Sex Differences In Wall-Punching
Whoopsy -- seems to reflect the sex differences that those in the feministocracy insist do not exist. 
From "America's most prolific wall punchers, charted," at Quartz.
via @SteveStuWill
Social Security Not Secure: The Well Will Run Dry In 13 Years
Well, who woulda thunk it? (Answer: Anyone with an IQ over the highway speed limit.)
Jed Graham writes at Investor's Business Daily:
The Congressional Budget Office has warned that Social Security's $2.8 trillion trust fund will run dry within 13 years. The reality is that this scenario, or something very close to it, is pretty much a foregone conclusion. At this point, even major benefit cuts won't be able to avert a serious budget hit.Despite decades of presidential commissions plotting Social Security reform, Congress is still going full tilt toward that iceberg, seemingly oblivious. Democrats are debating whether to raise benefits for everyone or just for the poor, even as the program's already sizable cash deficits are about to multiply.
Yet altering the course of the retirement program's finances is like turning a battleship. By the time the next president and Congress move Social Security to the front burner, settle on a plan and start implementing reforms, their goal will be to contain the damage to the retirement program and to the budget, not steer clear of it.
Even before benefit cuts, Social Security isn't especially generous, something you should consider when working on your financial action plan. Many people claim early retirement at age 62, with ObamaCare subsidies for older Americans providing a further incentive to stop working earlier. But if you retire at age 62, your lifelong benefit checks will be cut by 30%.
Rising longevity means that seniors will be at greater risk of outliving their savings and will depend heavily on Social Security. Yet dramatic benefit cuts will be needed to make much of a dent in closing the solvency gap.
...Social Security's official retirement age will start to rise next year by two months a year, hitting 67 in 2022. This rise was written into law in 1983, and the program's grim financial outlook already reflects it. Raising the retirement age to 70 by 2040 would close less than one-third of Social Security's official long-term financing gap. That official measure treats the trust fund as if it were money in the bank, not a license for the government to borrow.
The downside of making 70 the official retirement age is that people who claimed benefits at age 65 would still face a 30% early-retirement penalty. If these changes were in effect now, people with career-average earnings of about $30,000, who now get a benefit of $14,000 a year if they retire at 65, would instead get just $10,500.
And the retirement-age hike wouldn't even extend the trust fund past 2029. That's because the CBO projects that Social Security's annual cash gap will balloon from about $75 billion in 2015 to $361 billion in 2025 and keep growing.
Of course, it is in no politician's interest to do something about this, so nobody does, and we continue chugging along toward the iceberg.
Who's Burning Down Mosques?
Apparently Mosque attendees.
From the Houston Chronicle, Carol Christian and Leah Binkovitz write:
A Houston man has been arrested in connection with a suspected arson at a mosque on Christmas Day, but the motive for the crime remains a mystery, with the suspect maintaining he was a regular at the mosque.A spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives confirmed that the suspect, 37-year-old Gary Nathaniel Moore of Houston, was arrested early Wednesday. Moore appeared in court at 7 a.m., spokeswoman Nicole Strong said, and bond was set at $100,000.
...According to a charging instrument released by the Harris County District Clerk, Moore told investigators at the scene that he has attended the storefront mosque for five years, coming five times per day to pray seven days per week.
As @Instapundit put it, "The good news is that without fake hate crimes, we'd hardly have any hate crimes at all."
Linky Fresh
You were expecting minty?
The Age Of Meee!!gocentricism
There's never been such a sense of self-importance as there is now on college campuses.
The sense that your individual feelz matter -- to the degree that how you feel should stop other people's education and free speech -- is just shocking to any of us who grew up in a different world; one based on constitutional principles and the sense that you should pull up your pants and get on with life instead of asking the world to diaper you.
This ruins what used to be called a college education. As I've put it before, the feelz-driven protesters are trying to turn college into nursery school with beer. Consider college without the Greek and Roman classics, as Arthur Milikh writes about at City Journal:
This summer, some Columbia University students demanded a ban on Greek and Roman poetry at the Ivy League school. In November, an undercover reporter showed the willingness of Yale, Cornell, and Vassar College administrators literally to shred the U.S. Constitution if students complained that it "triggered" them. Disguising derision as idealism, the postmodern campus aggrievement industry aims to introduce a new standard of wisdom: judging the highest achievements of human knowledge by the unreasoned, spontaneous feelings of uncultivated minds.To be "triggered" means to have a feeling, an immediate sensation of repulsion culminating in aggrievement. The aggrieved seek flattery, but by making feeling the sovereign standard of judgment, the trigger doctrine actively denies the existence of wisdom higher than individual sensation. Unjustified feeling becomes the standard of rule. Such doctrines are infectious because, as the Athenian Stranger says in Plato's Laws, they make believe that "everyone is wise in everything." Everyone has feelings and therefore everyone has a claim to wisdom.
...The ancient poetry that Columbia wants to eradicate, and the modern political philosophy that Yale, Cornell, and Vassar want to shred, teach readers how civilizations are founded and preserved, and give lessons in human folly with a view to correcting the mind's errors. Insolence and impudence rules when a 20-year-old's feelings are considered superior to the wisdom of genuinely venerable sources.
I'm all for people protesting for their beliefs -- no matter how idiotic and backward I think they are. Where I draw the line is when you start shutting down other people's speech -- through laws, rules, or mere intimidation -- and putting administrators out of a job because they didn't toe the approved multi-culti, gender-fluid, "white people must be stomped down" party line.
Columbia Arts Journal Dumps Social Media Editor For Her Defense Of Choosing Contest Judges On Merit, Not Skin Color
Social media editor Sara Atrice Loitz got in trouble for this response to Yasmin Belkhr:
Greg Piper writes at The College Fix:
If you don't want to be accused of racism, sexism and oppression, make sure there aren't too many men - particularly white men - in important roles in your organization.If you can't immediately fix that problem - by firing or demoting them - then just abjectly apologize and hope for the best.
Your third option is to fire the woman who defends them, then abjectly apologize.
In a whirlwind that recalls one of the central incidents in Jon Ronson's book So You've Been Publicly Shamed, Columbia University's student-run arts journal dumped its social media editor, grad student Sara Atrice Loitz, one day after an open letter criticized Columbia Journal.
The journal's sin? Using all men to judge its writing contest this year. Even worse, two of the three men were white.
Racism and sexism are completely unacceptable these days -- unless you're using them against white men.
Columbia Journal, naturally, apologized for not choosing judges based on race and sex (that is, approved races and sexes).
Next year's slate, surely: Ask not whether they have the literary chops to judge; ask whether they're gender-fluid.
via @SteveStuWill
Macroaggressions: The Specialty Of The Sick Medieval Barbarism That Is Sharia Law
Public Sharia beatings and death -- think of it as football for Muslim majority countries!
Yes, while college students in America are throwing their books aside to wail that someone asked them "Where are you from," women are being hospitalized from their state-ordained beatings in Muslim countries. (That is, when their bodies aren't being carried to a pit and thrown in after they were stoned to death for adultery.)
Jennifer Newton writes for the Daily Mail that an Indonesian woman was caned for being "close" to a man she was not married to.
Hundreds of people gathered outside a mosque in Indonesia to see a woman scream out in agony after being caned as a punishment for being in 'close proximity' to a man she wasn't married to.Nur Elita was marched to the yard of Baiturrahumim Mosque in Banda Aceh for violating the region's strict Sharia laws, after she allegedly showed affectionate behaviour to a fellow university student.
Under the law men and women, who are not spouses, are not allowed to get too close due to the 'khalwat' offence and punishment is by public caning.
...After being brought to the stage as the crowd cheered, the woman was forced to kneel down while a masked man repeatedly whipped her with the cane.
We don't treat animals this way. We with Western values, that is.
She received five lashes and at the end of the punishment could be seen lying on the floor doubled over in pain.Eventually she was carried off the stage, into an ambulance, and had to be taken to hospital.
Tell me again how it's wrong to "judge" other people's beliefs?
Dodo
Rare, nearly extinct links.
I'm An Atheist Who Thinks It's Terrible That The "No Cake" Makers Just Paid Out Over $135K
I am an atheist (and a staunch gay rights supporter).
I think it's silly to believe, sans evidence, in a big man in the sky and to follow the tenets said Big Man's followers laid out in a big book. This includes those tenets that lead people to believe that gay people are doing something wrong by doing what the rest of us do: Meet and pair up with the person we love.
Well, I am also an atheist and gay rights supporter who very much supports the freedom from the state forcing us to do work that violates religious beliefs -- including those I find silly. If you are not, say, an emergency room doctor, the state should not be telling you that you have to do work for any person who shows up at your business.
Well, states have come down hard on Christian bakers who refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings and other businesses refusing to serve gay couples. I find their refusals disgusting, hurtful, and backward -- along with un-Christian, per the way Jesus talked and did things -- but again, they should have the right to refuse and not be fined for it by the state.
Forcing expression -- like forced creative work for a couple whose marriage violates your beliefs -- is a violation of the First Amendment. That gives us the right to free speech, not to force others to speak. Freedom of religion is another part of it. Again, violated by these states that have come down on the Christian bakers.
Well, there's a story at Fox News that also mentions that there was a gag order imposed on the bakers in Oregon. That's just terrible on top of terrible.
Except -- whoops -- Walter Olson, at Ricochet, points out that it's actually not a gag order:
Contrary to some early reports in the conservative press, this is not really a "gag order" that strips the Kleins of "all [their] First Amendment rights," "silences" them "from speaking publicly about not wanting to bake cakes for same-sex weddings" or even forbids them "from talking about the ruling." But even leaving the exaggerations aside, the case includes elements that should genuinely alarm free speech advocates.
The ruling ordered the Kleins to:
...Cease and desist from publishing, circulating, issuing or displaying, or causing to be published, circulated, issued or displayed, any communication, notice, advertisement or sign of any kind to the effect that any of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, services or privileges of a place of public accommodation will be refused, withheld from or denied to, or that any discrimination will be made against, any person on account of sexual orientation.
So, it's more of an order along the lines of "no shirt, no shoes, no service," but that's still a violation of what should be their rights.
But here, per Walter, is the way this played out:
[The State of Oregon] chose to go after the Kleins over appearances they did in national conservative media, and over having posted a sign on their closed business thanking supporters and promising to continue the fight. (They continue to sell cakes they bake at home.) Included as subjects of this complaint were national media interviews in which the Kleins, along with statements about what had gone through their mind when they turned down the lesbian couple's request, added a few forward-looking statements such as "we can see this becoming an issue and we have to stand firm." The window posting, meanwhile, included the language "This fight is not over. We will continue to stay strong. Your religious freedom is becoming not free anymore. It is ridiculous that we cannot practice our faith."Remarkably, as Scott Shackford noted at Reason, both the state agency and Avakian -- see pp. 22-26 of his ruling -- interpreted these statements as unambiguously announcing a forward-looking intent to discriminate in future transactions. Avakian's ruling neither notices nor engages the objection that speech by the targets of a government enforcement action seeking to rally public support for their cause might need more careful First Amendment handling than the announcement of, say, a gender preference in a classified ad.
Even more remarkably, the state agency had demanded damages from the Kleins over the very fact of media coverage sympathetic to their cause, which was said to have inflicted further trauma on their adversaries' eggshell psyches. While Avakian declined to grant a separate award of damages under this heading, he still declared the Kleins' statements in their own defense "unlawful."
The implication is clear enough: if locked in a legal battle with Oregon authorities, you may not have a legal right to rally your supporters with statements like "This fight is not over" and "We will continue to stay strong."
Increasingly, the America we're living in is seriously scary. We're going down bad paths -- rights-erasing paths -- at many turns, and too few people seem to notice or care. It's easy to just shrug off one violation of rights but if you look at the whole, we're in real trouble.
Fox story via @NealMcCluskey
The Gun Control Advocates Protected With Armed Bodyguards
Bob Owens writes at BearingArms.com about how powerful backers of gun control are protected by bodyguards -- the sort armed with more than colorful lollipops:
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the man personally bankrolling an otherwise dying gun control movement in the United States, is constantly surrounded by armed bodyguards (mostly poached from the NYPD, as I understand it), and I know for a fact that Moms Demand propagandist Shannon Watts has armed bodyguards, as I've seen them up close. Most other gun control supporters have public or private security, and a surprising number of them have concealed carry permits of their own.
In Virginia, State Sen. Bill Carrico has plans for staunch gun control advocate, Governor Terry McAuliffe, reports Tammy Childress in the Herald-Courier:
"I have a budget amendment that I'm looking at to take away his executive protection unit. If he's so afraid of guns, then I'm not going to surround him with armed state policemen."
The Problem With Islam, In A Nutshell
A commenter at the WaPo put it quite concisely:
carol24
There's violence in both the Koran and the Bible, but the ideologies are very different. Jesus taught, "Love your neighbor," "Turn the other cheek," and "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Muhammad taught, "Force your neighbor to submit and if he doesn't, cut off his head and rape his wife." And he not only taught it, he did it himself. And he is Islam's perfect man.
Islam requires adherents to fight until all submit. This is why Islam has given us 1,400 years or murder, rape and terror in its name (the Crusades was the Christian response to Muslims coming to towns and piling up Christian heads) and why there are deadly Islamic terrorist attacks all over the world every day (close to 30,000 since 9/11), why Muslims are burning people alive today in cages and selling women as sex slaves and marrying off little girls and teaching Jew hatred. Serious reform is going to be difficult, as the price for suggesting reform, criticizing Islam, or leaving Islam is death.
Zulu
Shakalinks.
Cops Seized Over $107,000 From Couple; Didn't Charge Them With A Crime
This is too terrible to be happening in America. But it does -- and that's because the cops never try to victimize some badass lawyer; it's always some poor kid on the train or some couple on disability who are driving to Salt Lake City from across the country so the hubby can see an ear specialist. (The latter one is the case detailed below.)
I'm talking about the euphemistically named "civil asset forfeiture," which is really legalized theft of citizens money and assets.
From an article in the Quad Cities Dispatch Argus by Rachel Warmke, "authorities used civil forfeiture laws to confiscate the couple's property without filing charges, under the assumption the money and vehicle were tied to illegal activity."
Under the assumption?
Hello? Aren't we supposed to be running this place (this country) on "innocent until proven guilty," not "guilty when assumed guilty"?
More from Warmke's piece:
Mr. Perry said he and his wife should not be required to prove their innocence in the civil case."This is not Nazi Germany where you can treat people like this," he wrote.
The letter also states that the couple is disabled and have previously tried, unsuccessfully, to have prosecutors return their "only vehicle" and personal effects, such as Mrs. Perry's wedding rings.
"I even begged and said please just give me my truck back and you can keep the money and ill (sic) walk away from it. Still denied," Mr. Perry wrote. "You don't understand the emotional, physical and financial terrorism you have caused."
The couple is representing themselves (typically a terrible fucking idea).
Institute for Justice's Nick Sibilla writes about the hell that they are going through:
A Massachusetts couple has been fighting for three years to regain cash they say was wrongfully seized from them. In October 2012, the Illinois State Police pulled over Adam and Jennifer Perry for speeding as they were driving through Henry County on Interstate 80. The Perrys said they were headed to Salt Lake City, Utah to see a hearing specialist for an ear infection Adam was suffering from.A drug dog sniffed and indicated on the car. Officers then searched the vehicle and found $107,520 in cash in a suitcase and in Jennifer's wallet. The Perrys claimed the search was without their consent and without a warrant. According to the officers, they also found a duffel bag that reportedly smelled of marijuana.
No drugs were found in the car, nor did the government file criminal charges against the Perrys. Nevertheless, officers seized the cash and eventually transferred it to the federal government.
Check out how sick this is, from one of the court papers:
The Perrys' Claim fails to identify the specific property they seek; their most specific reference is their request for return of "all currency, vehicle and property." Claim 3. The Claim also does not state the nature of the Perrys' interest in the currency in dispute. The Government's special interrogatories sought to obtain these details, which are necessary for determining the Perrys' entitlement to the money.
Their "entitlement" to the money?
Consider this: A police officer stops you, pulls your wallet out of your pants, and tells you that you have to prove the money in it is yours or he's taking it all.
Good fucking luck with that.
This is the America we're now living in -- one in which a couple had their home seized by the state because their son sold $40 worth of drugs outside of it. Luckily, after the Institute for Justice took their case, they were able to keep their home. Their home!
Oh, and P.S., regarding the Perrys' case: Lots of money has drugs all over it.
And also, despite the laws, what you put in your body is none of the government's business, and whether you sell plants or powder to other Americans sure shouldn't be.
And finally, property rights are foundational to a democracy. The fact that property rights have eroded to this degree -- along with our free speech rights and other rights -- does not bode well for civil liberties in our country's future.
via @Mark_J_Perry
Muslim Inmates Sue Over Activist Pamela Geller's "Poke A Dot" Bikini
Geller reports at Breitbart that Muslim prison inmates in Michigan filed a lawsuit against her, claiming her bikini violates their rights:
Muslim prisoners in Michigan filed a lawsuit against Pamela Geller for "wearing a Poke a Dot Bikini In Front of our eyes. We are offended." They demanded their freedom claiming their civil rights were violated. This Islamic supremacism is one and the same shared by the Muslim shooters at our free speech event in Garland, at the Christmas party in San Bernardino, the Paris concert hall, the jihad against Israel, the 9/11 terror attacks, and on and on. Same motive, same piety.David Yerushalmi told me that I had been sued by one or possibly two Muslims apparently who appear to be guests of the Michigan Correctional Hotel and Spa. "They sued you because, inter alia, you wear a bikini to distract them...the court dismissed the complaint on its own because plaintiff(s) failed to file the requisite filing fee or file the correct form to have the fee waived."
A good way to avoid seeing Geller's bikini is to keep to the inventions of the medieval, Enlightenment-combating religion that is Islam -- in other words, stay off the Internet.
Geller notes the protests we aren't seeing:
What we don't see, meanwhile, is what we need to see: why is it that Muslim "moderates" never protest against the Islamic terrorism that they supposedly reject and oppose? Why are there never any mass Muslim protests against this savagery? They claim to reject it, so what are they doing within their communities to stop young Muslims from falling for this supposed "misunderstanding" of Islam?The answer is: nothing. In Muslim communities and among Muslim leaders, they (like Rick Tocket Muhammad and Wayde Albright) spend much more time attacking and demonizing me than they do fighting against the doctrine of jihad that is threatening and killing non-Muslims in the U.S. and worldwide. And that is a stunning indictment of their supposed "moderation."
Slinky
Wigglelinks.
The New Racialism: Victimism As A Wellspring Of Identity
Tom Slater, deputy editor of Spiked, notes that race has made a comeback -- via a new politics of race:
What unifies it all is a troubling desire to erect racial boundaries - a call for black people to adopt the role of the victim and for white people to self-flagellate in a corner.
I explain this victim role as a way to have unearned power over others. Of course, those grievance-hunting over race have plenty of company from the feminist grievance hunters.
Slater continues:
Revelations that leaders in black-activist organisations, including the NAACP's Rachel Dolezal and (allegedly) BLM's Shaun King, are in fact white, should come as no surprise. In this toxic, racialised climate, political authority is calculated not on the basis of your arguments, or your support from a section of society, but from the position you claim for yourself in a hierarchy of oppression. That some white people are blacking up, and bolstering their credibility by cooking up fake hate crimes against themselves, is only a bizarre expression of the new politics of segregation.March 2015 marked the 50th anniversary of the civil-rights marches from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama. Defiant in their Sunday best, those protesters were the antithesis of the victim-obsessed quasi-radical radicals we see today. Marching in spite of police beatings, targeted assassinations and constant threats from government for them to cease their activities or else, they refused to be cowed - and made it out the other end with undented optimism. On the steps of the Montgomery state capitol, Martin Luther King hailed the coming of 'a day not of the white man, not of the black man' but 'the day of man as man'. In 2015, that day felt as far away as it's ever been.
At the moment, as somebody said at Spiked, "If you're white, you're wrong."
Frankly, if you're American in 2015, you're pretty damn privileged.
This isn't to say we're without racial problems (or many other problems), but legions of people (ugh) "of color" identifying as victims isn't a solution. They are ultimately self-identifying as second-class citizens. Smart!
Related, via @SteveStuWill, a scientific study by Emily M. Zitek, Alexander H. Jordan, Benoît Monin, and Frederick R. Leach at Stanford, "Victim Entitlement to Behave Selfishly." A line from the abstract:
Three experiments demonstrated that feeling wronged leads to a sense of entitlement and to selfish behavior.
The Sharia-Fisted Playboy Sultan of Brunei -- And The Author I Know Who Was The Playboy Prince's "Second-Favorite Girlfriend"
I saw this tweet yesterday, linking to a YouTube video (embedded below):
@TarekFatah
Playboy life of the Islamic Sultan of Brunei. Sharia for the rest of us Muslims; hookers for the rulers
I started watching, and up popped Jillian Lauren, a wonderful, best-selling writer who's been on panels I've moderated at LA Times Festival of Books multiple times. (I was especially moved by the tale of how she and her husband adopted a special needs child from Ethiopia and managed to master the pretty incredible challenges of making him feel safe and loved, which she writes about in Everything You Ever Wanted: A Memoir
Back to the Sultan of Sharia For Everybody Else, Edward Ebbert writes at NYULiveWire about Lauren's time in the "infamous harem of the younger brother of the Sultan of Brunei":
From College Dropout to "Princess" AdventurerHer tale began in 1992, when she was an 18-year-old New York University dropout, living in the East Village, stripping in Times Square and working occasionally for an escort service. Broke, bored, and looking for adventure, she accepted a mysterious offer to "audition" for a job entertaining an anonymous businessman from Singapore. She was told she would be very well compensated.
Before she knew it, she was on the South Asian island of Borneo, home of the tiny, oil-rich nation of Brunei and its playboy Prince Jefri Bolkiah.
Later, the prince's lavish lifestyle would come under international scrutiny after his brother, the sultan, filed a lawsuit in 2000 alleging that the prince had mismanaged billions of dollars from the Brunei Treasury.
But in the 90s, as Lauren tells it, she was the prince's second-favorite girlfriend, a position that came with lavish shopping sprees to Singapore and a seat beside his royal highness at palace parties.
Lauren writes in lucid, sometimes lurid detail about life in the cutthroat, often bizarre world of the palace harem. Ostensibly, the dozens of girls like her were paid to attend nightly dance parties as entertainment for the prince and his entourage of male hangers-on. In reality, the women were the merchandise in a high-class meat market catering to a single customer: Prince Jefri, a man with an appetite difficult to satisfy.
Lauren was seduced by the romantic fantasy of the royal lifestyle, but part of her knew it couldn't last. I knew I was a hooker, but somehow I felt like Cinderella," she writes.
Her book about this: Some Girls: My Life in a Harem.
More than just a sexy read set in an exotic land, Some Girls is also the story of how a rebellious teen found herself-and the courage to meet her birth mother and eventually adopt a baby boy.
Here's the video, from 60 Minutes Australia, detailing the Sharia-driven barbarism in Brunei -- applied to everybody there but the Sultan and his family and cohorts.
For Democrats In Office, The Problem With Charter Schools Is That They Aren't Failing
Democrats are opposing charter schools -- despite their success; no, in fact, because of their success, writes John C. Goodman at TownHall.com:
They fear that as these choice programs succeed, poor and minority moms and dads are going to figure out the Democrats are selling their kids out to the teachers unions.To appreciate what's at stake, consider two Harlem schools that operate side by side in the same building: Wadleigh Secondary School (a public school) and Harlem West (a charter school). At both schools 95 percent of the students and black and Hispanic and most are from poverty level families. As one of the teachers describes it:
The students ... eat in the same cafeteria, exercise in the same gym and enjoy recess in the same courtyard. They also live on the same blocks and face many of the same challenges.
Yet not one of the public school students met state standards in math (a typical question: What is 15% of 60?) or English, while the passing rates at the charter school were 96 and 75 percent, respectively. The city wide scores, by the way, were 35 and 30 percent, despite New York City average spending of $20,331 per pupil.
So, should there be more Harlem Wests and fewer Wadleighs?
As I wrote in another post, quoting Riordan from a Reason Magazine event I went to:
Former mayor Richard Riordan, in the Q&A session afterward, mentioned that D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee said that until you separate the Democratic party from the school board, you're not going to have great schools.
More from my previous post:
Ben Austin talked about "Parent Trigger." It is:a historic new law that gives parents in California the right to force a transformation of their child's current or future failing school. All parents need to do is organize - if 51% of them get together and sign an official Parent Trigger petition, they have the power to force their school district to transform the school.Austin and others said that parents, for the first time, realize they have power. And that's a good thing, because Jerry Brown wasted no time firing him and replacing him with the head lobbyist for the teacher's association.
Somebody pointed out that you can't get elected in New York City -- or many places -- without the teachers union. They described the behavior of the New York teachers union as akin to "mafia thugs."
And I think it was Riordan who said that schools are now designed to serve adults -- teachers! -- not students. And really, the whole deal is about power and money for the union, not even about teachers.
Crazy.
Lippy
Uppitylinks.
You Can Mute Unwanted Noise In Your Open Office (Especially If You're Willing To Get Arrested And Sent To Prison)
In the Harvard Biz Review, Joel Beckerman, the founder of some "sonic branding" company, suggests counteracting co-worker noise with "better sounds," like white noise from ceiling speakers.
Guess what: White noise is still noise and it annoys the fuck out of me. If I absolutely have to block out sound with sound, I use brown noise, which is still noise, and still annoying.
My suggestion: Even more effective for noise-quashing is binding and gagging loud co-workers and locking them in a supply closet.
My suggestion for those who have a problem with living in Maximum Security for 10 to 20:
1. Bose asshole canceling headphones (a pricey but completely lifesavingly worthwhile gift from Gregg).2. Hearos Xtreme Protection earplugs
(very unpricey).
3. A possible alternative to the Bose -- far cheaper -- are the $24.85 best-selling safety earmuffs, with a very high 34db noise reduction.
Sharia Air: "Please Wait Until We Are At Cruising Altitude To Beat Your Wife"
Malaysia has launched a Sharia-compliant airline, Rayani Air, as Caroline McGuire reports in the Daily Mail:
In-flight meals served on board its flights are completely halal, with alcohol consumption strictly prohibited, in compliance with Shariah laws.The dress code is also reflective of Shariah guidelines, as Muslim flight crew must wear the hijab while non-Muslim crew have to be decently dressed.
There will also be prayer recitals on the plane before take-off.
On the bright side, you probably don't have to worry about getting blown up by terrorists, since, under Islam, Muslims are only supposed to murder infidels, not other Muslims.
And in case you're wondering about the wife-beating, it is encouraged in Islam -- but (good news!) only if your wife is disobedient.
The Hanafis mentioned four situations in which a husband is permitted to discipline his wife by hitting her. These are: not adorning herself when he wants her to; not responding when he calls her to bed and she is taahirah (pure, i.e., not menstruating); not praying; and going out of the house without his permission.
Numbskull New York Times Food Writer On How To Make Coca-Cola's Popularity With Teens Skyrocket
Lucky Peach's Liz Crain interviews Mark Bittman, who wants to card teens trying to buy a Coke:
So what kinds of things can we do to make it harder for kids to drink Coca-Cola? I can think of two offhand. One is you don't market it to them. You put restrictions on the ability of marketers to target young people. Now that seems to be a First Amendment issue and that's a struggle, but it's a struggle that we have to be involved in. The second thing is you make it harder for young people to buy sugar-sweetened beverages. I suggest we start discussing carding kids when they go to the counter to buy a Coke. In other words, you have to be sixteen to buy a Coke, because we don't think that you're able to make a decision about how much soda you can drink until you're sixteen. Really it should be twenty, but I'm compromising because it's such a far-fetched idea. But it's not a wrong idea, it's a right idea.
via @Overlawyered
Linkstop
Drop your pits here.
Government Built That!
Mail usually takes a day in Los Angeles. You send it Tuesday, and it's there Wednesday, unless, perhaps, you're sending it to somebody who lives in some hippie hollow.
Well, a letter with a check dropped off in the box at the Los Angeles Post Office that's 3.7 miles from the recipient took one whole week to arrive. (It's not like Christmas came unexpectedly, dudes!)
"Is Your Refrigerator Running?..."
"I can see it from up here in space..."
From the BBC:
UK astronaut Tim Peake has tweeted a light-hearted apology after dialling a wrong number from space and saying to a woman on the other end of the line: "Hello, is this planet Earth?"Mr Peake said on Twitter it was not intended to be a "prank call".
The astronaut, a father-of-two from Chichester, West Sussex, arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday 15 December.
He is spending six months conducting scientific experiments on the station.
This Even Makes Atheist Me Want To Put Up A 20-Foot Cross
Next to a 20-foot menorah.
A tweet:
@JudithShulevitz
Read p. 2 of Cornell's "Fire Safety Guidelines For Holiday Displays" for new appreciation of the phrase Fire Safety.
Estimate from Jeffrey Goldberg:
@JeffreyGoldberg
@JudithShulevitz A menorah would count as eight micro-aggressions, I suppose.
Advice Goddess Free Swim
It's Thursday night, and I'm a little tired, so you pick the topics. I'll post more on Friday.
P.S. One link per comment or my spam filter will eat your post.
Being "Of Color" Shouldn't Be Considered A Pass To Say Ugly, Racist Things
There's a ridiculous piece at Salon (that statement being a bit repetitive, sorry) by Kathleen Furin, who says, "Let's stop lying to our kids about Santa."
Consider this statement about Santa from the piece:
"The thought of a white man in my chimney does not delight me," one of my friends, who is black, says. "It terrifies me."
And consider if it were this instead:
"The thought of a black man in my chimney does not delight me," one of my friends, who is white, says. "It terrifies me."
If the second one is unacceptable, the first one should also be considered unacceptable.
Below, John McWhorter and Glen Loury talk on video (really smart stuff) about the recent controversy over Santa's race -- and whether black people do themselves harm by being in a constant panic and self-consciousness over race. Does that become a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Here's the Aisha Harris Slate piece they're discussing -- in which she says Santa should not only not be white but should be a...sigh...a penguin.
Loury: "Do black children need a brown-colored Santa Claus in a world of a billion symbols ... to feel okay about themselves? Only in sick environment in which parents teach their children that their self-worth is to be measured by the correspondence of their skin and ... whatever they're looking at on television."
Most people I saw when I was a kid -- on TV and elsewhere -- did not have red hair and were not Jewish. This did not harm me, but it might have -- had I been raised to think that being redheaded and Jewish (or white) defined my existence.
And as I've written before, I grew up without friends until I was 15, and I experienced a good bit of anti-Semitism and bullying, including having our house violated with some regularity and getting ganged up on by a bunch of girls in junior high school, to the point my dad had to go to the Principal to have it stopped.
video via @SteveStuWill
Airlines Make More Money In Fees By Making Your Flight Miserable
Tim Wu writes in The New Yorker that airlines are making big bucks from fees and that the more miserable flyers are, the more willing they are to pay them:
Does it make any difference if an airline collects its cash in fees as opposed to through ticket sales? The airlines, and some economists, argue that the rise of the fee model is good for travellers. You only pay for what you want, and you can therefore save money if you, for instance, don't mind sitting in middle seats in the back, waiting in line to board, or bringing your own food. That's why American Airlines calls its fees program "Your Choice" and suggests that it makes the "travel experience even more convenient, cost-effective, flexible and personalized."But the fee model comes with systematic costs that are not immediately obvious. Here's the thing: in order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as "calculated misery." Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that's where the suffering begins.
The necessity of degrading basic service provides a partial explanation for the fact that, in the past decade, the major airlines have done what they can to make flying basic economy, particularly on longer flights, an intolerable experience. For one thing, as the Wall Street Journal has documented, airlines have crammed more seats into the basic economy section of the airplane, even on long-haul flights. The seats, meanwhile, have gotten smaller--they are narrower and set closer together. Bill McGee, a contributing editor to Consumer Reports who worked in the airline industry for many years, studied seat sizes and summarized his findings this way: "The roomiest economy seats you can book on the nation's four largest airlines are narrower than the tightest economy seats offered in the 1990s."
The various costs described here will not appear on any bottom line but can be easily witnessed in angry families, exhausted flight attendants, and the general sense of defeat emanating from passengers exiting coach. At best, it can be said that more people are able to fly for less...
I almost always buy an "economy plus" seat, or whatever they're called on a particular airline, and I pay a fee for my luggage to go under the plane (as opposed to taking up more than my share of the overhead, which is -- of course -- rude).
Pickle
Fermented links. Better yet, demented.
The Raging Impracticality Of So Much Advice In Daily Newspapers
Not my advice.
I'm talking about stuff like this LA Times piece, suggesting "last-minute gift ideas" -- recipes which involve, for example, use of a double boiler to melt chocolate (after you go buy the pretzels, the sprinkles, and the chocolate).
Realistic last-minute gift idea? Burglarizing the neighbor or wrapping things around the house that don't look all that used.
Lefty Bias In Social Psychology
Claire Lehmann has an excellent piece (cached here) at Quillette on a largely ignored researcher, Lee Jussim, and the tendency to ignore all but left-wing narratives in social science -- to the point where it's practically heresy to even consider questions that violate these narratives. Jussim's point in a presentation he gave:
The field had become a community in which political values and moral aims were shared, leading to an asymmetry in which studies that reinforced left-wing narratives had come to be disproportionately represented in the literature. And this was not, to quote Stephen Colbert, because "reality had a liberal bias". It was because social psychology had a liberal bias.Jussim explained that within the field, those on the left outnumbered those on the right by a ratio of about 10:1. So it meant that even if left-leaning and right-leaning scientists were equal in their bias, there would be at least ten times more research biased towards validating left-wing narratives than conservative narratives. Adding in the apparent double standards in the peer review process (where studies validating left-wing narratives seemed to be easier to publish) then the bias within the field could vastly exceed the ratio of 10:1. In other words, research was becoming an exercise in groupthink.
Jussim's research on stereotypes:
Very early in his career, Jussim faced a crisis of sorts. An early mentor, Jacquelynne Eccles, handed him some large datasets gathered from school children and teachers in educational settings. He tried testing the social psychology theories he had studied, but consistently found that his data contradicted them.Instead of finding that the teachers' expectations influenced the students' performances, he found that the students' performances influenced the teachers' expectations. This data "misbehaved". It did not show that stereotypes created, or even had much influence on the real world. The data did not show that teachers' expectations strongly limited students' performances. It did not show that stereotypes became self-fulfilling prophecies. But instead of filing his results away into a desk drawer, Jussim kept investigating - for three more decades.
More from his findings:
Jussim and his co-authors have found that stereotypes accurately predict demographic criteria, academic achievement, personality and behaviour. This picture becomes more complex, however, when considering nationality or political affiliation. One area of stereotyping which is consistently found to be inaccurate are the stereotypes concerning political affiliation; right-wingers and left wingers tend to caricature each others personalities, most often negatively so.Lest one thinks that these results paint a bleak picture of human nature, Jussim and his colleagues have also found that people tend to switch off some of their stereotypes - especially the descriptive ones - when they interact with individuals. It appears that descriptive stereotypes are a crutch to lean on when we have no other information about a person. When we gain additional insights into people, these stereotypes are no longer useful. And there is now a body of evidence to suggest that stereotypes are not as fixed, unchangeable and inflexible as they've historically been portrayed to be.
The response from social psychologists:
Reactions to Jussim's findings about the accuracy of stereotypes have varied on the scale between lukewarm and ice cold. At Stanford this year after giving a talk, an audience member articulated a position reflected by many within his field:"Social psychologists should not be studying whether people are accurate in perceiving groups! They should be studying how situations create disadvantage."
Jussim has heard this position over and over again. Not just from students, but also colleagues. One might find it surprising that psychology researchers would become so invested in shutting down research they find politically unbearable. But one shouldn't be.
It is not uncommon for social psychologists to list "the promotion of social justice" as a research topic on their CVs, or on their university homepages.
This is not science, and "not science" has become way too accepted in social science.
More on this from Jonathan Haidt. And related: Where microaggressions really come from.
Read Jussim's chapter, The Unbearable Accuracy of Stereotypes, (written with Thomas R. Cain, Jarret T. Crawford, Kent Harber, and Florette Cohen).
The Reality Of Islam, From A Former Muslim
From TheMuslimIssue:
Here's the text from TheMuslimIssue (linked above):
Mona Walter is on a mission. Her mission is for more Muslims to know what is in the Koran. She says if more Muslims knew what was in the Koran, more would leave Islam.We don't fully agree. Muslims don't need to know the Koran. Their entire culture is built on it. By living in their cultural ideology they live by the Koran. If Muslim women had the freedom to chose their religion many may leave, but it's doubtful the men would follow so willingly.
Mona Walters says when Muslims read the Koran they become killing machines. Walters says that Muslims don't view al-Shahaab, Boko Haram, ISIS and other terror groups as extremist. Muslims view them as good Muslims.
This is wrong. Not all Muslims view jihadists as good Muslims -- as is written in the Quran -- but far too many Muslims do. And it doesn't take many at all to gun down unarmed concertgoers and people out with friends in restaurants.
However, in a bit of bright news, Kenyan Muslims shielded Kenyan Christians in a bus attack by al-Shabab jihadists.
Some thoughts from counter-jihadists. First, Bosch Fawstin's thinking, via Danusha Goska at FrontPage:
Fortunately for us, Islam hasn't been able to make every Muslim its slave, just as Nazism wasn't able to turn every German into a Nazi. So there is Islam and there are Muslims. Muslims who take Islam seriously are at war with us and Muslims who don't aren't. But that doesn't mean we should consider these reluctant Muslims allies against Jihad. I've been around Muslims my entire life and most of them truly don't care about Islam. The problem I have with many of these essentially non-Muslim Muslims, especially in the middle of this war being waged on us by their more consistent co-religionists, is that they give the enemy cover. They force us to play a game of Muslim Roulette since we can't tell which Muslim is going to blow himself up until he does. And their indifference about the evil being committed in the name of their religion is a big reason why their reputation is where it is. In the toilet.[Non-observant Muslims] lead some among us to conclude that they must be practicing a more enlightened form of Islam. They're not. They're "practicing" life in non-Muslim countries, where they are free to live as they choose. There is nothing in Islam that stays the hand of Muslims who want to kill non-Muslims. If an individual Muslim is personally peaceful, it's not because of Islam, it's because of his individual choice, which is why I often say that your average Muslim is morally superior to Mohammad, to their own religion. When you see well-assimilated Muslims in the West, you're not seeing Islam in action; you're seeing individuals living up to the old adage, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. They're essentially post-Islamic Muslims who have rejected Islamic values and have embraced Western ones.
Wafa Sultan:
"The whole world has to realize that we are not waging war against Muslims, but indeed against a very hateful and dangerous ideology! Unless we are able to distinguish between Islam and Muslims, this misinformation and accusations of stereotyping Muslims will never end! The cause of the calamity we're facing today is deeply rooted in Islamic teachings, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to open the Islamic texts and find the most horrible mass destruction weapons, as I consider it. The Western governments are morally obligated to pressure the Islamic governments to reform those teachings! However, I am extremely confused and shocked by the fact that the Obama administration is ignoring Islamic terrorism and insisting that Islam is a religion of peace, not to mention, that Saudi Arabia is one of our allies against Isis!"
Linkiepop
How many licks?
Bank Of England Finding: High Levels Of Immigration Lead To Lower Wages
This affects nearly a quarter of Britons.
Raheem Kassam writes at Breitbart:
Britain's central bank, the Bank of England, has stated that the high level of immigration that Britain is currently experiencing does in fact lead to lower wages, with those hurt most by the policy being on the semi-skilled or unskilled end of the country's workforce: almost 1 in 4 Britons.The news will come as a blow to pro immigration campaigners and organisations who have long stated that the argument behind wage compression - as it is commonly known - is a falsehood.
From the Bank of England report:
Closer examination reveals that the biggest effect is in the semi/unskilled services sector, where a 10 percentage point rise in the proportion of immigrants is associated with a 2 percent reduction in pay.
Kassam continues:
Government net migration numbers of over 300,000 annually, together with those that are not captured in official figures, is preventing wages rising in line with inflation for native, British workers, noticeable at the lower end of the skills classification scale. But the 'knock on' effects of this many outsiders entering the UK workforce impacts the disposable incomes of workers across the social spectrum and, with technological advances, hinders employment opportunities for British people."Until policymakers in this country stop being apologists for mass migration it excuses them from dealing with the consequences of a dispossessed, impoverished, UK native 'underclass'. Successive Labour and Tory governments have been warned about this but done nothing."
via @KausMickey
RIP, Rosie The Roach
Hilarious.
There has been a dead cockroach in the anthropology building's stairwell for at least two weeks. Some enterprising person has now made her a little shrine.
Oh, and hilarious to the end. Don't miss the last shot.
The Nuances On Obamacare
Daniel P. Kessler writes in the WSJ that the best scholarly analyses of the Affordable Care Act suggest that it's neither the triumph trumpeted by its proponents nor the disaster suggested by its critics:
Obamacare has indeed reduced the number of Americans without insurance. According to a recent study in the journal Health Affairs, around 10 million previously uninsured people gained coverage in 2014--when most of the key provisions took effect--through expansions of Medicaid or the new "marketplaces" (subsidized insurance exchanges) created under Obamacare. The law thus reduced the number of uninsured people in the country from around 45 million (or 14% of the population) to 35 million (or 11%).Was this reduction in the number of uninsured worth the cost? A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study estimated the value of Medicaid to its recipients at between 20¢ and 40¢ per dollar of expenditure, with the majority of the value going to health-care providers like doctors and hospitals. By comparison, the Earned Income Tax Credit--a cash transfer program designed to enhance the incomes of the working poor--delivers around 90¢ of value to its recipients per dollar of expenditure. Given that more than half of Obamacare's reduction in the numbers of the uninsured has been from its expansion of Medicaid, this makes the law look more like welfare for the medical-industrial complex than support for the needy.
The root of Medicaid's weakness is the program's minimal effect on health. In 2008, the state of Oregon initiated an expansion of its Medicaid program, drawing names from a waiting list by lottery. The lottery created a rare opportunity to study the effects of Medicaid with the rigor of a randomized, controlled trial. An evaluation in the New England Journal of Medicine found that, after two years, the Oregon Medicaid expansion had no significant effects on beneficiaries' physical health, though it did reduce their self-reported financial strain and depression.
...What is needed now is an honest discussion of the fundamental trade-offs that we still face: between cost and coverage, incentives and generosity, markets and government.
Unfortunately, the way Obamacare was promoted to the American people has made this discussion difficult to have. The law was oversold in several ways.
Premiums haven't gone down. Many people who liked their old health plans haven't been able to keep them. The health benefits from expanding coverage have been elusive. And the macroeconomic consequences of the law have been negative: According to the Congressional Budget Office, the disincentives created by Obamacare--subsidies are phased out as beneficiaries' incomes rise--will reduce the number of hours worked by 1.5% to 2% from 2017 to 2024.
A WSJ commenter with an example from the workplace:
John Trottman
Here is a real life example of how a company employing hourly security guards avoided being penalized.ACA say they must offer an "Affordable" plan that meets "Bronze" standards.
Affordable means you cannot charge them more than 9.5% of their wages for single coverage. You do NOT have to cover spouses (so they didn't offer) and you can charge the full amount to the employee to cover kids (which they did).So these employees were offered a $5,500 deductible plan for 9.5% of their wages. Out of 6,000 employees, 180 enrolled. And the rest? Since their employer offered affordable coverage at the bronze level, they do not qualify for a subsidy on the exchanges.
This is the type of garbage the Pelosi & company put out daily.
More from the same guy:
John Trottman
Sure let's not mention what additional burdens ACA has placed on businesses. The same businesses that were struggling to recover only to have more taxes, expenses and reporting responsibilities thrust upon them.
* The pass through to the consumer Health Insurer Fee Excise tax at 3% to 4.5% of premium. For a 100 employee company that is the equivalent of $75,000.
* Transitional Reinsurance Fee.
* PCORI Fee.
* Covering bum kids to age 26 with no questions asked.
* Everything HHS says is preventative must be free. Free for the employer to fund 100% of the cost.
* Modifying W-2's to show premium paid. This is a lead up to taxing benefits in 2018.
* If you are employed, ask your HR department about the ACA reporting they are struggling with. Get ready to be yelled at.
It is all just a government grab, plain and simple.
Here's a comment that reflects some of the idiocy of Obamacare:
Jeff Funk
All I can tell you is our own health plan (which suited our situation quite well, thank you very much) was cancelled due to it not meeting the maternity requirements (we were in our 50s). Now our 'government approved' plan is 45% more expensive and offers far less covereage than our 'free market' plan. But wait...at least we have maternity coverage should my wife (who is now 60) becomes pregnant. What a joke.
Another view:
Mike Schmidt
Obamacare is actually a massive success - depending on your perspective. The goals of obamacare never had anything to do with improving peoples' healthcare - they were always about controlling people, tax increases, the insurance lobby, and govt. expansion.
Chestylinks
Chestnuts, you dirtyminds!
Tool Time: The Christmas Suit
Handy! From Macy's. Put out people's eyes without needing to use your hands! 
Asian Stomachs Matter: Oberlin Students Demand Culturally Correct Food
I wish this sort of thing -- whining about the food -- worked when I was a kid.
It did not.
My mother was an early adopter of "health food." She meant well, but she should have just been honest about the taste: "Yoohoo, Amy, would you like a nice piece of Pritikin bread for your snack -- or would you rather go out and gnaw some bark off a tree?"
At Oberlin, the "gastronomically correct" students, as the New York Post puts it, are angered by the culturally incorrect -- and thus horribly racially insensitive -- cafeteria selections. Melkorka Licea and Laura Italiano write:
Students at an ultra-liberal Ohio college are in an uproar over the fried chicken, sushi and Vietnamese sandwiches served in the school cafeterias, complaining the dishes are "insensitive" and "culturally inappropriate."Gastronomically correct students at Oberlin College -- alma mater of Lena Dunham -- are filling the school newspaper with complaints and demanding meetings with campus dining officials and even the college president.
General Tso's chicken was made with steamed chicken instead of fried -- which is not authentically Chinese, and simply "weird," one student bellyached in the Oberlin Review.
Others were up in arms over banh mi Vietnamese sandwiches served with coleslaw instead of pickled vegetables, and on ciabatta bread, rather than the traditional French baguette.
"It was ridiculous," gripes Diep Nguyen, a freshman who is a Vietnam native.
Worse, the sushi rice was undercooked in a way that was, according to one student, "disrespectful" of her culture. Tomoyo Joshi, a junior from Japan, was highly offended by this flagrant violation of her rice. "I f people not from that heritage take food, modify it and serve it as 'authentic,' it is appropriative," she said.
If I recall correctly, much of the food in my Alice Lloyd dorm at University of Michigan was "disrespectful" -- of people with stomachs.
Sadly, we didn't think to do as black students did recently at Oberlin -- staged a protect over how much cream was in "black" food, and also because they hadn't made fried chicken a permanent feature on the Sunday night menu.
Of course, if they had, some other students would be protesting, because assuming black people like fried chicken...isn't that...racist?!
P.S. I luvvvv fried chicken -- and I am probably the whitest person you will ever meet whose color isn't caused by a skin disease. (The notion that fried chicken is a form of racism -- or that lack of it has some special meaning -- is just one of the stupider ideas out there.)
via @AdamKissel
TSA: Protecting Us From Anyone WaPo Reporters Who'd Do Evil Things With, Uh, Grammar
The TSA was brought in to search everyone going in to the Republican debate -- including the reporters.
Alex Thomas writes at Intellihub about the "TSA diligently saving us from would be Washington Post terrorists":
The irony in this cannot be missed. While the Obama Administration moves forward with a plan to bring in tens of thousands of new refugees under a vetting process that doesn't even include telling state authorities when a refugee is released, the TSA is supposedly keeping us safe by searching the bags of members of the press.
Quackie
Duckylinks. With extra duck sauce.
Marry Christmas
Sign at my fave cafe. 
PS The guy who put it up has English as his second language. (I think he means "okay if the wife is divorced.")
The Idiocy Of Having Doctors In Training Work Crazy Numbers Of Hours
Jeffrey Clark and David Harari, resident physicians at the University of Washington, write in the WaPo about how dangerous it is to have "newly-trained doctors who have been awake and working for 30 or more consecutive hours":
For more than 100 years, we have tried to train doctors to live without adequate sleep, and yet we have predictably failed to produce superhumans. Instead, we've created a medical culture that encourages severely sleep-deprived, impaired physicians to take care of others. Does anyone want this?There is no reason to believe that 80-hour workweeks and shifts longer than 16 hours are associated with optimal patient or resident health. Adequate sleep is a fundamental physiological need. No amount of caffeine, prescription stimulants (as some physician leaders have advocated for) or "alertness management strategies" can adequately compensate for acute and chronic sleep deprivation.
If you are in the hospital, ask whether the residents treating you have been on for extended hours, and if they have, consider ask for someone who has not been on so long.
But a counterpoint, from WaPo's comments, dealing with the problem of handing off to a new doctor:
Sympatica
I am a 75 year old neonatologist with almost 50 years experience and care for sick infants. I work less than full time. I work six 12 hour shifts a month and two 24 hour shifts. I can do this because we have excellent neonatal nurse practitioners who are "first call" during the two night shifts. This means that I do not need to deal with the very many small things and only have to interrupt sleep for serious issues. This works just fine. I could not, and even when younger, I am not sure that I ever could be in top form after 12 hours of steady work. The Navy, studying submariners, found that a 10 hour shift was the most efficient. The other side of the issue is "continuity of care". When I have been taking care of a baby for 12 hours and know this child and the problems, it is not possible, no matter how much we try, for me to pass on all the details and subjective knowledge to another physician. The baby would be best served if I could get 8 hours sleep in 10 minutes. I have tried to learn to "sleep fast" but without much success. Sleep deprivation vs continuity of care represent trade-offs. The solution is not obvious.
A nurse:
krellie
And my question is, why? Why do docs continue to work insane hours? I don't want my physicians trying to function on no sleep and too much call. Would you, personally? I've been a hospital based nurse for 35 years and we know which docs are too tired to be there - and we don't feel safe with you. Maybe it's time for your profession to reexamine its priorities and find/make a better way.
How Obamacare Puts Businesses Out Of Business
As I've been saying for years -- as a person who has bought her own healthcare for decades, without an employer -- is that healthcare should be untied from the workplace.
Now, unfortunately, it is more tied than ever to the workplace, thanks to Obamacare. At The Daily Signal, Melissa Quinn writes of how it would have affected a deli owner's business. (He's now closing his doors -- in part because of Obamacare, he says.)
When Loventhal learned he would be faced with the added expense of providing his more than 50 employees with health insurance come Jan. 1--he estimated it would cost between $70,000 and $100,000 annually--Loventhal decided to close Noshville's doors before the provision of Obamacare overseeing businesses, the employer mandate, goes fully into effect."It's an onerous bill, and for a small business, it's a lot of time [to comply]," he said. "I've been studying this for three years, and I really couldn't come up with a good answer, and I feel sorry for closing this business."
Under Obamacare's employer mandate, businesses with more than 50 employees working more than 30 hours per week will be required to provide health insurance to its workers.
On Jan. 1, 2015, the employer mandate went into effect for businesses with more than 100 employees, and on Jan. 1, 2016, those rules will apply for those with more than 50 employees.
So far, the effects of the law differ according to who one talks to: President Obama and congressional Democrats argue Obamacare has caused the uninsured rate to drop to unprecedented levels. Republicans, meanwhile, say Americans are facing higher premiums and deductibles because of the law, and businesses are grappling with how to abide by its costly mandates.
Higher premiums and deductibles here.
I still have health insurance; I just can't afford to use it.
What kind of businesses are affected?
A 55-person law firm, for example, may not feel the effects of the law too strongly, particularly if the cost of health care goes up for its employees. By contrast, businesses like a restaurant with lower-wage workers and smaller margins would be impacted more."It's a significant increase in the business' labor cost, and that may have an adverse affect on the economics and profitability of the business," Haislmaier said.
Linkslobby
Room your clean!
My Boyfriend's Pet Possum
Gregg just found this old photo while digging through his archives.
His name was George -- named for George Jones, of course. Gregg rescued him when he lived in Algonac, MI.
Gregg: "I miss holding him by his prehensile tail. He would wrap it around my fingers like [he would] the limb of a tree."
More from Gregg: "He loved spaghetti and strawberries and nestling in the cool spot between the commode and the tub. Scared the you know what out of guests."
Love that he had a pet possum!
TSA: Protecting The Skies Against Award-Winning Veterinarians
Hugh G. Willett writes at KnoxNews.com about yet another person, wrongly on the no fly list, who can't get off.
Instead, the TSA thuggos gave him a letter -- about a year after he first complained -- that he could present whenever he was questioned. No, never mind removing him. They're too busy groping your grandaughter's girlparts to make sure she doesn't have a detonator.
Dr. Patrick Stephen Hackett is a veterinarian -- not a terrorist.Try explaining that in the airport security line.
Hackett, a lifelong resident of the Knoxville-Oak Ridge area, was named Outstanding Practitioner of the Year in 1992 by the Tennessee Veterinary Medical Association. He serves as president of the Humane Society of the Tennessee Valley.
He's on the no-fly list.
Hackett has never been arrested and never traveled to the Middle East or other centers of terrorist activity, but he found out more than a decade ago he's on the federal watch list because he shares the same name as notorious Irish Republican Army terrorist Patrick Joseph Hackett, who was jailed in the 1970s for planting bombs in Britain.
The difference should be easy to spot. The terrorist is missing an arm and a leg -- blown off when a bomb exploded prematurely -- while the Knoxville veterinarian has all his limbs intact.
"I don't know how I got on the list, and I don't know how to get off the list," Hackett said.
Since learning he was on the list, Hackett has been denied boarding on planes and even spent time in a foreign jail. He says that's why he worries about the recent proposal by President Barack Obama to prevent those on the Transportation Security Administration's no-fly list from purchasing guns.
In 2012, the TSA also yanked an 18-month-old baby from a plane for being on the no fly list. Via RT:
Initial reports describe the suspect as having curly brown hair, around 33 inches in height and really into drinking milk from a bottle.
via @instapundit
Seems Like "Stealth Jihad" To Me
At least CAIR's support of it, that is.
A teacher in Virginia didn't have students do calligraphied letters home to practice their penmanship; no, she had them write out the Shahada, the Islamic statement of faith, in Arabic, by hand.
From CNN:
Cheryl LaPorte had not designed the assignment herself, but took it from a standard workbook on world religions, local newspaper The News Leader reported.
Moriah Balingit and Emma Brown write in the WaPo:
The controversy started when teacher Cheryl LaPorte gave students a work sheet that instructed them to try their hand at writing the shahada. Reached Friday, LaPorte declined to comment.Kimberly Herndon, whose son is in the class, posted a photo of the work sheet to her Facebook page this week. Under the heading "practicing calligraphy," the work sheet says: "Here is the shahada, the Islamic statement of faith, written in Arabic. In the space below, try copying it by hand. This should give you an idea of the artistic complexity of calligraphy."
The shahada translates to: "There is no god but God. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah." Some translations start with: "There is no god but Allah."
...The superintendent said that students tried on head scarves in another lesson that taught them about the modest dress many Muslims adopt. Students will continue learning about world religions as required by Virginia's statewide academic standards, school officials said. But in the future, students will practice calligraphy using a different sample that has nothing to do with the Islamic faith.
...Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the controversy in Augusta County is "symptomatic of the hysterical anti-Muslim bigotry that we're seeing in America at this current time.
"Anything to do with Islam or Muslims somehow becomes controversial, and you get this knee-jerk reaction based on misinformation, stereotypes, bias, and it's really reaching frightening proportions," Hooper said, adding that the lesson in Augusta was appropriate. "The shahada, the declaration of faith, is the foundation of Islam. You can't learn about Islam without learning about the shahada."
Actually, I'd say you can't learn about Islam without learning about how it commands the death or conversion of, well, you, if you're non-Muslim, and how it commands the stoning of gays for being gay and of women for adultery, and how women are valued at half the value of a man.
Duckie
Linkie with orange webbed feet.
Black Privilege -- Affirmative Action -- Does No Favors For Many Black Students Admitted Under It
I blogged about this recently but I thought this American Spectator Thomas Sowell piece -- from the perspective of a person who's been a professor -- is worth a read:
The case before the High Court is whether the use of race as a basis for admitting students to the University of Texas at Austin is a violation of the 14th Amendment's requirement for government institutions to provide "equal protection of the laws" to all.Affirmative action is supposed to be a benefit to black and other minority students admitted with lower academic qualifications than some white students who are rejected. But Justice Scalia questioned whether being admitted to an institution geared to students with higher-powered academic records was a real benefit.
Despite much media spin, the issue is not whether blacks in general should be admitted to higher ranked or lower ranked institutions. The issue is whether a given black student, with given academic qualifications, should be admitted to a college or university where he would not be admitted if he were white.
Much empirical research over the years has confirmed Justice Scalia's concern that admitting black students to institutions for which their academic preparation is not sufficient can be making them worse off instead of better off.
I became painfully aware of this problem more than 40 years ago, when I was teaching at Cornell University, and discovered that half the black students there were on some form of academic probation.
These students were not stupid or uneducable. On the contrary, the average black student at Cornell at that time scored at the 75th percentile on scholastic tests. Their academic qualifications were better than those of three-quarters of all American students who took those tests.
Why were they in trouble at Cornell, then? Because the average Cornell student in the liberal arts college at that time scored at the 99th percentile. The classes taught there -- including mine -- moved at a speed geared to the verbal and mathematical level of the top one percent of American students.
The average white student would have been wiped out at Cornell. But the average white student was unlikely to be admitted to Cornell, in the first place. Nor was a white student who scored at the 75th percentile.
That was a "favor" reserved for black students. This "favor" turned black students who would have been successful at most American colleges and universities into failures at Cornell.
...Justice Scalia was not talking about sending black students to substandard colleges and universities to get an inferior education. You may in fact get a much better education at an institution that teaches at a pace that you can handle and master. In later life, no one is going to care how fast you learned something, so long as you know it.
What "Equal Rights" Means If You're Male
It's usually men who are the ones accused of sexual assault on campus -- and expelled for it, even if they were passed out drunk at the time the assault took place, as in, even if they were the victim.
(The woman in that case, at Amherst, blew the guy while he was unconscious. Of course, under the new Obama admin "civil rights" normal, he was the one booted out of school.)
Ashe Schow writes at the Wash Ex of how it works under the Office of Civil Rights' "Dear Colleague" letter to colleges:
Accusers have the entire Title IX office behind them without any additional expense, while the accused must pay out of pocket to speak to a lawyer (who can't represent them in the hearing) or struggle to find a campus administrator willing to support them. Schools were "strongly discouraged" by OCR from allowing the accused to cross-examine an accuser. The accused is often disallowed from providing evidence in their defense such as text messages or Facebook posts and are essentially treated as guilty-until-proven-innocent.
Now the OCR's $100 million budget has been increased by $7 million.
Which is, effectively, a little more money to put behind removing due process from men on college campuses.
Ah, equality!
"The Freest Arabs Still Are Those Who Are Citizens Of Israel"
Sohrab Ahmari writes in the WSJ about what anyone with knowledge of Islam understands -- it is not a system that supports democracy or freedom:
Thursday marks a bitter anniversary in the Arab world. On Dec. 17, 2010, a Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after the authorities confiscated his goods and beat him. The incident sparked an uprising that within weeks would topple Tunisia's venal autocracy. Protests spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. Despots from Morocco to Mesopotamia felt the heat of popular anger. Many couldn't withstand it.Yet today the Middle East is less stable, and less hopeful, than it was before the Arab Spring. Five years ago, the denim-clad, smartphone-wielding Arab liberal became the region's avatar. Now the knife-wielding jihadist and the refugee have risen to prominence instead.
Each Arab Spring country is unhappy in its own way. Tunisia is the only success story among the bunch, having adopted a secular constitution and completed several peaceful power transfers. As Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia's moderate Islamic Ennahda party, recently told me, "We've remained on the bridge of democratic transition while others have fallen off." True, but the birthplace of the Arab Spring is also the world's top exporter of fighters for Islamic State, or ISIS.
...How did dreams turn into nightmares? The standard account has it that by crushing or co-opting opponents, secular autocrats like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak empowered Islamist outfits that were the only remaining channel for dissent. Once the dictators fell, the liberals were quickly sidelined as Islamists and remnants of the old order battled for dominance.
It's a theory riddled with contradictions. For one thing, it underestimates political Islam. As early as the 19th century, Islamist intellectuals had called for restoring Islam's lost glory and expelling Western pollutants. To say that the movement's grip on the region is a reaction against secular dictatorship is to deny Islamists' agency and inherent ideological drive.
...As for ordered liberty, five years after Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated, the freest Arabs still are those who are citizens of Israel. Millions fleeing other parts of the region are rendering their own judgment about the state of Arab civilization. The intellectuals and activists don't dare imagine another uprising because they know that, given an opening, large numbers of Arabs will demand Shariah law, repression of women, and ethnic and sectarian revenge.
Perhaps that's an unfair judgment, but it follows from a political culture that prizes honor, tribe and piety above reason and compromise. Viewed in that light, it isn't just the years since the Arab Spring that the region has wasted, but the whole century since it was freed from the Ottoman yoke.
Here's a man facing death in Iran for "waging war on God" while a teenager, still in school.
Meanwhile, 600 million Muslims (in places besides America) support death for converts. That's 86 percent.
Barbaric.
Linksmut
Nastylinks.
Fort Meyers TV Station Airs Accidentally Accurate TSA Logo
From Kevin Eck at Adweek. Station is WBBH. They'd apparently intended to post the actual DHS logo, not this faaabulous tweak of it, depicting what the repurposed mall food court workers at airports are actually doing as they violate our Fourth Amendment rights: 
Pickle-Brained Morons At Yale Ready To Repeal The First Amendment
It was a joke, a prank, by political satirist Ami Horowitz, but the results are completely unfunny.
As Jennifer Kabbany writes at TheCollegeFix:
It took political satirist Ami Horowitz less than one hour to get 60 signatures [actually "over 50," he says on the video] from Yale University students signing a "petition" that calls for the repeal of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.You know, the one that guarantees freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom to assemble. No biggie.
"I think it's really awesome that you're out here," one student told Horowitz. Said another: "I think this is fantastic, I absolutely agree ..." Others chimed in with "love it" and similar expressions of support.
The video:
"I think the Constitution should be one big safe space..." says one of the students.
I think we call this "idiot privilege."
via @MeanCharlotte
Picture On T-Shirt Of A Weapon That Only Exists In Star Wars Movie Causing Panty-Wadding In School
Eugene Volokh blogs in the WaPo that a seventh grader's Star Wars T-shirt was banned because the storm trooper was holding a weapon (or rather, a movie weapon).
And actually, all of you fun-squashing, expression-squashing dipshits, constitutional scholar/law prof Eugene explains:
Actually, even T-shirts depicting real weapons are constitutionally protected against K-12 school discipline, unless there's real evidence that the T-shirts are likely to substantially disrupt the educational process (something that's highly unlikely here); categorical bans on all depictions of weapons, regardless of whether they are disruptive, would be unconstitutionally overbroad.
And you gotta love Eugene for this line at the end:
Nor does Morse v. Frederick (2007), which allowed a school to discipline a student for display of a "Bong hits 4 Jesus" banner, change the analysis. The Supreme Court in Morse relied on its judgment (whether or not that judgment was correct) that the banner could be reasonably understood as promoting illegal drug use; yet nothing about this T-shirt can reasonably be understood as promoting illegal blaster use.
Linkier Mercies
Tess Harper is lost somewhere in this post. I think she and Ellen Barkin went out drinking.
No Room For Humor At The Inn
There's a funny photo of a family of five that of course the Internet burst its spleen over, and it's this:
To me, this is a joke that reflects that the women in the family have all the power, and the only way for the guys to get ahead was to bind and gag them.
It also makes fun of how women tend to be the chatter-y sex. (It's certainly how I am compared to Gregg or any guy I know who isn't flamingly gay.)
Humor no longer being allowed on the Internet, and everything being taken VERRRRY SERIOUSLY, this caused an uproar, leading to Facebook removing the photo.
From the Daily Dot's Carrie Nelson:
Though the photo perpetuates the adage of "Women should be seen and not heard"--a notion that some may find amusing to parody ironically--an image of girls and women silenced and restrained by men also suggests far darker connotations. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence estimates that one in three women in the United States will be victims of intimate partner violence over the course of their lives, and that a woman is physically abused every nine seconds.Given these staggering facts, it is not difficult to see why, by Tuesday morning, the Facebook fan page for Hannah Hawkes Photography had been deleted, along with the hundreds of shares that spread the photo virally. Some people, though, are continuing to post their concerns about the photograph and its photographer, indicating that they will not patron[ize] Hawkes' business should she relaunch her page.
Hawkes' reply:
After being silent, now isn't that ironic, I would like to speak! I have been called every name in the book, and have received some very hateful and vulgar comments and messages. I would like to say that as a female I do NOT and have never promoted violence to women! I do not support abuse, or the degradation of women. My controversial photo was taken by request by the family, and was in no way meant to promote abuse. This photo was taken with humor in mind, and was meant as a comical Christmas photo. I personally know this family, and have known them for many years. They are not abusive to their children in any shape or form. Also, I would like to add that no one was harmed during the process! So everyone have a very MERRY CHRISTMAS and MAY GOD BLESS you and yours!
My reply: Chill the fuck out, grievance hunters!
If you go through life looking to interpret everything as an attack, well, you will go through life as a victim.
If you need a hobby, take up knitting. Or extreme knitting, whatever that might be.
And while we're on victims, as Cathy Young tweeted, some victims get different treatment than others:
@CathyYoung63
FB removes humorous family photo - mom & daughters w/mouths taped shut ... Any examples of male-bashing humor tolerated?
The Real "Crime" Of The St. Paul's "Rapist"
Spot-on Caitlin Flanagan piece in the New York Daily News, explaining that the real "sin" of the St. Paul's school "rapist," Owen Labrie, was overstepping -- being out of his poor-boy league:
Labrie was also a star athlete -- captain of the varsity soccer team -- at one of the best prep schools in the country, and he was every other good thing you could be there: a prefect, an excellent student, the recipient of one of the school's top awards and of an admission letter to Harvard. As such, in the narrative that gathered quickly around him, he was a monster, the one-man embodiment of white male privilege.But there was one fact about him that couldn't be reconciled with the others: He was also a poor kid on full scholarship, the only child of a single mother who says she went years without child support.
He had changed the trajectory of his life and hers when he got into St. Paul's, but he forgot the first rule of being a scholarship boy at a prep school, which is that you don't cause any trouble to the rich kids. When he singled out the younger sister of a girl with whom he'd already had a sexual relationship -- when he created a situation that would either drive a wedge between the two girls or unite them in fury against him -- he took his life in his hands.
...He'd been a cad, another old-fashioned word, but he hadn't recognized that he wasn't like the other boys, didn't have a rich father who could fly out and stop him from talking for hours to the cops without counsel.
In the time-honored manner of the only sons of single mothers, he had been trying to protect her as much as -- maybe even more than -- himself.
...At the end of the day, all Labrie was left with were the remnants of those traditions: the herringbone jacket, the tortoise shell glasses -- and a prison term.
He had pretended he cared about a girl, but she was really just a name on a list. As soon as he got back to his room, he told his buddies that he'd boned her. He added another mark to the tally the boys were keeping on a wall behind the dorm washing machines.
Labrie seemed to have walked straight out of the manosphere, with its detailed descriptions of "game." Not that he needed anybody's help, with his "golden change of heart," his secret key, his ability to text in French. He might have succeeded if he had deployed his bag of tricks on the checkout girls at Walgreen's.
But he was out of his league, toying with the affections of rich girls, leaving a record of his cruelty a mile long. He got caught doing something women have always feared and loathed: tricking them, flattering them, taking sex from them and making a joke of them. And now he's been crushed for it.
Linkus
Aurelius.
Merkel Notices That Europe Has Been Committing Suicide
In the Washington Post, Rick Noack reports on her mention of "multiculturalism." Yes, there's damage done by accepting countless immigrants who have no interest in blending into your society (and in fact, very possibly want to kill your citizens, as ordered by their medieval religion):
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's refugee policy has attracted praise from all over the world. Time magazine and the Financial Times newspaper recently named her Person of the Year, and delegates applauded her for so long at her party's convention on Monday that she had to stop them.The speech that followed, however, may have surprised supporters of her policies: "Multiculturalism leads to parallel societies and therefore remains a 'life lie,' " or a sham, she said, before adding that Germany may be reaching its limits in terms of accepting more refugees. "The challenge is immense," she said. "We want and we will reduce the number of refugees noticeably."
Although those remarks may seem uncharacteristic of Merkel, she probably would insist that she was not contradicting herself. In fact, she was only repeating a sentiment she first voiced several years ago when she said multiculturalism in Germany had "utterly failed."
Um, duh-ski!
Merkel emphasized that despite her commitment to limit the influx of refugees, she was standing by her decision to open the borders earlier this fall. "It is a historical test for Europe," she said, adding that other countries in Europe should accept more refugees to take some of the burden off Germany.Refugees in need should be helped, she said, but she also suggested that not everyone who has come to Germany fulfilled those criteria. German authorities are expected to ramp up deportations in the coming months.
The rest will get to stay and live off the welfare state -- as 80 percent of Turkish Muslims apparently do in Germany.
That's the difference between immigrants to our country from Mexico and elsewhere -- they're looking to join our economy, for a better life for themselves and their children. They don't have an ideology that commands them to lie in wait and slaughter Americans.
Social "Justice"
In the words of a friend of mine, via email:
Advancing one person's opportunity by removing that of another.
The Idiots In High Positions In Our Government And Their Deadly And Idiotic PC
A person doesn't have a civil right to immigrate to our country.
But while Homeland "Security" honcho Jeh Johnson supervises the repurposed mall food court workers violating Americans' civil liberties at airports, he gets all weepy about the civil liberties of Syrians and others trying to migrate to the U.S. from Terrorism Central.
Kristina Wong writes at The Hill:
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson decided against ending a secret U.S. policy that prohibits immigration officials from reviewing social media posts of foreigners applying for U.S. visas, according to a report by ABC News.Johnson decided to keep the prohibition in place in early 2014 because he feared a civil liberties backlash and "bad public relations," according to ABC.
"During that time period immigration officials were not allowed to use or review social media as part of the screening process," John Cohen, a former acting undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security for intelligence and analysis, told ABC News.
As Mickey Kaus tweeted:
@kausmickey If not this, is there any bad decision Jeh Johnson could make that would require him to resign?
What Happens When Racial Preferences Are Removed From College Admissions?
Jason Riley writes in the WSJ:
After racial preferences were banned in the University of California system in 1996, black enrollment at higher-ranked UCLA and Berkeley fell, but black academic outcomes improved. Mr. Sander and Mr. Taylor have demonstrated empirically that as more minority students attended schools where they weren't at a preparation disadvantage relative to their classmates, grades rose along with graduation rates. That isn't surprising. Historically black colleges and universities, which are less selective than the top-tier schools, produce about 40% of blacks with undergraduate degrees in math and science, despite accounting for only around 20% of black enrollment.Racial preferences almost certainly result in fewer black professionals than likely would exist in the absence of such policies, which is bad enough. But they also have a long track record of poisoning the academic environment. The racial unrest on campus today is a byproduct of college admissions schemes that place race above ability. It is also nothing new.
Thomas Sowell, a longtime critic of racial double standards, predicted in his 1990 book, "Preferential Policies," that they would be "educationally disastrous" for blacks and increase racial tensions and resentment on college campuses. Reviewing the book in the New York Times, liberal scholar Andrew Hacker of Queens College sounded a lot like Justice Scalia. "I agree," he wrote, "that some of the minority students being recruited by high-powered colleges would be better served at schools like my own, where they could proceed at a pace more in tune with their preparation."
Jason Riley's book: Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed
Clinky
Jailhousesnitchylinks.
WRITERSNARL
Is it uncharitable of me to want to go hurt people who talk about writing in terms of "banging something out"? I last "banged something out" at 4 -- and got a spanking for the marks I left in the dining room table.
Shocking, Horrible "Accidental Shooting" By Cop
Accidental, my ass.
The cop shoots a man who is merely pulling himself out of his truck post-accident.
At the time, it's a probable drunk driving incident, but cops are merely supposed to arrest drunk drivers, not execute them on the spot.
This is horrible, and no charges are being filed against the cop, Patrick Feaster, who gave gave chase when he saw a Toyota Four-Runner speeding out of a bar parking lot without headlights on:
Feaster followed in his patrol car, as the Toyota ran a red light and turned onto Pearson Road where the driver, 26-year-old Andrew Thomas struck the median and flipped, ejecting his 23-year-old wife Darien Ehorn from the vehicle. Ehorn was killed in the crash.Ramsey said Feaster drew his gun when Thomas "popped" out of the car, believing he would flee. As Officer Feaster moved towards Thomas, the gun discharged and struck Thomas in the neck. The shot hit Thomas in the C7 and T1 vertebrae and could lead to him being paralyzed for life.
When backup arrived on the scene, Feaster did not mention anything about having fired his weapon. According to Ramsey, Feaster notified his commanding officer about the discharge only after Thomas' gunshot wound was found.
As the commanding officer suggested an investigator return to Canteena and try to find out if Thomas had been shot at the bar, Feaster revealed that he may have shot Thomas.
Ramsey said nearly 11 minutes passed before any other officers, medics or firefighters learned Thomas had been shot.
According to Ramsey, several factors led investigators to believe the shooting was accidental. "The dash cam video shows Officer Feaster was not prepared for and was surprised by the guns firing. The pistol discharges in mid-stride and the officer both flinches his head to the right and does a stutter step indicative of an officer not prepared for nor intentionally firing his pistol. Additionally, officers normally train to fire a minimum of two shots. There was no second shot and the officer immediately holstered his weapon after the discharge."
In a media release, Ramsey said "His (Officer Feaster's) reaction on the dash cam video and his statements to protocol investigators confirm an honest belief that he did not intentionally fire his pistol."
The rollover/shooting sequence starts pretty early in, just after :48. The clip's a little big for my blog, so just click twice and it'll go to full screen.
Reason's Brian Doherty reports:
Old news clip from 2012 shows that Feaster saw drunk drivers as a special crusade of sorts. From the News Review out of Chico, it reveals Feaster to have a personal longstanding interest in drunk drivers and enforcing the law on them, having lost his uncle, who he is named after, to one 10 years before he was born.
It is just sick that this cop is not being charged. Not even with manslaughter.
I Hear And Smell Rude People
Persistent noise forced on a person can have negative effects on health, and it's just plain wildly unpleasant.
There's an article in The New York Times by Roy Furchgott about New York City apartment dwellers going to great expense to silence their apartments or the noise from their neighbors, hiring acoustical engineers to accomplish that.
As I write in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," nobody has a right to change the ambience and of another person's living space.
A commenter on the NYT site gets it exactly right:
DK
In my co-op, we coined the term "Your acoustical space". That means, each resident must keep personal noise "within the confines of one's own apartment". Each resident is responsible for sound insulation of the unit lived in, either through learning to live quietly or through sound insulation. The concept: I am NOT responsible for paying to stop YOUR noise. I pay for my apartment and you do not have the right to take my acoustical space, which is just as real as visual space. To be clear, we made parallel to the visual views available from one's apartment windows. The resident above may not hang a cloth over a lower apartment window, removing the view. Similarly, a resident in a neighbor apartment may not usurp the quiet of another apartment without paying a rental fee for use of "acoustical space". Once the logic was clear, quiet began and no fees were ever paid. I suggest taking the concept of "Your acoustical space" to the board of your co-op or condo association. Our building went from noisy to calm and quiet. And I was thanked by several residents who had put up with annoying noise for over a decade.
Smells Like Jihadi Spirit
I guess you could call it "Islam-Creep."
A New York Post headline gets it so right about the pernicious, medieval ideology that is Islam:
They're 'so nice,' until they get religion and want to kill us
Paul Sperry writes in the Post:
Unlike other mass murderers, who exhibit antisocial, paranoid, narcissistic or schizoid traits, Farook and Malik do not appear to be natural born killers. Neither had a history of violence nor criminal record, and both generally were described as pleasant people.In fact, friends invariably called the 28-year-old Farook a "very nice person," while his landlord even described him as a "very gentle person." He enjoyed working on old cars and shooting hoops. For her part, the 29-year-old Malik was seen as "a good girl" and a good student who aspired to be a pharmacist. Before dressing in austere Islamic clothing, she was even viewed as a "modern girl."
Muslims and non-Muslims alike spoke highly of them both. Then suddenly a switch went off, and the couple went medieval.
By all accounts, that switch was piety. They simply got closer to their religion, immersing themselves in Islamic scripture.
Farook and Malik devoted themselves to Islamic study, which culminated in both of them memorizing the Koran, a high honor in Islam. They began wearing traditional Islamic garb -- Farook, a white tunic and skullcap, and Malik, a black veil and robe.
Before long, Farook was slaughtering fellow Americans, many of them co-workers, shooting them at point-blank range with his wife by his side, the two of them stopping only to reload. Why? Because as US taxpayers, the 14 people they killed supported Israel and the Jews.
We saw the same transformation in the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston, who were considered "nice" and "normal," even partiers -- until their mother made them stick their noses in their holy books and get religion. Within a matter of just a couple of years of becoming more fervent in their Muslim faith, these "typical American boys" were making shrapnel bombs and blowing off limbs of innocent bystanders at the Boston Marathon to "punish" fellow Americans for supporting wars in Muslim lands. And that was after the oldest boy, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, nearly beheaded a couple of Jews he once befriended.
Law enforcement sees this:
Case agents have seen the link between Islamic belief and violence firsthand."Evidence exists to demonstrate that a greater level of adherence to Islamic law correlates to a greater likelihood of violence," said FBI veteran John Guandolo, who worked some of the nation's biggest terrorism cases out of the bureau's Washington field office after 9/11.
Studies back him up, including one recently published in Europe that found that Islam is the only religion in the world in which people become more violent the stronger they believe.
...Islam is not a "religion of peace," and won't be until most of its followers -- the Taliban, the Ayatollah, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, the mullahs of Saudi Arabia -- reject tenets like jihad. To suggest otherwise is naive. Virtually everyone is hacking at the branches of this growing menace, and almost no one is striking at its root.
Linkety
Uppitylinks.
How Mismatch Hurts The Minority Students It Is Supposed To Help
From the WaPo's Volokh Conspiracy blog, by Richard Sander:
The "mismatch hypothesis" contends that any person (certainly not just minorities) can be adversely affected if she attends a school where her level of academic preparation is substantially lower than that of her typical classmate. The idea was advanced in the mid-1960s, not in the context of affirmative action; it has been a subject of empirical research for about 20 years, with a sharp uptick in the sophistication of that research just in the last five.
I am for helping students who are poor but able to attend college, but it is unfair to qualified students to say no to them and to admit unqualified students who don't meet the standards. It also ultimately ends up doing harm to minority students admitted to a college they aren't prepared for, explain Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., in The Atlantic:
Large preferences often place students in environments where they can neither learn nor compete effectively -- even though these same students would thrive had they gone to less competitive but still quite good schools.We refer to this problem as "mismatch," a word that largely explains why, even though blacks are more likely to enter college than are whites with similar backgrounds, they will usually get much lower grades, rank toward the bottom of the class, and far more often drop out. Because of mismatch, racial preference policies often stigmatize minorities, reinforce pernicious stereotypes, and undermine the self-confidence of beneficiaries, rather than creating the diverse racial utopias so often advertised in college campus brochures.
The mismatch effect happens when a school extends to a student such a large admissions preference -- sometimes because of a student's athletic prowess or legacy connection to the school, but usually because of the student's race -- that the student finds himself in a class where he has weaker academic preparation than nearly all of his classmates. The student who would flourish at, say, Wake Forest or the University of Richmond, instead finds himself at Duke, where the professors are not teaching at a pace designed for him -- they are teaching to the "middle" of the class, introducing terms and concepts at a speed that is unnerving even to the best-prepared student.
The student who is underprepared relative to others in that class falls behind from the start and becomes increasingly lost as the professor and his classmates race ahead. His grades on his first exams or papers put him at the bottom of the class. Worse, the experience may well induce panic and self-doubt, making learning even harder.
When explaining to friends how academic mismatch works, we sometimes say: Think back to high school and recall a subject at which you did fine but did not excel. Suppose you had suddenly been transferred into an advanced class in that subject with a friend who was about at your level and 18 other students who excelled in the subject and had already taken the intermediate course you just skipped. You would, in all likelihood, soon be struggling to keep up. The teacher might give you some extra attention but, in class, would be focusing on the median student, not you and your friend, and would probably be covering the material at what, to you, was a bewildering pace.
Wouldn't you have quickly fallen behind and then continued to fall farther and farther behind as the school year progressed? Now assume that you and the friend who joined you at the bottom of that class were both black and everyone else was Asian or white. How would that have felt? Might you have imagined that this could reinforce in the minds of your classmates the stereotype that blacks are weak students?
...Of course, being surrounded by very able peers can confer benefits, too -- the atmosphere may be more intellectually challenging, and one may learn a lot from observing others. We have no reason to think that small preferences are not, on net, beneficial. But contemporary racial preferences used by selective schools -- especially those extended to blacks and Native Americans -- tend to be extremely large, often amounting to the equivalent of hundreds of SAT points.
At the University of Texas, whose racial preference programs come before the Supreme Court for oral argument on October 10, the typical black student receiving a race preference placed at the 52nd percentile of the SAT; the typical white was at the 89th percentile. In other words, Texas is putting blacks who score at the middle of the college-aspiring population in the midst of highly competitive students. This is the sort of academic gap where mismatch flourishes. And, of course, mismatch does not occur merely with racial preferences; it shows up with large preferences of all types.
By the way, Scalia, in discussing mismatch, was actually quoting one of the submitted briefs. Note the boldfaced bits in this quoting of his statement on this -- left out of most of the media reports:
There are there are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less a slower-track school where they do well. One of the briefs pointed out that...most of the most of the black scientists in this country don't come from schools like the University of Texas...They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they're that they're being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them...I'm just not impressed by the fact that that the University of Texas may have fewer. Maybe it ought to have fewer. And maybe some you know, when you take more, the number of blacks, really competent blacks admitted to lesser schools, turns out to be less. And... I don't think it...stands to reason that it's a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible...
There's too much of this opportunistic attacking of people for remarks that weren't quite what they said.
From the Federalist link to the Scalia quote above, here's Clarence Thomas on the issue:
The University admits minorities who otherwise would have attended less selective colleges where they would have been more evenly matched. But, as a result of the mismatching, many blacks and Hispanics who likely would have excelled at less elite schools are placed in a position where underperformance is all but inevitable because they are less academically prepared than the white and Asian students with whom they must compete. Setting aside the damage wreaked upon the self-confidence of these overmatched students, there is no evidence that they learn more at the University than they would have learned at other schools for which they were better prepared. Indeed, they may learn less.
I speak at an inner-city school from time to time -- just did my last session in October. And I also sometimes see the kind of preparation privileged kids get in LA -- some of whom are not white -- due to some friends in the education biz (among them, a private tutor). These privileged kids are vastly, vastly more prepared than even the honors students at the inner city high school. I just can't see the kids I speak to competing at elite colleges. You don't do them a favor by letting them in. You do quite the contrary.
This isn't to say they're dumb. They're just not going to be able to compete at the level of, say, students at the University of Michigan. However, maybe by going to a community college, or less prestigious state school, they could learn study methods and get help and go to a more prestigious school two years in -- while saving a fuckton of money.
One of my former assistants, a first-generation American, did this. She went to Santa Monica Community College, did well, and ended up getting a free ride to Northwestern. From what I understand, Santa Monica College gives a pretty good education.
Tim Sandefur, Whose Brother Was Murdered In San Bernardino, On The Approach To The Jihadist Threat
Daniel Kaufman, Sandefur's adopted brother, was among those murdered in San Bernardino. (Nobody ever called him "Larry," his given name, Sandefur says.) Sandefur writes:
I believe there is no solution to the jihadist threat short of victory against our enemies. When attacked, one has a basic choice: one can curtail one's own behavior, in hopes that the enemy can be persuaded not to attack again--or one can accept the challenge, and defeat that enemy. The United States has so far largely chosen the former. For years now, officials of both parties have refused to face the fact that we are targeted by theocratic totalitarian movement, funded and overseen by Saudi Arabia and Iran, among others, which is committed to the destruction of the values essential to civilization. Our current President believes that the war against Islamofascism should be "ended." But wars are never "ended." They are either won or lost. Unless we accept the responsibility of victory, attacks like this--like Fort Hood, like Chattanooga, like Little Rock, like Los Angeles, Boston, Garland, Madrid, London, Bali, New Delhi, Delhi, Delhi again, Paris, Paris again, and so many others, including of course New York City--will only continue. War is horrible. But it is not the worst horror. A life without freedom or law is still worse. Peace, said Churchill, cannot be "preserved by praising its virtues." Nor by lowering flags to half-staff, reading lists of victims' names, putting "coexist" bumper stickers on your car, having James Taylor play at your press conferences, etc. That may feel nice, but the future of freedom, peace, and civilization requires more than hugs and hashtags. It demands that we compel the Islamist aggressor, who has warred against us since 1979, to cease making war and accept peace on civilized terms. Our family agrees with the sentiment expressed by Christopher Hitchens: "We might practice nailing the colors to the mast rather than engaging in a permanent dress rehearsal for masochism and the lachrymose." It is for this reason that we choose not to participate in public demonstrations of mourning.Those of us who also serve by only standing and waiting must respond in just the way that our enemy most despises: by living our lives exactly as we would have done. That means cherishing our freedom; celebrating our secular, free institutions; relishing the pleasures of life as physical beings; respecting the special spark in each individual person--here, in this world, during this life. Our values triumph each time we exercise them. Danny and I watched the attacks of September 11, 2001, together on the TV in our living room. I can say with certainty that--to the extent that so kind a man was capable of understanding such evil--he believed in defying the barbarian by living just as we choose: freely, tolerantly, skeptically, joyfully, laughingly, humanly.
via @Overlawyered
When The Government Does The Background Checks On Immigrants
Turns out they missed San Bernardino murderer wife's zealotry -- openly posted on social media.
Matt Apuzzo, Michael S. Schmidt, and Julia Preston write in The New York Times:
WASHINGTON -- Tashfeen Malik, who with her husband carried out the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., passed three background checks by American immigration officials as she moved to the United States from Pakistan. But none uncovered what Ms. Malik had made little effort to hide -- that she talked openly on social media about her views on violent jihad.She said she supported it. And she said she wanted to be a part of it.
American law enforcement officials said they recently discovered those old -- and previously unreported -- postings as they pieced together the lives of Ms. Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, trying to understand how they pulled off the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001.
Had the authorities found the posts years ago, they might have kept her out of the country. But immigration officials do not routinely review social media as part of their background checks, and there is a debate inside the Department of Homeland Security over whether it is even appropriate to do so.
How 'bout we just hope nobody wants to mass-murder any Americans? That's worked so well for us.
Any reasonably intelligent person, in trying to background check a person, would go on the Internet and run a few searches.
Astonishing -- yet not surprising -- that government workers don't even rise to the level of basic intelligence in doing their jobs.
via @AHMalcolm
Linknut
Wingnuts with links.
Men Are Comfortable With Hierarchy And Competition In Ways Women Are Not
Sex differences researcher Joyce Benenson lays this out in her book, Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes
Well, this plays out in a reader letter in the LA Times about a Patt Morrison interview with Hollywood reporter chief exec Janice Min.
Elizabeth Bentel, the reader, explains that Min mentioned "an influential woman in the entertainment industry who burst into tears and left a red-carpet event because her rank on the Hollywood Reporter's top 100 women in entertainment list had fallen from the previous year":
This is the moment Min "began to get a real sense of how possibly destructive these sort of rankings were." So this year, the tears won out and the ranking was eliminated.To the Hollywood Reporter: Women displayed as too sensitive for these types of rankings is a tired singular depiction -- and not a very "powerful" one. I'm sure a few men on a power list who may have fallen from No. 5 to 20, 40 or, heaven forbid, 80 or 99 may have been irked and had a moist-eye moment themselves.
I think all these powerful people can handle their yearly fluctuations in rank. And if they can't, how powerful are they really?
From Patt's interview, why Min cut the list:
Janice Min, the Hollywood Reporter's president and chief creative officer, says she made the change because the list wasn't doing what it was meant to -- advance women in Hollywood.
Note how second league this is. Men don't have top 100 lists to "advance men." They have them because they love seeing who's on top or above them and imagining how they might beat the guy's ass.
Min again reflects how women get hurt and insulted by the prospect of competing. In fact, competition is mean!
Our list [with rankings] was not getting more women directors hired. It wasn't getting more women in top executive suites. It was just its own little novelty act. The worst part was the pitting of women against each other.
Yes, Min herself feels bad about the prospect of women being forced to compete.
Contrast that with men. Could you ever imagine a man making these statements?
IRS Can Now Send Private Collection Agents After You -- And Have Your Passport Revoked
Kelly Phillips Erb writes at Forbes that they snuck this into a transportation bill:
And as you would expect in a bill targeting highways and infrastructure, it also requires Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to use private debt collection companies.Wait? You didn't expect that? Of course not. Because tax policy has no business being stuffed into an already bloated bill (1,300+ pages) ostensibly focused on highways. But when has that ever stopped Congress before?
...Concerns were also raised in previous years about tactics used by private debt collectors. Year after year, the Federal Trade Commission receives more complaints about debt collectors than any other industry. In 2013 alone, there were over 200,000 complaints filed with respect to collection practices (you can see a list of collectors banned from the industry here).
Additional concerns about taxpayer privacy and fraud should not have been ignored. Last year, J. Russell George, the Inspector General Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), referred to a scheme where fraudsters called up taxpayers as "the largest scam of its kind that we have ever seen." TIGTA, IRS and Treasury have all warned taxpayers to be on guard against scammers, reminding them that "It's worth noting that the IRS doesn't generally initiate contact by phone." But private debt collectors do. Outsourcing collections will no doubt cause potential confusion for taxpayers and create new opportunities for scammers.
There are a number of reasons to be concerned about the consequences of outsourcing tax collections to private debt collections. When it was still in the early stages, the proposal was labeled "wrongheaded," "the wrong approach," "misguided," and "a recipe for taxpayer abuse." Nevertheless, Congress signed it into law, ordering IRS to " implement the proposal without delay."
The passport story is also in Forbes, by Robert W. Wood:
The law says the State Department can revoke, deny or limit passports for anyone the IRS certifies as having a seriously delinquent tax debt in an amount in excess of $50,000. Administrative details are scant. It could mean no new passport and no renewal. It could even mean the State Department will rescind existing passports....A $50,000 tax debt including interest and penalties is common, and the IRS files tax liens routinely. It's the IRS way of putting creditors on notice. The IRS can file a Notice of Federal Tax Lien after the IRS assesses the liability, sends a Notice and Demand for Payment, and you fail to pay in full within 10 days.
The right to travel has been recognized as fundamental, both between states and internationally. And although some restrictions have been upheld, it is not clear that this measure will pass the constitutional test if it is challenged. Speaking of challenge, it is not off-topic to mention FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.
FATCA penalizes foreign banks that don't hand over American account holders. There are approximately eight million Americans living overseas, many of whom are still reeling from FATCA compliance problems.
Matt Welch in Reason on the horror that is FATCA.
Is this the America you want to be living in?
collec agents via @overlawyered
Immigration: We Should Be Asking What You CAN Do For Your Country
"My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country," said John Kennedy.
Good point -- and one that should be considered when we're opening the gates to the U.S.
A long read by David Frum in The Atlantic notes that, yes, coming to the US would benefit millions of would-be immigrants, but policymakers seldom ask whether their arrival would benefit us:
Nobody is making conscious decisions about who is wanted and who is not, about how much immigration to accept and what kind to prioritize--not even for the portion of U.S. migration conducted according to law, much less for the larger portion that is not.Nor is there much understanding of what has happened after it has happened. A simple question like, "How many immigrants are in prison?" turns out to be extraordinarily hard to answer. Poor information invites excessive fears, which are then answered with false assurances and angry accusations.
How's our don't ask; just admit immigration policy going?
•Minnesota is home to America's largest Somali community, 33,000 people. The unemployment rate for Somali Minnesotans in 2015 was triple the state average, 21 percent. As of 2014, about 5,950 of the state's Somali population received cash assistance; 17,000 receive food assistance as of 2014.
•A close study of Somali refugees by the government of Maine (home to the nation's second-largest Somali community) found that fewer than half of the working-age population had worked at any time in the five years from 2001 through 2006.
•Somalis have so much difficulty finding work in the developed world because their skills badly mismatch local labor needs. Only about 18 percent of boys and 15 percent of girls attend even primary school in Somalia. UNICEF has given up trying to measure literacy rates. Much of the U.S. refugee population is descended from people held as slaves in Somalia, who accordingly lack any family tradition of education. Their children then flounder in Western schools, baffled by the norms and expectations they encounter there. In the U.K., Somali students pass the standard age 16 high school exams at a rate less than half that of Nigerian immigrant students.
•Other young Somalis turn to political and religious violence. An estimated 50 American Somalis returned to fight for al Shabab, committing some of the most heinous acts of that insurgency. One carried out a suicide bombing that killed 24 people in 2009. Al Shabab claimed three American Somalis took part in the attack on Nairobi's Westgate shopping mall in 2013 that killed at least 67 people. Al Shabab is now intensely recruiting American Somalis to undertake terror missions inside the United States.
Immigration advocates understandably prefer to focus on the contributions of the refugees from Nazism than on less successful and more recent experiences.
Yet surely it is the more recent experiences that are more relevant. Pre-civil war Syria was no Somalia, but it was very far from a developed country. In 2010, the average Syrian had less than six years of schooling, less even than Egypt, according to the UN Development Index. Women were systematically subordinated: Only a quarter of Syrian women completed secondary education; only 13 percent participated in the workforce. Few Syrians will arrive with the skills of a modern economy, even apart from the language gap.
...One reason we hear so much about the Jewish refugees of the 1930s, to circle back to where I started, is the natural human tendency to wish away overwhelming problems. If the word "refugee" conjures up Albert Einstein, Kurt Weill, Hans Bethe, Lawrence Tribe, Billy Wilder, and Henry Kissinger--well, what country wouldn't welcome as many as it could get?
...Everywhere in the Western world there is a fast-growing constituency for new kinds of immigration and refugee policies. If anything is shameful, it is the shabby, thoughtless, and arrogant elite consensus that has to date denied that constituency a responsible political leadership. But that too is changing, yielding to heavy evidence and hard experience.
Limn
The painted link.
"The People Who Have The Power" For "Gender Equality" In Moviemaking Are The Viewing Public, And They Aren't Buying It
In yet another nobly futile act by a female star, Patricia Clarkson puts out the call for "gender equality" in movies.
She's talking about Hollywood power brokers' choices to make the films lots of people want to see (though she doesn't quite process that). She explains her idea of how power brokers should choose the movies they make New York Post shortie article by Mara Siegler:
"You say, 'OK, I'm going to do Quentin Tarantino's movie and such-and-such's movie,' that's great," she told us at the New York Women in Film & Television lunch at the Hilton. "'But wait, I'm also gonna do this film directed by [a woman] that stars this woman.' It's simple, it's math!"
It's a demand for affirmative action in moviemaking, and it's not going to happen.
The thing is, Hollywood studios have been bought out by huge corporations, so the mythical power broker of yore no longer really exists.
Stockholders (with their need for returns and not losses) are the powerbrokers, and what's mass is the action thriller starring some moviestar guy.
Those Calling For This Should Change The Name Of Their Movement To "BLDMS"
That would be "Black Lives Don't Mean Shit," because that's what their request suggests they're thinking.
Per Hot Air, from a Mediaite article by Alex Griswold:
One of the leaders of the Chicago protests said on MSNBC Thursday that one of their main goals was to defund the police department."So getting Mayor Rahm Emanuel to resign is definitely not the main goal of the movement right now," Breanna Champion, leader of the Black Youth Project. "In Chicago, police receive 40% of our city's budget to remain operational. That is completely unheard of and unacceptable."
"One of our major demands is that police be defunded and that that money used to fund police be used to fund black futures, and be used to fund our communities and things that we need," she said.
Perhaps buy them pretty pots of flowers. When gangbangers drive by, residents can throw them at their cars!
Defunding the police would be especially devastating for black communities. NewsOne's Terrell Jermaine Starr writes:
A 2011 U.S. Department Of Justice study reports that Blacks are six times more likely to be victims of violent crime than whites. The same study reports that Blacks are eight times more likely than whites to be perpetrators of violent crime than their white counterparts.
When that happens, if you listen to dipshit Breanna and defund the police, who ya gonna call...Ghostbusters?
Do you get the sense from the demands popping up all over the place that some of these protesters, black and white, rising up on college campuses and elsewhere, would be more useful using brooms instead of their brains?
The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same
About the (Muslim) "Barbary Pirates," Christopher Hitchens writes at Slate that Jefferson went to ask Tripoli's envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, why the Muslims were hijacking ships and why more they had sold more than a million Americans and Europeans into slavery. As Jefferson told Secretary of State John Jay, and to the Congress:
The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
Yes, this is what the Quran says. And this is why there are Muslims leaving their baby with grandma so they can go gun themselves down some infidels -- unarmed co-workers at a holiday party who'd just thrown a shower for their child.
As Hitchens puts it about Jefferson's statement above:
Medieval as it is, this has a modern ring to it. Abdrahaman did not fail to add that a commission paid directly to Tripoli--and another paid to himself--would secure some temporary lenience. I believe on the evidence that it was at this moment that Jefferson decided to make war on the Muslim states of North Africa as soon as the opportunity presented itself. And, even if I am wrong, we can be sure that the dispatch of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to the Barbary shore was the first and most important act of his presidency. It took several years of bombardment before the practice of kidnap and piracy and slavery was put down, but put down it was, Quranic justification or not.
Linkwit
Nits, nits, everywhere...
That "Now, You Be Good!" Scolding Worked Out Well
A released ex-Guantanamo detainee is now an al Qaeda leader in Yemen, reports Thomas Joscelyn at LongWarJournal:
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released a new video featuring a former Guantanamo detainee, Ibrahim Qosi, who is also known as Sheikh Khubayb al Sudani.In July 2010, Qosi plead guilty to charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism before a military commission. His plea was part of a deal in which he agreed to cooperate with prosecutors during his remaining time in US custody. Qosi was transferred to his home country of Sudan two years later, in July 2012.
...A leaked Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) threat assessment and other declassified files documented Qosi's extensive al Qaeda dossier. In the threat assessment, dated Nov. 15, 2007, US intelligence analysts described Qosi as a "high" risk to the US and its allies.
...In Dec. 2001, the Pakistanis captured Qosi as he fled the Battle of Tora Bora. He was detained as part of a group dubbed the "Dirty 30" by US intelligence officials. The "Dirty 30" included other members of bin Laden's bodyguard unit, as well as Mohammed al Qahtani, the would-be 20th hijacker. Qahtani, who was slated to take part in the Sept. 11, 2001 hijackings, had been denied entry into the US just months before.
While detained at Guantanamo in 2003, Qosi was asked why he stayed true to bin Laden for so many years. According to JTF-GTMO, Qosi explained it was his "religious duty to defend Islam and fulfill the obligation of jihad and that the war between America and al Qaeda is a war between Islam and aggression of the infidels."
Qosi made it clear in AQAP's new production that he hasn't changed his opinion in the twelve years since.
In related news, there is an unexpected group threatening ISIS -- via a Mexican cartel boss telling them not to mess with his drug trade.
via @Drudge
The Discussion Should Be About Why Such Idiots Are Being Let Into College
There's an uproar in Pennsylvania about the name of a college building -- a building named for a former president of the college, whose last name happened to be "Lynch," reports Colin Deppen at PennLive:
Depression-era Lebanon Valley College leader with the last name Lynch has found himself thrust into the middle of a roiling 21st-century debate on campus civil rights.Students at the private college in Annville have demanded administrators remove or modify Dr. Clyde A. Lynch's last name, as it appears on a campus hall, due to the associated racial connotations.
The demand was made at a forum on campus equality issues held Friday, capping a week of demonstrations calling for changes at the predominantly white institution.
In that time, organizers, including members of a Black Student Union group, have been calling for policy changes they say are needed to address long-standing "institutional injustices" impacting a variety of groups on campus.
...Student activists who made the demand said they'd be willing to settle for adding his first name and middle initial to the building instead of removing it altogether. At Friday's forum they acknowledged no known links between Dr. Clyde A. Lynch and the practice of "Lynching" but said as is, the building and last name harken back to a period in American history when Blacks were widely and arbitrarily killed by public hangings and "Lynch Mobs."
...Commenter "Badpenny" asked "Does anyone really think that a building named Lynch Memorial Hall is memorializing lynchings?" adding that the situation recalled one "20 or so years ago, when a certain group (PETA) wanted NY to change the name of one of their towns. The town was Fishkill NY. It's a Dutch word meaning (fish) creek. It doesn't mean to go out and kill fish."
P.S. Johnson & Johnson is likewise not Penis & Penis.
Why We Can't Really Vet Refugees In Any Meaningful Way And Why Japan Doesn't Have To
There's the Islamic principle of taqiyya, lying to advance the cause of Islam. (A related concept is kitman, lying by omission to advance Islam.)
From the link above:
From Muhammad to Saddam Hussein, promises made to non-Muslim are distinctly non-binding in the Muslim mindset. Leaders in the Arab world sometimes say one thing to English-speaking audiences and then say something entirely different to their own people in Arabic. Yassir Arafat was famous for telling Western newspapers about his desire for peace with Israel, then turning right around and whipping Palestinians into a hateful and violent frenzy against Jews.
It's an Islamic value -- a good and holy thing to do this sort of lying to advance Islam...like to get into a country so you can murder the "infidels."
So, how could we possibly ask questions that would determine whether a person has been "radicalized"?
This isn't like testing for typhoid.
It's guesswork.
As a person who deeply values civil liberties, especially those this country stands for, and as a person who would like this country to be a humanitarian refuge, I don't have answers to the problem of how we vet the migrants fleeing from Islamic countries. (These immigrants are far more likely to end up wanting to slaughter us for Allah than, say, people coming here from Iceland.)
Japan's answer? Cherson and Molschky write:
What Japan did to avoid problems related to Muslims was much simpler and cheaper; Japan is practically closed to Muslims.Officially, immigration to Japan is not closed to Muslims. But the number of the immigration permits given to the applicants from Islamic countries is very low. Obtaining a working visa is not easy for adepts of Islam, even if they are physicians, engineers and managers sent by foreign companies that are active in the region. As a result, Japan is "a country without Muslims."
There is no reliable estimate on the Japanese Muslim population. However, claims of thirty thousand made by some researchers are without doubt an exaggeration. Some claim that there are only a few hundred. This probably amounts to the number of Muslims openly practicing Islam. Asked to give an estimate on the actual number of Muslims in Japan, the ex-president of the Japan Islamic Association Abu Bakr Morimoto replied, "To say frankly, only one thousand. In the broadest sense, I mean, if we do not exclude those who became Muslims for the sake of, say marriage, and do not practice then the number would be a few thousand."
One of the leaders of the Muslim community in Japan, Nur Ad-Din Mori, was asked: "What percentage of Japan's total population are Muslims?" He responded, "The answer at the moment is: One out of a hundred thousand."
Japan's population is 130 million people, so if these Muslim leaders are correct, then there must be around 1300 Muslims. But even those Muslims who obtained immigration permits and lived many years in the country have very poor chances of becoming Japanese citizens.
Japan officially forbids exhorting people to adopt the religion of Islam (Dawah), and any Muslim who actively encourages conversion to Islam is seen as proselytizing to a foreign and undesirable culture. Too active "promoters of Islam" face deportation- and sometimes even a jail sentence.
The Arabic language is taught by very few academic institutes; I could find only one such institute: The Arabic Islamic Institute in Tokyo. But even the International University of Japan in Tokyo does not offer courses on Arabic or Islamic languages.
Importing the Koran in Arabic is practically impossible, and the only one permitted is the "adapted" version in Japanese.
Until recently, there were only two mosques in Japan: Tokyo Jama Masjid and Kobe Mosque. Now, the total number of Muslim praying sites in Japan is counted in some 30 single story mosques and about a hundred apartment rooms set aside for prayers.
And Japanese society expects Muslims to pray at home: no collective "prostrating" in the streets or squares; in Japan, for such "shows" the actors can get pretty high fines, and in those cases Japanese Police consider "serious", the participants can be deported.
Quite often, Japanese companies seeking foreign workers specifically note that they are not interested in Muslims. There is not even a trace of a Shari´a Law in Japan, and halal food is extremely difficult to find in there.
The Japanese tend to perceive Islam as a "strange and dangerous religion" that a true Japanese should avoid, and the recent murders of two Japanese nationals, Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto, by ISIS have not contributed to any improvement in the opinions of the Japanese on this matter.
And the most interesting thing in the Japanese approach to Muslims is the fact that the Japanese do not feel any guilt for such a "discriminatory" approach to Islam, and they evidently do not think they should apologize to Muslims for the negative way in which they perceive their religion. Arab gas and oil- yes, and Japan maintains good relations with Arab exporters. But Islam - no, and Muslim immigration- neither. Islam is something that is suitable for others, not for Japan, and therefore the Muslims must remain outside.
And Muslims in Japan do not riot, they do not brand the Japanese "racists", they do not burn cars, smash windows, behead Japanese soldiers for having been in Afghanistan, Iraq or anywhere else on Earth - and not a single Japanese has been victim of a Muslim terrorist attack on Japanese soil in the last 30 years.
Well, we are not Japan. So anybody have any answers?
Lucky
Bettylinks.
The Latest In Idiocy On College Campuses
My little card below was inspired by a student's remark in this video by Reason TV's Zach Weissmuller, "Do College Students Hate Free Speech? Let's Ask Them."
Please buy my book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," here. Only about $11 brand new, and new (not used) copies help support my blogging and other writing.
What's kind of amazing on college campuses -- and in this video -- is how students sound like parrots of the anti-free-speech movement, reciting the narratives. The arguments against free speech (to protect hurt feelz), coming from students attending universities, are pretty shocking.
Generously, one girl says she doesn't think we should send people to prison for saying mean things.
Man Sues NY Metropolitan Museum Of Art Because Jesus Is A Honky In A Bunch Of Old Paintings
This is a painting from the Met, by Sebastiano Ricci, an Italian painter of the Baroque school of Venice, who died in 1734. And that little tyke is little baby Jesus.
I have laughed before at how Jesus is portrayed in art. Frankly, kind of Swedish.
In reality, he was surely a swarthy Middle-Easterner.
Well, unlike Justin Renel Joseph, I saw no reason to go suing museums over the lack of accuracy in art.
From Daniel Nussbaum at Breitbart:
A New York City man has reportedly sued the Metropolitan Museum of Art for housing four "offensive" and "racist" masterpiece paintings that depict Jesus as white and blond.Justin Renel Joseph, 33, filed a lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court alleging that four of the museum's paintings by Italian masters -- "The Holy Family with Angels" by Sebastiano Ricci; "The Resurrection" by Perugino; "The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes" by Tintoretto; and "The Crucifixion" by Francesco Granacci -- are guilty of "offensive aesthetic whitewashing" of Jesus, who the man claims had "black hair like wool and skin of bronze color."
"The implication that someone who possesses physical features like the plaintiff could not be the important historical and public figure of Jesus Christ . . . caused the plaintiff to feel, among other things, rejected and unaccepted by society," the complaint says, according to the New York Post.
The story by Kathianne Boniello at that NYPost link just above has these gems:
"When they were painted, it was typical for artists to depict subjects with the same identity as the local audience. This phenomenon occurs in many other cultures, as well," said Met spokeswoman Elyse Topalian.Joseph called the Met's inclusion of the works in its collection "an extreme case of discrimination."
"They completely changed his race to make him more aesthetically pleasing for white people," he told The Post. "I'm suing a public venue which by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 can't discriminate on a protected basis."
I grew up with kids taunting me, "The redhead is dead!" Among other nastier and sometimes anti-Semitic things.
And I've never quite fit in. I tell the sad tale in my next book, along with how I pulled myself up by my bra straps.
Get over it, ya big pussy.
Oh, wait -- you can't sue anyone for that.
How Govt. Helps Entrenched Businesses Keep People Who Want To Work Out Of A Job
The creep of crony capitalism keeps people who want to work from working -- like in the case of stay-at-home moms who want to watch over others' kids (in their home). This is how humans have been caring for children for centuries upon centuries. No "license" was required -- until now, in some states.
Mark V. Holden writes at the WSJ about the scam of occupational licensing, quoting Thomas Jefferson: "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."
Earlier this year the White House released a report detailing how occupational licensing laws affect the economy: "more than one-quarter of U.S. workers now require a license to do their jobs" and "the share of workers licensed at the State level has risen five-fold since the 1950s."If that sounds benign, consider that licenses for low- and middle-income professions on average cost more than $200 and require nine months of training and at least one exam, according to the Institute for Justice. There's scant evidence that these hurdles improve quality or safety, so why does government make it so difficult for Americans to improve their lives by plying a new trade?
It takes 372 days on average to become a licensed cosmetologist, but only 33 days to become an emergency medical technician, known as an EMT. In several states, a hair-braiding license requires 1,500 hours of training and multiple exams. For those with limited means, that may prove impossible.
What the article doesn't mention is that hair braiding -- for black hair -- is not even what's taught in the cosmetology training! So the state is forcing people to spend money to train that will not even prepare them for their job.
Last year the city council of Washington, D.C. passed a measure requiring CrossFit and other fitness trainers to register with the mayor's office and pay a fee. But it was heartening in September to see the council take steps to scrap the idea of requiring them to obtain a license from the city.Who pushed for these laws? The Board of Physical Therapy, a little-known agency within the D.C. Health Department charged with regulating the practice. This board, composed mostly of physical therapists, is a textbook case of a special interest working with the government to restrict competition.
...The harm of licensing rules shouldn't be underestimated: By one assessment, such regulation has prevented the creation of nearly three million jobs and lowered entrepreneurship rates. Instead of licenses, states could require certification, a lower qualification that doesn't bar outsiders from offering a similar service.
The thing is, there should be no punishment for the working-while-uncertified (except in certain dangerous professions, like if you are "practicing" "medicine"). I should be able to choose to patronize an "uncertified" businessperson if I want, and so should you. Or, you can choose to believe that payment to the government of licensing or certification fees means competence.
Increasingly, looking to the crowd has become a form of vetting -- seeing if the Uber driver or restaurant has good reviews. (Uber dumps drivers who don't attain a certain minimum review.) This, not looking to the state for a rubber stamp, is increasingly how businesses will be judged by people looking to patronize them.
Absence Is Presence
Moving and beautiful post by a friend of mine, Elyse Foltyn, a child of Holocaust survivors, married to another child of Holocaust survivors.
There's a story in it, but there's also this:
Over the years, I have come to believe that missing details are often more telling than the details themselves. The lack of something can speak volumes for what is really taking place. I felt this over and over again as we toured Germany earlier this year. In Berlin, we saw a memorial of empty book shelves below ground and in front of the Opera House. The Bebelplabtz book burning memorial by Micha Ullman, called "Library," is on the exact spot at which more than 20,000 books were collected and burned on May 10,1933. In both the Jewish Museum and at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe we got lost in towering cement monoliths. The Memorial, designed by architect Peter Eisenman, consists of 2,711 concrete slabs, arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. By all measures, it is powerful. However, as stirring as the concrete slabs were, I could not decide whether the memorial was the cement or the empty space. There is often a sense that absence is presence.
Sloopy
Comingaboutylinks.
Bad Logic On Gun Control + How My 78-Year-Old Mom May Soon Be Packing
Karl Denninger writes at Market Ticker:
Let's look at the alleged "reasonable" response that the NY Times ran this morning.It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.
False. A right is immune from prior restraint. The First Amendment is absolute. This does not absolve you from responsibility should you exercise that right in a blatantly and grossly irresponsible manner. This is the infamous "fire in a crowded theater" example so often cited. But what is being intentionally mis-characterized is that you cannot be forced to wear a muzzle when entering a theater because you might utter the word "Fire" when there isn't one.
There is nothing wrong with punishing someone who falsely claims there is a fire in a crowded theater when there is not, just as there is nothing wrong with punishing someone who brandishes or otherwise uses a firearm for an impermissible purpose.
And more on how gun control wouldn't have stopped the SB mass murder:
As an example of why so-called "gun control" doesn't work and can't Tashfeen Malik and Sayed Farook obviously did not give a damn about the law; they not only committed murder but they apparently constructed and amassed a number of bombs, every one of which was very illegal to make and possess. In fact they had roughly four times as many bombs as they did guns. The only saving grace in that regard is that they were*****-poor bomb-makers and their instruments of destruction failed to explode. Neither of these individuals appears to have been known to be dangerous beforehand, although again as usual we seem to be ignoring the negligence of our government, just as we did after 9/11, after Boston's bombing and in myriad other cases, a few of which I've documented such as the three-time jackass in central Florida who killed a Marshal that was attempting to serve papers on him.In this case there are allegations that Malik at least misled the government about where she lived when she applied for her Visa to enter the US. It appears probable that she not only was the radical intent on jihad and stoked its fire she may have come to the United States for the explicit purpose of committing jihad and her "marriage" may have been nothing more than a vehicle to accomplish that. That we do not yet know and may never find out with certainty, but the timelines and acts involved certainly appear to support such a belief.
Who will be held accountable for that? Nobody. They never are, just like we've never held anyone accountable for the hundreds if not thousands of guns our government knowingly trafficked to drug lords in Mexico (including at least one that was used to kill a border agent), the former Florida Governor Bush (now Presidential contender) who gave Driver Licenses to people here in the state who were neither citizens or permanent residents (who continued on to kill 3,000 Americans in part facilitated by that state-issued ID), and of course the Boston Bombers who we had explicit warning on from foreign governments and ignored same.
I called my mom in Michigan over the weekend to suggest she train to shoot and get a concealed carry permit. To her credit, when I called, she mentioned that she'd been thinking of this before I could even tell her that.
I googled and sent her all the info for her on this -- the law in Michigan, where to train (a class specially for women, which probably focuses on guns women can hold and shoot).
And about the law, there are a whole bunch of hoops to jump through to have a concealed carry permit in Michigan. It is not a simple and easy thing to get. My mother, having not knocked over liquor stores or been arrested for a DUI or anything, will not have a problem with the requirements. But many will.
And those people can easily get guns in Detroit -- they just won't get them legally.
Tell A Tasteless Joke On Social Media; Get Suspended From College For Almost Two Years
Remember "Animal House"?
Remember when telling tasteless jokes was kind of what college was about? At least, in part?
Well, from campus free speech defenders theFIRE.org, a six-word joke has gotten a student suspended from Colorado College. Katie Barrows reports:
Colorado College has suspended and banned a student from campus for nearly two years in response to a comment intended as a joke on the anonymous social media application Yik Yak.In November 2015, Thaddeus Pryor sent an anonymous reply to the comment "#blackwomenmatter" on Yik Yak. Pryor's response read, "They matter, they're just not hot." On November 20, Colorado College found that Pryor's post violated its "Abusive Behavior" and "Disruption of College Activities" policies and suspended him from the college until August 28, 2017. In the meantime, the college has banned Pryor from setting foot on campus and has forbidden him from taking classes at other institutions for academic credit. Pryor has appealed his suspension.
In a letter sent on November 25, 2015, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) urged Colorado College, a private institution, to honor its moral and contractual obligation to keep the promises of freedom of expression that it makes to students. Colorado College's Student Guide, The Pathfinder, provides that "all members of the college community have such basic rights as freedom of speech...."
"Colorado College's disciplinary action toward Pryor--a 21 month suspension--for posting what was intended to be a joke on social media completely contradicts the school's promises of freedom of speech," said FIRE Senior Program Officer Ari Cohn. "The college's punitive and heavy-handed overreaction to Pryor's social media post will have a chilling effect on campus discourse."
...Just last month, Colorado College wrote a letter to the campus community proclaiming that its commitment to diversity is intertwined with its commitment to dialogue. FIRE again urges Colorado College to uphold its promises of freedom of speech on campus.
"Colorado College may not claim to respect freedom of expression while throwing a student out for two years for making a six-word joke," said Cohn.
Finland Is For Slackers -- Or Will Be If A Govt Plan Goes Through
Woohoo, welfare for all!
Olivia Goldhill writes at Quartz that Finland plans to give a basic income to every adult -- as in, make working adults pay for those sitting on their asses (as well as paying for this basic income for themselves):
The Finnish government is currently drawing up plans to introduce a national basic income. A final proposal won't be presented until November 2016, but if all goes to schedule, Finland will scrap all existing benefits and instead hand out €800 ($870) per month--to everyone....It may sound counterintuitive, but the proposal is meant to tackle unemployment. Finland's unemployment rate is at a 15-year high, at 9.53% and a basic income would allow people to take on low-paying jobs without personal cost. At the moment, a temporary job results in lower welfare benefits, which can lead to an overall drop in income.
...One of the major downsides, of course, is the cost of handing out money to so many people. Liisa Hyssälä, director general of KELA, has said that the plan will save the government millions. But, as Bloomberg calculated, giving €800 of basic income to the population of 5.4 million every month would cost €52.2 billion a year. Finland only plans to give the basic income to adults, not every citizen, but with around 4.9 million adults in Finland, this would still cost €46.7 billion per year. The government expects to have €49.1 billion in revenue in 2016.
No mention of what they'll do if they get boatloads of Syrian immigrants.
No mention of what they'll do if revenue goes down.
Linkeracy
Read and weep links.
Homeland Security Can't Even Police Their Own Ranks: 72 In DHS On Terrorist Watch List
While they're feeling the seams of your underpanties in the airport -- because you're under suspicion as a terrorist because you're flying to visit your granny...again! -- they're ignoring the actually worrisome people in their own ranks.
Adam Kredo writes at Free Beacon:
Rep. Stephen Lynch (D., Mass.) disclosed that a congressional investigation recently found that at least 72 people working at DHS also "were on the terrorist watch list.""Back in August, we did an investigation--the inspector general did--of the Department of Homeland Security, and they had 72 individuals that were on the terrorist watch list that were actually working at the Department of Homeland Security," Lynch told Boston Public Radio.
...Lynch referred to a recent report that found the Transportation Security Administration, which is overseen by DHS, failed to stop 95 percent of those who attempted to bring restricted items past airport security.
"We had staffers go into eight different airports to test the department of homeland security screening process at major airports. They had a 95 percent failure rate," Lynch said. "We had folks--this was a testing exercise, so we had folks going in there with guns on their ankles, and other weapons on their persons, and there was a 95 percent failure rate."
Lynch said he has "very low confidence" in DHS based on its many failures over the years. For this reason, he voted in favor of recent legislation that will tighten the vetting process for any Syrian refugees applying for asylum in the United States.
..."I have even lower confidence that they can conduct the vetting process in places like Jordan, or Belize or on the Syrian border, or in Cairo, or Beirut in any better fashion, especially given the huge volume of applicants we've had seeking refugee status," Lynch said.
Here's one of the lovely ladies we let in. 
And, finally, as a commenter on a friend's FB post wrote about the 72 on the terrorist watch list:
That may be true, but they successfully make me throw out my water every single time, so there is that.
via SH
Thumbsuckers Matter: What Passes For A "Damning Comment" On College Campuses These Days
Erin Aubry Kaplan has never met a ginned-up race-tinged issue she couldn't ride like a wave.
This time, it's the supposed lack of "racial equality" on campuses, the topic of the latest EAK op-ed in the LA Times.
In a way, she's right -- because so many campuses have racial preferences in their admissions process, admitting minority students not qualified for the particular campus and causing them problems they wouldn't have had at a lower-tier school.
All of this happens in the name of "diversity."
Of course, the kids we should be helping are poor kids, of any color, who have the grades and skills to do well in college but can't afford to go there -- in part due to rising costs from all the administrative bloat. Administrators now actually have real work to do, dealing with all the hunger strikers and such blocking people's way to class with their protests. Meanwhile, they all forgot to notice their "privilege" -- yes, that's right: Because attending college is a privilege not all people have. And you'd think that these idiots would figure that out and put their time into studying.
But if you're studying "gender relations," an arena which thrives on ignoring biological sex differences and others such evidence-based annoyances, probably the only kind of power you'll ever have is the unearned kind -- the kind you get from talking about how others are stomping on your tender feelz. Like by having an opinion that doesn't quite jibe with yours. Or by assigning you classic literature and not letting you know that some of the punctuation marks in it might remind you of that time that somebody said something mean to you on the school bus.
And yes, sometimes people have worse memories "triggered." But this is something that should be dealt with by a guy who charges by the hour to listen to your problems, not by transforming what's taught on campus to fit your particular trauma set.
Getting back to Aubry-Kaplan, she made this remark in her op-ed:
The dean of students at Claremont McKenna College resigned after a damning comment caused protests from black students and a brief hunger strike.
The administrator, Mary Spellman, was merely trying to be kind and acknowledge what the Latina student mentioned about feeling "marginalized" in an op-ed she wrote, included in the email she sent the administrator. For example, the student wrote this bit:
Maybe most of us have felt out of place at Claremont McKenna College for one reason or another, but my feelings of not belonging cut deep across economic and racial lines. It was uncomfortable coming to CMC and seeing my home being better represented in the poorly paid, working-class staff rather than those more central to managing the school's trajectory and curriculum....Within the first weeks of school, I told an upperclassman Latino that I felt like I was admitted to fill a racial quota. Why would they want me here? Impostor syndrome is prevalent among first-generation students. These feelings caught me by surprise as I had never known what it felt like to be the "minority" in my predominantly immigrant, low-income Latinx hometown. The week after classes started, I cried at the Chicanx/Latinx New Student Retreat, where I felt comfortable enough to voice my concerns about the school. Feelings of inadequacy have haunted me throughout my time at CMC, and my struggles with anxiety and depression first arose at the end of my second year.
Spellman responded in her email:
"[W]e are working on how we can better serve students, especially those who don't fit our CMC mold.
From LAist:
Spellman sent an email to community members yesterday morning, saying that when she sent the email to Espinosa, her "intention was to affirm the feelings and experiences expressed in the article and to provide support," according to The Student Life. Spellman also spoke at the student protest, apologizing and saying that she was committed to changing things and had already been working on some issues.
In the wake of student protests, Mary Spellman resigned.
Yes, this is just the sort of thing Dr. Martin Luther King marched for.
Again, what I'm amazed by is how all these students who claim they have it so hard in college are spending so little time studying -- taking advantage of their potential for the privilege of a college education -- and so much time marching around screaming about how awful they have it.
Welcome To Fantasy Islam! (A Very Special Product Of Government)
At NRO, Andrew C. McCarthy writes about all the Islam-avoiding babble from President Obama on down about whether a mass murder "by two heavily-armed, obviously well-trained Muslims constituted a terrorist attack."
But then Rudy Giuliani came forward as crap-cutter-in-chief with this:
You can come to one clear conclusion with the information they have right now. This is an act of terror. The question was motivation. . . . The question here is not, is it an act of terror. We're beyond that. When you got two assault weapons, two handguns, you're in body armor, you got a home that's booby-trapped. You've [ACM: meaning "they've"] been practicing to do this. . . . If you can't come to a conclusion at this point that this was an act of terror, you should find something else to do for a living besides law enforcement. I mean, you're a moron.
McCarthy gets into why our leaders (and so many people) get tongue-tied when it comes to Islam:
So why is it that, upon seeing two-plus-two, they can't call it four when Islam is involved?
Here's their thinking, per McCarthy:
The government denies that terrorism is caused by Islamic doctrine. This is a triumph of willful blindness and political correctness best illustrated by former British home secretary Jacqui Smith, who might as well have been speaking for our government when she branded terrorism as "anti-Islamic activity." That is: the savagery is not merely unrelated to Islam but becomes, by dint of its being violence, contrary to Islam. This must be so because the British government, like our government, insists Islam is a "religion of peace."Now, this is absurd, of course. There are various ways of interpreting Islam, and millions of Muslims manage to "contextualize" Islamic scripture's numerous commands to conduct holy war, reasoning that these divine injunctions applied only to their historical time and place and are no longer relevant. Yet, even if you buy this line of thinking, that does not make Islam a peaceful belief system. Verses like "Fight those who believe not in Allah," and "fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war," are not peaceful injunctions, no matter how one "contextualizes" them.
More to the point, the stubborn reality is: There will always be a large percentage of Muslims who believe these scriptures (and the many others like them) mean exactly what they say.
Our government is in denial of this. Unwilling to deal with Islam as it is, the government must make up an Islam of its very own. Regardless of the abundance of evidence to the contrary, the government holds that Islam is a religion of peace, case closed. (Such a laughable case has to be closed because it cannot withstand even slight examination).
Therefore, to the government, terrorism committed by people who happen to be Muslim is not in any way a reflection of any legitimate interpretation of Islam -- even if Islamic supremacist ideology, which endorses jihadist violence, is so mainstream that tens of millions of Muslims adhere to it. Remember, here in America as in Western Europe, the violence is deemed anti-Islamic. That is what has been dictated to our law-enforcement agents by their superiors. If those were your instructions, you'd be babbling like a moron, too.
Link
And load.
Born To Be Conned
We love stories and we get wound into them -- and we don't recognize the power a compelling story has over us.
Maria Konnikova writes in The New York Times about how even smart people can become the victim of improbable cons:
Caught up in a powerful story, we become blind to inconsistencies that seem glaring in retrospect. In 2000, two psychologists, Melanie Green and Timothy Brock, had a group of people read "Murder at the Mall," a short story adapted from a true account of a Connecticut murder in Sherwin B. Nuland's "How We Die." The plot followed a little girl as she was murdered in a mall. After reading the story, participants answered questions about the events. Then came the key query: Were there any false notes in the narrative, statements that either contradicted something or simply didn't make sense? Ms. Green and Mr. Brock called this "Pinocchio circling": the ability to spot elements that signal falsehood. The more engrossed a reader was in the story, the fewer false notes she noticed.Well-told tales make red flags disappear. Consider the case of Ann Freedman, the former president of the now-defunct gallery Knoedler & Company, who became embroiled in one of the largest art forgery scandals of the 20th century. For over a decade, she had been selling work on behalf of Glafira Rosales, an art dealer. The Rosales collection, it would turn out, was made up entirely of forgeries. In retrospect, there were red flags aplenty, but Ms. Freedman was so swept up in Ms. Rosales's story about a mysterious collector who had amassed a previously unseen trove of Abstract Expressionist masterpieces that none of them stood out.
In one of the most telling examples, Ms. Freedman, along with multiple experts, failed to spot a seemingly egregious sign of forgery: a Jackson Pollock painting that she herself had purchased and displayed in her apartment, where the signature was misspelled "Pollok."
"I never saw it, in all the years I lived with it," Ms. Freedman told me recently. "Nor did anybody else." It wasn't a failure of eyesight so much as a failure of belief: Faced with incongruous evidence, you dismiss the evidence rather than the story. Or rather, you don't dismiss it. You don't even see it.
Given the right circumstances, we all exhibit a similar myopia. As the psychologist Seymour Epstein puts it, "It is no accident that the Bible, probably the most influential Western book of all time, teaches through parables and stories and not through philosophical discourse."
In a sense, all victims of cons are the same: people swept up in a narrative that, to them, couldn't be more compelling. Love comes at the exact moment you crave it most, money when you most need it. It's too simplistic to dismiss those who fall for such wishful-seeming thinking as saps...
via @sbkaufman
Parenting Fail
Some "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" café fun from yesterday. 
Humanist And Former "Moderate Muslim" On How To Tell A Moderate Muslim From A Radical Muslim
Short answer: "You can't."
Simi Rahman, a female US pediatrician, writes in a pretty incredible Facebook post:
Every Muslim humanist is asking themselves a question I first asked myself in September 2001.How do you tell a radical Muslim from a moderate peace loving one?
And here is my train of thought.
The 9/11 hijackers reminded me of boys I had gone to school with in Dubai in the 80s and 90s. They were the same age, background, and modern enough to have listened to 80s pop and chased girls. Meaning that just like most young people in the Muslim world, we weren't that religious.
So, I thought, maybe I could locate the differences between them and me, and at some point I would identify a breakaway point. Something they would do that I never would. And it took me a while to realize this, and now with the California shootings, it has reaffirmed for me, that indeed, when it comes to being able to tell a moderate from a radical in Islam, you can't.
You really can't tell until the moment before they pull the trigger, who is moderate and who is jihadi. Tashfeen has broken our moderate backbone, by revealing that she lived among us, unnoticed, normal, experiencing motherhood, enveloped in our secure community and yet, had radicalized.
And that's the problem, that there are many others like her with exactly the same beliefs, who may not have been ignited yet by a radical cleric, but if the opportunity presented itself, they would follow. They're like a dormant stick of dynamite, waiting for the fuse to be lit. The TNT is already in there.
What's it made of? Not the 5 pillars, belief, charity, prayer, fasting and pilgrimage. Not the sayings of the prophet as to how to lead a good and just life. Not the celebration of Eid ul Fitr.
It possibly glimmers through in the fealty that Allah demands during the Eid ul Adha, when Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son as a sign of his superior faith is commemorated in a sacrifice and celebration very much like the American Thanksgiving, with family and food. But without the football. And oh yes, the fratricide.
It is there in the silence one must maintain during prayer, brooking no interruptions, because it would make the prayer invalid. It is there in the severity of the hijab when it is followed to a tee. Not a hair can show. It is there in the forced separation of men and women at social gatherings.
It is present in every act that is performed that excludes us from the mainstream. It is present in the very concept of Us and Them. Because the only way we remain Us is to reject Them. The only way to be an exemplary Us is to reject westernization at every turn. Halal only is a sham, constructed out of this notion of meat that has been cut a certain way. It's the same meat. And yet there is a magical difference that people will attest to in all seriousness.
...And so, to understand the moderate mind, you have to envision it on a continuum from radical to middle, but the closer you get to liberal, there is a wall. It creeps up on you, in the condemnation of homosexuality, in the unequal treatment and subjugation of women, but it's there. Beyond that wall that they are afraid to look over, for fear of eternal hell fire and damnation, is where the answer lies though. So being a Muslim moderate these days is like running a race with a ball and chain attached to your feet. A handicap. Unless you can imagine what the world beyond that wall looks like, you can't really navigate it. If you're so terrified of blasphemy that you refuse to look over, you're forever stuck. Right here. And behind you is the jihadi horde, laying claim to real Islam, practicing it to perfection, as it is laid out in the Quran. A veritable rock and a hard place. I feel your pain. I've been there. And it was untenable.
I read, discussed, debated alongside many good Muslim young people from all over the world, in Internet forums, trying to argue our way to a solution, much like we are doing on social media right now. I knew I rejected the homophobia, I knew I rejected the subjugation of women. And it all remained a theory until I saw it in practice. In the drawing rooms of the Midwestern professional moderate Muslim. There was the discussion of whether the verse that allows a man to strike his wife instead actually means, he should strike her with a feather. As a doctor, I am a humanist first, and so the blatant homophobia was irrational, dangerous and something I stopped tolerating politely. I attended presentations at the mosque of videos from the Palestinian Territories, played to rouse the outrage of the gathered congregation.
And that's when the absurdity started to really hit home. What in the world were we doing? We were training our children to kowtow without questioning an authority that we believed would keep them safe from evil western ways. And so the community's children went to Sunday school, wore hijab, prayed and fasted. They were enveloped in a Muslim identity that was unlike any that I had experienced before. I was raised in a Muslim country in the Middle East and religion was something we kept in its place, somewhere after school, soccer and cartoons. Here was a more distilled, pure and, most dangerously, a context-free Islam. There were no grandmothers here to sagely tell us which parts of the Quran to turn a blind eye to. There were no older cousins here who skipped Friday prayers and goofed off with their friends instead. Oh no. This was Islam simmered in a sauce of Midwestern sincerity, and boiled down to its dark, concentrated core. This was dangerous.
As my children grew older, I grew more afraid. I had tolerated their father's insistence on sending them to Sunday school, where mostly they played and learned a few surahs. But as they grew older I knew it would change. A sincerity would creep in to their gaze, teenage rebellion would find just cause in judging your less religious parents as wanting and inferior. Bad Muslims. How many teenagers have started to wear hijab before their own mothers? I've lost count. Mothers who found themselves in this dilemma would choose to join their child on this journey. They would cover too, and as such offered a layer of protection from the ideology by offering perspective.
I worried though, about the Internet, about radical recruiters posing as friends, finding willing and malleable clay in our unformed children. For we would keep them unformed. We would shield them from western influences in order to protect them, only to create a rift that could be exploited as an entry point. We would in essence be leaving our children vulnerable to radicalization.
And that is exactly what has been happening. The young girls from Europe and the US who have traveled to Syria to join ISIS, have done so because they're looking for what all teenagers are looking for, a sense of identity, to differentiate themselves from their parents and find a separate identity, the thrill of rebellion, adventure. They can't date, drink or dance, so they might as well Daesh.
This thought is what drove me to scale that wall. I dropped prayer, stopped feeling guilty for not praying. I drank alcohol, in moderation like most people do in the west, and I didn't instantly turn into an alcoholic. I dropped the need to cover to my ankles and wrists, and wore regular clothes. Bacon. I mean, seriously, it's bacon, I don't have to explain how good it was. I turned to look back at the wall from the other side, and it was...a relief. I relief to lose that fear of apostasy. To realize there was no such thing, it was purely in my mind. The ideas that had worn a groove in my mind, the guilt, the anxiety, the self flagellation for being a bad Muslim, all were gone.
...We have to make the problem bigger. Instead of minimizing, we need to blow it up big and examine it and let go of this idea that a sacred text is unchangeable. Or unquestionable. We have to look at it instead as a humanism problem. Is Islam, in the way it is practiced and preached, humanistic enough? In that does it respect the personhood of a human being enough, and if it doesn't, then what can we do about it.
We have to make it ok to walk away. We have to come out of this closet and into the light. Because none of us are safe anymore. And none of the old bandages will hold much longer before it becomes a full on carnage that we only have ourselves to blame for.
via @djgrothe, via @aliamjadrizvi
Limpy
Bum leggylinks.
Where's Attorney General Lynch's Concern For The (Actually) Most Discriminated-Against?
While Loretta Lynch says she'll stand up for Muslim children bullied at school, the FBI's stats tell a different story about who's actually discriminated against for their religion.
Religious bias Of the 1,223 victims of anti-religious hate crimes:60.3 percent were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders' anti-Jewish bias.
13.7 percent were victims of anti-Islamic (Muslim) bias.
6.1 percent were victims of anti-Catholic bias.
4.3 percent were victims of bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).
3.8 percent were victims of anti-Protestant bias.
0.6 percent were victims of anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.
11.2 percent were victims of bias against other religions (anti-other religion).
So, 60.3 percent of the victims of these "hate crimes" were Jewish and 13.7 percent were Muslim. Kind of fucks up the AG's narrative, huh?
Maybe the discussion we should be having is "What is Islam?" (and not according to those who want to believe it calls for peace, love, and butterflies, but what it's really about). Looking at Islam closely leads to the understanding that it is a religion that calls for violence against non-Muslims and rewards it heavily -- with an express path to salvation and special rewards for slaughtering the "infidel."
Lovely.
Oh, and naturally, per Dr. Susan Berry at Breitbart:
The education department defines "bullying" very broadly, justifying federal intervention in many schoolyard disputes or political arguments among teenagers:"Bullying is defined as a form of unwanted, aggressive behavior among school-age children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance and that is repeated, or has the potential to be repeated, over time... Verbal bullying is a form of intentional aggression that involves saying or writing things that are mean or hurtful to others."
Free speech to criticize Islam?
Um, nuh-uh!
Four
That's the actual number of mass shootings there have been in America this year -- not 355, as Rachel Maddow and others reported, writes Mark Follman in The New York Times:
What explains the vastly different count? The answer is that there is no official definition for "mass shooting." Almost all of the gun crimes behind the much larger statistic are less lethal and bear little relevance to the type of public mass murder we have just witnessed again. Including them in the same breath suggests that a 1 a.m. gang fight in a Sacramento restaurant, in which two were killed and two injured, is the same kind of event as a deranged man walking into a community college classroom and massacring nine and injuring nine others. Or that a late-night shooting on a street in Savannah, Ga., yesterday that injured three and killed one is in the same category as the madness that just played out in Southern California.While all the victims are important, conflating those many other crimes with indiscriminate slaughter in public venues obscures our understanding of this complicated and growing problem. Everyone is desperate to know why these attacks happen and how we might stop them -- and we can't know, unless we collect and focus on useful data that filter out the noise.
Obama's calling for the non-solution -- especially for people slaughtering for Allah -- of tougher gun laws. Ed Morrissey writes at Hot Air:
The tougher gun laws Obama wants already exist in California. In fact, California's laws are tougher than those proposed by Obama. The Washington Post cited them yesterday as the toughest in the nation, with background checks required for private sales, mandatory 10-day wait times, and bans on so-called "assault weapons." How did that work out in San Bernardino this week? (For that matter, how did roughly the same laws in Connecticut -- cited by the Post as the second-toughest state in the Union for gun regulations -- work out in Newtown a few years back in a non-terrorism case?) Gun control didn't stop terrorism in California, which may be why Obama wants to ignore the FBI's findings that this was a case of radical Islamist jihad conducted by someone who'd been given a green light by his State Department.
Let's Just Hope None Of The Syrian Refugees We're Letting In Want Us Dead
I want us to continue to be a country of immigrants, but when there's a real possibility that some or many of a people who want to come here want us dead, and when we have little way to figure that out...
...well, allowing them in seems a very bad prospect.
Oh, but we have vetting procedures, some will say.
Oh, do we?
From ABCNews, check out what Rhonda Schwartz, Brian Ross, Justin Fishel, and Lee Ferran report about mass-murdering Tashfeen Malik, who is said to have posted a pledge of allegiance to ISIS around the time she and her husband slaughtered 14 unarmed people and wounded many more:
Malik came to the U.S. on what is known as a "fiancé" visa, which allows an American fiancé to petition for his or her partner's temporary entry before marriage. For the visa application, the address she listed in her Pakistani hometown, ABC News discovered today, does not exist. Malik received a her Green Card this summer, U.S. officials said.
She's also reportedly linked to Pakistan's "most notorious radical cleric and mosque."
And then there's this about the terror wifey:
Hifza Batool tells The Associated Press on Saturday other relatives have said that Malik, who was her step-niece, used to wear Western clothes but began wearing the hijab head covering or the all-covering burqa donned by the most conservative Muslim women about three years ago."I recently heard it from relatives that she has become a religious person and she often tells people to live according to the teachings of Islam," said Batool, 35, a private school teacher who lives in Karor Lal Esam, about 450 kilometers (280 miles) southwest of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.
And what so many of us don't want to believe about Islam is the truth -- that the Quran is considered to be infallible and unquestionable (because it's said to be the word of Allah), and it calls for the conversion or death of "the infidel" -- which is probably every person reading here.
Lawyers for the family apparently asked that people not show this sicko's face out of "respect." 
As I tweeted:
I stop "respecting" people's wishes after they gun down numerous unarmed people.
Snippy
Lippylinks.
How Male Sexuality Has Been Turned Into Rape
Evolutionary psychology research shows over and over that women are the choosier sex. Women have a higher potential cost from any sex act. Well, here, from my syndicated column:
A single romp in the bushes could leave a woman with a hungry kid to haul around and feed. So women evolved to be the choosier sex -- to cross their legs until the man vying to be their sex partner showed he'd be likely to stick around to provide for any ensuing Neander-browed children.
This makes men the sex more likely to need to persuade a woman to have sex. In fact, this is what male sexuality, which co-evolved with female sexuality, is largely about.
So women, in turn, evolved to be commitment skeptics. But being persuaded or even fooled into having sex; that's not rape. That's "Be a little smarter next time, kitten," or "Jeez, was I ever an idiot.
But this is what is being turned into rape charges over and over again.
Cathy Young explains it with a cake metaphor at Spiked:
Suppose your friend says, 'Oh come on, just one slice. It's really delicious!' And you say, 'okay, sure'. Or maybe you keep saying, 'No, I really don't feel like it', and your friend keeps pushing, coaxing and wheedling you until you finally say yes. Maybe she uses guilt: she slaved for hours baking that cake just for you, or made the rounds of a dozen bakeries trying to find the perfect cake! Maybe she tells you you've ruined her whole evening, or just sulks and pouts visibly. Finally, you agree to eat the damn cake just to get her off your back. And maybe then she badgers you into having another slice. Or two.Is your friend being obnoxious? Sure. No one would blame you if you weren't in a rush to visit that friend again, or complained to mutual friends about how annoying her behaviour was. On the other hand, if you suddenly decided that what your friend did was no different from grabbing you by the nose and forcefeeding you cake when you opened your mouth to breathe, or forcing you to eat the cake at knifepoint... well, your mutual friends would be likely to think there was something wrong with you. And if you walked into a police station with a story about being guilt-tripped or pestered into unwanted cake-eating, they'd laugh in your face and probably tell you off for wasting valuable police time.
When it comes to sexual assault, though, respectable mainstream studies are increasingly relying on definitions that include 'arguing and pressuring the victim' into unwanted sex, or 'using guilt'. On college campuses, there are educational posters asserting that 'if you have to convince them, it's not consent' (obviously, someone doesn't get the dictionary meaning of 'convince'!), and 'if they don't feel free to say no, it's not consent'. In the media, we have rape narratives that boil down to 'I kept saying no but he kept trying until I went along with it'.
Being willing to have sex is consent. Being regretful afterward -- it's on you. Or it should be, if there was no knifepoint.
And as Cathy puts it:
If you're drunk (but sufficiently in control of your faculties to eat cake...), that's also consent. If you weren't thinking straight and ate so much cake you were sick the next day, chalk it up as a valuable learning experience.
Related, on a word usage note: "persuade" vs. "convince."
via @adamkissel
Student Rape Victim Argues For Gun Control -- The Kind Of Control You Have If You Have A Gun
Anthony Gockowski writes at Campus Reform of a Florida woman now working to get "campus carry" bills passed in the state:
Shayna Lopez-Rivas, a student at Florida State University, was raped at knifepoint on her campus on November 13, 2014. Her efforts to fend off her attacker with pepper spray proved futile. Later, she was taken to the hospital where she was denied a rape kit by her nurse....Lopez-Rivaz said she believes she could have prevented the rape if she had been carrying a firearm.
"Do you know what it is like to be forced into a secluded area? To be told to not scream? Because I do. I remember the details well enough to know that had I been trained, like I am now, in tactical firearms defense - and had I been carrying - I would not have been raped," she wrote.
via ifeminists
Can't Deal With Caustic Comments? Stay In Saudi Arabia
Jonathan Turley blogs about vile mass murderer Sayed Farook:
It appears that he may have gotten into an argument with with colleague Nicholas Thalasinos (right), a Messianic Jew who was one of the victims. Thalasinos was known to write highly caustic comments about Islam on the Internet.
Law prof Turley's parrotting of that from a news story, sans remark, is a bit disturbing, and reminiscent of those deluded people whose response to the Charlie Hebdo slaughter, for example, was, "Well, they were kinda rude."
This is America. You can make "highly caustic comments" about any subject you want, because this is not Saudi Arabia, where they jail you or even execute you for free speech.
To make that a little clearer, America is the land of loud assholes -- or it can be, because we have a civil-liberties-protecting Constitution, and the First Amendment gives you a right to criticize and even mock religion.
People uncomfortable with loud assholes -- to the degree that they do more than go loud asshole right back -- don't deserve the extreme privilege of being in this country, and lack humanity to a degree that they should be caged so they can't hurt anyone with their medieval belief system.
Mass Murder Detour
A Bernard Kerik comment I just heard on CNN makes sense: In Kerik's opinion, there was initially another target (for the mass murder in San Bernardino), but after Farook got pissed off at someone in his workplace, they used their weaponry to hit the party.
And yes, it seems to be Islamic terrorism.
Loopy
Nutbaggylinks.
The Problem With "We Need Gun Control!" As A Solution
Gun control -- the very strict gun control in France -- did not stop the violence there.
It doesn't stop the violence in Chicago.
That's because gun control laws stop good people from having guns. The criminals in France got them despite those gun control laws.
Good people having guns is the best protection against bad people killing the rest of us.
My dad, for the record, has owned a gun for perhaps 45 years. He has never shot another human being. But we in my family were sure glad he had it -- and a concealed carry permit -- when he went into vacant buildings in dangerous neighborhood in Detroit to try to sell or rent them (which is how he fed and clothed us and sent us to college).
Also, consider that even without access to guns, there are incendiary devices. You can't have "bomb control," because you can never ban all the possible substances somebody could use to blow something up.
The best way to stop people from mass-murdering other people is through probable cause-based investigation. However, the reality is, we can never stop every one of their plots. We need to understand this and not let these horrible murders lead us to roll back civil liberties.
The San Bernardino Slaughter
There are reports that murderer Sayed Farook, 30, "bolted from the holiday bash after arguing with another attendee, and then returned a short time later with the other two shooters."
That makes this horrible mass murder sound like some spur-of-the-moment thing.
But sorry, when you come right back with two people dressed in military gear, with serious weaponry, that's premeditated. It's not like you can pick this stuff up with a bag of Doritos at the 7-Eleven on the way.
"The two suspects were armed with AR-15 assault rifles, pistols, and many magazines of ammunition, an agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms told KTLA."
I have friends down there -- at University of Redlands -- but I grew up in suburban Detroit and spent a bunch of years in New York City. I'm so dim about geography (beyond LA), I only realized (very late in the day) how close this shooting was to my friends, and only after seeing a news report about some kid from Redlands High School hiding under the bed with his mom.
My friends are okay, but I am just horrified by this slaughter and all the people who lost people they love -- people guilty only of showing up at their job.
There really aren't words to describe the kind of monsters who gun down unarmed people like this -- especially in a facility like this, serving people who are disabled. My sister is going back to school to work with disabled people -- because she wants to help, among others, elderly people with dementia to have the best possible quality of life. She sees humanity and value in people many people don't even see as people anymore. I think that's really something, and I'm guessing there were kind people with goals like hers working at this place.
Please post your thoughts on the attack -- and links to any more news about it that comes up throughout the day. (One link per comment, or your comment may go to spam.)
Oops, I Forgot To Feel Microaggressed Over The Lack Of Redheaded Emojis
There has been such deplorable discrimination against those of us verrrry white of flesh and red of head.
Yes, growing up, the only dolls that looked like me were Raggedy Ann and Andy. (This, of course, is the reason I grew up to rob liquor stores and run a meth lab.)
Jess Zimmerman, on the beat of the tough issues for The Guardian, points out, "People of color have only had 'turban guy' for years. It's only fair that white people should learn to navigate a world where the only emoji princess has brown skin."
But let's see the sad state of emoji-affairs we've been dealing with. As Jess puts it:
Apple's emoji keyboard has a number of notable omissions: avocado, bed, taco, levitating businessman. But by far the most glaring imperfection, as emoji become more and more indispensable to the daily texting habits of sexy people, has been the overwhelming whiteness of all the little cartoon people. With two exceptions - a man in a turban, and another who seems to be coded as Chinese based on his hat - every emoji human or human part, from haircut woman to flexing arm to Santa Claus, is Caucasian-pink. At least, so far.
Luckily -- all hail! -- emoji-color is upon us!
With the next iOS upgrade, it seems this may finally change. Last year, the Unicode Consortium, which develops the Unicode Standard from which iPhone and other emoji draw, announced that more diverse emoji were on the way. Now, beta versions of updated Mac and iOS operating systems show how the new icons will look and how they'll operate: hold down on any human emoji, and you'll bring up a menu of different color options based on the Fitzpatrick scale of skin tone.
For me, of course, the real problem is grown adults communicating in tiny cartoon figures.
Gregg's been on this neighborhood committee, and they all were texting emojis back and forth. Love him -- he finally texted back a string of random emojis: A skier, the same skier, a trophy, etc. (They're all probably still trying to figure it out.)
My kinda guy.
Who's Threatening Black Students?
Um, another black student, at least in this case.
And it crossed my mind about the Harvard case (of black tape put over black professors' framed photos.)
In a NYT piece about that, black Harvard Law school prof Randall Kennedy writes:
The identity and motives of the person or people behind the taping have not been determined. Perhaps the defacer is part of the law school community. But maybe not. Perhaps the defacer is white. But maybe not. Perhaps the taping is meant to convey anti-black contempt or hatred for the African-American professors. But maybe it was meant to protest the perceived marginalization of black professors, or was a hoax meant to look like a racial insult in order to provoke a crisis, or was a rebuke to those who have recently been taping over the law school's seal, which memorializes a family of slaveholders from colonial times. Some observers, bristling with certainty, insist that the message conveyed by the taping of the photographs is obvious. To me it is puzzling.Assuming that it was a racist gesture, there is a need to calibrate carefully its significance. On a campus containing thousands of students, faculty members and staff, one should not be surprised or unglued by an instance or even a number of instances of racism.
...Disturbing, too, is a ... tendency to indulge in self-diminishment by displaying an excessive vulnerability to perceived and actual slights and insults. Some activists seem to have learned that invoking the rhetoric of trauma is an effective way of hooking into the consciences of solicitous authorities. Perhaps it is useful for purposes of eliciting certain short-term gains.
In the long run, though, reformers harm themselves by nurturing an inflated sense of victimization. A colleague of mine whose portrait was taped over exhibited the right spirit when he jauntily declared that it would take far more than tape to slow him down.
Linksmacked
A third cousin of "gobsmacked."
The Police Were Right That Someone Could Abduct Her Son
Only "someone" might be Child Protective Services.
A woman, Sonya Hendren, living in a gated Sacramento apartment complex, let her 4-year-old play outside on a playground,120 feet from her apartment's front door. A neighbor reported her to Child Protective Services, and police arrested Hendren for felony child neglect and endangerment.
Theresa Edwards writes at SheKnows:
The charges were later reduced to misdemeanors, and Hendren is hoping to get them dropped completely. If she's found guilty of even misdemeanor neglect and endangerment, that's a charge that can carry up to six months of jail and three years of probation. Alternatively she can take the very attractive offer of just 30 days in jail and a year of probation. So far she has declined that offer.In the meantime, she has a CPS case open against her and claims she will be in violation if she lets her son out of her line of sight.
Video here. Check out how close the playground is to the houses. This is like my parents allowing us to play in our backyard, except apartment dwellers don't have their own yard.
Meet The Neo-Puritans -- On Campuses Across America
I have been thinking of those on campus calling for speech restrictions, administrator firings, and punishments for those who say the "wrong" things as tiny little Stalins.
However, Harvard History prof Niall Ferguson gets it right in the Bo Globe:
One group of Brandeis students (#IamFordHall2015) has published a list of responses to frequently asked questions. Question five caught my attention: "What are these violences and injustices people are talking about? Can you give examples?"The answer is extraordinarily revealing: "First and foremost, this is a violent question because it essentially implies that the need for proof of harm is more important than addressing the harms. When this question is asked, it invokes this sentiment instead, 'I don't experience violence, so I don't feel it exists. Would you mind in addition to experiencing these violences, doing the labor of explaining them and proving that they are real?' "
It took me a while to realize where I had encountered this style of argument before -- the indignant repudiation of the questioner's request for proof as something in and of itself illegitimate.
This is not political language at all. It is religious language -- and it reads in places like the reincarnation of the tracts that 17th-century Puritans used to publish.
With their craving for "safe spaces," their revulsion against rational discussion (not to mention Halloween), their fundamentally illiberal and indeed irrational state of mind, the protesters strike me not as "little Robespierres" but as the natural heirs of the Puritans who founded the British colonies in New England.
How appropriate that the protests should reach their climax just in time for Thanksgiving, when Americans celebrate the Puritans' first good harvest at Plymouth!
Now, what's the right emoticon for "Back to the real world"?
A commenter on the piece understands the Constitution loads better than these idiots protesting -- who don't understand that "BLM" would have been the speech stamped out not long ago, and that's precisely why free speech for all is so precious:
kevincamp
These "students' don't see the irony in their own arguments and behaviors (and I use the word arguments generously here). Little is more closed minded than wanting to censor "offending" speech; and they get to define what is offensive. 200 years ago speech associated with freedom of all from slavery would have been considered "offensive' by many. They are unable to comprehend the foolishness of their own positions.
On a positive note -- about the Puritans -- at least they had trials.
On campuses today, they just complain the administrators out of the university.
via @SteveStuWill
Raising The Minimum Wage: Suddenly, Your Waitress Has An IOS
Pandering politicians lap up votes with measures that ultimately hurt the workers who are voting for them, putting them out of jobs.
Foreshadowing what's surely to come, Richard Rider writes at FlashReport about a trip, with his wife and two young grandchildren, to Applebees -- in California, where politicians are trying to raise the minimum wage to $15 (and have succeeded in raising it to $10). Rider explains that Applebees gave them the option there to order --and pay -- from a tablet rather than a waitress:
For now, one can still use a waiter for service, but obviously the plan is to reduce or eliminate that service. That makes PARTICULARLY good sense in California, which is rapidly becoming the home of the $15 minimum wage. Moreover, California is one of only 7 states that requires "tip" employees to be paid a FULL minimum wage IN ADDITION TO all tips collected. That can make a meal too pricey -- reducing the number of times patrons choose to dine out.Because of the hectic nature of two tykes seeking guidance in meal selection, we opted to use the waitress -- much to her delight. I had a nice salad as my entry (my diet is limited by salt). Our meal for 4, two of which were child's meals and without desserts, with tax and tip came to $60. When/if the $15 minimum wage kicks in, that cost will likely rise another $5-$8 (assuming tip percentage remains the same).
Yes, we can afford it -- if we want. But we find a home meal costs 1/5 or less what dining out costs, and in many ways is just as good and certainly quicker than a sit-down restaurant (counting travel time). That price disparity is set to grow significantly in the near future.
I figure that on the evening shift, my bubbly waitress made at LEAST $25 an hour in total paid compensation (current minimum wage is "only" $9 an hour). The CA minimum wage goes to $10 an hour on 1 January, 2016, and a prop is on the ballot to make it $15 an hour.
Clearly Applebee's is looking ahead and changing their labor policies. If a busboy delivers our food, my tip will be reduced significantly -- or disappear entirely. It will be more like a buffet than a restaurant when it comes to service.
Welcome to McDonald's, New York City.
via @reasonpolicy
What Critics Get Wrong About Uber
Uber critics mope about how bad Uber and Lyft are for drivers.
Liya Palagashvili writes at Mercatus that it's these services that improve the lot of drivers:
If people care about the welfare of drivers, they should support a competitive labor industry for them. When only a few employers control an industry, it can lead to the abuse of employees because they have fewer exit options given their relevant skills. Most people are aware of the dangers of monopolies where there is a single seller, yet few extend the same analysis into monopsonies, in which there is a "single buyer." In the labor market, employees are harmed when there is a single "buyer" for a specific job. More companies competing for employees usually results in better wages, benefits and treatment of workers.Take for example drivers in New York City. About 82 percent of taxi drivers in New York City are immigrants who have limited employment options but have cultivated one major skill: driving in the city. Knowing this, large taxi fleets are notorious for abusing and mistreating their drivers. Drivers pay $75 to $130 a day to lease medallion rights and end up driving 12 hour shifts in the hopes of recouping their cost and making some profit. On some days, they lose money.
The owners also abuse the drivers by adding on miscellaneous fees, such as for "new models" and "new drivers." Further, drivers have to bribe dispatchers or else they'll get bad shifts or no shifts at all. An undercover exposé revealed that this phenomenon occurs in cities beyond New York as well.
Before Uber and Lyft, if owners or dispatchers abused cab drivers, the cabbies didn't have many other choices but to put up with it. With new companies entering the market, if cab drivers suffer abuse and high fees, they can merely switch to Uber or Lyft and not have to bribe dispatchers or pay outrageous fees.
This is precisely what's happening. Drivers have been switching to Uber and Lyft and creating a graveyard of taxi cabs. One worker at the taxi dispatch company McGuiness explained: "Business is getting so bad that people are just dropping their cabs off here. Everyone is going to Uber, where they don't have to pay a lease, and they don't have to deal with a dispatch."
And these Uber drivers are getting paid better, too. A study of Los Angeles cab drivers found that, on average, they worked on 72 hours a week for a wage of $8.39 an hour. Uber drivers, on average, worked less than 35 hours a week for $19 an hour.
While it may be true that Uber drivers aren't working in heavenly conditions, these jobs are far superior to the alternative, and there is much hope for driver conditions improving even more as Lyft and Sidecar gain popularity. With new companies competing for drivers, this could put pressure on Uber to offer better benefits. Those who advocate better conditions for drivers should support new companies entering the market and offering more employment options.
I've had great experiences with Uber.
via @reasonpolicy
Linksmut
Trash and vaudeville.
Miss Funeralface
An Alex Baze tweet:
@bazecraze
Every fashion model looks like she was just told there's no wifi.
He's the SNL Weekend Update writer. More.
Ivy Privilege
If I were PRIVILEGED -- yes, privileged -- enough to attend Dartmouth, I sure as fuck wouldn't be spending my evenings yelling at other students in the library. First, because it's rude, but mainly, because it's a waste of a potential education...and a high-dollar one at that.
Jessica Chasmar writes at the Wash Ex:
Roughly 150 Black Lives Matter protesters reportedly stormed a library at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, Thursday night to berate students studying there for their supposed racial privilege.The Dartmouth Review, an independent newspaper at the private Ivy League college, reported that protesters marched into the Baker-Berry Library shouting profanity and berating white students.
Protesters reportedly shouted "F- you, you filthy white f--" "f- you and your comfort" and "f- you, you racist s-."
"Throngs of protesters converged around fellow students who had not joined in their long march," The Review reported. "They confronted students who bore 'symbols of oppression' such as 'gangster hats' and Beats-brand headphones. The flood of demonstrators opened the doors of study spaces with students reviewing for exams. Those who tried to close their doors were harassed further. One student abandoned the study room and ran out of the library. The protesters followed her out of the library, shouting obscenities the whole way."
Ivy Privilege: Being able to attend Dartmouth. Ivy Thuggery: Stopping others who do from studying in the library.
As for where some of this rage might be coming from, Stuart Taylor, Jr., explains in The American Spectator that racial preferences policies "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, 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.
Our Utter Idiocy In Toppling Saddam
I've said it for years -- that you cannot bring democracy to Muslim nations; it's antithetical to the culture. Also that we had no business invading Iraq. Also, we have no business being the world's policeman, and that we never seem to learn our lesson -- that, when we meddle in the Middle East, it is particularly unlikely to end well.
Matthias Gebauer and Holger Stark of Spiegel interview former US special forces chief Mike Flynn, who says, without the Iraq war, ISIS wouldn't exist:
Flynn: When 9/11 occurred, all the emotions took over, and our response was, "Where did those bastards come from? Let's go kill them. Let's go get them." Instead of asking why they attacked us, we asked where they came from. Then we strategically marched in the wrong direction.SPIEGEL ONLINE: The US invaded Iraq even though Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11.
Flynn: First we went to Afghanistan, where al-Qaida was based. Then we went into Iraq. Instead of asking ourselves why the phenomenon of terror occurred, we were looking for locations. This is a major lesson we must learn in order not to make the same mistakes again.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: The Islamic State wouldn't be where it is now without the fall of Baghdad. Do you regret ...
Flynn: ... yes, absolutely ...
SPIEGEL ONLINE: ... the Iraq war?
Flynn: It was huge error. As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him. The same is true for Moammar Gadhafi and for Libya, which is now a failed state. The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq. History will not be and should not be kind with that decision.
Link Tac Toe
X marks the spotted.
