn't health insurance be more like my old disability insurance?A good doctor would first diagnose a cause of an illness, then treat the cause, rather than treat the symptoms and let the disease fester. Similarly, a good reformer of our health insurance system would have first diagnosed the cause of the problems and addressed those causes first.
If all along people could have bought a noncancelable health insurance policy when they were young the way they buy life or disability insurance, take it with them from job-to-job and state-to-state, and obtain the same tax treatment as is provided for employer-sponsored group plans our system would not have been forcing conscientious people who pay their premiums on time to lose insurance when they lose a job or move out-of-state, precisely the problem Obama cited in support of the new law. Instead of creating new laws we could have repealed laws that hampered the marketplace from healing itself. Repealing laws is a lot less expensive than a massive new entitlement; and tax laws written when a great many people never switched employers in an entire career can wreak havoc in our modern economy.
When In America, Do As The Saudi Arabians Do
I love the idea of America as a melting pot.
When my ancestors came here from various Eastern-European shitholes, they were determined to become American.
That meant learning the language and living with American values, like the value of entrepreneurial work. (My great-grandpa engaged in that in less-than-lofty ways, as a self-employed trash-picker, collecting metal scrap to the point he sent my grandpa to Wayne State University -- and med school.)
Well, some immigrants aren't exactly so into the "becoming American" thing. Like this guy.
From the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune, 53-year-old Youssif Z. Omar was at the local high school when he saw his 14-year-old "female family member" was not wearing her hijab (headscarf).
What else was there for Omar to do?
Omar became irate, Stroer said, grabbed the girl "very violently by the hair" and pulled her outside and down a flight of stairs.Omar allegedly slapped the girl's face and pulled her into his car by her hair, Stroer said. Police arrested Omar on suspicion of child abuse, a felony, at 5:10 p.m. Wednesday at his residence in the 1700 block of Timber Creek Drive. He was released from the Boone County Jail after posting a $4,500 bond.
And yes, contrary to what you sometimes hear, Islam, which views women as the possessions of men, requires women to cover themselves:
Islamic law (Sharia) requires women to cover themselves. The practical application in modern Muslim countries varies with a combination of individual and social taste. The Taliban require full burqas (covering everything, including a mesh for the eyes), while the more secular governments of Turkey and Tunisia once banned headscarves in public buildings (the bans have since been lifted following the Islamist ascension).
The head covering is interpreted as a symbol of male domination by most critics and by many Muslim women who fight for the right to dress as they please. In December of 2007, a father in Canada beat his 16-year-old daughter to death for refusing to wear the hijab (headscarf).
Some apologists insist that the veil is not mandated by the religion, although they do not have anything within the sacred texts to counter the passages in which Muhammad instructed its use. In fact, verse 24:60 says that the veil is optional only for unmarried women too old to have children.
CAIR's Jamal Badawi, often held up as a moderate scholar, insists that the hijab is "a command of Allah to Muslim women" and it should be "the duty of the state" to enforce it.
Some women do wear the hijab by choice, but it is impossible to say what percentage, since the pressure to cover one's head can either be subtle or pronounced. In 2011, an imam at a supposedly moderate mosque in Sammamish, Washington claimed that Muslim wives wear the hijab because they want to, but then stated that they may be "punished" if they refuse. In Pakistan, uncovered women are routinely attacked with acid. In Iran, Basij fundamentalists have raped and killed dress code violators.
Clerics, such as Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, have said that unveiled victims of public rape invited their attackers: "If I came across a rape crime - kidnap and violation of honour - I would discipline the man and order that the woman be arrested and jailed for life.' Why would you do this, Rafihi? He says because if she had not left the meat uncovered, the cat wouldn't have snatched it... If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park or in the backyard, without a cover and the cats eat it, is it the fault of the cat or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem."
In responding to a 2014 anti-hijab demonstration by women, an Iranian activist bluntly said that "it is a man's right to benefit from what he loves. When a man forces himself onto a woman because she is "showing off her beauty", this [should not] be considered rape."
Tweeted the link on Sunday night and got this back:
@shoshido
@amyalkon He's Libyan, not Saudi.
My response:
@amyalkon
Header not about where he's from in particular. It happens in pretty much any Muslim majority country. And now, in Missouri!
Full Circle: Now We've Got The Anti Free Speech Movement
Sorry, Mario Savio...
Conor Friedersdorf writes at The Atlantic about the Amherst protests and how protesters were demanding that the college shut down the speech of those whose views they deemed wrong and insensitive.
As if that's not awful enough, they seek to have students punished for not adhering to the language they deem racially sensitive.
Here's one of their statements:
President Martin must issue a statement to the Amherst College community at large that states we do not tolerate the actions of student(s) who posted the "All Lives Matter" posters, and the "Free Speech" posters that stated that "in memoriam of the true victim of the Missouri Protests: Free Speech." Also let the student body know that it was racially insensitive to the students of color on our college campus and beyond who are victim to racial harassment and death threats; alert them that Student Affairs may require them to go through the Disciplinary Process if a formal complaint is filed, and that they will be required to attend extensive training for racial and cultural competency.
Elite college-going Americans who are clueless about what the Constitution says and why. (Free speech for me, but not for thee!)
As Friedersdorf puts it:
Protestors were trying to punish counter-protests with an extensive, compulsory racial-reeducation program. Perhaps the curriculum could be issued in a little red book.
Ducky
Duck goosey links.
What The Campus Thumbsuckers Want
Stephen Moore writes in the New York Post about the "grievance generation" now turning campuses into nursery schools with beer:
I've noticed that these students attend my lectures not to learn anything -- they know everything already -- but hoping that I'll slip up or say something they can label as offensive or that violates their eight-volume campus speech code.When I ask them what they want, a typical response is a "radical transformation of the economy" to reduce income inequality, racism, sexism and, of course, to end climate change. Government will command these changes to achieve this transformation. These are young Stalinists willing to suspend almost every basic freedom and civil liberty for "the greater good."
...I can't help contrasting these campus attitudes with a recent meeting I had with a group of soldiers who had returned from Afghanistan. These brave men and women risked their lives every day. They had real bullets shot at them, not the verbal ones that the campus leftists find so offensive. They have genuine and, in some cases, life-changing injuries -- ringing in the ear, post-traumatic stress syndrome and broken limbs.
...Yes, I admit that these complaints are made of every generation. But this one seems seriously off -- and we made them this way. A generation that has grown up in more affluence and personal freedom than any other in history has been taught to hate the free-enterprise, wealth-creation process that gave them what they want in the first place.
As I keep pointing out, the grievance-hunting is a shortcut to power -- unearned power.
Let's remember that this is a generation that has had a whole lot handed to them, and, through technology, has had easier lives than people at any other time in history.
Work for power? Ruh-roh, Shaggy...that's scary.
No, they'll just mass-complain their way into it.
via @MichaelShermer
Obamacare Is Care In Name Only For The Mentally Ill
I have healthcare; I just can no longer afford to use it for anything more than a doctor visit and a "please don't diagnose me with anything that requires more than, oh, stretching at home."
This story below -- of a housekeeper who started losing it mentally and then could find no psychiatrist to take her Obamacare -- is yet another story of...whoops!...how the "Affordable" Care Act is also the Affordable "Care" Act.
Dana Milbank writes in the WaPo:
One in five of us needs mental-health treatment at any given time, and for those who get good care, the recovery rate is between 60 percent and 80 percent -- higher than in many other medical fields. But only about 40 percent of the people who need treatment get any help, Santopietro said, and those who do "often get bounced around in a system that leaves them feeling misunderstood, stigmatized, brushed aside."Obamacare aimed to improve this woeful system by requiring mental-health parity. But psychiatrists, many of whom stopped taking insurance because of the paltry reimbursements, have yet to rejoin the system. This leaves the public mental-health system (clinics that charge on a sliding scale) overloaded.
"What we had is a major expansion of coverage, at least on paper," said Mark Covall, president of the National Association of Psychiatric Health Systems, a group of 800 mental-health hospitals. But now, "you have insurance but you don't really have access to these services because these services aren't readily available."
Thankfully, a bipartisan group in Congress is trying to fix this. The "Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act," introduced by Rep. (and psychologist) Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) and Rep. (and psychiatric nurse) Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), attempts, among other things, to reinforce community mental-health programs. It has 165 co-sponsors and has already cleared a commerce subcommittee. Similar legislation by Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) attempts to expand the mental-health workforce.
This is what happens when you pass the law to find out what's in it and don't hold the theories behind it up to how people -- doctors -- actually act when you decrease the money they're paid and vastly increase the paperwork.
The Welfare State Destroys The People It's Supposed To Be Helping
As a society, I think we should care for the mentally ill, the seriously disabled, and the elderly and infirm. These are people who have no hope of getting a job.
However, we ruin lives by paying young and able-bodied people to not work. And a big part of the reason we do it is not to serve the people we're paying welfare to but to serve a massive system that employs countless handlers, along with support systems employing researchers and processors and accountants and others.
Brendan O'Neill writes at The Spectator/UK:
The growth of welfarism in recent decades, the replacement of economic vision and the creation of new wealth with a colossal system of state charity and therapy, has terrible consequences. It dents individual ambition, and corrodes social solidarity. When people are invited to rely for their every financial and psychic need on the distant, faceless state, then they're less likely to rely on their own volition and on the support and kindness of neighbours and friends.Welfarism is a classic good intention turned hellish: in the name of helping people it actually weakens both individual pluck and community zest.
...Some people say, 'But welfare benefits is not a huge part of government spending!' This is true. It accounts for somewhere over 20 per cent. Or they say, 'And old people get most of it!' This is also true, and I think it is quite proper: the generational jihadists who moan about pension spending don't seem to realise that old people who have worked or child-reared all their lives deserve society's help in their twilight years, and that this is massively different to giving state largesse to fit, young 25-year-olds.
But my concern with welfarism is not how much it costs the government but the costs it has for community life, public spirit, the self-willed individual. Welfarism should be radically rethought not in order to save a few billion quid but in order to reverse the state's spread into communities and to repair the self-belief and independence of working-class and poorer sections of society.
...Both the right and left are failing on welfarism. The right ought to oppose it in the name of shrinking state interventionism. And the left ought to oppose it for the reason that many working-class institutions did oppose it when it was first being developed in the early twentieth century: because it makes people unproductive, and rips them from the society they live in, and because we should have full employment not paternalistic handouts.
The end result of this right/left failure is acquiescence to the rise of a new feudalism: millions of middle-class people employed by the state to look after millions of poor people. It is a scandal. It is domestic imperialism.
Linkamaid
Childhood memorial links.
Liberté, Equalité, Lingerie
Love this.
How Racial Preferences In Education Ruin The Future Of Minority Students
Stuart Taylor, Jr., explains in The American Spectator:
Only 1 to 2 percent of black college applicants emerge from high school well-qualified academically for (say) the top Ivy League colleges. Therefore, those schools can meet their racial admissions targets only by using large preferences. They bring in black students who are well qualified for moderately elite schools like (say) the University of North Carolina, but not for the Ivies that recruit them. This leaves schools like UNC able to meet their own racial targets only by giving large preferences to black students who are well qualified for less selective schools like (say) the University of Missouri but not for UNC. And so on down the selectivity scale.As a result, experts agree, most black students at even moderately selective schools -- with high school preparation and test scores far below those of their classmates -- rank well below the middle of their college and grad school classes, with between 25% and 50% ranking in the bottom tenth. That's a very bad place to be at any school.
This, in turn, increases these students' isolation and self-segregation from the higher-achieving Asians and whites who flourish in more challenging courses. At least one careful study shows that students are more likely to become friends with peers who are similar in academic accomplishment.
Put yourself in the position of manyHispanic and especially black students (recipients of by far the largest racial preferences) at selective schools, who may work heroically during the first semester only to be lost in many classroom discussions and dismayed by their grades.
As they start to see the gulf between their own performance and that of most of their fellow students, dismay can become despair. They soon realize that no matter how hard they work, they will struggle academically.
It is critical to understand that these are not bad students. They did well in high school and could excel at somewhat less selective universities where they would arrive roughly as well prepared as their classmates.
But due to racial preferences, they find themselves for the first time in their lives competing against classmates who have a huge head start in terms of previous education, academic ability, or both.
Researchers have shown that racial preference recipients develop negative perceptions of their own academic competence, which in turn harms their performance and even their mental health, through "stereotype threat" and other problems. They may come to see themselves as failures in the eyes of their families, their friends, and themselves.
Such mismatched minority students are understandably baffled and often bitter about why this is happening to them. With most other minority students having similar problems, their personal academic struggles take on a collective, racial cast.
via @Mark_J_Perry
Chicago's Gun Control Laws Didn't Save This 9-Year-Old
Nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee was shot after swinging on a swingset in a park near his grandma's house, after putting down the basketball he loved, and then lured to a park where gang members shot him.
Steve Schmadeke, Jeremy Gorner and Rosemary Regina Sobol report in the Chi Trib that gang bangers out for revenge targeted 83-pound Lee, in the wake of a shooting of a mother and her 25-year-old son, who was killed:
As two of the gang members drove off in a black SUV, the one who remained in Dawes Park picked up Tyshawn's basketball and dribbled it a few times before handing it back to him. He then lured the boy into a nearby alley about the same time the SUV re-emerged. As the two looked on from the SUV, the one gang member shot Tyshawn five times, killing him, according to prosecutors and police. The fourth-grader's basketball was found a few feet away.Corey Morgan, 27, the first suspect to be charged in Tyshawn's slaying, was ordered held without bail Friday. It was Morgan whose brother was slain and mother wounded after they left a gang-intervention meeting run by Chicago police Oct. 13.
Tyshawn's mother, Karla Lee, said she grew up with Morgan and was disgusted to learn of his alleged involvement in what authorities have called an execution.
"The feeling? Lord Jesus, it's like I just can't believe it," she told reporters moments after leaving court. "The same guy I grew up with, talked with, played at the park and stuff ... (is) the same one that murdered my baby.
"I'm going to be sick. I did not know that they did him like that," said Lee, who learned details of the slaying for the first time from attending bond court at the Leighton Criminal Court Building.
Prosecutors alleged that Morgan announced his intentions to go after the families of gang rivals after his brother was killed and mother wounded by gunfire.
"He allegedly said since his brother was killed and his mama was shot he was going to kill grandmas, mamas, kids and all," said Assistant State's Attorney George Canellis Jr., supervisor of the office's felony review division.
Horrifying:
One of the bullets nearly severed Tyshawn's right thumb, a wound likely caused when the boy saw the gun and raised his hand to protect himself, Canellis said. A shot to the head was fatal.
Low-Income Taxpayers Benefit Least from Mortgage Deduction
Jason J. Fichtner and Jacob Feldman explain at Mercatus
One of the most commonly cited justifications for the mortgage interest deduction (MID) is the claim that the deduction promotes homeownership among the middle class and supports industries that employ middle-class workers.1 But with 65.2 percent of all tax filers claiming to make less than $50,000, only 9.8 percent of these returns used the mortgage interest deduction. By an economic valuation, the MID is a sizable tax subsidy--one of the largest tax deductions in the code (behind the exclusion of employer contributions for medical insurance premiums and the exclusion of all pension and retirement contributions), which decreased federal revenues by an estimated $69 billion in 2013. While the upper middle class does benefit from the deduction, the vast majority of the dollar benefits go to higher-income taxpayers while little to no dollar benefits go to low-income households that purchase homes.One reason that low-income and many middle-income taxpayers are unlikely to use the MID is that the standard deduction for an individual taxpayer in 2014 is $6,200 ($12,400 if married and filing a joint tax return). Unless annual mortgage interest expenses (combined with any other expenses that are allowed as itemized tax deductions) are greater than the standard deduction, a taxpayer will not opt to itemize deductions.
...The purported public policy role of housing-related tax deductions and credits is to increase homeownership. As currently structured, the MID fails to significantly increase homeownership among its intended beneficiaries, and it encourages greater debt among homeowners. In short, the MID is generally giving a tax break to households that would likely purchase homes anyway and enabling high-income households to buy homes that are roughly 10-20 percent larger than those they would buy otherwise.
Economic inefficiencies will only be eliminated with a full repeal of tax-favorable housing policies in exchange for lower marginal rates, but if tax-favored housing must exist, it should at a minimum promote homeownership among low-income and middle-income households.
Linkee
A fruit to go with Chinese food.
Prehipstoric
Am I a bad person because I love John Denver? ("Take Me Home, Country Roads" came up on Pandora, and I started singing along...uh, scaring my dog.)
"Multiple Layers Of"...Repurposed Mall Food Court Workers
The TSA again shows what they're made of.
A Tweet:
@tedfrank
As you sit on hours of lines in TSA security theater this weekend, chew on this. (Tagging @amyalkon)
He retweeted this:
@foxandfriends
A convicted criminal made it through airport security with a woman's stolen boarding pass
From the AP:
SALT LAKE CITY -- A sex offender with a stolen boarding pass got through airport security in Salt Lake City and checked in at a gate for a flight to California before he was caught earlier this month, authorities have disclosed....He had grabbed a boarding pass that a woman accidently left at a check-in kiosk and used it to get through a Transportation Security Administration checkpoint, said Craig Vargo, chief of airport police.
"He tried to make it seem like it was a mistake, that the boarding pass printed incorrectly, or that he grabbed the wrong boarding pass," Vargo told the Deseret News, a Salt Lake City newspaper that first reported the story.
The only reason he was caught? Not due to the pretend security force in pretend cop uniforms using their "power" to grope and intimidate passengers.
Salata was detained after the woman who had left the pass at the kiosk checked in using a replacement ticket that had been uploaded to her phone, Vargo said.
Our civil liberties are taken from us in a useless security puppet show which pretends every single American is a security risk instead of having trained intelligence officers do probable cause-based policing that looks at actual risks.
Your cupcake in a jar is not a danger. Even your gun is not a danger. It's people who are a danger: people who believe what Islam tells them -- that they get an express pass to salvation by mass-murdering for Allah -- and are willing to act on it.
The vast sums we spend to humiliate some grandma with a diaper -- while getting Americans used to having their civil liberties violated (and training them to be docile in the face of that) -- would be far better spent investigating the few people in America likely to do harm to the rest of us.
Hateful Speech Must Also Remain Free -- Including That Of An Anti-Semitic, Holocaust-Denying French Asshole
As the coddled kittens on college campuses are demanding trigger warnings for "The Great Gatsby" and Greek poetry, and as they are trying to shut down any speech that does not align with their beliefs, speech around the world is getting less and less free.
As I've written before, nobody needs the First Amendment to say, "Have a nice day!" It's the amendment for assholes, and it's a very good and healthy thing we have it.
The ideas in speech that is banned do not go away; they just go underground.
This is why I, as a person who grew up Jewish and got kind of kicked around for it by rotten kids, am all for the free speech of an anti-Semitic French asshole comedian, and I think it's absolutely disgusting that he's been sentenced to jail in Belgium.
Brendan O'Neill, at Spiked, thinks as I do:
It's the 21st century and Europe is meant to be an open, enlightened continent, and yet a man has just been sentenced to jail -- actual jail -- for something that he said. Will there be uproar? It's unlikely. For the man is Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, the French comedian, and what he says -- that Jews are scoundrels and the Holocaust is a fiction -- is deeply unpleasant. Yet if we're serious about freedom of speech, if we are truly committed to ensuring everyone has the liberty to think and say whatever they please, then the jailing of Dieudonné should outrage us as much as the attempts to shut down Charlie Hebdo or the jailing of a Saudi blogger for ridiculing religious belief. We should be saying 'Je Suis Dieudonné'.Due to the regimen of hate-speech laws in 21st-century Europe -- which police and punish everything from Holocaust denial to Christian denunciations of homosexuality -- Dieudonné has been having run-ins with the law for years. In 2009, a French court fined him €10,000 for inviting a Holocaust denier on stage during a gig. In March this year, a French court gave him a two-month suspended prison sentence for saying he sympathised with the attack on Charlie Hebdo and with the anti-Semite who murdered Jews at a Parisian supermarket a few days later. Now, this week, a Belgian court has given him an actual prison sentence: a court in Liège found him guilty of incitement to hatred for making anti-Semitic comments during a recent show and condemned him to two months in jail.
In all these cases, Dieudonné has been punished simply for thinking and saying certain things. This is thought-policing. It's a PC, spat-and-polished version of the Inquisition, which was likewise in the business of raining punishment upon those who said things the authorities considered wicked. To fine or imprison people for expressing their beliefs is always a scandal, regardless of whether we like or hate their beliefs. Dieudonné really believes the Holocaust is a myth, as much as a Christian fundamentalist believes that people who have gay sex will go to hell or American liberals believe Hillary Clinton will make a good president. He is wrong, massively, poisonously so; but then, so are those Christians about gays and those liberals about Hillary. If every person who says wrong, malicious or stupid things were carted off to jail, Europe's streets would be emptied overnight.
O'Neill's bottom line is exactly right:
All hate-speech laws should be scrapped. Dieudonné should be freed. And a continent whose governments argue against the imprisonment of bloggers in Saudi Arabia while jailing comedians at home needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror.
via @adamkissel
Phew! The Firefighter Has A Vagina! That Will Keep Us So Much Safer In A Fire!
In New York City, a female firefighter who was allowed to graduate the academy, despite failing physical tests, is on medical leave -- 10 days into the job.
And no, she didn't get injured rushing into a burning building. She was checking some stuff on the truck.
Susan Edelman writes in The New York Post:
Probationary firefighter Choeurlyne Doirin-Holder injured herself Monday while conducting a routine check of equipment at Queens' Engine 308 in South Richmond Hill. Getting off the truck, Doirin-Holder missed a step and landed on her left foot, suffering a fracture, sources said.It was her second shift after a transfer from Engine 301. In training for a hazmat assignment, officers found her struggling to perform the required tasks.
Firefighters called the tripping incident embarrassing -- and alarming.
"If you're going to get hurt in the firehouse checking a rig, what would happen at a fire?" an insider asked.
Check out her training history:
But Doirin-Holder's competence was questioned by sources familiar with her training. They said academy instructors let her pass the Functional Skills Test, a rigorous obstacle course of job-related tasks, even though she had failed to complete it in the required 17 minutes and 50 seconds or under.In addition, when she failed to finish a 1.5-mile run in 12 minutes or less -- even after the course was shortened -- she was allowed to demonstrate aerobic capacity on a StairMaster machine under watered-down requirements enacted by FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro.
Doirin-Holder, who turns 40 this month, is one of 282 "priority hires" passed over in 1999 and 2000. Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis ordered they must get preference as victims of past discrimination against minorities.
It was Doirin-Holder's third attempt to pass the academy. She failed midway through an academy class in 2013 and returned to her former job as an EMT. Two other female priority hires in that class did well.
I don't care if you're black, white, spotted, male, or female. What I care about is whether you can pass the required tests and work as a teammate with your fellow firefighters.
But even if you are a team player and the nicest person in the world, if you aren't strong enough and fit enough to have their back, you endanger your fellow firefighters -- and any person you're supposed to be rescuing in a fire.
Blech Friday
The idea of going to a store today...well, I'd rather pop out my eyeball and feed it to my dog.
Dealz!! (Without Leaving Your Chair!)
Today's Deals
Search Amy's Amazon
And please consider "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" -- only $11ish at Amazon. Along with positive reviews in the WSJ and other publications, Library Journal gave the book a starred review: "Verdict: Solid psychology and a wealth of helpful knowledge and rapier wit fill these pages. Highly recommended." Orders of the book (new only, not used!) help support my writing, blogging, radio hosting, and my answering questions that won't make the column.
Government Protecting Us From Dangerous Criminals: Bubbies Busted For Mahjong Gambling Den At Florida Condo
Hilarious.
Anne Cohen writes at Forward.com:
Quiet Jewish mahjong group or illicit gambling den?That is now a very real question for Lee Delnick, Bernice Diamond, Helen Greenspan and Zelda King (ages 87 to 95) after their weekly game of mahjong was interrupted by a police raid.
The women were told to pack up their dominos and leave the Escondido Condominium clubhouse in Altamonte Springs, Florida, where they have gathered regularly for some time, the Times of Israel reported. The charge? Violating a local ordinance prohibiting playing mahjong for money.
Apparently, an anonymous Escondido snitch (call him the busybody in Building 11) tipped off the authorities to the ladies' shady activities.
The four women did as they were told -- begrudgingly. "This is ridiculous," King complained. "We haven't played in the clubhouse for weeks! We have to go to each other's homes to play and not everyone lives in Escondido."
"It is an international game and we are being crucified!" she added.
King has a good reason to be outraged. She explained to the Florida Jewish News that her neurologist has told her mahjong is a good way to "delay and possibly prevent dementia."
Apparently, it is not actually illegal because the ladies have a $4 limit, and the law states:
"Certain penny-ante games are not crimes; 'Penny-ante game' means a game or series of games of poker, pinochle, bridge, rummy, canasta, hearts, dominoes, or mahjong in which the winnings of any player in a single round, hand, or game do not exceed $10 in value."
Also, common areas of a condo, etc., count as a dwelling.
And finally, it's legal because "the ladies are well over 18."
Yay, cops! I'm sure these ladies are a danger to someone -- like if they leave their cane sticking out across the floor in the grocery store.
via @CFChabris
On An Airplane, My Seat Is Not Partially Your Seat Just Because You're Large
There's yet another story out there of a man who engaged in seat spillage on a plane -- spilling over into the seat of the person next to him.
While American Airlines wasn't wise in initially trying to yank him off the plane, the man, naturally, was indignant that he not be allowed to just have his body take over part of a seat another person has paid for. Free of charge, natch!
From News.com.au:
Chris Shelley claims he was booted off an American Airlines flight with no explanation other than "anyone two inches over the seat can't sit on the aircraft."The American engineer said: "The worst part was being treated as if I was some sort of criminal. Not only a criminal, but a fat criminal."
Chris, who flies more than 100,000 miles a year, was sat on board a flight from Dallas to Orange County on Friday when an elderly petite woman sat in the aisle seat next to him.
He said: "She was clearly not particularly happy, got up and left and went towards the front of the aircraft."The retired marine said he thought nothing of it until "a young gentleman in a vest with an American Airlines emblem on it turns to me and says: 'Sir! You need to take your things and deplane immediately. Come with me."
The mortified passenger said he was "in shock" when the employee told him the woman had complained he was too big for his seat.
He said: "They told me anyone over two inches (five centimetres) in the seat can't sit on the aircraft."
They ended up finding him another seat after he begged to stay on the plane.
Guess what: You have no right to any inches of my seat area. You want or need to take up more than one seat? Don't expect to get it for free.
I write about this in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck":
The "No Grazing in Others' Seat Space" rule also applies if you've got 200 or so extra pounds you keep meaning to lose. If you take up two seats, buy two--or at least offer the passenger next to you a couple hundred dollars for colonizing half of theirs.
As commenter skirabbit said on FlyerTalk:
The airline industry needs to do something about overweight people. I am not sure why it is acceptable to tell someone their luggage weighs too much but there is such a taboo around telling people they are too fat to fit into an economy class seat. I personally cannot stand when some overweight person spills over into my seat or my space. I am not sure why I should be polite or accept that I have to share my space with someone who is obese.Just like with luggage weight, hand luggage size, there should be a rule that if you do not fit into your space you need to pay for a bigger seat e.g. in first or two seats. Whilst I feel sorry for Mr Shelly and his weight problem - where is his concern for his fellow travellers?
There's a Spanish proverb I learned from the late psychologist Nathaniel Branden: "Take what you need, but pay for it."
Obama's Naivete On ISIS
The President seems to be utterly clueless about behavioral economics.
Shadi Hamid writes in The Atlantic:
Obama hypothesized that if he were "an advisor to ISIS," he would have released rather than killed hostages like Foley, with notes pinned to their chests no less, saying "stay out of here." It is a self-evident banality that very few American politicians take seriously: Understand your enemy in order to defeat him. Obama should be lauded for being both able and willing to imagine himself in diverse political contexts, but the statement was remarkably naive, suggesting a readiness to apply a straightforward "rational actor" lens that doesn't necessarily apply in the fog of jihadist war. This role as analyst in chief is one the president has warmed to. He regularly insists, for example, that world leaders are acting against their own rational self-interest, whether it be Vladimir Putin, with his "reckless" interventions in Ukraine and Syria, or the Israelis, for failing to support an Iranian nuclear deal that Obama thinks will make them safer. As for the Iranians, once the nuclear deal was struck, the hope, sometimes explicit but always somewhere underneath the surface, was that Iran would "moderate" and be induced to become a constructive partner in the resolution of regional conflict. Being "constructive" was in their interest, after all, just as it was in America's, and just as it was in Russia's.
Behavioral economics has shown that we are driven by cognitive biases and don't just act with the cool rationality economists of yore thought drove us. A good book to read on this is Thinking, Fast and Slow
Why people--and organizations--do what they do is one of the most fascinating (and sometimes frightening) questions considered by political scientists. There are elaborate, formal models of rational-choice theory, in which human behavior is consistent, predictable, and straightforward, yet we know, from our own lives, that we constantly act against our own interests. Oftentimes, we know we're acting against our own interests but plod along anyway, oblivious to the costs or perhaps taking pleasure in that feeling of weightlessness and abandon that often accompanies irrational decisions....Regardless of what the U.S. and its allies do, ISIS will prove an unusually challenging foe. And this is where religion and particularly apocalyptic religion matter. Take, for example, the ISIS leader Abu Muhammad al-Adnani's September 2014 statement, in which he addresses the West directly, saying, "being killed ... is a victory. This is where the secret lies. You fight a people who can never be defeated. They either gain victory or are killed. And O crusaders, you are losers in both outcomes."
In Islam, a person who dies committing violence for Islam gets an express pass to salvation and special rewards once he's there.
So, live or die, it's a win-win for those seeking to force the Dark Ages on the rest of us.
Pass The Yams And The Rude Remarks, Please
Check out my appearance on KPCC talking about handling Thanksgiving rudeness -- and proactively getting in the right spirit. Just about 10 minutes of tips to make your Thanksgiving thankier and less contentious.
Much of this handling is done pre-emptively, as I point out on the episode. Here's the link to both the episode and some printed thoughts.
I'll give extra thanks if you buy my manners advice book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck." It's science-based and funny.
And whoopee...the Kindle of my book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society
Gobble, Gobble
Turkeylinks.
Smart Highways Instead Of A Stupid "High-Speed" Train
Politicians in California are effectively putting money into horseshoes. Billions upon billions of dollars.
In the LA Times, UCSB econ prof Dick Startz explains that "there's a better, cheaper, more California solution to moving people long distances: smart highways":
For an estimated $2 billion, we can add smart lanes to Interstate 5 in both directions between Los Angeles and San Francisco. For those keeping track, that's 32 times less costly [than trains]. And much of the necessary technology is being developed here in California. In contrast, while future high-speed trains might be built in the United States, the California High-Speed Rail Authority has asked for and received a waiver of the "Buy America" requirements for the first prototype trains.High-speed rail might be a good solution if we had a flat, unoccupied plot running from Los Angeles to San Francisco with no mountains, valleys and expensive land to purchase in the way. Obviously, we don't. And even an ideal landscape wouldn't solve the "last mile" problem -- getting to and from the central rail stations. With rail, if you live far from the railhead (which almost everyone does), you need to drive through traffic to the central station, find a place to park and arrange transportation at the other end. But high-tech highways can have many entrances and exits and link up with the existing highway system.
In theory, modern railways have a speed advantage over modern highways. Not only would the bullet train travel faster than existing autos, it would also travel faster than computer-driven cars along certain stretches, notably from Los Angeles to San Jose, with a promised top speed of 220 mph. Along other stretches, however, including San Francisco to San Jose and Anaheim to Los Angeles, the train's anticipated speed will be 110 mph. We have regular cars that can beat that now. Granted, we don't allow cars to reach their top speeds due to safety concerns. But on a high-tech highway, computer-driven cars would be able to achieve high speeds routinely and safely.
...The high-tech highway offers yet another plus that's not often mentioned: Unlike rail, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution run by a monopoly. Once highway lanes are added and standards are established for just how smart a vehicle has to be, anyone can go into the smart highway transit business. There will be small-business opportunities for renting and "driving" smart autos, smart vans, smart limos and smart buses. How about a 120-mph luxury bus trip with no driver but with a steward serving drinks and snacks? The Dutch have already built a prototype 23-passenger, electric-powered limo with cruising speeds of 160 mph.
The use of high-tech highways need not be limited to driverless vehicles. Current technology is very close to allowing high-speed cars and buses with just enough smarts (such as smart cruise control with lane-guidance technology) to "platoon" in reserved lanes. Packing vehicles tightly together as they travel would cut wind resistance enough to overcome energy efficiency issues, enabling at least some car models in current use to cruise at 120 mph.
Princeton Group Rises Up Against Politically Correct Intimidation On Campus
Posted at NRO: "The Princeton Open Campus Coalition is a student group at Princeton University formed to push back against the recent wave of politically correct suppression of open academic discourse on campus."
Here's an excerpt from their letter to Princeton President Eisgruber:
We oppose efforts to purge (and literally paint over) recognitions of President Woodrow Wilson's achievements, including Wilson College, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and his mural in Wilcox Dining Hall. As you have noted, Wilson, like all other historical figures, has a mixed legacy. It is not for his contemptible racism, but for his contributions as president of both Princeton and the United States that we honor Wilson. Moreover, if we cease honoring flawed individuals, there will be no names adorning our buildings, no statues decorating our courtyards, and no biographies capable of inspiring future generations.We worry that the proposed distribution requirement will contribute to the politicization of the university and facilitate groupthink. However, we, too, are concerned about diversity in the classroom and offer our own solution to this problem. While we do not wish to impose additional distribution requirements on students for fear of stifling academic exploration, we believe that all students should be encouraged to take courses taught by professors who will challenge their preconceived mindsets. To this end, the university should make every effort to attract outstanding faculty representing a wider range of viewpoints -- even controversial viewpoints -- across all departments. Princeton needs more Peter Singers, more Cornel Wests, and more Robert Georges.
Similarly, we believe that requiring cultural competency training for faculty threatens to impose orthodoxies on issues about which people of good faith often disagree. As Professor Sergiu Klainerman has observed, it reeks of the reeducation programs to which people in his native Romania were subjected under Communist rule.
We firmly believe that there should be no space at a university in which any member of the community, student or faculty, is "safe" from having his or her most cherished and even identity-forming values challenged. It is the very mission of the university to seek truth by subjecting all beliefs to critical, rational scrutiny. While students with a shared interest in studying certain cultures are certainly welcome to live together, we reject university-sponsored separatism in housing. We are all members of the Princeton community. We denounce the notion that our basic interactions with each other should be defined by demographic traits.
Okay, So Veterans Left To Rot Without Proper Healthcare -- Here's $142 Million In Bonuses!
Donovan Slack and Bill Theobald write in USA Today:
WASHINGTON - The Department of Veterans Affairs doled out more than $142 million in bonuses to executives and employees for performance in 2014 even as scandals over veterans' health care and other issues racked the agency.Among the recipients were claims processors in a Philadelphia benefits office that investigators dubbed the worst in the country last year. They received $300 to $900 each. Managers in Tomah, Wis., got $1,000 to $4,000, even though they oversaw the over-prescription of opiates to veterans - one of whom died.
The VA also rewarded executives who managed construction of a facility in Denver, a disastrous project years overdue and more than $1 billion over budget. They took home $4,000 to $8,000 each. And in St. Cloud, Minn., where an internal investigation report last year outlined mismanagement that led to mass resignations of health care providers, the chief of staff cited by investigators received a performance bonus of almost $4,000.
...-- In Arizona, Sandra Flint, now-former director of the Phoenix regional VA benefits office, received a bonus of $8,348. Irate veterans confronted Flint at a public forum in August 2014 over a backlog of about 8,200 pending benefit claims. Included were 3,667 pending longer than 125 days. A spokeswoman at the office could not be reached for comment.
Gotta love government. In real life, you get bonuses for doing exemplary work.
In government, they give you money just for being alive and breathing.
Which -- whoopsy! -- is more than we can say about some of the veterans who were "helped" by people working for the VA.
via @reasonpolicy
John McWhorter Talks To Glenn Loury On What Campus Protesters Get Wrong
From Bloggingheads.tv:
via @SteveStuWill
Plinky
Chopsticks-playing links.
Paris Attacks Really Caused By "Magical Shape-Shifting Jews"
Instead of blaming the Muslims who slaughtered hordes of unarmed people who were enjoying meals or a concert with their friends, the suburban Paris Muslims Daily Beast reporter Dana Kennedy interviewed blamed...who else...the jooos!
But -- no less -- magical, shape-shifting Jews!
For the record, I'm a post-Jewish atheist, but I still like to shape-shift for a little extra exercise.
It's actually pretty invigorating -- except for when I shape-shift into a lady in a burka and get mistaken for covered porch furniture.
Stuart Winer explains in the Times of Israel:
The belief that Jews have supernatural abilities to carry out their wicked plans is not uncommon in the Middle East.In 2013 during a speech to religious students, Mehdi Taeb, who headed a think tank and was considered close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, said that Jews are powerful sorcerers who have used their abilities to attack Iran. He noted that while "the Jews" had yet to unleash their full powers, their abilities were negated after they tried to use magic to interfere with the Iranian elections of 2008 and 2009.
And here's a satire site with a rather hilarious "explanation" of how we magical Jews do it.
The Greens And Some Inconvenient Truths
Joshua S. Goldstein and Steven Pinker write in the Bo Globe about some inconvenient truths for the green movement:
The first is that, until now, fossil fuels have been good for humanity. The industrial revolution doubled life expectancy in developed countries while multiplying prosperity twentyfold. As industrialization spreads to the developing world, billions of people are rising out of poverty in their turn -- affording more food, living longer and healthier lives, becoming better educated, and having fewer babies -- thanks to cheap fossil fuels. In poor countries like India, citizens want reliable electricity to power these improvements, and stand ready to vote out any government that fails to deliver it. When American environmentalists tell the world to stop burning fossil fuels, they need to give Indians an alternative that delivers the prosperity they demand and deserve.That brings us to the second inconvenient truth: Nuclear power is the world's most abundant and scalable carbon-free energy source. In today's world, every nuclear plant that is not built is a fossil-fuel plant that does get built, which in most of the world means coal. Yet the use of nuclear power has been stagnant or even contracting.
Nuclear power presses a number of psychological buttons -- fear of poisoning, ease of imagining catastrophes, distrust of the unfamiliar and the man-made -- and so is held to an irrationally higher standard than fossils. When a coal mine disaster kills dozens, or a deep-water oil leak despoils vast seas, nobody shuts down the coal or oil industries. Yet the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant accident in Japan, which killed nobody, led Germany to shut down its nuclear plants and quietly replace them with dirty coal. Even France -- which gets three quarters of its electricity from nuclear power and has never had an accident -- now plans to shut down many plants under pressure from environmentalists.
Ideology often leads to idiocy, like our "environmentalist" LA mayor's "road diet" initiative. Yes, he's trying to put LA on a diet from roads, meaning that he's shutting off traffic lanes and turning them into bike lanes...which means that he's turning LA into more of a traffic hell than it already is.
Now, I got around New York on my bike. That's because with 20 blocks as a mile, it would have been six miles for me to ride all the way from downtown (Canal Street) to 100th Street. LA is far more vast and spread out. What we need to be on a diet from is this particular mayor.
The Insult Of Overprotecting Minority Students
Ralph Ellison saw it that way.
The thing is, claiming to be insulted or "wounded" by words is now a way to unearned power over others. Overprotection is the best pathway to grievance for all the grievance hunters -- who are really power-seekers with a PC veneer.
About Ellison's take, NYU history and education prof Jonathan Zimmerman writes in the LA Times:
In a 1967 interview, the African American novelist Ralph Ellison denounced the commonplace idea that blacks had been permanently "damaged" by slavery, segregation and institutional racism. Instead, Ellison insisted, blacks' survival in the face of discrimination and hatred demonstrated their strength and character."Any people who could endure all of that brutalization and keep together, who could undergo such dismemberment and resuscitate itself ... is obviously more than the sum of its brutalization," Ellison said. "I am not denying the negative things which have happened to us and which continue to happen, but I am compelled to reject all condescending, narrowly paternalistic interpretations of Negro American life and personality from whatever quarters they come, whether white or Negro."
Ellison would be appalled by our current moment on American campuses, where the damage thesis has returned with a vengeance. From Yale University and Ithaca College to the University of Missouri and Claremont McKenna College, black students and their allies are claiming that racist behavior -- and administrators' weak response to it -- are harming minorities' psychological health. They insist that overtly racist comments as well as "microaggressions" -- smaller, day-to-day slights -- take a psychic toll.
"I have friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals, and who are having breakdowns," wrote one student at Yale, where a professor's email about Halloween costumes triggered protests.
...If we let ourselves be governed by feelings, we'll go down a rabbit hole of competing grievances and recriminations. The question will no longer be who is right or wrong or what's most worth rectifying -- in any objective, demonstrable sense -- but who is experiencing the most pain and trauma.
In the process, we'll demean minority students in the name of protection. As Ralph Ellison reminded us nearly half a century ago, the idea of damaged black minds condescends to people who are much stronger than the accumulated slights they have suffered. I support the minority students standing up to the racism that still surrounds them. But I won't patronize them by "validating" everything they say simply because they feel it. Neither should you.
Asset Forfeiture: Federal Agents Are Bigger Thieves Than Burglars
Federal agents took more money and stuff from Americans in 2014 than burglars did, writes Bonnie Kristian at Rare.us.
The feds took $4.5 billion. Burglars only made off with $3.9 billion.
As recently as 2008 it was "just" $1.5 billion, and there's compelling evidence that law enforcement agencies use this license to bolster their budgets in lean years....This comparison is even more appalling when you consider that many people whose money or stuff is taken through civil asset forfeiture are never charged or convicted with any crime.
That's because it essentially allows a police officer who finds you "suspicious" to just take your stuff.
Once your property has been confiscated, the burden of proof is on you, not the police, to show that you didn't get it from any criminal activity. Even if you personally are cleared of all charges, that may not matter. As the Philadelphia City Paper reports, "Technically, it's the property--not its owner--that's being accused of criminality, which means the property can be subject to forfeiture whether or not its owner is ever convicted of a crime."
In other words, they don't have to charge you. They don't have to present any evidence of illegal activity. In fact, you have no right to a lawyer and won't get a day in court. In some jurisdictions, you actually have to pay thousands of dollars just to be able to contest the seizure.
Linkation
Like a staycation, but with links.
"This Is The Business We've Chosen"
Dogman Roth.
Where Is The Joy In The Islamic Death Squad Business?
Joyce Carol Oates, tweet-slapped: 
Government-Creep: You Are A Criminal In So Many Ways
Jarret Skorup and Geneva Ruppert write at Michigan Capitol Confidential about what I just named government-creep -- how people can be prosecuted for breaking ridiculous laws they don't know exist:
Lisa Snyder's neighbors had children and early starts at work. She was happy to watch their kids until the school bus arrived in the morning -- until she was threatened with penalties for running an unlicensed child care service.Alan Taylor needed more parking at his growing business and thought he had received all the proper permits to expand the lot on his property. But the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality successfully prosecuted him for jeopardizing a wetland he didn't know existed.
Kenneth Schumacher got rid of some scrap tires at what turned out to be an unlicensed disposal facility. Though he didn't intend to break the law, he was sentenced to 270 days in jail and a fine of $10,000.
Michigan has over 3,000 felonies and misdemeanors on the books -- far more than the average resident could possibly remember. Obvious crimes, like murder or theft, make up some of these statutes, but more of them cover actions such as "transporting Christmas trees without a manifest" or burning grass clippings or leaves in certain areas.
These laws are especially dangerous to ordinary people because 26 percent of Michigan's felonies and 59 percent of its misdemeanors don't specify criminal intent. This means that people who never intended to break the law may be (and often are) prosecuted for crimes they had no idea they committed.
That's "mens rea" -- having a "guilty mind"; an intent to commit a crime -- which has been removed from consideration.
It's serious stuff when a man goes to jail -- is put in a cage -- and fined, and over disposing scrap tires a facility he had no idea was unlicensed. (What, are we supposed to check a business's paperwork when we patronize it? So, every time you go to 7-Eleven, Target, a bike shop on the boulevard?)
These laws can be used to squash speech and in other nefarious ways (beyond their mere nefarious existence).
More from the piece on possible reforms -- and how sick that they are needed:
To fix this problem, the Michigan Legislature is considering adding intent provisions to laws that currently lack one, with two bills before the Senate Judiciary Committee. House Bill 4713 passed the state House unanimously and would establish that if a law does not indicate a "culpable mental state" the prosecution must show that a person violated a law "purposely, knowingly or recklessly." This bill exempts certain sections of Michigan code.Senate Bill 20 is similar, but would only apply to future laws. Because there are so many laws and regulations already, proponents of criminal intent reform prefer a bill that is strong going forward but also applies to laws on the books. Neither of these bills eliminates crimes; they merely clarify the standard of intent needed in a prosecution.
These reforms would not allow a Michigander to get out of a larceny charge by claiming ignorance of the law, but they would make it less likely for him to do jail time for catching a fish he didn't realize was protected, or being smacked with hefty fines for failing to properly display a camping license on his tent.
The prohibitions against operating "day care" in one's home -- or watching one's neighbors' kids so mom can get off to work on time -- mainly hurt poor women who are struggling to make ends meet without going on public assistance. (They aren't so good for middle-class women, either.)
Harvey Silverglate's book on how we're all criminals now: Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.
via @instapundit
The "Sensitivity" Double Standard On Campuses
I'm uncomfortable with the thought of Joe Biden occupying any position any more powerful than, say, emcee of a golf club roast.
However, at the coffee shop on Saturday, I spent about a half an hour talking with (and listening to) Marie, who'd love to see Biden as President, and has a number of views on a number of issues that are on the opposing end of mine.
Still, she's a thoughtful person, so I listened to what she had to say -- some of which made me uncomfortable; some of which made me cringe down into my organs. (Mainly the Biden-as-President portion of the conversation.)
Being uncomfortable is okay. It's even good. I'm all for it -- and think it's an essential part of gaining an education. In college and in life.
Alan Dershowitz writes in the NY Daily News about the "safe spaces" college students are demanding -- safe from speech that makes them uncomfortable:
However, the "safe spaces" envisioned by these protesters seem to matter only when the interests of those who share their political persuasions are affected.There has been conspicuously little attention paid to incidents of anti-Semitism reported, for example, at Hunter College, where students supportive of Israel were chased away from a rally blaming high tuition fees on "Zionist administrators," and where protestors shouted "Zionists out of CUNY" (the City University of New York), by which they meant Jews.
Where are the cries for safe spaces for Jewish students faced with such blatant intimidation?
Instead, "safe spaces" rhetoric has been used by students to insulate themselves from ideas that they deem offensive. Last spring at Columbia, the Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board objected to the inclusion of material by the Roman Poet Ovid on the ground that "like so many texts in the Western Canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom." Last month, an event hosted by a student-group at Williams College called Uncomfortable Learning, was cancelled due to security concerns when protestors subjected organizers to severe online abuse.
...The hypocrisy of protestors demanding protection from potentially offensive ideas while simultaneously insulting and harassing people who fail to demonstrate adequate levels of enthusiasm for their agenda should be obvious to all. But too few university administrators and faculty call out these hypocritical students for their double standard.
Let's be clear: All students should be made to feel physically safe on campus. They should also be protected from verbal abuse. Colleges should attempt to foster an inclusive and tolerant environment that allows individuals of varied backgrounds to feel comfortable discussing a wide range of intellectual, social and political topics.
...Students subjected to abuse or intimidation should be offered support services, and that may even entail setting aside "safe spaces" where they can find peace and quiet, access peer support groups and counseling services.
However, such safe spaces must not be extended to campuses as a whole. Classrooms in particular must not become intellectually sterile environments, where ideas are subjected to censorship based on the fact that they make some students feel uncomfortable. To the contrary, universities should foster discussions of controversial ideas, subversive ideas, ideas that provoke and challenge students to question their beliefs and preconceptions. That process is central to learning and intellectual progress more generally. Safe spaces rhetoric must not be allowed to undermine it.
via @SteveStuWill
Why Syrian Refugees Are Not Like Jewish Refugees in World War II
Joel B. Pollak writes at Breitbart about the claim that the Syrian refugees are like the Jewish refugees from World War II. He explains why the Jewish and Syrian crises -- and refugees -- have little in common. A few examples:
1. Jews were not a terror threat; there is evidence terrorists are hiding among Syrian refugees. Jewish refugees were not a threat to the countries where they sought asylum. In the early 1920s, fears of communist activism among Jewish immigrants had helped drive restrictive immigration laws, but that threat-and the over-reaction to it-had long passed. In contrast, at least one, and as many as three, of the terrorists in the recent Paris attacks allegedly hid among Syrian refugees, prompting legitimate fears.2. Jews were singled out for persecution by the Nazis, not (initially) fleeing an ongoing war. If anyone has a unique moral claim that parallels the Jews of Europe, it is the Syrian Christians, Iraqi Yazidis, and other minorities being persecuted by radical Islamist forces in the Middle East. But that is not true of the broader wave of Syrian refugees. That is not to blame them for the war, but it does suggest there is a good moral case for distinguishing among refugees, rather than admitting all who wish to come.
3. Jews had nowhere to go; Syrian refugees should have many places to go. When Nazi Germany began persecuting Jews, the Jewish population had few-and dwindling-alternatives. The State of Israel did not exist, and Britain, to appease Arab leaders, tried to keep Jewish refugees out of Palestine. Syrian refugees, however, theoretically have many options. There are 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, for example; some, unconscionably, are refusing so far to admit any refugees.
4. Opposition to Jewish refugees was "racial"; opposition to Syrian refugees is based on security concerns. One of the main reasons immigration laws restricted Jewish entry into the U.S. was to promote the racial, i.e. genetic, superiority of the national "stock." (Such eugenicist ideas were widespread, far beyond Nazi Germany.) In contrast, resistance to Syrian refugees has to do with fear of terrorism (see above), and valid concerns about importing radical Islam (a severe problem among Somali refugees).
Slurpee
Eyefreezylinks.
Suppression Of Free Speech In Academia Is Out Of Control
Nat Hentoff, not exactly a Tea Party member, has a piece at Cato Institute about the latest in hostility to the exercise of free speech on American college campuses. There's a disturbing trend:
MU's student body vice president later tried to justify the students' self-imposed restrictions on the press during an interview on MSNBC. She suggested that the First Amendment "creates a hostile and unsafe learning environment."
via @instapundit
No More Yoga For You, Non-Hindus! It's "Cultural Appropriation"
Aedan Helmer writes in the Ottawa Sun that a free campus yoga class was recently cancelled:
Student leaders have pulled the mat out from 60 University of Ottawa students, ending a free on-campus yoga class over fears the teachings could be seen as a form of "cultural appropriation."Jennifer Scharf, who has been offering free weekly yoga instruction to students since 2008, says she was shocked when told in September the program would be suspended, and saddened when she learned of the reasoning.
Staff at the Centre for Students with Disabilities believe that "while yoga is a really great idea and accessible and great for students ... there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice," according to an email from the centre.
...The centre goes on to say, "Yoga has been under a lot of controversy lately due to how it is being practiced," and which cultures those practices "are being taken from."
The centre official argues since many of those cultures "have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy ... we need to be mindful of this and how we express ourselves while practising yoga."
The concept of cultural appropriation is normally applied when a dominant culture borrows symbols of a marginalized culture for dubious reasons -- such as the fad of hipsters donning indigenous headdresses as a fashion statement, without any regard to cultural significance or stereotype.
But Scharf, a yoga teacher with the downtown Rama Lotus Centre, said the concept does not apply in this case, arguing the complaint that killed the program came instead from a "social justice warrior" with "fainting heart ideologies" in search of a cause celebre.
"People are just looking for a reason to be offended by anything they can find," said Scharf.
This is the new way people become special -- by being offended.
And I guess for some, it makes a lot of sense.
Why put in all that sweat and hard work to accomplish something in the world when you can be somebody -- make people notice you, make them stop whatever they're doing -- simply by saying you're offended?
via @JonHaidt
Immigration Minus Assimilation Means Conflict
Daniel J. Flynn writes at The American Spectator that terrorists are often on the dole before they murder:
The ex-wife of Ibrahim Abdeslam, who blew himself up in last Friday's Paris attacks, says he worked one whole day during their two-year marriage. Instead of labor, he slept during business hours, watched DVDs, and smoked "alarming" amounts of marijuana every day while blaring Arabic rap music. She told the Daily Mail, "We lived on unemployment benefit which was only €1,000 a month between us so we worried a lot about money."...Before he blew himself up outside a French soccer stadium, Bilal Hadfi lived in state-subsidized housing. Like so many, he hated his landlord. His Facebook page shows him drinking, raising his middle finger, and aiming a firearm. He failed his school exams and confessed an addiction to video games. He repeatedly posted the message (pardon my French) "Nique de police."
...Many of the terrorists displayed more decadence than devotion. Boulahcen's brother maintains she never read the Koran. The headmaster at Hadfi's Belgium school says he "wasn't especially religious." Abdeslam's wife notes that he refused to go to mosque.
...Open wallets as much as open borders doom Europe. Harboring shiftless populations alienated from the surrounding culture by religion asks for trouble. Give them blank checks and watch them fill up the blank spaces of indolence with destruction. We hate our benefactors.
The Islamists understand the tolerance and multiculturalism of the West as weaknesses to exploit rather than kindnesses to reciprocate. They pay back the dole with gunfire. Ahmed Almuhamed, saved off a sinking refugee boat by the Greeks, returned the favor by shooting up a packed concert hall. The English language lacks a word describing such off-the-charts ingratitude. Perhaps the French now have one. Almuhameditude?
"The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism," Samuel Huntington concluded two decades ago in The Clash of Civilizations. "It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.
UPDATE: Incredible photo, via @LewRockwell -- payday at a Paris welfare office ("Photo taken in front of Social Security Family Benefits Office in Rosny-sous-Bois" -- which is actually a suburb of Paris).
Twinkie
Cream-filled links in last-forever cake.
Columbia Undergrad "Traumatized" By Reading Books About White People
Literature is about the human condition, not the condition of people exactly like you.
I grew up reading a laundry basket of books a week -- about white people, black people, people in Russia, people who exist only in a fantasy world.
What they all had in common were emotions and morality or lack of morality that we see in humans -- of all colors, nationalities, etc.
This simple (and rather obvious) notion escaped Nissy Aya, a young woman who claims she's taken five years to get through Columbia undergrad because she was so "traumatized" by having to read books about white people.
The reality is, much of modern civilization was created by men and much by white men.
This is a simple fact, and those who try to elevate the random woman or person "of color" to take a place within the hordes of inventors and explorers and others who were white and male do not change that.
And you have to laugh a little at kids privileged enough to attend Columbia who don't devote every minute to studying and making something out of themselves and the education they are offered while there. Erin Mizraki writes at the Columbia Daily Spectator:
"I was brought up by seniors in this institution. I don't know how I could've gotten through freshman year without seniors," she said. "I have so many first-years I took under my wing last years because I could not imagine what it would be like to be a 17, 18 year-old coming into this institution. ... It's to the point where you should pay me for all I do."In addition to a lack of substantive support beyond "quick fixes" from the administration, Aya said that the the Core Curriculum further silences students of color by requiring students to read texts that ignore the existence of marginalized people and their histories.
"It's traumatizing to sit in Core classes," Aya said. "We are looking at history through the lens of these powerful, white men. I have no power or agency as a black woman, so where do I fit in?"
Um, as a human being, dipshit?
St. Louis Cabbies Sue Uber For Lost Business
This would be like my suing the Internet because newspapers have gone under. Yes, it sucks when technology changes the business status quo, but you need to try to shift with the changes. I'm writing my next book (after "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck") for St. Martin's Press and I'm doing speaking engagements.
The cabbies in St. Louis take a different approach -- trying to bring a class action suit against Uber.
Leah Thorsen writes at StLToday:
ST. LOUIS COUNTY • Four taxi drivers are suing Uber and seeking class-action status, alleging they've seen up to a 40 percent dip in business since the ride-hailing service began operating in violation of local regulations.The plaintiffs in the suit filed in St. Louis County Circuit Court are Aaron Vilcek and Jeffrey Hamilton, drivers for St. Louis County Cab; Robert Glynn, who drives for Laclede Cab; and Douglas Uchendi, an ABC Cab driver.
On Sept. 18, the St. Louis Metropolitan Taxicab Commission voted to allow ride-hailing services such as UberX, an app-based service in which drivers use their own cars to ferry passengers, but directed that drivers be fingerprinted as part of a criminal background check.
Drivers for ride-hailing services also are required to possess a class E Missouri commercial drivers license, also known as a chauffeur's license.
Those requirements are mandated by Missouri law, the commission said. The state law that requires vehicle-for-hire drivers to have fingerprint checks is specific to St. Louis and St. Louis County.
Local cabdrivers also must have drug tests, vehicle inspections and get notes from doctors to prove they're in good health.
But Uber described the regulations as onerous, saying it conducts its own background checks of drivers, many of whom drive less than six hours a week -- but not fingerprint checks.
Guess what: Government background checks of taxi drivers don't make citizens measurably safer. For example, anybody can get a doctor's note -- they get them all over Los Angeles to get bullshit handicapped plates. And the fact that somebody's done time doesn't mean they're a continuing criminal. Also, most people on the road drive just fine most of the time. You don't need a professional license to drive carpool; you shouldn't need one to drive Uber.
And these are all bullshit reasons to sue.
What the cab drivers should be doing is trying to lift the government regulations, not trying to throw them on others.
via @Overlawyered
From Anti-Establishment To Auntie Establishment
Students marching on campus these days are demanding everything short of a 24-hour hug-giver in every dorm room.
Many of their demands are about more bureaucracy and more caretaking -- "more connection with with the Man, not less," as Harvard Law School prof Jeannie Suk puts it in her New Yorker piece, "A New Family Feeling on Campus." By family, she's talking about "in loco parentis" -- students demanding more authority on campus.
The list of concrete demands recently announced by student activists at Yale is decidedly not anti-establishment. They seek more connection with the Man, not less. Many of their calls are for more bureaucracy: the creation of an academic department, the hiring of more employees for cultural centers, and the development of training, surveys, and reporting requirements (borrowed from the now established Title IX school bureaucracy). But it is in the demands for more mental-health services, for stipends and food for students in need during breaks, for dental and optometry care, and for eight financial-aid consultants that we most clearly see their yearning not only for safety but for a safety net. The Million Student March demonstrations at multiple campuses last week, in support of free tuition, cancellation of student debt, and a fifteen-dollar minimum wage for campus jobs, went directly to the point. At Amherst College, the student emphasis is on apologies to current and former students from the president and chancellor for the institutional legacy of everything from white supremacy to cis-sexism to mental-health stigma. These demands for administrative affirmation of students' needs are far from a rejection of the institution. Instead, they reach for a familial embrace.
These campus administrations need to do the opposite of what they are doing. They need to stop giving in to these students' demands, and truly behave as the stern father and just say no.
It really is quite amazing how "radicalism" on campus these days involves calling for more of Big Daddy.
Lunky
Oafish links.
Kindergarten Teacher Proudly Discriminating Against Boys
She's gleeful in how she prevents the boys from playing with Legos in order to encourage her female students to play with them.
Ashe Schow writes at the Wash Ex:
Karen Keller bars the boys in her class from playing with the colorful blocks, even going so far as to lie to them about their opportunity to play."I always tell the boys, 'You're going to have a turn' -- and I'm like, 'Yeah, when hell freezes over' in my head," Keller told the Bainbridge Island Review. "I tell them, 'You'll have a turn' because I don't want them to feel bad."
Keller does this because she saw the boys in her class gravitating toward the blocks during their "free choice" play time while the girls flocked to dolls and crayons. Keller's solution was to deny the blocks to the boys, who wanted to play with them, in order to encourage the girls to play with them. The Review article offers no indications about how Keller gets the girls to play with something of which they have no interest.
Keller had originally tried to entice the girls by providing pink and purple Legos, "But it wasn't enough." So she requested a grant from her school to purchase Lego Education Community Starter Kits for three classrooms at the Captain Johnston Blakely Elementary school, where she has taught for seven years. She requested the grant without telling the school she would be denying boys access to the toys.
..."I just feel like we are still so far behind in promoting gender equity," Keller said.
Sick.
As I've long said, modern feminism is too often about gaining special treatment for women -- under the guise of equal treatment.
And science measures what generally is the case, and not all girls want to play with dolls, predominantly, that, yes, generally is the case, while boys want to play with construction toys, transportation toys, and weapons.
Just scroll down and look at the girl chimp playing with the rocks like they're dolls in the piece I wrote referencing Joyce Benenson, Richard Wrangham, and Sonja Kahlenberg's research on sex differences.
Do you really think she got the idea to do that because she's denied Legos or saw it on Saturday morning TV?
Humanitarian Guessing Is A Really Bad Idea
The sign on the door to America says "Welcome Refugees" -- or, in Emma Lazarus's exact words on the Statue of Liberty, "Give me your tired, your poor..."
I would like to be a country that welcomes refugees, but it simply seems idiotic to just let everybody in and hope it turns out okay.
The problem is that we have little or no good way of telling which of these tired and poor are merely tired of allowing us to continue living as the Allah-snubbing infidels we are.
Michael van der Gallen writes at PJM that we've already made this mistake with the thousands of Somali refugees we've let into the US:
Somalia has been partially overrun by Al-Shabaab, an organization that shares ISIS's radical views, goals, and strategies. It frequently publishes videos and photos of executions of "unbelievers" or people suspected of working for the Somali authorities.According to Refugee Resettlement Watch, a total of 100,000 Somali refugees have come to the United States in recent years -- 8,858 of them in 2015 alone. Since October 1 of this year, 827 refugees have been added to that amount. The Somalis are generally resettled in Minnesota, Arizona, New York, Ohio, and Texas.
There appears to be as much risk of importing Muslim fanatics pretending to be refugees from Somalia as from Syria. Worse yet, the risk may be greater.
...In October of this year, even NPR had to admit that many "marginalized, young Somalis look East to join ISIS."
...That's not the only threat these "refugees" pose. If they are willing to join ISIS overseas, they're probably willing to carry out terrorist attacks for that organization in the United States itself. They'll go wherever ISIS needs them.
Meanwhile, the United States continues to import Somalis without being able to vet them. Even Speaker Paul Ryan seems to be unaware -- or uncaring -- about the security threat Somali "refugees" pose: in his new immigration bill, he only demands that the government certify that refugees from Syria and Iraq are not terrorists.
It's not "mean" or horrible to not let just anybody into this country unless we can be reasonably sure they won't blow up a mall or something for Allah.
The thing is, if and when there is that sort of violence from an immigrant, no one person's imprimis will be on the legislation that opened the floodgates to let them in, giving all these "Aww, let them all in" politicians just the cover they need to gather up votes from the under thinking without paying the price when their open door policy goes south.
via @instapundit
Shopping For New Health Insurance: The New Seasonal Stress
Abby Goodnough writes in The New York Times about the new annual fun for a number of people, thanks to Obamacare:
WASHINGTON -- For 2014, the first year she got health coverage through the Affordable Care Act, Gail Galen chose a plan from a new nonprofit insurer, Oregon's Health CO-OP. But the price jumped for 2015, so Ms. Galen switched to a policy from a different company, LifeWise Health Plan.Now, with open enrollment for 2016 underway, she is preparing to leap to her third insurer in three years -- and stocking up on whiskey, she says, only half in jest, as she braces for another round of shopping on the federal insurance marketplace.
"Every year I feel like I'm starting all over again, and I just dread it," said Ms. Galen, 63, of Warrenton, Ore. "My stress level just shoots up."
Over the past two years, the Affordable Care Act has created entirely new markets for health insurance, and a new way of buying it, via online exchanges that allow comparison shopping. They have brought coverage to nine million people, many of whom could not afford it or were rejected by insurers before. But these new markets have also seen sharp price swings, or changes in policies, that are driving many consumers to switch plans each year.
The Obama administration is encouraging switching as a way to avoid steep increases in premiums -- and to promote competition among insurers, as the law intends. Next year will be no different: The price of plans will rise in most states, and the administration says that 86 percent of people who currently have coverage through the federal exchange can find a better deal by switching.
Think about the horrible waste of time and stress people go through.
Remember "If you like your health care plan..."?
UPDATE, from Byron York at WashEx:
On Thursday, UnitedHealth, the nation's largest healthcare company, announced huge losses from the sale of Obamacare plans and threatened to pull out of the exchanges altogether. "We cannot sustain these losses," CEO Stephen Hemsley said. "We can't really subsidize a marketplace that doesn't appear at the moment to be sustaining itself."
Loopy
Crazylinks.
Government All Up In Your Sports Bar Business
If you want to show the game in your sports bar, you'd better have that closed captioning up and running if your bar is in Portland, Oregon.
Dirk VanderHart posts at the Portland Mercury:
Every public place in the city with a television set will have to display closed captioning during business hours beginning next month, or face the specter of hundreds or thousands in fines.As advocates for the deaf cheered, and restaurant lobbyists shook their heads in frustration, Portland City Council this morning unanimously adopted an ordinance designed to ensure people with hearing problems have equal access to Portland's public TVs.
"This ordinance benefits everyone," said Commissioner Amanda Fritz, who brought the law forward. "It promotes access for everyone."
A ridiculous aim.
There are so many people out there now trying to buffer every possible possibility in life -- and there are costs to this. I get carsick from my own driving when driving any distance -- like, not long ago, in traffic from Venice, about a mile from the ocean, to Highland and La Brea. Should all events I might attend only be scheduled within a five-mile radius of where I live?
And, getting back to the captioning thing, the "logic" here in the supposed need for captioning for deaf people on every TV is just ridiculous.
So, if the sky is falling, with our myriad forms of communication (including people pulling your arm and saying, "Let's get the fuck out of here!"), there's no other way a deaf person would know, except if they are able to read the captions of a TV in a sports bar?
By the way, personally, I am very bothered by these blaring TVs in bars and airports, probably in part because of my ADHD. Where do we draw the line? Do we turn the TVs' sound off for people like me? Or do we just smash them all and be done with it?
via @Overlawyered
Int'l Men's Day At College Cancelled: Gender Equality -- For Men, That Is -- Is "Misogynistic"
Glen Poole writes in the Telegraph/UK that The University of York has withdrawn plans to celebrate International Men's Day on November 19, which would have highlighted issues like like male suicide.
Turns out academics and students complained, saying "gender equality is for everyone" is "misogynistic."
Right. Just ignoring men killing themselves, that's the humanitarian thing to do under feminism.
In confirming that he had cancelled plans for an International Men's Day celebration, the university's Registrar and Secretary, Dr David Duncan said: "the intention was to draw attention to some of the issues men tell us they encounter and to follow this up by highlighting in particular the availability of mental health and welfare support which we know men are sometimes reluctant to access".And so once again we see the double bind that suicidal men and those who advocate their need for support are constantly placed in. On the one hand we are told that the answer to the public health emergency of male suicide is to get men talking about their issues. On the other hand we are told that we can't talk about men's issues because women's issues are more important.
The tragedy of this situation is that by campaigning against men's issues, women's rights advocates at the University of York have made it harder for suicidal men to reach out and get the help they need.
...The message that the University of York has sent out to men and boys, by capitulating to the anti-male sentiments of lecturers, student reps and alumni, is that it is socially unacceptable to talk about men's issues.
And when you send out a message that is socially unacceptable to talk about men's issues, you re-enforce unhelpful cultural messages about masculinity like "boys don't cry" and "real men" don't talk about their issues.
In 2015 we are still conditioned to believe that care and compassion is for women and girls; those who campaign against International Men's Day re-enforce these outdated and sexist attitudes by demonstrating a complete lack of compassion for the issues faced by men and boys.
More: Tragic.
The Cruelty Of Dating From Hope
More in my book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck."
Minky
Soft, black, furry links.
Hey, LAPD: Didn't Work In France; Why Assume It Would Work Here?
A tweet:
@LAPoliceFdtn
The #LAPD is counting on its relationships with the local #Muslim community to help avert terror attacks in the... http://fb.me/4g7sVAFYN
Merely announcing you're doing something isn't the same as doing something actually productive.
From a New York Times story on the capture of the Islamist scum who mass-murdered unarmed "infidels" as they dined and listened to music:
Ms. Khaldi said she was not surprised the police had tracked the suspects to the neighborhood. She said a friend of hers believed she had seen one of the wanted men, Salah Abdeslam, on Monday. "She was terrified and she looked at another woman knowing that she recognized him too," Ms. Khaldi said. "They did not dare to go to the police."
From the CBS story in the tweet:
"This was a barbaric act, and it's got no place in our religion," said Ehsan Khan of the Islamic Center Northridge.
Yawnies. Violent jihad gets you on the express path to salvation. It's in that Quranie thingie.
And the later, violent passages, after Mohammed got power abrogate -- as in, nullify -- the earlier peacie-weasy, interfaithy passages.
As Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan Al-Banna put it in his treatise, "Jihad":
The verses of the Qur'an and the Sunnah of Muhammad (PBUH {Peace Be Unto Him}) are overflowing with all these noble ideals and they summon people in general (with the most eloquent expression and the clearest exposition) to jihad, to warfare, to the armed forces, and all means of land and sea fighting.
Awww...!
COEXIST!, ya'll!
The Slobbering Worship Of The Racist Worldview Of Ta-Nahisi Coates
He is most remarkable for being able to find anti-black sentiment in everything short of an 8 and a half by 11 sheet of paper, and in doing that, is just seething with anti-whiteness.
In The Atlantic, in a thoughtful long read, Kyle Smith writes:
Coates repeatedly returns to an incident in which his son, at age four, was shoved on an escalator on the Upper West Side by a woman who said, "Come on." Coates reacted angrily, which is understandable, but he also pushed another man who took the woman's side, which is not. To Coates, this was the same old story: slavery. "Someone had invoked their right over the body of my son," he writes. Coates stands 6' 4" and no doubt did not appear in the moment as the sagacious soul beloved to New York Times readers, possibly because he was screaming his lungs out, though the vague language makes it hard to say ("I spoke to this woman, and my words were hot with all of the moment and all of my history").Such an incident would upset any father. But Coates evidently overreacted because of an unquenchable need to find racism, an eagerness to assume the absolute worst of people at all times, even when there is no evidence for it. Or does he think white New Yorkers never shove other white New Yorkers? A couple of years ago, I was walking to work on West 48th Street when a black man stopped me. I thought he might be seeking directions, but when he instead commenced a tale of woe, no doubt with an eye toward asking for spare change, I continued on my journey. Half a block later, he ran up behind me and shoved me, not gently, in the chest with both hands. "The next time you IGNORE me, I'm going to beat the shit out of you!" he cried. I realized he could have done great harm to me in a few seconds. Shaken, I hurried off to work, wishing I had eyes in the back of my head, but that was the conclusion of the incident.
I quickly forgot all of this and never mentioned the encounter to anyone. The only reason it has arisen in my memory now is that I was trying to think of an experience similar to Coates's at the escalator. There's nothing remarkable about what happened to me. It's the sort of nuisance you learn to forget when you live in New York. Frustrated and impatient people are everywhere. But we don't organize our personalities around minor run-ins, much less intentionally pass along such an obsession to our children or elevate them to world-historical status, as Coates does in a bathetic and dreadfully written paragraph that begins with the hypocrisy of the Founding and its tolerance for slavery, and concludes with that single shove of four-year-old Samori.
More:
Coates's detachment from fact is nothing compared with his moral detachment, however. He says, "my heart was cold" when he watched the Twin Towers burn and collapse. The cops present on September 11 deserved to die because they all shot Prince Jones; firefighters had to go because they are kind of like cops, though if Coates has any examples of firefighters killing black men, he does not supply them. Those office workers guilty of believing themselves to be white obviously had it coming to them. And everyone else who died? Black office workers? Foreigners? Shrug.If you think I'm exaggerating Coates's position, consider this passage:
I could see no difference between the officer who killed Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters who died. They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could--with no justification--shatter my body.This is not a man possessed of hard truths, but rather a hard heart. To praise Coates is to condone mass hatred. Coates's college hero, Malcolm X, was widely denounced after he remarked, upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that "chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad." Coates is if anything even more blasé about the destruction of the World Trade Center.
This:
The phrase "twice as good," which Coates says is aspirational advice handed down from black parents to their children, is a frequent and bitter refrain. "No one," he says, "ever told those little white children, with their tricycles, to be twice as good. I imagined their parents telling them to take twice as much." Take twice as much of what? Coates is absolutely right about white Manhattan parents, though. They certainly do not push their kids to be twice as good. They push them to be ten times as good. They urge them through summer arts-tennis-chess camps, rain cello lessons on them until their fingers bleed, and regard anything less than admission to Harvard Law School as failure. Just as Coates so often sees things that are not there, he misses the things that are so widely noticed as to become cliché.
via @WalterOlson
Part And Parcel Of The TSA Panic That We're All Potential Terrorists -- And Never Mind Actually Effective Probable Cause-Driven Policing
Completely idiotic.
Apparently, somebody of "Middle Eastern descent," as several passengers on a plane identified them, was -- gasp! -- watching the news on a smartphone.
When another passenger noticed this, what was there to do but sound the alarm -- report them to the authorities as probable terrorists?
Now, the Balt Sun report by Jessica Anderson and Colin Campbell does have this bit -- about how everything supposedly "added up" to cause concern:
"Everything added up to create a situation where she felt concerned," [Maryland Transportation Authority spokesdude Jonathan] Green said of the witness. "Everything was done in the interest of safety."
I have my suspicions on that (about actually meaningful stuff being reported) since there's none of that reported in the story. More from it:
Spirit Flight 969 was taxiing before takeoff when the passenger alerted a flight attendant, Spirit Airlines said."Out of an abundance of caution, the plane returned to the gate," the airline said.
Officers removed three men and a woman from the flight, Green said. He said those passengers included a married couple, who were traveling with a family member, and a male passenger sitting near them.
Now, just a guess on my part, but I think it isn't just the Paris attacks leading to thinking like this -- the idiotic notion that looking "Middle Eastern" and using a smartphone are cause for concern.
I strongly believe the fact that the TSA treats every single person who flies to see Granny (or is a blind, Alzeheimer's-stricken granny) as a possible threat contributes to this kind of ridiculous thinking.
What would serve us is not having a gazillion repurposed Cinnabon workers in pretend cop suits groping our genitals at airports, but focused policing -- probable cause-based policing -- by highly-trained intelligence officers.
The ridiculous chortling by the TSA's social media turd every time some tired Texan forgets to unpack his gun from his laptop bag is just more security theater. This is profiling weapons rather than people. A gun will not bring down a plane. Not even a person who uses the gun on the plane will.
Oh, and mass surveillance (and other chippings away at our civil liberties) isn't the answer -- any more than mass searches are.
Motor
Your link is running.
"Pastafarian" Woman Gets To Have Driver's License Photo Taken With Colander On Her Head
I love that this Massachusetts atheist, Lindsay Miller, fought for -- and won -- the right to get her driver's license photo taken with an upside-down colander on her head. 
From AOL:
Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles has granted one woman the right to wear a colander on her head for her drivers license photo.Lindsay Miller practices at the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which, according to their website, is a secular religion that believes the existence of a "spaghetti monster" to be just as possible as the existence of God. Those who practice the religion are known as Pastafarians, but they want to assure you, the religion is 100% real.
When the RMV initially denied Miller's request to take her drivers license photo with a colander on her head, she enlisted the help of the American Humanist Association's Appignani Humanist Legal Center's attorneys to file an appeal and was scheduled to attend an appeal in October about the matter.
However, luckily for Miller, the appeal was postponed and the RMV has decided to let her wear the spaghetti strainer in her photo.
Miller told MyFoxBoston:
"While I don't think the government can involve itself in matters of religion, I do hope this decision encourages my fellow Pastafarian Atheists to come out and express themselves as I have."
The Peaceful Muslim Majority Is "Irrelevant," Says Brigitte Gabriel
Brigitte Gabriel gives a great answer to Muslim woman claiming Muslims are portrayed badly.
An estimated 15 to 20 percent (a huge number) of all Muslims are "radical" -- compared with the non-violent 80 percent.
"The peaceful majority is irrelevant," notes Gabriel -- as it has been in Nazi Germany and elsewhere.
David Harsanyi writes at The Federalist:
The vast majority of Muslims aren't terrorists, but in the contemporary world nearly all movements and ideas that produce political terrorism are birthed in Islamic communities that house mostly peaceful people. Mass immigration bolsters those communities with millions of new, unassimilated adherents in the middle of secular nations with belief systems that grate against Islamic worldview. How can Europe not expect some of them will embrace the radicalism and fundamentalism adopted to some extent in nearly every other major Islamic community?It doesn't only manifest in terrorism, but in the medievalism of whippings, mass hangings, stoning, and violent misogyny and bigotry -- not just mean words.
The tragedy of Syria should make us sympathetic to the plight of refugees fleeing murderers, but that doesn't change the fact that -- according to a Pew poll and every other reputable polling that's been done on the topic -- "overwhelming percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the official law of the land." The losers of civil war are victims, but that doesn't mean they have liberal values. When the Arab world has been granted the right to vote, it almost always backs religious extremism. It votes for Hamas and for the Muslim Brotherhood. ISIS and Shia terror groups aren't funded by Kickstarter; they are partly funded by forces in Gulf States, Iran, and throughout the Islamic world.
..."This is an attack not just on Paris, it's an attack not just on the people [of] France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share," Barack Obama explained after the attacks. All of humanity? No, it was an attack by fundamental Islam against Europeans. Just like 9/11 was an attack against the United States, stabbing civilians in the streets of Israel was an attack against Jews, and the Charlie Hebdo massacre was an attack against free expression.
When there is a deadly bombing in Beirut or horrifying assaults on civilian populations in Iraq or Syria, it is part of an ongoing factional religious war. This is not some ideology disconnected from all others that visits from outer space every few days to kill humans randomly. Yet, many of the same people who argue that ISIS was created by George Bush and climate change will also tell you that the group has nothing to do with Islam. It's about economics. It's about blowback. It's about poverty. It's about anything and everything but the theological war that's actually going on.
None of this is to say Muslims can never assimilate in the West. The U.S., for the most part, proves the opposite. But there is nothing bigoted about being vigilant when embracing millions of new people who bring all kinds of illiberal baggage with them. If, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali says, we keep pretending this has nothing to do with Islam, we will never actually talk about the problem. There are many good Muslims, but if that's the only criteria, no one will be able to be critical of any theology or ideology ever again.
Gabriel video via @instapundit
Doctor
The common link.
Govt. Regulators Drive A Pillow Company Out Of Business
Their offenses and problems include using the wrong font on their labels. Yes, the wrong font! Leading to a costly fix.
Other issues are government regulations that cause them to raise wages and workmen's comp -- and never mind how the Internet is eating away at their business. (It's e-commerce and its affect on the gift stores they sell to.)
Without the government intervening, they could possibly make their costs commensurate with what they take in. But government has a heavy fist and just brings it down, and never mind who ends up losing their job.
Debbie Cobb writes at ActionNewsNow that the Woof & Poof C.E.O. and owner, Roger Hart, said the company will stop production on his products, which include stuffed collector dolls, blankets, door hangers, musical Santas, and pillows:
Hart says a raise in minimum wage and workers compensation are just a couple of issues that have made it difficult to keep the business financially afloat here. Hart said, "The high cost of doing business in California coupled with ridiculous regulatory environment makes it virtually impossible to do business." He says he has seen an 11% hike in payroll.At the company's work peak, during the summer months, he has 30 employees. He says he hasn't taken a paycheck home in two years. A recent visit by an inspector with the Department of Consumer Affairs set the company back. The inspector from Sacramento cited him for having the wrong size font on the decorative pillow labels. He was told to take the labels out, or they would have his inventory seized. It was a costly fix. Hart says he and his wife, Sabrina love Chico. His employees also live and work in Chico and they don't want to send production to China. Production costs would be a lot less in China, Hart said, but it wouldn't be the same 'Woof & Poof' product. There is a possibility someone could buy the business and keep it local, but that decision has not been made.
Meanwhile, today, people started lining up at 4:30am for the 8am Woof & Poof annual sale at the warehouse. Items have to be snatched up pretty fast or they're gone. The Santa Claus dolls are usually the first to go.
The Grinch of government regulation came first.
via @reasonpolicy
My Bottom Line On Other People's Belief Systems
I don't care what you believe as long as it doesn't motivate you to gun down people eating dinner.
Roger Cohen's Simple And Simplistic Solution For ISIS
Cohen writes in The New York Times:
The only adequate measure, after the killing of at least 129 people in Paris, is military, and the only objective commensurate with the ongoing threat is the crushing of ISIS and the elimination of its stronghold in Syria and Iraq. The barbaric terrorists exulting on social media at the blood they have spilled cannot be allowed any longer to control territory on which they are able to organize, finance, direct and plan their savagery.
The same way the two people who edit me work over Skype, the terrorists are collecting in nowhere -- in cyberspace. So, no, bombing the fuck out of ISIS will not stop terrorism. It rises from the commands of Islam to convert or kill the infidel, and lone wolves are embedded in Western society, ready to do the evil Islam demands.
Cocoa
Linkobutter.
Don't Kid Yourself: These Paris Attacks Can Happen Anywhere, And Surely Will
An American expat who survived the attack at Le Carillon, a bar in the 10th arrondissement of Paris (that might as well be in Seattle, Silverlake, or Williamsburg), spoke to The New York Times's Nicola Clark:
Ms. Murphy said it took her some time to realize that she and her friends had been the victims of a terrorist attack."When I was lying there, I couldn't believe this was happening," she said. "They were so very Parisian, the places they chose. This was not the kind of place I'd ever dreamed of having something happen there."
American expats living in Paris are contemplating coming back to the states. But as I wrote to a Paris-dwelling friend yesterday, this can be done anywhere. And surely will.
The incentive to do it comes out of how violent jihad is the express path to "salvation" in Islam. No, this is not a distortion of Islam. It is what Islam calls for.
James Anderson explains at Answering Islam (in a piece worth reading in its entirety):
What happens to martyrs in jihad?The Shafi'i manual quotes a hadith:
A man said, "O Messenger of Allah, will my mistakes be forgiven me if I am killed, in steadfastness and anticipating Allah's reward, advancing and not retreating?" He replied: "Yes, except for debts." (p. 667, p20.3(3))
It is unclear how Allah extracts the debts from a jihadist, but maybe it involves some degree of punishment for him in the afterlife or a financial burden on his family in their earthly life. Ruling o9.5(1) (p. 602) says that a creditor may give his debtor permission to fight, so the hadith passage is not followed that closely.
More importantly, this passage guarantees jihadists the forgiveness of sins and an escalator to heaven. This is reason enough for dazed and confused young Muslim men to conduct jihad against unbelievers.
ISIS calls the attacks in Paris "the first of the storm." Rukmini Callimachi writes for The New York Times:
The Islamic State claimed responsibility on Saturday for the catastrophic attacks in the French capital, calling them "the first of the storm" and mocking France as a "capital of prostitution and obscenity," according to statements released in multiple languages on one of the terror group's encrypted messaging accounts...."Eight brothers, wrapped in explosive belts and armed with machine rifles, targeted sites that were accurately chosen in the heart of the capital of France," the group said in the statement, "including the Stade de France during the match between the Crusader German and French teams, where the fool of France, François Hollande, was present."
"Let France and those who walk in its path know that they will remain on the top of the list of targets of the Islamic State," the statement added, referring to the attacks at the Bataclan concert hall and elsewhere in Paris.
"But Christianity Has Been Behind Horrible Things, Too!"
Douglas Murray asks in The Spectator, "Will politicians finally admit that the Paris attacks had something to do with Islam?"
An essential bit:
We might all agree that the history of Christianity has hardly been un-bloody. But is it not worth asking whether the history of Christianity would have been more bloody or less bloody if, instead of telling his followers to 'turn the other cheek', Jesus had called (even once) for his disciples to 'slay' non-believers and chop off their heads?
More:
Here we land at the centre of the problem -- a centre we have spent the last decade and a half trying to avoid: Islam is not a peaceful religion. No religion is, but Islam is especially not. Nor is it, as some ill-informed people say, solely a religion of war. There are many peaceful verses in the Quran which -- luckily for us -- the majority of Muslims live by. But it is, by no means, only a religion of peace.I say this not because I hate Islam, nor do I have any special animus against Muslims, but simply because this is the verifiable truth based on the texts. Until we accept that we will never defeat the violence, we risk encouraging whole populations to take against all of Islam and abandon all those Muslims who are trying desperately to modernise, reform and de-literalise their faith. And -- most importantly -- we will give up our own traditions of free speech and historical inquiry and allow one religion to have an unbelievable advantage in the free marketplace of ideas.
More still:
We have spent 15 years pretending things about Islam, a complex religion with competing interpretations. It is true that most Muslims live their lives peacefully. But a sizeable portion (around 15 per cent and more in most surveys) follow a far more radical version. The remainder are sitting on a religion which is, in many of its current forms, a deeply unstable component. That has always been a problem for reformist Muslims. But the results of ongoing mass immigration to the West at the same time as a worldwide return to Islamic literalism means that this is now a problem for all of us. To stand even a chance of dealing with it, we are going to have to wake up to it and acknowledge it for what it is.
And sadly, as Rob Long pointed out, this article was not posted in the past few days. It was posted in January, after the last attack on Paris.
Here's an instructive video -- an Islamic scholar on what Muslims will do when they become powerful (in the U.S, for example):
("Jiyza" is a non-Muslim humiliation tax that Jews and Christians are made to pay -- or be enslaved or killed if they don't pay.)
People are desperate to proclaim Islam "a religion of peace," which it is not. It is a violent, totalitarian system masquerading as a religion. And until we admit that, we won't be on any sort of track to any sort of solution to how Islam commands Muslims to convert or kill non-Muslims and slaughter gays, apostates, women who have sex outside marriage, and anybody who "insults" the prophet or the religion. All of this is part of Islam's mission tp overthrow societies with Enlightenment values and civil liberties and install "The New Caliphate" around the globe.
Four Important Lessons The World Must Learn From The Slaughter In Paris
John Bolton writes at AEI:
We should be immediately concerned that other attacks in prominent Western capitals, against senior European and U.S. government officials and the West generally may be in the offing.Second, we should not view the appropriate American and Western response as "bringing these terrorists to justice," in President Obama's words. This is not a matter for the criminal law, as many American political and academic leaders, including the President, have insisted, even after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
This is a war, as President Hollande has forthrightly called it, not a slightly enhanced version of thieves knocking over the corner grocery store within an ordered civil society. And the mechanism of response must be to destroy the source of the threat, not prosecute it, not contain it, not hope that we will "ultimately" destroy it. "Ultimately" is too far away.
Third, in light of Paris and the continuing threat of terrorism it so graphically conveys, we need a more sensible national conversation about the need for effective intelligence gathering to uncover and prevent such tragedies before they occur.
"Effective intelligence gathering" is not what we have at the airports. What we have is pretend security, absurdly treating every citizen as an equal risk of being a terrorist, that leaves us as sitting ducks for anybody who'd walk in the door of an airport with an AK-47.
What we need are highly-trained intelligence officers doing probable cause-driven policing.
The reality is, we cannot perfectly (or probably even adequately) protect ourselves from terrorism. What we can do is start being honest about what Islam calls for. Only when you define a threat can you figure out how to deal with it.
But here's what we have and are likely to continue having, from Mark Steyn:
Visiting the Bataclan, M Hollande declared that "nous allons mener le combat, il sera impitoyable": We are going to wage a war that will be pitiless.Does he mean it? Or is he just killing time until Obama and Cameron and Merkel and Justin Trudeau and Malcolm Turnbull fly in and they can all get back to talking about sea levels in the Maldives in the 22nd century? By which time France and Germany and Belgium and Austria and the Netherlands will have been long washed away.
Among his other coy evasions, President Obama described tonight's events as "an attack not just on Paris, it's an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share".
But that's not true, is it? He's right that it's an attack not just on Paris or France. What it is is an attack on the west, on the civilization that built the modern world - an attack on one portion of "humanity" by those who claim to speak for another portion of "humanity". And these are not "universal values" but values that spring from a relatively narrow segment of humanity. They were kinda sorta "universal" when the great powers were willing to enforce them around the world and the colonial subjects of ramshackle backwaters such as Aden, Sudan and the North-West Frontier Province were at least obliged to pay lip service to them. But the European empires retreated from the world, and those "universal values" are utterly alien to large parts of the map today.
And then Europe decided to invite millions of Muslims to settle in their countries. Most of those people don't want to participate actively in bringing about the death of diners and concertgoers and soccer fans, but at a certain level most of them either wish or are indifferent to the death of the societies in which they live - modern, pluralist, western societies and those "universal values" of which Barack Obama bleats. So, if you are either an active ISIS recruit or just a guy who's been fired up by social media, you have a very large comfort zone in which to swim, and which the authorities find almost impossible to penetrate.
via @Mark_J_Perry
Is The Entire Mizzou Protest Based On Lies?
Clay Travis, at FoxSports, no less, has a good piece on this. An excerpt:
3. The hunger striker, who claimed he was hunger striking based, at least initially, on grad school health care costs, is the son of a man who made almost seven million dollars last year.He grew up in a $1.3 million dollar mansion in Omaha. For reference sake, that's a big house in Omaha. Warren Buffett, one of the five richest men in the world, lives in an Omaha house worth $500,000.
Now, merely being rich doesn't mean you can't advocate for social justice. But when the first platform of your demands for social justice is that the president of Mizzou should publicly denounce his white privilege, shouldn't you also have to acknowledge and denounce the fact that you are wealthier than 99.99% of the people on earth?
Moreover, on the privilege flow chart, doesn't being worth over $20 million rank an awful lot higher than merely being white? In other words, is there anyone out there who wouldn't trade their race in exchange for $20 million? Because I 100% would. Black, white, asian, hispanic, green, blue, I will be any color for the rest of my life if you give me $20 million to do it.
On top of that, the "hunger striker" -- I question whether he was actual hunger striking too, by the way, what evidence do we have of that? -- said he was hunger striking because of increased graduate school health care costs. YOUR DAD MADE NEARLY $7 MILLION LAST YEAR, BRO. Check your privilege. Do you really think he didn't have the money for health care?
The hunger striker has also been on campus for nearly eight years. If Mizzou was such an awful, racist place, wouldn't you go somewhere else for grad school?
Finally, how am I the only person talking about how rich the hunger striker is? Isn't that kind of a big detail when your hunger strike is attacking the privileges of others? You are literally one of the most privileged people in the world. Infinitely more privileged, for instance, than the man you demanded be fired from his job.
Oh, and the hunger striker was also spreading lies last night on campus. So much so that the university's official Twitter account felt obligated to respond to him because so many people were terrified.
They said there were no reports of death threats on campus.
Lorca
Gabriel Garcia Linka.
Amherst Nitwits Demand A "Safe Space" -- Meaning One Where Free Speech Is Not Safe
(Unless it's speech they approve of.)
At The Daily Beast, Katie Zavadski writes:
A group calling themselves the Amherst Uprising listed 11 demands they want enacted by next Wednesday. Among them is a demand that President Biddy Martin issue a statement saying that Amherst does "not tolerate the actions of student(s) who posted the 'All Lives Matter' posters, and the 'Free Speech' posters."The latter posters called the principle of free speech the "true victim" of the protests at the University of Missouri.
Going further, the students demand the people behind "free speech" fliers be required to go through a disciplinary process as well as "extensive training for racial and cultural competency."
...President Martin must also apologize for the college's "institutional legacy of white supremacy, colonialism, anti-black racism, anti-Latinx racism, anti-Native American racism, anti-Native/indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, anti-Middle Eastern racism, heterosexism, cis-sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, mental health stigma, and classism," the Uprising says.
..."We want to stress that any action taken by Amherst College to address the demands made will not erase the fact that it exists within a larger system of oppression," Sharline Dominguez, Cristina Rey, and Carolina Vergara wrote in a blog post apologizing for not discussing their actions with other activists. "We believe that we will not be free until this larger system is deconstructed."
Please, someone oppress me by sending me to Amherst. 2015-2016 Cost of tuition, fees, and expenses for an undergrad year there: $68,393 - $70,843
The Amherst Uprising list of demands is here, via @CHSommers.
Statement from the "All Lives Matter" individuals (two individuals).
Salon Of Fools
Salon used to be a really good site -- long ago, back when they started. Now, it's often absurdly bad -- to simply absurd.
Reason's Nick Gillespie gave an appropriate "WTF?" to this Salon tweet:
@NickGillespie
WTF? MT @Salon Real terror unfolds in Paris Perhaps this will convince the right to done down their violent rhetoric http://slnm.us/ORRmnae
Yes, that's right -- Salon seizes the Paris "Allahu Akbar" mass murder to explain that the problem is "violent rhetoric" by American right.
Linksadness
Just shaken from the terrible events of Friday. I think of the French, who know how to live life, out with their friends, having wonderful food, good times, and then this.
People say or write or tweet "Je suis Paris," but it just seems so inadequate that I can't bring myself to do that.
Libération Editor Lawrence Joffrin On The Paris Terror Attacks
Plus the ugly realities of Islam, which actually commands this sort of attack. (More on that below.)
A witness account of the attack, from radio reporter Julian Pearce via KTLA:
Pearce saw two people he called terrorists enter the theater, "very calm, very determined" and firing "randomly."They wore black clothing but no masks. He saw the face of one shooter, who was very young -- a maximum of 25 years old.
"He was like a random guy holding a Kalashnikov. That's all."
Pearce said the gunmen managed to reload their weapons three or four times.
"They didn't shout anything," he said. "They were shooting people on the floor."
Other accounts.
Joffrin writes in his newspaper (translated):
The barbarity of terrorism has just taken a historical step. A massacre coordinated in the heart of Paris and the Stade de France was conducted with cold determination, in order to kill as many as possible.Even at the height of the clashes linked to the Algerian civil war in the 1990s, France had never experienced this level of violence. And it is France, its policies and its international role, which are targeted by the killers. Unlike the attacks on Charlie Hebdo or the Hyper Cacher, which were precise in their execution, tonight's attacks are acts of indistinct cruelty unleashed to inspire terror across the nation.
The sites of the attacks, all dedicated to entertainment and friendliness, were purposely in the line of fire as a way to underline the fact that French people are now under menace in their everyday life, as they simply go out with friends.
We are horrified in front of the vastness of this massacre, and compassion for the victims is the most humane and immediate reaction to have. We first and foremost think of the victims and their families. As for the rest - it has to focus on cold blood and civism. French society should arm itself with enough courage not to give an inch to the killers. It has to show both vigilance and the undying will to face the horror with the force of the law and solidarity.
I'm struck by this (and a look at Bataclan underscores it even further):
The sites of the attacks, all dedicated to entertainment and friendliness, were purposely in the line of fire as a way to underline the fact that French people are now under menace in their everyday life, as they simply go out with friends.
No, not all Muslims are terrorists or support it -- but a vast many do. However, it is not Muslims who are the problem; it is Islam, which is not the mere religion most people believe it to be, but a totalitarian system masquerading as a religion. It demands the death or conversion (or at very least, the third-class citizenhood, taxing, and shaming) of all non-Muslims, the removal of civil liberties from all of us, and the installation of a Muslim dictatorship called "The Caliphate" around the globe.
Ongoing story at The Guardian.
The ugly realities of Islam, which I have been studying since just after 9/11, summarized at the excellent site, thereligionofpeace.com:
The pattern of violence and aggressive disregard for human suffering that is persistent in Muslim history and contemporary attitude toward non-believers reflects the message of the Quran, which is one of personal superiority and arrogance.In today's world, Muslim dominance is characterized by the oppression and discrimination of non-Muslims, while Muslim minorities within larger societies are distinguished by varying degrees of petulant demand, discord and armed rebellion. Few Muslims are uncomfortable with this blatant double standard, in which Islam either plays the victim or unapologetically victimizes others, depending on its position of power - and the reason is obvious.
Islam is a supremacist ideology in which the role of non-believers is subordinate to the position of Muslims. Those who resist Islamic rule are to be fought until they are either killed or fully humiliated and forced to acknowledge their inferior status by converting to Islam or by paying a poll-tax and otherwise accepting the subjugation of their own religion.
There is simply no other religion on earth that draws such sharp distinction between its own members and others, or devotes as much of its holiest text toward condemning and dehumanizing those who merely choose not to follow its dogma.
So much about Islamic terrorism and the general indifference of the broader Muslim community toward the violence makes sense only against this dual nature of Islam - as does the strange willingness of Muhammad's followers to tolerate their own subjugation under Ottoman or Arab tyrants, such as Saddam Hussein, while being violently opposed to a Jewish neighbor state.
The apologists are correct in saying that Islam teaches love and kindness, but they fail to add that this applies only to the treatment of those within the Muslim community. Loyalty to one's own identity group is valued above all else and empathy for those outside the faith is optional at best - and even explicitly discouraged in places.
If this is a "misunderstanding" of Islam by modern-day "radicals," then it is an error that the founder of Islam made as well. In Muhammad's time, non-Muslims were put to death merely for speaking out against the new religion and its self-proclaimed prophet. Likewise, the Jews of Qurayza were summarily rounded-up and executed on Muhammad's order, even though they had not even fought in battle. Since the life of a non-Muslim is cheap, actual physical harm to a Muslim is not necessary to justify murder according to the example of Muhammad.
The Quran meets every criterion by which we define hate speech. Not only does the message inspire loathing and disregard for others, but the text mandates the superiority of Islam, even if the means of establishment is by violent force.
In his later years, Muhammad directed military campaigns to subjugate other tribes and religions, "inviting" them to Islam at the point of a sword and forcing them to pay tribute regardless. He set in motion the aggressive military campaigns that made war against all five major world religions in just the first few decades following his death.
Islam incorporates the ultimate devaluation of non-Muslims in the most obvious way by teaching that while a Muslim may be punished with death for murdering a fellow Muslim (Bukhari 83:17), no Muslim can be put to death for killing a non-Muslim (Bukhari 83:50, 3:111 - Muhammad: "No Muslim can be killed for killing a kafir."). The Quran's "Law of Equality," which assigns human value and rights based on gender, religion and status, is the polar opposite of equality in the sense intended by Western liberal tradition, which ideally respects no such distinction.
One can always find apologists willing to dismiss the harsh rhetoric of the Quran with creative interpretation, tortuous explanation or outright denial, but their words and deeds almost always belie a concern for Islam's image that does not extend to Islam's victims - at least not with the same sense of urgency - thus proving the point.
Of course, there are also exceptional Muslims who do not agree with Islamic supremacy and sincerely champion secularism and respect for all people. Some even find verses or fragments of such to support their independent beliefs. But, for these people, the Quran as a whole will always be a constant challenge, since it explicitly teaches the distinct and inferior status of non-Muslims.
Germ-Killing Bathroom Sprays May Also Beat Up Your Sperm
Researchers reported that they found that this was also the case in low doses -- not just in the high level doses that might be far from human experience of these chemicals. (Whether the "dose" is realistic in our experience is always something to look at in these studies -- before you throw out everything under your sink.)
Brian Bienkowski writes at Sci-Am:
Health researchers are concerned about specific chemicals used in cleaners--including popular brands like Lysol, Clorox and Simple Green--called quaternary ammonium compounds, used to kill microorganisms. Recent laboratory work from Virginia Tech University scientists found that when mice are exposed, both males and females have some unsettling impacts, such as weaker sperm and decreased ovulation.Industry representatives have pushed back on the research, saying federal agencies deem the chemicals safe and that mice were exposed to unrealistically high levels.
...Some of the mice were dosed at very high levels, Hrubec acknowledged. But male mice given low doses still had reproductive problems, she said.
In addition, some male mice weren't dosed at all but rather lived in a cage and room where the compounds were used to clean cages and floors and still had impacted sperm, she said.
Proper functioning hormones are vital for reproduction, and much research recently has focused on endocrine disrupting chemicals, which mimic and alter hormones.
It is too early to speculate why these cleaning chemicals are causing problems for the mice, Hrubec said.
But some of the impacts--such as the reduction in number of "heat" cycles for the females--are "hormonally driven," raising suspicion of endocrine disruption, she said.
...Dr. Jeanne Conry, an obstetrician and past president of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said most physicians do not understand how little research is done on chemicals prior to being released into the environment. These studies, she said, should be taken into account.
"We walk a fine line between being alarming and being aware," Conry said. "I tell women eat healthy, live a healthy lifestyle and keep your cleaning as simple as possible, maybe use something like vinegar and water."
Cleaning with vinegar from -- yes, there is such a thing -- The Vinegar Institute.
Majoring In Being "Oppressed"
Newsflash to whinging college students: If you're in college at all, you're "privileged," more than any other people at any time in history
Bizarrely, college has become a place, not of intellectual inquiry and debate, but to make demands that one's "oppression" be recognized.
Oopsy!Care
Obamacare promises and Obamacare reality are a bit far apart -- as expected by those of us who aren't Obama fanboys and girls. That's okay -- they got it passed. As for now, at the WashEx, Philip Klein writes:
There are very real and serious problems facing the law. Now that insurance companies have had a chance to assess medical claims being filed from those who signed up for Obamacare, it's become clear that the pool of enrollees is costlier than expected. Simply put, insurers aren't signing up enough young and healthy individuals to offset the cost of covering older and sicker enrollees. And the administration has slashed its enrollment projections for 2016....On the surface, there seems to be a growing consensus among Republicans when it comes to crafting an Obamacare alternative. Several plans introduced by Republicans in Congress have significant overlap with the presidential proposals unveiled by Gov. Scott Walker when he was running, and more recently, Jeb Bush. Those plans would generally repeal Obamacare and provide a tax credit to individuals to help them purchase insurance instead.
But many conservatives object to the idea on the grounds that a tax credit in effect is really another term for more government spending.
Other proposals, including ones introduced by Jindal and the House Republican Study Committee, instead rely on giving a standard tax deduction to individuals for purchasing health insurance. But fans of the tax credit argue that this approach wouldn't do much to help those with little or no tax burden against which to deduct, meaning that it wouldn't be competitive enough on coverage to be a politically viable alternative to Obamacare.
...In March, Cruz released a bill called the Health Care Choices Act, but aside from repealing Obamacare regulations, all it would do is allow for the interstate purchase of insurance. That's a positive step, but that alone would do little to change the multitude of barriers to a free market that would remain even if Obamacare were repealed. His presidential campaign has not released a detailed alternative.
Basically, the Republicans all have their thumb up their ass and there's no sign of any meaningful impending extractions.
Linksagna
Fetaccompli. Oh, wait -- it's ricotta.
Oh, fuck it.
Government Charges You With A Crime And Then Finds Reason To Take All Your Money So You Can't Pay For A Defense
And never mind whether you got the money through criminal activity. Because they can pretty much just say they think you did.
I've seen this happen to friends -- who, by the way, were not guilty of what they were accused of, but that doesn't matter when government as bully is calling the shots.
Radley Balko in the WaPo on the government freezing all of a defendant's assets before trial -- "even those the government itself concedes aren't tainted by any connection to criminality, thus effectively preventing that defendant from paying for his own defense."
It's difficult to imagine that the men who wrote and voted for the Bill of Rights would have both believed in the right to an attorney and in giving the government the power to make it impossible to pay for one....This particular policy is aimed at people accused of bank fraud, insider trading and other high-finance crimes. Those aren't the most sympathetic defendants. (One would hope that the likability of defendants wouldn't affect our assessment of whether a law is fair. But of course it does.) But the radical expansion of the government's power to seize property before trial grew out of the drug war. And as this exchange between Dreeben and Justice Kennedy demonstrates, there's no reason to think the policy will be limited to tycoons.
JUSTICE KENNEDY: But what is it that confines your your rationale to a specific area? It seems to me that if the government prevails in this case, every State in the union, every locality could say that in the event of assault and battery, malicious mischief, an accident caused by drunk driving, any crime involving a bodily injury, that the government is entitled to restrain disposition of assets that might be used for medical care, for pain and suffering. And this would, in effect, prevent the private bar from from practicing law unless it did so on a contingent basis.MR. DREEBEN: Justice Kennedy, it's correct that our principle is not limited to the types of crimes that are in this case. It is limited to the government making an adequate showing that at the conclusion of the case, it will have the right to the money.
Appalling and awful.
A wise comment at the WaPo, laying out where this could go:
Speckintime
How many businesses can survive if you freeze all of their assets? What a wonderful way for the government to destroy legal businesses that they don't like.
Seems like anybody running a political blog can also be taken down this way, sadly our soldiers sacrifices have not been able to protect our freedoms from the beast within.
Both parties are working for the same cause, the powers that be keep the hot potato of blame passed around so that the voters stay confused. Who is really running the show is not for the voters to know. That way the men behind the curtain can keep the voters fighting each other, while their power remains secure. It's all smoke, mirrors and misdirection to keep a population in control.
For what both parties have been doing to this country for decades Americans should be voting every incumbent out at every election and diluting the rats nest with third party candidates. Sadly the US has either become a nation of fools or the vote is a fraud and totally controlled, either way it doesn't leave too much hope for the country.
You Do Have To Appreciate The French Form Of Sacrilege
It's dining without wine, Iran's requirement that France said, "Eh, non" to.
WaPo Berlin Bureau chief Anthony Faiola writes:
BERLIN -- Guess who's not coming to dinner -- or even breakfast or lunch?Ahead of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's landmark European trip kicking off this weekend, French officials reportedly nixed plans for a formal meal in Paris with President François Hollande following a dispute over the menu. The Iranians, according to France's RTL Radio, insisted on a wine-free meal with halal meat -- a request based on Islamic codes that amounted to culinary sacrilege in France, a nation that puts the secular ideals of the Republic above all else.
The French, RTL said, counter offered with a presumably alcohol-free breakfast -- which the Iranians promptly rejected because it appeared too "cheap." The two leaders will now reportedly settle for a face-to-face chat next Tuesday.
There Is A Need For One Big Pre-College "Trigger Warning"
Jonathan Rauch, in the New York Daily News, writes about the increasing campus hysteria and the demands by students that campuses be "places of comfort" rather than places of intellectual challenge:
The trouble is that intellectually safe places are finishing schools, not universities. They can confer connections, polish and useful skills, but they will not educate, because to educate is to inflict and to endure criticism, which is not comfortable.In 1978, when I was a freshman at Yale, I watched with very mixed feelings as a student melted down in my political philosophy class. The professor had challenged us to name a proposition that is entirely certain, and a classmate ventured the certainty that we all will die, because everyone had died in the past. Pushing back, he said, "But how do you know?" After all, no amount of knowledge about the past can give any completely certain knowledge about the future. And then my classmate, encountering for the first time the icy Humean logic that ended human epistemological innocence in 1748, began to cry. I didn't cry, but I felt the shock in the room. This was no "little paradise."
So it is only fair to warn students and their parents that higher education is not a Disney cruise. Tell them in advance so they can prepare. Not, however, with multiple trigger warnings festooning syllabi. One will suffice:
"Warning: Although this university values and encourages civil expression and respectful personal behavior, you may at any moment, and without further notice, encounter ideas, expressions and images that are mistaken, upsetting, dangerous, prejudiced, insulting or deeply offensive. We call this education."
Display that trigger warning prominently on the college website. Put it in the course catalog and in the marketing brochures. Then ask students and their parents to grow up and deal with it. And watch as they rise to the challenge.
via @AdamKissel
Meow
Linkscratch fever...
Rubio Wrong On Philosophers And Their Supposed Bread-Crust Existence Compared With That Of The Supposedly Flush Welders
Love the title of this Ethan Epstein piece at NRO, "Marco Rubio, Bad Guidance Counselor."
In a riff that began with a discussion of the minimum wage, Rubio pivoted to praise vocational education. That's fine; every country needs people in the skilled trades. But he then took an unnecessary foray into philistinism. "Welders make more money than philosophers," he said, "we need more welders and less [sic] philosophers." (Thereby becoming the first person to blame America's economic woes on a surfeit of philosophers.)There was far more wrong in Rubio's assertion than the mangled grammar. For one, the idea that only purpose of higher education is to make money is dangerously misguided. At its best, education makes us (as the term liberal arts implies) free men and women, and better citizens. And it's bizarre, as Rubio seemed to suggest, to believe that anybody studies philosophy in order to get rich.
But maybe they should.
Because Rubio wasn't just wrong in his first principles: He was wrong on the facts. For it turns out that philosophers, in fact, make significantly more money than welders.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual salary of a mid-career American welder is $37,000 a year. The median starting of a philosophy graduate, meanwhile, is $39,000 a year, according to Payscale. The mid-career median salary of a philosophy graduate, meanwhile, tops $80,000 annually. That's right: Contrary to Rubio's assertion, philosophy majors make twice as much as welders.
Oh, and on a grammatical note, that should be "fewer" philosophers.
And a good point:
@RadioFreeTom
Dear Reporters Eager to Argue with Rubio: Go find out what most philosophy *majors*, not *philosophy professors*, end up making.
via @charlescwcooke
No, Everything Is Not A Conspiracy Against Christians And Jesus
It's the holiday version of seeing the Virgin Mary in your toast -- how, supposedly, Christians are deeming Starbucks cups an insult to Christmas and Christians because the seasonal cups are just red and green and lack snowflakes.
From HuffBlo news editor Hillary Hanson:
"This is a denial of historical reality and the great Christian heritage behind the American Dream that has so benefitted Starbucks," Andrea Williams of the U.K.-based organization Christian Concern told Breitbart. "This also denies the hope of Jesus Christ and His story so powerfully at this time of year."
Jesus played in the massive snowbanks of Nazareth? Okay, they have a few snowflakes there.
On a somewhat related note, for the record, I think it's dumb as fuck that stores instruct employees to say "Happy holidays."
It's Christmas -- a holiday that celebrates peace, joy, love, and clobbering the guy next to you to get the last Nintendo.
But Christians are the majority in this country.
They are not "persecuted" if, say, Macy's gives its employees the directive to go bland.
By the way, for anybody just dropping in here, I'm a post-Jewish atheist.
If you say "Merry Christmas" to me, I will say something back to you:
"Thank you! You, too!"
Not because I believe in Jesus. Because I try not to act like an asshole.
P.S. If your religion can't make it without the support of the graphic design at Starbucks, maybe you should consider switching.
P.P.S. I don't know any actual Christians who would make a hissy about something so dumb. Do you?
In America, 2015, Students Argue For Shutting Down Speech
They have an appropriately Orwellian way of describing this -- being "respectful."
At the end of the video below, Melissa Click, a Missouri prof -- disgustingly -- calls for "muscle" to eject a reporter from covering their protest: "Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here; I need some muscle over here."
From FoxNews:
Tim Tai, a student photographer on a freelance assignment for ESPN, was trying to take pictures of protesters on a public area of the campus.Another photographer who uploaded video of the incident to YouTube wrote, "Students form a perimeter around the #ConcernedStudent1950 tent village and ask media to leave. This is what civic-level censorship looks like at a university with the largest and oldest public college for journalism."
A woman [redhead, end of video] who began yelling at Tai to leave was later identified as Melissa Click, a professor in the university's communications department.
...Judge Andrew Napolitano reacted to the video on Fox Business Network, likening the professor's reaction to the "playbook" of Russian Communist leader Vladimir Lenin.
The judge and Stuart Varney agreed that "this is what happens when the leftists of the 1960s take over America's universities and create this socialism essentially and a denial of free speech and rights."
Napolitano said the photojournalist had the "absolute unfettered right" to take pictures out in the open on a public university's campus.
Click's apology.
Linkiefly
From larva to big, beautiful URL.
The Privileged, Thumbsucking Grievance Hunters Attending American Universities
James Kirchick writes at Tablet:
When I hear, in 2015, students complain about feeling "marginalized" at Yale due to their racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, or any other identity--and, on top of this, demanding institutional retribution against those who mildly express viewpoints they don't agree with and sartorial injunctions on pagan bacchanal holiday garb--I can't help but think of James Meredith. Meredith was the first black student to attend the segregated University of Mississippi and had to do so under the cover of heavily armed federal marshals. When I see photographs of Meredith and other black students of the civil rights era staring down state-sanctioned American racism--not the rumored antics of inebriated frat boys or emails from well-meaning child developmental psychologists about the propriety of certain Halloween costumes--I don't see people pleading for Dean's Excuses so they can huddle in a "safe space" to recover from "traumatic racial events." I see unbelievably courageous young men and women who, by keeping their heads high, exposed their spittle-flecked antagonists as the bigoted Neanderthals they were and changed this country for the better.The sight of Yalies forming self-appointed people's tribunals to stage show-trials of their professors inspires an obvious analogy to the period when students from Berkeley to Columbia staged "occupations" of the campuses in protest of their university administrations' bureaucratic entanglements in the Vietnam War. But while the behavior and language may be similar, the objectives of the 1960's student movement differed from that of today in at least one, crucial respect. 50 years ago, young people manned barricades demanding the overthrow of the system; their watchword was personal freedom. Now they desperately appeal to the system, insisting that it exercise even more control over their already hyper-managed lives. As Erika Christakis wrote in her triggering email, "American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience." Today universities have become cosseting nurseries for overgrown neurotics, who like the author of the aforementioned piece in the Yale Herald, proclaimed, "I don't want to debate. I want to talk about my pain." Perhaps, then, she should take time off from class and see a therapist.
The bigger problem here?
These students have not been equipped with the intellectual or emotional tools required for operating in a disputatious society. That inability to confront ideas one doesn't like and engage respectfully with those whom one disagrees with is not only a failure on the part of the individual students, but of the society that has produced them. What we're witnessing at Yale are the abysmal consequences of a decades-long inculcation of identity politics and grievance mongering, which hold that the relative virtue of an argument is directly proportional to the professed "marginalization" of its proponent, and it is destroying the ideal of a liberal education. Like the students who thought it entirely unobjectionable to hail an unhinged anti-Semite, (indeed, their joy at his defiance seemed inspired by an element of épater la bourgeoisie, precisely because he was unsettling their Jewish classmates), apparently no adults in these young peoples' lives have informed them that shouting in the face of a professor, hurling imprecations at those who question their assumptions, and then demanding refuge from the tempestuous waves of intellectual discourse in the form of a "safe space" where their fatuous notions go unchallenged, is behavior befitting a toddler, not an undergraduate at one of America's premier institutions of higher learning.
via @adamkissel
The Wild, Wild West Wing Gets Stopped By The Court On Enabling Illegal Immigration
Our lawless president's attempt to ignore the law and do whatever the fuck he wants has been slapped down by a federal appeals court -- at least in the illegal immigration domain.
David Nakamura writes at the WaPo:
A federal appeals court on Monday ruled against President Obama's plan to shield up to 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation, dealing another blow to the administration's effort to remake immigration laws and likely setting up a final battle in the Supreme Court next year...."The president must follow the rule of law, just like everybody else," Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement Monday.
Bummer!
Texas led a coalition of 26 states that brought the lawsuit. "Throughout this process, the Obama Administration has aggressively disregarded the constitutional limits on executive power."...There are an estimated 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally. After House Republicans blocked a comprehensive immigration bill last year, Obama announced plans to use executive action to dramatically expand a 2012 program that deferred the deportations of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who entered the United States illegally as children. Under the new program, the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens would be eligible to remain and apply for three-year work permits, provided they had not committed other crimes and lived in the country at least five years.
But 26 states, most with Republican governors, sued to block the program, arguing they would incur fees associated with the issuance of driver's licenses to the immigrants and asserting the Obama administration had failed to abide by federal rulemaking requirements. In February, a U.S. District Court judge in Brownsville, Tex., ruled that the program could not get underway as he continued to review whether the program was constitutional, stopping it just days before the Department of Homeland Security was to begin accepting applications.
Coddled Babies At Yale Aren't Going To Class Because -- Gasp! -- Somebody Disagrees With Them
My parents paid for me to go to the University of Michigan for three years and then, in addition to a scholarship I got for a piece I wrote, paid for much of the cost of my final year at NYU.
I am truly grateful that they did this. Not everybody's parents pay for college, and some kids who are smart and would do well in college never get to go. Sure, you can make something of yourself without college, and truth be told, I only finished at NYU because I know that some might not hire people who lack a college degree. But going to college is a privilege, and I only wish I had the time and resources to keep taking college classes today.
Well, that's a very different attitude than is being expressed by Jencey Paz at Yale. For some reason, her piece in the Yale Herald wasn't available (site down message), but I found it -- titled "Hurt at home" -- in Google cache.
Ah -- here's why.
She sees free speech -- and differences of opinion -- as a form of attack:
Last week, Erika Christakis, the associate master of Silliman College, sent an email to the Silliman community that called an earlier entreaty for Yalies to be more sensitive about culturally appropriating Halloween costumes a threat to free speech. In the aftermath of the email, I saw my community divide. She did not just start a political discourse as she intended. She marginalized many students of color in what is supposed to be their home. But more disappointing than the original email has been the response of Christakis and her husband, Silliman Master Nicholas Christakis. They have failed to acknowledge the hurt and pain that such a large part of our community feel. They have again and again shown that they are committed to an ideal of free speech, not to the Silliman community.
Paz is doing what theFIRE.org's Greg Lukianoff explains as conflating emotional "safety" with physical safety. You have a right to be physically safe from harm. You have no right to not be offended; in fact, the rest of us have a First Amendment right to offend you.
Check out these kids -- at Yale! (which was way out of the price range of the schools my parents would send me to) -- who are not focusing on their education because they're too busy being all hurty feelz because somebody doesn't share their opinion on their right to be coddled. Paz continues:
I have had to watch my friends defend their right to this institution. This email and the subsequent reaction to it have interrupted their lives. I have friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals, and who are having breakdowns.
Yes, it is mindboggling to me that people privileged enough to attend Yale are indulging in "breakdowns" because somebody has a different view than they do.
Grow the fuck up or get to the sort of institution that helps people whose feelings are too fragile to allow them to function in adult society.
Lurky
Sneakylinks.
Immigration Non-Enforcement: How The IRS Screws Citizens Over When Their Identity Is Stolen
They won't even tell you if they see that somebody else is using your social security number. They are prohibited from doing it!
Shocking blog item by Mark Krikorian at NRO about how the Obama administration's aggressive enabling of illegal immigrants in this country and the disgusting part the IRS is playing in this -- at the expense of taxpaying citizens.
He got the information from an extensive report from the investigative unit of the Indianapolis NBC affiliate, "Secret IRS policy hides identity theft from victims." Bob Segall is the "13 Investigates" reporter.
The findings of the 13 Investigates report include:
•The IRS accepts millions of tax returns - and issues tax refunds - even when taxpayer documents show clear warning signs of identity theft•Confidential IRS policies instruct IRS employees not to tell taxpayers when someone else uses their social security number to earn income
•The IRS allows illegal immigrants to "borrow" social security numbers that do not legally belong to them
•The IRS is discontinuing a program to notify taxpayers when their social security number is used by someone else to gain employment
Here's a sample of what goes on:
What action does the agency take when it learns someone else used your Social Security number to get work and earn a paycheck?"We're not allowed to say anything. Not a word," explained an IRS whistleblower.
"You were told to ignore it?" I asked, making sure I heard correctly.
"Yes. Identity theft is a crime. It affects real people in a lot of ways. But we are not supposed to do anything. Just let it go," she said. "I talk to these people every day who don't understand exactly what happened to them, and it's heartbreaking."
As somebody who's had her identity stolen (which I chronicle in I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society), I am especially appalled by this.
Having frozen my credit in 2006, I didn't go through quite as huge a hell as many do, but it is still a time-sucking, terrible violation that leaves you feeling financially vulnerable and vulnerable in general for years afterwards...if not for as long as you live.
via @kausmickey
States' Tax Welfare For Hollywood A Really Bad Idea
Jazz Shaw writes at Hot Air about the massive tax breaks given to Hollywood productions by various states. Here's how it worked in New York, reports Joseph Spector at the Press & Sun Bulletin:
Nearly two-dozen studios raked in more than $1.5 billion in rebates from New York over the past nine years as the state rapidly expanded its incentives to lure in movies and shows.At a time when upstate New York is battling job losses and Gov. Andrew Cuomo is trying to entice new companies through tax incentives, it's Hollywood that is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the state's largesse...
NBC/Universal was by far the leader in rebates awarded between 2006 and 2014, getting back a whopping $320 million for up to 30 percent of its production costs to film in New York.
Sony/Columbia was refunded $200 million, while HBO got $198 million, the WB got $185 million and CBS received $171 million, the records obtained by Gannett through a Freedom of Information request showed.
The figures were staggering to critics of the program, who said the money should be used instead to help existing businesses in New York, particularly in regions trying to recover from decades of decline in manufacturing jobs.
Overall, $423 million was sent back to studios in 2014 - with the most, $117 million, returned to CBS, said Empire State Development, the state agency that runs the program.
Shaw notes:
And how much does this really bring into the coffers of the city and the state? Not that much, really. It's a very brief infusion. The jobs they create are short term and generally low wage. It's true that the amount they spend is a nice injection for some local restaurants and hotels, but that only helps a handful of businesses and none of it produces long term growth. And none of this addresses the weeks at a time when they can simply shut down traffic and inconvenience everyone in the area.The amount of money that the government is giving back pretty much wipes out most of the benefits, and how many people really decide to pick up and move someplace new based on the backdrop to a a movie? Shouldn't the competition at the state government level be going toward sustainable growth and attracting businesses which will actually stick around and build communities? These figures are pretty staggering, particularly for smaller cities trying to get a piece of this pie. Voters need to speak up and let local leaders know that it's their tax money being given away at home and the profits are all going to the studios and networks. (They aren't really hurting for profits in most cases, by the way.)
via @Instapundit
Is There A "Find My Messiah" Like "Find My iPhone"?
From The Hill's Peter Sullivan:
Former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) calls in an interview for converting as many people as possible to Christianity because Jesus is "coming soon."
How does she know?
On a side note, coming from the Detroit suburbs, I found it hilarious that there are so many people out here in California named "Jesus." (Though, to be fair, it's pronounced "hay-zeus.") For a while, I saw Jesus often -- every time my fucking pink Rambler broke down.
While Jews Care For Palestinians -- Even Those Who Attack Jews -- In Israeli Hospitals...
...Palestinians have a store called "Hitler" with mannequins clutching knives out in front.
Snippy
Lippylinks.
Ben Carson And The Psych Exam: An "Our Hero!" Versus An "I Got Fooled" Story
Walter Olson of Cato Institute and Overlawyered posted this serious of tweets below on Ben Carson and his stories about his past in his autobiography, a number of which are now coming into question. (Links to pieces within his tweets are below.) 
The link to the newspaper article posted on Facebook (in the first tweet) is here.
The WSJ link to a story about Carson is pay only, but you can also Google the headline, which I've done for you, to get to the story. The essential excerpt:
In his 1990 autobiography, "Gifted Hands," Mr. Carson writes of a Yale psychology professor who told Mr. Carson, then a junior, and the other students in the class--identified by Mr. Carson as Perceptions 301--that their final exam papers had "inadvertently burned," requiring all 150 students to retake it. The new exam, Mr. Carson recalled in the book, was much tougher. All the students but Mr. Carson walked out."The professor came toward me. With her was a photographer for the Yale Daily News who paused and snapped my picture," Mr. Carson wrote. " 'A hoax,' the teacher said. 'We wanted to see who was the most honest student in the class.' " Mr. Carson wrote that the professor handed him a $10 bill.
No photo identifying Mr. Carson as a student ever ran, according to the Yale Daily News archives, and no stories from that era mention a class called Perceptions 301. Yale Librarian Claryn Spies said Friday there was no psychology course by that name or class number during any of Mr. Carson's years at Yale.
The Short-Sighted Stupids We Elect To Represent Us
Here in California, they're building us a "high-speed" train that won't actually be high speed and that is projected to cost $68 billion (and will surely cost tons more by the time it's done).
Yet, self-driving cars (AVs -- "autonomous vehicles," as the piece by Steven Strauss in the LA Times refers to them), are just around the corner:
In 1898, the U.S. population was about 74 million, and there were only 800 registered cars. By 1927 -- less than 30 years -- the U.S. had more than 19 million cars on the road, and more than 55% of American families owned one. The 20th century shift to automobiles, within the span of a normal human life, destroyed many existing sectors (anything to do with maintaining 20 million horses, for example). Entirely new laws, regulations and infrastructure (roads, tunnels and bridges suitable for motor vehicles, gasoline distribution and much else) had to be created.The delegates to the 1898 urban planning conference failed to recognize the developments that would transform their world. Today's transportation infrastructure discussions -- about building a $10-billion bus terminal in New York, or a $70-billion high-speed rail system in California -- may prove similarly shortsighted. These transportation mega-projects don't seem to take AVs into account. Yet by the time these initiatives are completed, AVs will be a major part of the transportation landscape. AV minibuses, providing home to office direct service, may completely replace traditional buses. And there's little doubt that AVs will radically change the economic calculations and assumptions that make high-speed rail projects seem worthwhile (i.e. the speed and cost of travel by conventional car).
...Policy leaders need to seriously consider winding down vocational schools that teach bus and truck driving as a career. Cities need to start rethinking their housing policies. And that's not all. As AVs facilitate a shift to electric and hybrid vehicles, highway trust fund revenue, which comes from the gasoline sales tax and pays for most federal road work, will collapse. How will road repair be funded going forward?
All sorts of technological, legal and regulatory barriers must be addressed for AVs to deliver their full potential. But these barriers aren't higher than those encountered in the shift from horses to conventional cars. Autonomous vehicles are coming. We need to stop thinking within the limitations of the past and focus instead on the tectonic shifts of the future.
Chris Christie's Plea To Change How America Handles Drug Addicts
What's with the notion that we'll punish people instead of helping them?
@BrianDavidEarp
Finkie
Snitchy.
University College Of London Now Censoring Criticism Of The Islamic State
Brendan O'Neill writes at The Spectator that Macer Gifford, a former UCL student, was set to give a talk there this week "on his experiences with the YPG, the fighting units of Syrian Kurdistan who have valiantly stymied the spread of Isis":
But the Kurdish Society who invited him was told by Asad Khan, the activities and events officers of UCL's students' union, that the talk couldn't go ahead, because 'in every conflict there are two sides, and at UCLU we want to avoid taking sides in conflicts'.It's true there are two sides in the YPG v Isis conflict. One side has both men and women fighting hard to protect their homeland and people from falling to brutal Islamist rule; the other pushes gay people off buildings, stones adulterers, sets fire to its prisoners of war, and mows down anyone who stands in the way of the growth of its creepy Caliphate. If you can't 'take sides' in a conflict like that, then your moral compass is in serious need of repair.
Hey, Coddled College Students, Get Ready To Be Offended -- Because We Have The Right To Offend, And That's A Beautiful Thing
At Townhall.com, UNC-Wilmington criminology prof Mike Adams posted the text from a talk he gave to his incoming students:
Let's get something straight right now. You have no right to be unoffended. You have a right to be offended with regularity. It is the price you pay for living in a free society. If you don't understand that you are confused and dangerously so. In part, I blame your high school teachers for failing to teach you basic civics before you got your diploma. Most of you went to the public high schools, which are a disaster. Don't tell me that offended you. I went to a public high school.Of course, your high school might not be the problem. It is entirely possible that the main reason why so many of you are confused about free speech is that piece of paper hanging on the wall right over there. Please turn your attention to that ridiculous document that is framed and hanging by the door. In fact, take a few minutes to read it before you leave class today. It is our campus speech code. It specifically says that there is a requirement that everyone must only engage in discourse that is "respectful." That assertion is as ludicrous as it is illegal. I plan to have that thing ripped down from every classroom on campus before I retire.
Moving on over to Yale, Blake Neff writes at The Daily Caller:
Yale University has been hit by controversy in the past week after professor Erika Christakis, associate headmaster of the school's Silliman College, sent an email to the college's members suggesting that they shouldn't be overly sensitive about Halloween costumes that engage in "cultural appropriation." Instead, Christakis encouraged students to tolerate them and avoid trying to censor expression."Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious ... a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?" Christakis wrote. "American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition."
In response, Christakis and her husband Nicholas (Silliman's headmaster) have been besieged by calls for their resignation by students who say they have made Yale a dangerous place for black students.
On this video, a student screams hysterically at Nicholas Christakis for creating an "unsafe space" at Yale:
Some of what the student screams:
"You should step down! If that is what you think of being headmaster, you should step down! It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not!"
There are "safe spaces," and they are not institutions of "higher learning."
The notion that college was supposed to be a sort of giant padded crib with beer -- this has never been the case until now.
America...we are pretty much fucked.
People React To Being Asked To Work On Spec
This video was posted at AdWeek by Tim Nudd:
About the video, Nudd writes:
Zulu made the video for Strategy magazine's annual Agency of the Year event on Wednesday night, where a number of agencies presented comic videos. But despite the humorous approach, the topic is a serious one for Zulu.The shop took part in spec pitches during its first two years of operation, but founder and CCO Zak Mroueh abruptly stopped doing so. "We haven't done a pitch that requires spec creative in five years," he told Adweek this year. "This approach allows us to support our clients' brands rather than using the resources our clients pay for to gain new business."
Now, it wants other agencies to follow its lead. "It's time we all said no to spec," says the on-screen copy at the end of the new video.Could it be that easy?
Slippy
Watch your steppy links.
The Healing Power Of Dog Snout
Dog snout on arm. One of the best feelings there is. 
P.S. If you've got Instagrams or other links to photos of your dog, please post them (one link per comment or your comment will likely go to my spam folder). I love seeing photos of people's dogs. (And a secret about me: Though I am not a kid person, I love seeing photos of friends' kids. Nobody believes me on this, but it's true. Of course, another secret -- photos are quiet.)
Bernie Sanders Bashes "Unregulated" Uber; Uses It For All His Taxi/Ride-Sharing Transportation
Blake Neff writes at the Libertarian Republic:
Just a couple months ago, Bernie Sanders lambasted Uber as an "unregulated" company with "serious problems," but financial disclosures by the Democratic presidential candidate reveal that whenever his campaign requires a taxi, they literally always turn to Uber.According to research done by National Journal, 100 percent of Sanders' spending on taxi and ride-sharing services was spent on Uber. Among 2016 presidential contenders, that's a distinction Sanders shares with only Bobby Jindal, Martin O'Malley, and the defunct Scott Walker and Rick Perry campaigns. (RELATED: Bernie Sanders Does NOT Like Uber)
It also puts him way ahead of Hillary Clinton, who only had 41 percent of her taxi costs go to Uber. Only Clinton and Mike Huckabee spent more than half of their taxi spending on traditional taxis rather than modern ride-sharing apps.
I love Uber. It makes it cheaper to get anywhere in LA, and I love being picked up by these drivers who seem to take great pride in keeping their cars clean and shiny and who are often trying to fund some ambition they have.
I also took Uber in Boston and loved it. My final ride there was with Jeremias, who came to pick me up very, very early on a Sunday morning wearing a suit, tie, and a snazzy hat. When's the last time your taxi driver looked so snappy in honor of your ride? 
Male Mating Tactics Are Now Considered Rape
Evolutionary psychologists David Buss and David Schmitt explain that men and women have conflicting sexual strategies. Women are the choosier sex and men are the sex that, well, if you're female and have a pulse, they very well might choose you. Even, in some cases, if you don't have a pulse.
Being a male often means trying to talk a woman into bed. And if that's all a man does -- if the woman agrees -- there shouldn't effectively be "take back" afterwards, with anything prosecutors can get on you.
Jeannie Suk writes in The New Yorker of the Owen Labrie case -- the boy at private St. Paul's School who persuaded a female student to have sex with him and was sentenced to a year in jail, followed by five years of probation, and must register for as a sex offender.
And do note that he was not judged to have committed rape; his sentence was all they could get on him: having sex with an "underage" girl. (He was 18 and she was 15...which isn't the same -- or shouldn't be considered as the same -- as when somebody's 35 and having sex with a 12-year-old.)
Suk writes:
While a competition of sexual conquests and talk of "scoring" and "slaying" among teen-age boys may be appalling, they reveal the boys' stratagems to get girls to have sex with them, not to have sex without their consent. Labrie bragged of having "used every trick in the book" during his hookup with the accuser. He told friends that, with girls, he would "feign intimacy ... then stab them in the back." What we are really talking about here is not rape, as we have until recently understood it, but rather sex that we strongly dislike.We are in the midst of a significant cultural shift, in which we are redescribing sex that we vehemently dislike as rape, and sexual attitudes that we strongly disapprove of as examples of rape culture. For centuries, the legal definition of rape was intercourse accomplished by force and without consent. Many states have done away with the force criterion, and no longer require proof that the victim physically resisted the assailant or failed to do so because of reasonable fear of injury. With force absent from rape definitions, there has been increasing pressure on how to define consent. In the past several years, on many college campuses, consent has become affirmative consent, according to which not obtaining agreement before each sexual act is sexual misconduct. California and New York require affirmative-consent policies at schools receiving state funding. Some college campuses have gone even further and defined consent as not only positive but "enthusiastic" agreement to have sex. Anything short of that becomes sexual assault. It is not surprising that Judge Smukler, presumably influenced by these ideas, would say that, even though lack of consent had not been proven, this didn't mean that the girl had, in fact, given consent. Far-fetched at the time, Catharine MacKinnon's 1981 statement, "Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated," is effectively becoming closer to law, even if it is not on the books.
And that's pretty damn sick.
Groucho Marxism
Make me link.
Sorry, Feminists, Historical Accuracy Is Not Sexism
There's some to-do in the UK over the new British passport, which features British historical figures.
Not surprisingly, a lot more of them were men than women, and feminists are getting panty-bunched over it.
What were the passport people supposed to do, put some laundress and some society lady on there just to get some female representation?
As Ella Whelan writes at Spiked:
The idea that I need to see Mary Wollstonecraft on every item in my handbag, from my passport to my cash, in order to feel important and valued is pathetic.
via @jowilliams293
Suspending Boys For Being Boys
As sex differences researcher Joyce Benenson points out in Warriors and Worriers, males evolved to be the warriors of the species, and boys play with weapons and pretend that they're doing battle.
In fact, Benenson notes from her research on very young kids, that if you don't give boys toy weapons, they'll end up shooting "bullets" out of a doll's head.
Well, more and more, we see boys being punished for being boys.
The latest case comes out of a Catholic school in Cincinnati, Ohio. Dallas Franklin writes at KFOR that a first-grader was suspended for three days.
His "crime"? Pretending to be a Power Ranger during recess and pretending to shoot another student with an imaginary bow and arrow.
In other words, it's the crime of being a boy.
The boy's parents are Matthew and Martha Miele
Principal Joe Crachiolo called Martha Miele to let her know about the situation."I didn't really understand. I had him on the phone for a good amount of time so he could really explain to me what he was trying to tell me," Martha Miele told WLWT. "My question to him was 'Is this really necessary? Does this really need to be a three-day suspension under the circumstances that he was playing and he's 6 years old?'"
The Mieles begged the principal to reconsider.
"He told me that he was going to stand firm and that he was not going to change it," Martha Miele said.
Principal Crachiolo sent a letter home to parents stating in part:
"I have no tolerance for any real, pretend, or imitated violence. The punishment is an out of school suspension."
Do they read literature in that school? Do they only stick to the parts where they write about blowing wind in cow pastures (and none of that Tennyson nastiness about how nature is "red in tooth and claw")?
How The Nanny State Encourages Kids To Smoke Or Keep Smoking
Michael Greenwood writes at the Yale School of Medicine site that banning e-cig sales to minors, as more than 40 states have done, has unintended consequences: increasing teens' use of conventional ciggies.
This was the finding in a new study by Abigail S. Friedman out of the Yale School of Public Health, now in press at the Journal of Health Economics. (For a non-protected copy that probably has similar information, check out Friedman's dissertation.)
Using data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the research finds that state bans on e-cigarette sales to minors yield a 0.9 percentage point increase in rates of recent conventional cigarette use by 12 to 17 year olds, relative to states without these bans."Conventional cigarette use has been falling somewhat steadily among this age group since the start of the 21st century. This paper shows that bans on e-cigarette sales to minors appear to have slowed this decline by about 70 percent in the states that implemented them," said Abigail Friedman, assistant professor of public health and the study's author. "In other words, as a result of these bans, more teenagers are using conventional cigarettes than otherwise would have done so."
via @ATabarrok
Doodles
Scrawlylinks.
Boys Will Be...Handcuffed. At Age 7.
A police officer handcuffed a 7-year-old -- and then couldn't uncuff the kid because he'd lost the key. The kid remained cuffed for "nearly an hour," according to a news reporter on the video below.
The mother says on the video that the son has been diagnosed with ADHD. In other words, this sounds like yet another episode of pathologizing -- and criminalizing -- being a boy.
John Vibes writes at The Free Thought Project:
An angry mother recently posted cellphone video of her 7-year-old son in handcuffs at his elementary school. The officer who detained him was unable to release him because he lost his set of keys to the handcuffs.Cameron McCadden, who is 7-years-old, told his mother that he was handcuffed by police because he kicked a cart and refused to sit down when the officer asked him to, and the school has remained silent about the details of the incident.
In a statement, the Flint Police Department said that the student "appeared intent on injuring himself" and that "The officer used handcuffs to restrain the child to prevent injury to the child or others." However, Cameron says that he never hit or threatened any of the other children, and no one at the school actually said that he did, the officer just said that he was afraid that the child might hurt someone.
Cameron's mother, Chrystal McCadden, said that her son has ADHD and while he sometimes has difficulty focusing in class, he is not a violent person and has never exhibited any signs of violent behavior.
"He's hyper. I've gotten these calls about (him) being hyper before. But he is not a violent kid. I'm still trying to get answers," she said.
Some kids are bratty. Sometimes because they're brats; sometimes because they have trouble sitting still and focusing, and this makes them frustrated and angry and leads them to act out.
The problem, especially for some boys, is that the school environment is a poor match for our evolved psychology. (I take Adderall for my ADHD so I can sit still and focus on writing for long periods of time.) Parents, too, may be at fault for raising underparented children. Whatever the cause, the solution isn't calling the cops on a 7-year-old and treating him like a gun-toting perp.
via @PolicePoliceACP
Weather Vein
The difference between LA and Michigan: When it rains in Michigan, 46,000 people do not tweet pictures of it.
Black Like Me
Rachel Dolezal, on a syndicated talk show called The Real, finally admitted that she's white.
From The Federalist:
"You're not black," host Jeannie Mai said to Dolezal, who is white. "You weren't born black, so when you say you are black, it makes it hard for people to understand where you're coming from,""Right, and that's why I said I acknowledge that I was biologically born white, to white parents," Dolezal said to cheers and applause from the studio audience. "But I identify as black," she continued.
Dolezal made headlines earlier this year when reports surfaced that she was not, in fact, black. Dolezal, who previously served as the chapter president for the Spokane NAACP, spent years pretending to be a black person. She claimed a black man as her father on social media. Dolezal also regularly wrote about her black son Iziah, who was actually her adopted brother. Dolezal, a graduate of Howard University, previously taught classes on Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University.
My dog identifies as a person who eats a lot of bacon.
Unfortunately for her, she's gotten about 1/10 of one piece in her lifetime, due to little bitsies crumbling off as I eat breakfast at the computer, right over her (as she sleeps in her little plush bed in my lap).
And a tweet:
Crime Lab Scandals: Lying Crime Lab Employees Lead To Wrongful Convictions, Public Officials' Shrugs
Innocent people are being convicted, reports Radley Balko in the WaPo, due to lying or shoddy or wrong work of crime lab analysts. And then, when the evidence is found to be wrong, or bad, or a lie:
...prosecutors have no special duty to notify defendants that their convictions might have been obtained with evidence that was falsified by government employees.
That's a remark about one particular lab, but as Balko notes:
Read that line a few times. Let it sink in. This is consistent with other crime lab scandals across the country.Back in the Oklahoma story, Bender lamented that those defense attorneys from New York were implicating not just Cox, but also hard-working cops and prosecutors -- that they were "trying to trash the names and careers of professionals who have given to our community for years." But really. What sort of public servant sees no ethical obligation to even notify potentially innocent people that the conviction that sent them to prison and ruined their lives was won with falsified evidence, and that they could now try to clear their names? Scratch that. I guess we know what sort of public official -- a prosecutor.
But even if there is no professional obligation, there's certainly a moral one.
Day after day, I see story after story about police or the courts that does not reflect the America we're supposed to be living in.
Linko
Like the lottery, but without the scratch-off cards.
Sweetheart Scam Stole Our Taxpayer Dollars Under The Cover Of Law, Handed Them Over To Build Useless Gas Station In Afghanistan
Tom Vanden Brook writes at USA Today of a gas station built in Afghanistan for $43 million. A similar gas station built in Pakistan cost $500K.
Best of all the gas station has no value for any but the wealthiest handful of Afghans, as it's a compressed natural gas station:
The Pentagon's own contractor stated that converting a car to compressed natural gas costs $700 in Afghanistan. The average annual income there is $690....[Sen. Claire] McCaskill, in a letter to the Pentagon, demanded to know how the money was spent and whether the filling station is still open for business. She noted that the contractor responsible for keeping the pumps running failed to renew its operating license only six months after it opened.
The company that did this? Central Asian Engineering, of CADG.
It's "a multi-national construction firm that describes itself as doing 'the hardest jobs' in 'the toughest places' with 'the best people.'"
Their website.
I dunno. Separating our money from politicians seems pretty damn easy.
Let's see who got what out of this deal. And let's see some sleazebags go to jail.
Here are those who run the company.
The Corrupt State And Federal "Justice" Systems And A Presidential Panel That Did Nothing To Change Them
TheFIRE.org founder Harvey Silverglate writes at WGBH about a panel on criminal justice reform, filmed at the White House -- one that failed to discuss the real reforms needed:
Our state and federal justice systems over-incarcerate by a huge margin, and it is one of America's greatest shames that we have the largest prison population in the world. But all of the reforms discussed by President Obama, Colorado United States Attorney John Walsh, and Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck belie a central scandal: a vast number of defendants are prosecuted for either (1) engaging in conduct that should not be criminalized at all, or for (2) acts that they did not commit but which a rewarded witness fingered them for. Nor did the discussion take into account (3) the thousands of people serving sentences for violations of criminal statutes so vague that no person of ordinary or even elevated intelligence - including many lawyers and judges - would instinctively consider crimes.These structural defects of the criminal justice system will continue to result in over-incarceration of our innocent fellow citizens, even if all of the reforms discussed at Keller's White House extravaganza come to pass. The reforms mentioned at the panel - the reduction of long sentences, the targeting of only the "worst-of-the-worst," an increase in federal community policing grants - will only put a dent in the problem.
The panel only briefly touched upon the toxic plea bargaining culture that has developed throughout the country. U. S. Attorney Walsh proposed that mandatory-minimum sentences be reserved only for the most violent offenders. But he failed to mention a practice that goes hand-in-hand with these sentences: government cooperation in exchange for lower sentences. Endowed with the immense power of imposing long prison sentences, a prosecutor can single-handedly get a defendant to say almost anything about almost anybody. Such witnesses, as the saying goes, will "not only sing, but compose." Many an innocent defendant has gone to prison for decades based on such bought testimony of dubious accuracy.
The White House discussion also failed to address the kinds of crimes such as "conspiracy," violation of "national security," or "fraud" - that are not defined with sufficient clarity so that a typical citizen can discern what conduct is allowed and what is prohibited. There is an ancient precept of the English common law that a person not be designated a criminal unless he intentionally and knowingly violates a clear legal requirement. Too many people are prosecuted today, mostly in the federal courts, who have no idea that they violated some obscure or vague statute buried in the federal criminal code. (I wrote a whole book on the subject, my 2007 volume entitled Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. My thesis was that the typical American arguably commits three federal felonies a day without even knowing it. I guess the President never got around to reading my book.)
Once during the discussion U.S. Attorney Walsh complimented the President on his vast command of the issues in this sprawling area of law and life. Chief Beck reiterated the compliment. But in reality, none of the panelists, nor the host of the panel for that matter, really appeared to understand the deeper ills of our state and federal criminal justice systems. Perhaps this was due to the panel's utter and obvious lack of a member of Washington D.C.'s Public Defenders office, or an ACLU attorney, or Washington Post columnist Radley Balko, who covers these issues in detail week after week. Without these sorts of panelists, this "conversation" on criminal justice was rendered completely asymmetrical and incomplete from the outset.
We not only incarcerate too many defendants for too-long periods, but we convict and incarcerate a vast and largely unknown number of individuals who are in fact innocent of crime properly understood. The system is broken, yes, but in many more ways than we heard about today.
Silverglate's book on the subject: Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent
Obummercare -- Prices Jump
Jericka Duncan writes at CBS News that it's sign-up season again for "Affordable" Care, now in year three:
In most states, premiums are rising, up 31.5 percent in Alaska and up nearly 36 percent in Oklahoma....Self-employed accountant Fred Imel of Oklahoma buys insurance for his family through the Health Insurance Marketplace.
He just learned his premiums are going up from $1,100 per month, to $1,700.
That means Imel could pay $20,000 next year for health insurance -- an increase of 66 percent.
"The first job when I got out of school was $16,500," Imel said. "You know that's a lot of money."
...According to the Department of Health and Human Services, with tax credits, more than 7 in 10 current market place enrollees could find plans for $75 per month in premiums, or less.
But Fred Imel doesn't qualify for tax credits, forcing him to shop around.
You've gotta appreciate the political salsa dancing that went on here: Call it "affordable" care and people will just assume it will be.
Ducky
Quackylinks.
Education: Who Has What Rights? Do Home-Schooled Kids Actually Have To Learn Something?
Do kids have a right to an education? If so, why?
Do parents have a right to decide that their kids will not be educated in math, English, computer science, and other subjects being taught in the schools but to be homeschooled mainly that the Jesus bus will be around to take them to heaven?
On the other hand, where does religious freedom come in? Does it allow you to teach your children in a way that will surely handicap them from joining our economy as adults and competing with their peers?
Are children their parents' possessions? We don't think so in cases of physical child abuse. Where does denial of a commensurate (to their peers) education come in?
A story out of Austin, Texas, from KRGV:
Laura McIntyre began educating her nine children more than a decade ago inside a vacant office at an El Paso motorcycle dealership she ran with her husband and other relatives.
Now the family is embroiled in a legal battle the Texas Supreme Court hears next week that could have broad implications on the nation's booming home-school ranks. The McIntyres are accused of failing to teach their children educational basics because they were waiting to be transported to heaven with the second coming of Jesus Christ.
At issue: Where do religious liberty and parental rights to educate one's own children stop and obligations to ensure home-schooled students ever actually learn something begin?...Like other Texas home-school families, Laura and her husband Michael McIntyre weren't required to register with state or local educational officials. They also didn't have to teach state-approved curriculums or give standardized tests.
But problems began when the dealership's co-owner and Michael's twin brother, Tracy, reported never seeing the children reading, working on math, using computers or doing much of anything educational except singing and playing instruments. He said he heard one of them say learning was unnecessary since "they were going to be raptured."
Then, the family's eldest daughter, 17-year-old Tori, ran away from home saying she wanted to return to school. She was placed in ninth grade, since officials weren't sure she could handle higher-level work.
The El Paso school district eventually asked the McIntyres to provide proof that their children were being properly educated and even filed truancy charges that were later dropped. The family sued and had an appeals court rule against them, but now the case goes Monday to the all-Republican state Supreme Court.
via ifeminists
Daylight Stupid Time
From a @IAMMGraham (Michael Graham) tweet:
Hey, morons--we invented something called "electricity." STOP SCREWING WITH THE CLOCKS!
Traffic Court: How To Legally Rob The Citizenry
Jeffrey A. Tucker writes about traffic court on the blog at Foundation for Economic Education, in a piece called, "How to Steal $75,000 from the Poor in One Day's Work: Traffic Court Is a Tax-Collection Scheme Masked as Justice":
Cops, judges, and courts ... exercise arbitrary power to ruin people's lives, and they continue to do so at astonishing rates, all over the country.I recently saw this firsthand. I sat in a municipal traffic court from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., awaiting my own time with the judge for a petty moving violation. I was there with 150 other people, gathering cobwebs as the judge took his sweet time and shamed people as they stood at the bench and humbly submitted to his rule.
No phones or computers are allowed in court. My iPad was not allowed, either. Once you enter through the metal detector, you are trapped for the duration. There is no contacting anyone. For most people today, this would be the only time in their lives when such contact is forbidden. This rule contributes to the feeling of being controlled by and subjected to power.
You just have to wait your turn, even if it takes eight hours. So there we sat.
Not one person in this courtroom had harmed anyone. Not one. They had not stolen anything, had not mugged anyone, had not caused any car wrecks. And yet there they were, facing torment at the hands of a judge drunk on power and a criminal-justice system that is out of control.
...Each person was fined between $500 and $3,000, and always on a plea bargain. They admitted guilt for something in exchange for paying a reduced fine.
For example, the judge dismissed my one charge (not complying with the "move over" rule -- which requires a drive to switch lanes away from a patrol car on the shoulder -- a rule I didn't know existed) and I admitted guilt for something that wasn't even true: driving without my license. In fact, I did have my license, so the form I signed was a lie that the judge had me tell. By what understanding of justice does the court blackmail you to admit to crimes you didn't commit?
Fully one-third of these people had been dragged in for pot possession. In the typical scenario, a cop would stop a car on a rural stretch for some minor moving violation. The cop would claim to smell pot, which constitutes probable cause, and initiate a thorough search of the car. The cop would find a pipe or some pot, arrest the person, and then issue a few other tickets in addition, for things like no proof of insurance, a burnt-out taillight, and so on. But it was the pot charge that had landed these drivers in front of the judge.
Repeatedly, the judge reminded the accused, "We are not in Colorado. In the state of Georgia, your offense carries with it a 12-month prison sentence."
The judge then said he would not send the person to jail. He dismissed a few other charges, thereby positioning himself as a merciful public servant. He was then in a position to get any of these poor souls to admit guilt for anything as long as they would get a lesser sentence.
Everyone was fined. But some punishments went further. The pot criminals were required to do 50 to 100 hours of community service, taking away time from school, work, and family. They now have to attend classes on the dangers of drugs (I'm sure those work!). They also must submit to six months of drug testing to make sure they are not consuming this dangerous substance. They prove this by sending in urine samples. Now I understand why there is such a burgeoning market for synthetic urine.
They also get a criminal record.
Then there's the fine. Most people could not pay hundreds or thousands of dollars on the spot. The judge gave them one month to cough up the money. Where are these poor people going to get that kind of money? One solution that immediately occurred to me: they could get into the drug business temporarily. Another option: steal the money. How much crime is being brought about through these fines?
He estimated that there was $75K collected on his day in traffic courts, with everyone treating the judge as "some kind of great man."
Here in Los Angeles, you can prove you didn't commit the violation -- like when I showed that my car actually was re-registered...months before I got the ticket. Didn't matter. I sent in a letter showing my paid-for registration and a photo of the current sticker on my license plate. The reply? Pay the fine.
Gangsters with the force of law behind them. Sleazy.
Here are my tweets to LA's head parking violations sleazebag, Seleta Reynolds.
Linky Riccardo
Desilinks Productions.
"Walking While Black" Or Walking Like An Oblivious Idiot?
Woman accuses police officers for stopping her for "walking while black," when, the truth was, they were just doing their job -- trying to keep her from getting hit by a car and/or impeding traffic.
Watch the video below and read the point/counterpoint in the Dallas Morning News.
I was uncomfortable with their power grab in asking for ID from her. Why would they need to know who she is to protect her from traffic?
About the ID request, Corinth Chief of Police Debra Walthall counters at the above link:
Impeding traffic is a Class C misdemeanor, and it is our policy to ask for identification from people we encounter for this type violation. I am surprised by her comments as this was not a confrontational encounter but a display of professionalism and genuine concern for her safety.Please review the video and I'm sure you will agree the officers' intent was simply to keep her safe. Ms. Bland never contacted the police department to voice her concerns regarding this encounter and has not returned my phone message left at the number provided by the mayor.
The citizens of Corinth as a whole are a highly educated population, and it is disappointing that one of our residents would attempt to make this a racial issue when clearly it is not.
I still see no real need for the woman to provide ID. Police officers should violate our civil liberties -- like the right to privacy -- as little as possibly required to protect public safety.
Did they have reason to believe she was some hardened criminal because she was walking down a public street flailing her arms? I'm guessing that they were just following policy. They didn't seem to be bad or abusive guys.
Well, police policies need to be as protective of civil liberties as possible.
Fall-ish, Los Angeles
My joke about LA is that we don't have seasons; we have fires, mudslides, earthquakes, and freeway chases.
Photo by Gregg Sutter.
Criminals Owe Their Victims, Not Society
When my pink Rambler was stolen, the LAPD did fuck all to catch the thief, despite my handing Pacific Division's Officer (now Sergeant) Lowe, a pile of evidence on the guy. However, some cop eventually picked up him on a bench warrant.
He was -- miraculously -- ordered to pay restitution for the damage he did to my car and the possessions he took from my trunk.
And this is how it should be. I was victimized, not the "state." I've long felt that we should jail the creep until he pays the victim -- along with the state for his room and board in his cage.
An article by Wendy McElroy at The Independent Institute argues for this -- for payment to be made to the victims. An excerpt:
I would like to challenge a basic concept in the law. Namely, that criminals owe a debt to society. I believe an individual who commits a crime owes a debt--that is, restitution--to the individual who has been harmed....Repaying individuals for their injuries is associated with the civil courts, which traditionally handle private and nonviolent matters such as contract disputes. Civil judgments attempt to restore to individuals what they have lost or, at least, to provide whatever compensation is possible. Often, court costs can be assessed against those found "guilty."
Repaying society is associated with the criminal courts, which handle violence such as rape and murder. Criminal judgments do not attempt to compensate the individuals harmed except, perhaps, by providing the satisfaction of seeing someone punished. Indeed, as taxpayers, the victims themselves pay for that satisfaction by supporting an expensive judicial and prison system.
I believe both civil and criminal court systems should aim at compensating the victim.What would a criminal system organized around restitution look like? No one knows. The current system has evolved, for better or worse, over centuries and circumstances. Any other system would do the same. But it is possible to sketch a working hypothesis that gets the discussion rolling.
A criminal court that focused on restitution would force those convicted to repay their victims not only for direct financial losses but also in compensation for emotional trauma. Criminals would bear the cost of court proceedings and of collecting any restitution that is not rendered voluntarily. If criminals did not have the means to pay a judgment or could not be trusted to do so over time, they could be monitored or confined to an institution for the sole purpose of working to earn that compensation and to pay the cost of confinement. The taxpayer would be taken out of the loop.
Objections immediately arise: for example, some categories of crime are so heinous that they do not seem to allow restitution. How can you compensate a victim of rape or murder?
I have always found this objection to be odd. The fact that there may be no perfect or adequate form of restitution is not an argument against providing whatever repayment is possible. A rapist cannot restore a victim's sense of safety but he or she can be made to pay such items as medical bills, the cost of counseling, and compensation for emotional trauma. A murderer cannot repay his debt to the dead but he can be forced to earn money to pay in perpetuity the expenses of a victim's family: food, mortgage, tuition, and so on. It is odd to argue that only non-criminal or trivial injuries deserve restitution. The more serious the injury, the more it seems that the victim deserves compensation.
Linklight Savings Bullshit
Linkety stupidville.
