The Fashion Of Dissing Everything And Everyone People Generally Admire
In the age of social media, with everybody having the ability to be a publisher of any information they choose ("Oh, look...kitty has paws!" or "Sandwich again!"), you need something special to stand out -- a hook.
And what better hook than being the one to trash what we least expect to be trashed?
I've noticed something recently -- in various arenas -- and it's the tendency for people to feel good about themselves by saying bad things about other people, or practices, or careers.
I'm not talking about gossip.
This is finding ways to dismiss people who are generally admired or practices or careers that are.
There's an example of this in this journalist's piece about how surgeons are basically the frat boys of medicine -- most closely related to the corner butcher, cutting you your pork chop.
Coming back with a good reaming is this guy -- trauma surgeon Doc Bastard, who points out that there's a bit more smarts and thinking involved in being a surgeon than sharpening the ole 10 blade.
Stinks
Smellylinks.
Big (Less) Hairy Deel!
Today's deal at Amazon is the Veet Infini'Silk Light-Based IPL Hair Removal System For Home Use -- a #1 Best Seller in its category -- and on super-sale for $79 (regularly $299).
A note: "Veet Infini'Silk is NOT SUITABLE for you if: 1: You have a naturally dark skin complexion. 2: Your body hair is white, grey, red, or blond."
If you are just white and brown-hairy, it should get rid of unwanted hair.
To buy stuff you don't see in my links and give me a wee kickback (that costs you nothing), Search Amy's Amazon here.
And thanks to all who shop through my links! Every purchase you make is much appreciated!
Feminist "Self-Care": Thumbsucking For Grownups
There's a post by Eleanor Sharman at Versa about self-care culture and "the bizarre infantilization of women," which I think should be called "the bizarre self-infantilization of women."
We all feel a need for comforting from time to time, but that's different from creating a comfort culture -- which some feminists have on Facebook -- and going to...yes, I'm serious...an "adult nursery school," where you fingerpaint and such.
Discomfort is actually adaptive, meaning it motivates you to look at problems in your life and fix what's broken.
Sharman feels similarly:
This post is about self-care. And, in a way, I'm a pretty staunch advocate. Looking after yourself is vital. Vulnerable people must be able to defend themselves. It's important to realise that you may always have your detractors, and running after them with flowers won't make anybody happier. Trying to make reality kinder, and safer, is no bad thing: to say otherwise is at best a dick move, and at worst both selfish and dangerous.But there's a difference between trying to make reality kinder and burying your head in the sand. And the massive growth of self-care culture is getting weird. There's the harmless and good, like the Oxford Women Self-Care Facebook group [apparently now erased from Facebook], where women post their feelings and things they need cheering up about, and other women oblige. It's actually very lovely. But there are also other things.
For instance, self-care culture is all-forgiving: you fuck up? No problem. You do something awful? Not your fault. You hurt someone? Don't beat yourself up.
The thing is, sometimes we should beat ourselves up. Not the constant, vicious self-flagellation that comes with low self-esteem and other problems, but human, moral guilt. When we hurt others, we should feel bad about it. Fucking up doesn't mean you're a bad person; it means you did something wrong. Perspective is vital. But this urgent, reactionary desire for mutual absolution has a sinister side. Cheap pronouncements of forgiveness from strangers don't fix anything. They just make us feel better about our own failings.
And the better we feel, the more we deny responsibility, the less likely we are to change. The more likely we are to fuck up again. So we'll be back to the internet begging for pictures of cute animals, for positive vibes from well-meaning people who don't have a clue. It's the kind of escapism seen in America's terrifying new fetish for adult play centres.
And no, that doesn't involve tongue. Unless you're talking about fingerpainting with pudding, which we did when we were, oh, 6.
Why is it that feminism these days so often seems to lead to the antithesis of breast-baring, chest-pounding equality-professing?
via @SteveStuWill
Gluey
Stickylinks.
Repeal The Fed Extortion That Is The National Drinking Age
In 1984, President Reagan signed the Uniform Drinking Age Act, requiring states to make 21 the minimum age for purchase and consumption of alcoholic beverages -- or lose 10 percent of their federal highway funding (later amended to eight percent).
I'm at the big social psych conference, SPSP, in San Diego, and at dinner, we were talking about groups and how Michael Jordan and others who've retired from sports or the military seem to miss the group they were a part of -- the group that was previously so much a part of their lives.
I mentioned how we're social animals and evolved in small bands -- and seem to need this "group-i-ness." It's something we often lack in the way we live in these vast, transient societies -- too big for our brains, as I point out in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck." (Why get to know the neighbors; in six months, they'll move again.)
Well, I suspect a psychological need to be part of a group may be a big reason people join frats and sororities. But I think another big reason is the drinking.
Via Overlawyered, Jeffrey A. Tucker writes at the Foundation for Economic Education:
Being able to drink with friends, and unhampered by authority, is a major appeal of the Greek system on campus. It's a way to get around the preposterously high drinking age. Getting around this law will consume a major part of the energy and creativity of these kids for the next three years.As for everyone else who cannot afford to join, it's all about a life of sneaking around, getting to know older friends, lying and hiding, pregaming before parties just in case there is no liquor there, and generally adopting a life of bingeing and purging, blackouts and hangovers, rising and repeating. And so on it goes for years until finally the dawn of what the state considers adulthood.
For an entire class of people, it's the Roaring Twenties all over again.
It's all part of Prohibition's legacy and a reflection of this country's strange attitudes toward drinking in general. The drinking age in the United States (21), adopted in 1984, is one of the highest in the world. Countries that compare in severity are only a few, including Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Cameroon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan.
Most of the rest of the world has settled on 18 for liquor and 16 for beer and wine. In practice, most European countries have very low enforcement of even that. Somehow it works just fine for them.
...People speak of a rape crisis on campus, and whatever the scope of the problem, the fact that women under 21 must retreat to dorm rooms and frat houses to drink puts them all in a vulnerable situation. It's hard to imagine that consent is really there when people are falling down, passing out, and feeling mortified the next day about what happened. In fact, the law represents a true danger to women in particular because it prohibits legal access to safe public places to drink responsibly, and go home to a safe environment afterward.
There is an organization of college administrators who are fed up. It is called the Amethyst Initiative. Currently, 135 colleges have signed support for a lower drinking age. Their goal is not to encourage more drinking but to recognize the unreality of the current law, and how it has led to perverse consequences on campus.
...Current drinking-age law is unenforceable and destructive. The reality is that kids are going to drink. Denying that and imposing ever more draconian punishments doesn't fix the real problems with alcohol.
What we need is a normal environment of parental and community supervision so that such drinking can occur in a responsible way. Yes, kids will probably drink more often, and yes, more kids will probably try alcohol, but they can do so in an environment of safety and responsibility.
As I did. I've written a number of times about how alcohol wasn't a big deal to me because, while my mother wasn't pouring us wine at every meal, we could have had some on Jewish holidays or had tastes of whatever my dad was drinking.
When I wanted to experiment with alcohol, I got the clever idea of doing it while my parents were there. I got drunk at my cousin's wedding, threw up on the way home, and had my dad laugh at me. Not yell at me. Not ground me. He thought it was hilarious that I had a hard lesson with liquor.
Not having it forbidden made it far less exciting to me than other kids I knew, and I barely drank during college.
That's also what I see of a number of my French friends and other European friends who were raised similarly.
Not everybody is going to deal well with this, and not everybody does in Europe. But pre-punishing the majority -- I think -- is more hurtful and dangerous.
Smugly
Self-congratulinktory.
How Not To Design Your Cellphone Manners: "A Lot Of People Act Like Assholes, So I Will, Too"
Noelle Carter has a story in the LA Times that's headlined, "Hey, Snapchatters, a new dining survey says it's OK to use your cellphone at dinner."
My response: No, it's fucking not.
It's mean. It's rude. There's little that feels as bad as having somebody turn away from conversation with you to something that -- clearly -- is more interesting and important to them.
The survey, as reported in her piece:
When it comes to cellphones, 54% of Angelenos surveyed have no problem with pulling out a phone at dinner, so long as the phone is used in moderation (and, we suppose, you're not ignoring your dinner date).
And there's an explanation for that 54%.
I write in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" about "attribution bias":
[It] describes how we tend to think far more charitably about ourselves and our own behavior than other people and theirs.
And then there's how prone we are to self-justification -- a topic studied by social psychologist Elliot Aronson. Anything to give our ego a soft-landing.
So, people who use their phones in restaurants -- while their friend or partner is sitting right there -- are likely to give it a thumbs up on a survey.
Again, this doesn't mean it's nice or an okay thing to do. It means that there are a lot of assholes out there.
Here's my bit on this subject from "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck":
• When a person on a phone is multitasking deep into your eyes As I wrote in my advice column, answering the phone while at a restaurant with a date is the digital version of deserting your dining companion and bopping over to sit with friends across the restaurant. Texting? In old-school terms, it's like whipping out a pen and legal pad and saying to your date, "You busy yourself with that pork chop, sweetcheeks. Got a couple letters I gotta mail out first thing."When your dining companion gets on the phone or starts texting, don't just sit there pretending to examine your napkin for hidden messages. Allowing disrespect tells people you're okay with it. If the person's a friend, put your foot down: You're not going to share their attention with the sports scores (and that goes for any covert peeks, as well).
On a date, if there aren't understandable extenuating circumstances for the interruption, you're within your rights to excuse yourself to the bathroom and crawl out through the window. At the very least, strongly consider making it your last date with them.
Their flagrant lack of consideration doesn't bode well for a relationship, nor does any flagrant lack of response from you. In short, you get what you put up with. As I noted in that column, "if you're going to invite somebody to dinner and ignore them, at least have the decency to get married first and build up years of bitterness and resentment."
Lanky
Tallskinnylinks.
Rip Down That MLK Quote! Martin Luther King's Thinking Just Not "Inclusive" Enough For U of Oregon Students
University of Oregon's student union building, now under renovation, has the famous Martin Luther King quote on the wall:
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream..."
I've always found this so inspiring -- perhaps because I'm not one of today's grievance hunters, looking for insult at every turn.
And really every, every turn, because the nitwits on the Student Union Board at U of O "seriously considered replacing the quote," according to Mediaite's Alex Griswold:
"The quote is not going to change," reports student paper Oregon Daily Emerald, "but that decision was not made without some hard thought by the Student Union Board."When the student union considered the question, some students asked, "Does the MLK quote represent us today?" The problem wasn't so much the message, but the fact that it only focused on racial diversity instead of gender identity.
"Diversity is so much more than race," said one sophomore architecture major. "Obviously race still plays a big role. But there are people who identify differently in gender and all sorts of things like that."
Being judged by the content of your character...well, it does leave a bad taste for the grievance hunters, who prefer to be judged by (and given unearned power for) the content of their worksheets: that is, how many checkboxes on the victimization list they can tick off.
The Libertarian Argument For Professorial Tenure
Interesting piece on how professorial tenure is important for academic freedom and the truth-seeking mission of universities.
Philosophy prof Aeon Skoble and and econ prof Steven Horwitz explain at the Foundation for Economic Education:
The search for truth is a discovery process analogous to the market. Just as entrepreneurs in a market require the freedom to discover value where their best judgment takes them, subject to rules against force and fraud, so do scholars in a university require the freedom to discover truth where our best judgment takes us.Tenure protects scholars like us from interference with our attempts to discover truth. Scholars cannot engage in truth-seeking if we're facing retaliation from people who don't like where our research leads. A university cannot be a university without robust protection of the open exchange of ideas and the freedom of each scholar to research in his or her field without intimidation.
By ruling out the possibility of firing a professor simply for the content of her beliefs, tenure ensures that the university will be what Michael Polanyi called "a republic of science," in which truth-seeking is the highest standard.
Skeptics might argue that even if tenure were abolished, faculty still wouldn't leave their current jobs because they would find it difficult to get hired elsewhere. But that's not the point. The point is that we cannot do our jobs without a credible guarantee of academic freedom, and tenure is one way to secure that.
Tenure protects academic freedom in three distinct ways. First, when we engage in research and publishing, we can't be worried that some administrator, trustee, politician, or even a student activist will find our work offensive and retaliate against us. This will have a chilling effect on our ability to seek the truth, which is our job as college professors. There are numerous examples of libertarian and conservative faculty facing just these sorts of threats, and tenure is the primary reason those threats are empty.
Second, when we construct and teach our curricula, we can't worry that any of the usual suspects will take offense, or try to substitute their judgment for ours. Finally, when participating in institutional decision making about academic matters, we can't be afraid to call shenanigans on various administrator-driven fads (of which there are many) that would undermine our ability to engage in research and teaching.
The offer a number of solutions and answers to arguments, like to the possibility that a prof would get lazy, at the link.
Soupy
Liquidifying links.
The Line Is Not, "When In Rome, Do As The Iranians Do"
The medieval practices of Islam and the visit of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani to Italy have coincided in the Italians covering up nude statues and (reportedly) not serving wine with dinner.
My question to the Italians: Why rush things? With the population of Islam adherents exploding in Europe, mandates banning nudity (even in art) and alcohol consumption will be with you soon enough.
Punishing Pre-Crime Is No Longer Just In Tom Cruise Movies
Brendan O'Neill at Spiked explains it that way in describing the sick injustice of a man found not guilty of rape who still must:
...provide the police with the name, address and date of birth of anyone he plans to bed, 'at least 24 hours prior to any sexual activity taking place'. So despite not being found guilty of a crime, he will still be treated as a criminal. This should alarm anyone who cares about due process, liberty and not allowing the state to stick its snout into the sexual relations of consenting adults....The Sexual Risk Order against the man is an interim one. In May, there will be another hearing to decide whether it should become a full Sexual Risk Order, which can last for anything between two years and forever. If an individual breaks an order, he or she can be imprisoned for up to five years. So if this guy - who is not a criminal, remember - has sex with someone without first informing the police, he could be jailed. That is, he could be jailed for having sex. It should concern anyone who believes in even basic autonomy, in the sovereignty of the individual over his mind and body, that the threat of jail-for-sex hangs over the head of an ostensibly innocent man.
...The Yorkshire case, and Sexual Risk Orders more broadly, demolishes the ideal of due process. If someone can be treated as a criminal, or precriminal, despite not having been convicted of a crime, then the entire, Magna Carta-derived basis of civilised law is called into question. Last year, Britain celebrated the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, a document which insists that 'no free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions', unless he's found guilty of a crime through 'lawful judgement'. This is the foundation stone of democratic societies: that citizens are free until such a time as they have been convincingly, openly convicted of an offence. This is now reversed.
...A society in which a non-guilty man must provide the police with information about his every sexual conquest is not a free society. It's the opposite; it's a society in which no zone of life exists independently of officialdom, and in which more and more of us are viewed as precriminals, and sex is viewed as pre-rape.
It's easy to let each one of these yankings of our civil liberties fly by as we're busy with other things. This, the legalized theft known as "civil asset forfeiture," the removal of due process from men on campus accused of sexual assault, and the TSA's violation of our civil liberties at airports under the pretense that they're providing is with security and under the cover of "administrative search."
The problem is, the more we allow rights to be taken from us, the easier it is to take more and more rights.
Twerpy
Tinylinks.
Governmommy Cares About Your Light
But not that it doesn't make your home glow one reminiscent of green-walled mental wards. It only cares that you are energy-efficient.
Well, if you're willing to pay the higher rates for better light, why should that be the government's business?
It isn't -- which is why I bought 120 incandescent bulbs before the government's ban went into effect. By the way, I live in a tiny shack, and typically have two lights on all day -- the two lamps on my desk.
My landlord installed one of those energy-efficient fixtures -- the sort that takes a few minutes to fully come on. I keep a flashlight by that light for when I need to find something and can't wait for the light to go find its robe and glasses before it comes on.
By the way, MIT has come out with incandescents that are more efficient than LEDS.
Blame Evolution, Not Girls Or Television, For Why Little Girls Like Girly Things
I heard Steven Pinker speak at an ev psych conference in Austin about 10 years ago, and he asked the question why -- since we push women to get into fields men naturally gravitate to -- that we don't push men to become, say, kindergarten teachers.
The ultimate unasked question in that was "Why don't we just leave women the fuck alone and let them do what they want to do?"
Roderick Long blogs about the contention by feminist Dana Edell, who charged that Lego was "sending a message that girls get to play with hair dryers while boys get to build airplanes and skyscrapers."
He quotes a Mises article by Ryan McMaken. Edell's complaints are misguided, McMaken explains:
Ms. Edell ... should probably aim her disappointment and disdain at seven-year-old girls rather than at Lego. After all, Lego's success, or lack thereof, in marketing these products depends on the decisions of little girls. ... The real problem the anti-Lego feminists have, then, is not with Lego but with the fact that girls like to play with the sort of toys found in the Friends line. The blame for this lies with the girls themselves. After all, Lego did not raise these girls or tell them what to like.
More:
The activists think that Lego is responsible for deciding what girls should want because - like many people who don't understand how markets work - they think that producers dictate to consumers what to buy. ... But it doesn't work that way. Companies make money by selling what people want.
Long also notes this:
Deborah Rhode recounts a telling anecdote: "One mother who insisted on supplying her daughter with tools rather than dolls finally gave up when she discovered the child undressing a hammer and singing it to sleep.(Rhode, Speaking of Sex, p. 19.)
Linkerary
FScottLinkgerald.
"You Just Think That Because You're White And Male!" Um, No, Says The Science
Jason Brennan co-authored "con" part of the pro/con book, Compulsory Voting: For and Against
Well-informed and badly informed citizens also have systematically different policy preferences.As people (regardless of their race, income, gender, or other demographic factors) become more informed, they favor less government intervention and control of the economy. They are more in favor of free trade and less in favor of protectionism.
They are more pro-choice. They favor using tax increases to offset the deficit and debt. They favor less punitive and harsh measures on crime. They are less hawkish on military policy, though they favor other forms of intervention. They are more accepting of affirmative action. They are less supportive of prayer in public schools. They are more supportive of market solutions to health care problems. They are less moralistic in law; they don't want government to impose morality on the population.
And so on.
In contrast, as people become less informed, they become more in favor of protectionism, abortion restrictions, harsh penalties on crime, doing nothing to fix the debt, more hawkish intervention, and so on. (Remember: these effects are not due to differing demographics between low and high information voters.)
He notes that this is the case even within political parties:
Democrats are not united in their moral and political outlooks.High information Democrats have systematically different policy preferences from low information Democrats. Rich and poor Democrats have systematically different policy preferences.
Compulsory voting gets more poor Democrats to the polls. But poor Democrats tend to be low information, while affluent Democrats tend to be high information voters.
The poor more approved more strongly of invading Iraq in 2003. They more strongly favor the Patriot Act, invasions of civil liberty, torture, protectionism, and of restricting abortion rights and access to birth control. They are less tolerant of homosexuals and more opposed to gay rights.
In general, compared to the rich, the poor--including poor Democrats--are intolerant, economically innumerate, hawkish bigots.
His take on compulsory voting, from the Amazon writeup to his book, aligns with mine (which is that we want fewer idiots -- uh, people -- voting, not more):
Compulsory voting is unjust and a petty violation of citizens' liberty. The median non-voter is less informed and rational, as well as more biased than the median voter.
via @SteveStuWill
Wisconsin's Cookie Police: Sell One Of Your Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies; Maybe Spend 6 Months In Jail
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Anything Peaceful posts about the latest in state licensing ridiculousness -- the law against selling your own baked goods in Wisconsin:
Wisconsin's home-baked-good ban has nothing to do with safety. The state bans home bakers from selling even food the government deems to be "not potentially hazardous" such as cookies, muffins, and breads. The state also allows the sale of homemade foods like raw apple cider, maple syrup, and popcorn, as well as canned goods such as jams and pickles.In addition, the state allows nonprofit organizations to sell any type of homemade food goods at events up to 12 days a year.
The ban is purely political. Commercial food producers like the Wisconsin Bakers Association are lobbying against a "Cookie Bill" -- which would allow the limited sale of home baked goods -- in order to protect themselves from competition.
Wonderful Institute for Justice is taking this on.
Lippy
Smartyasspantslinks.
Bartender Mercies
A little dating advice for misguided boys who'd like to go home with the girl -- or at least eventually have some prospect of that -- rather than always watching her go home with somebody else.
More "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck":
With Uber Out There, Why Ever Rent A Car Again?
These days, even your car insurance company is likely to give you money for Uber (if you ask), instead of a rental car, while they're repairing your wheels. Maybe $30 a day in Uber money.
A rental car comes with all this responsibility, and if you're at a hotel, you probably have to pay to park it.
Maybe if you need to drive around to a bunch of locations with a trunk full of stuff -- or if you just prefer to drive -- renting a car still makes sense.
And if you aren't in an area with a good supply of Ubers, renting a car is maybe the best idea.
But with Uber, assuming some city government isn't stopping Uber from going to and from the airport, there's none of that rushing to get gas and return a rental car before you get on a plane.
And it could end up being cheaper daily or weekly -- and maybe by far.
Seems other people are thinking this way. At BizJournals.com, Annie Gaus writes:
Uber eclipsed car rentals as percentage of total rides for the first time in the fourth quarter, the report notes. Uber accounted for 41 percent of total ground transport on the platform, as opposed to rental cars' 39 percent."The overarching piece is that when a business traveler has the freedom to select, they're doing so," says Neveu.
via @Mark_J_Perry
The Man From Linky River
Snowdriftylinks.
All Plants Eventually Commit Suicide On Me
Gregg bought... -- uh, I think it's watercress -- and it had a little rootbed attached and a note that said to put it in the "crisper" in the refrigerator.
Well, just two days later, here's our sad little cressy. (In retrospect, maybe I was also supposed to water it?) 
It's By Becoming Leaders, Not Standing Outside The Admin Building And Yelling At Them, That Black Men Succeed On Campus
It's the behaviors of success, not victimhood, (and the identity that comes with success, not victimhood) that help black male students get ahead. Samantha Figueroa writes at The College Fix that black men on campus succeed by brushing off stereotypes and taking on leadership roles:
In a study published in the winter edition of the Harvard Educational Review, University of Pennsylvania Prof. Shaun Harper wrote that successful black men on "predominantly white campuses" tend to be active members of their institutions and take on leadership roles.The founder of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education said much research has been done on why African-American males don't succeed, but little on how they overcome stereotypes or perceived racism, whose psychological effects can impact their academic performance.
For his new research, Harper wrote that he interviewed 143 undergrads at 30 predominantly white campuses who had cumulative GPAs above 3.0 and had "established lengthy records of leadership and engagement in multiple student organizations." They had "meaningful relationships" with professors and officials outside the classroom, participated in study-abroad and other "enriching educational experiences," and earned "numerous merit-based scholarships and honors," the study says.
...Despite being well-known around campus and often presenting themselves in suits or other professional attire, the black males would still be approached by white students who thought they could procure drugs or assumed they were athletes, Harper wrote.
They got past such stereotypical experiences by using a "three-step strategic redirection process," Harper wrote. When a white peer would ask, say, whether the black student had marijuana, the "achiever" would ask why the peer assumed he was involved in marijuana-related activities. "During this reflective period, the stereotyper (or microaggressor) usually comes to understand on her or his own that the question posed or assumption made was racially problematic," Harper wrote.
The study participants said they were proactive in campus leadership not just for themselves but to show positive examples of black male students, Harper wrote. "I am involved because I want to do something to dispel these stereotypes," said Dante, a student at Michigan State.
Kevin and Jamar, two students from Illinois, said they founded the "4.0 Club" - a study and support group for African-American students that rewarded members for earning 4.0 GPAs - because they were aware that "African American students' GPAs are considerably lower than the campus average."
Black power? That's true black power -- the sort that comes out of actually being powerful.
And there's this:
Fowler turned that experience into motivation, though. "So I spent months going above and beyond, working harder and harder, day and night to be the best RA I could be to prove to myself that I was more than just my skin color." He's also organized programs where speakers led discussions about race among diverse groups of students to promote understanding and show that race is not taboo.
When I was growing up, my mother told me that there are a number of people who don't like Jews and won't want to "let you in." Her response to this was that I needed to work harder and be better -- not that we should have a long whine about how life isn't fair.
Also, Fowler is doing exactly the right thing to promote understanding. No, you don't yell people into thinking differently. You talk them into it.
Congresswoman Jackie Speier Wants To Make Extra-Sure Young Men's Lives Are Ruined
It's not enough that, in sexual assault accusations, young men are forced into campus kangaroo courts where due process is removed from them.
Of course, sexual assault accusations should be handled by the criminal justice system, not some chickie who needs to go study for her midterms.
What happens in the current system, however, is that the accused is allowed to be present but barely allowed to defend himself. Here's an example from a CNN story by Sara Ganim and Nelli Black:
Months after the sexual encounters took place, Jane Roe filed a complaint with school officials at UCSD, accusing John Doe of sexual misconduct when he touched her the following morning.Doe said all their sex acts were consensual and said he had text messages to prove it.
He was investigated and tried by his own university. The tribunal found Doe responsible for violating the school's policy on sexual misconduct for trying to digitally penetrate the woman the morning after they had sex.
But Doe says the hearing was one-sided and unfair. He was allowed to have a lawyer, but the lawyer couldn't speak.
He submitted questions for his accuser, but not all of them were asked. He wasn't allowed to dispute the testimony or examine the evidence.
"I tried to object a few times," he told CNN, "and they reminded me that it was just a school hearing and it wasn't criminal so I wasn't allowed to do that." Doe declined to testify on his own behalf during the proceedings on the advice of of his attorney.
He was suspended from school for one semester, and each time he appealed, his punishment was increased without explanation until he was facing a suspension of more than a year.
"I'm all for true victims of rape to receive all the assistance they need," Doe says, "but at the same time the accused students have rights."
So he sued UCSD, and a state judge agreed with him, finding the tribunal process was skewed and violated John Doe's rights.
The standard, unlike in actual court, is not "reasonable doubt" but whether "more likely than not" there was an assault that took place. Judged by some campus panel, not a judge and jury.
Many male students have been expelled from schools and had their lives ruined by this -- by the mere accusation anyone can make. It's rather like the Salem Witch Trials, only the men are spared the hanging -- though being expelled is likely life-ruining (or at least maiming) for many.
As if that's not terribler enough, Ashe Schow reports at the Wash Ex that "Congresswoman Jackie Speier, D-Calif., says she plans to introduce legislation that would ensure colleges and universities are made aware when a transferring student has been found responsible for sexual assault or sexual harassment."
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education points out that this would be an acceptable approach if the findings of campus hearings weren't flawed. But as Anita Levy, senior program officer for the American Association of University Professors, told Inside Higher Ed, passing on such information is concerning "when the original proceedings may have been severely lacking in procedural protections, and thus the findings questionable -- even if that means some genuine serial harassers may slip through the nets."
But here's the sick turn that women have taken. It is common within civil liberties circles to talk about how it's better to let guilty people go free than to falsely convict an innocent person.
Activists may suggest that it is better that innocent students be harmed than a responsible student be allowed to continue his education. This was evidenced in a Washington Post survey about campus sexual assault, in which students were asked which was worse, an innocent person being expelled or a guilty student going free. Fifty-six percent of women surveyed said it was worse for a guilty student to go free. Just 36 percent of women surveyed said it was worse for an innocent to be punished, showing an alarming ignorance of the Constitition.We've created a system where false accusations are easier to make and carry few if any consequences.
Women now have better lives and more privilege than women people at any time in history and in any other place.
It is just twisted that women now are taking an "Off with his head" approach to men, and that women who claim to want equal rights are doing little or nothing to protest a sick process that does not allow men a proper defense. The thing is, when rights are removed from some people, the ultimately are likely to be removed from all of us.
It's just "fashionable" now to be anti-male.
But look at the women who are. Look closely. Women who resent and even hate men like that have something broken in them. They're women to keep far away from -- especially if it's night and nobody else is around to corroborate your story.
Four Linko
Wakeylinks.
The Drug War Is Part Of What's Crowding Emergency Rooms
At the Foundation for Economic Education, a medical doctor, Geoffrey Hosta, explains:
During one of my more depressing shifts, a nine-year-old girl (let's call her Nancy) came into the emergency room with an arm broken at a 90 degree angle. On that same night, a drug-seeking patient (let's call him Richard) came into the hospital for the fifth time that month with the same concocted excuse.While I worked on Richard's fake ailments, I was unable to alleviate Nancy's excruciating pain. She suffered with little more than a stuffed animal to comfort her because Richard needed his fix.
In an environment of drug prohibition, patients like Richard are not rare. But it is not the sheer number of drug seekers that exacerbates what is already a problem of ER overcrowding. It is also the ailments that drug seekers like Richard create. They tend to invent symptoms indicative of serious illnesses that offer a quick ticket to the back and the best chance for intravenous drugs.
Unfortunately, those complaints require hefty ER resources, which would have otherwise helped people like Nancy. Worse still, addicts repeat the trick. One of my drug-seeking patients made 183 visits to my emergency department in a year and visited at least two other emergency rooms. Based on my experience, I estimate that drug seeking accounts for 20 to 30 percent of all ER visits.
Scholars corroborate my estimate.
And how does this work out? It surely leads to a rise in healthcare costs -- perhaps a substantial one. And it often means doctors undertreat pain in the rest of us:
Many providers have become so frustrated that they prefer to risk under-treating pain in non-drug seekers than be burned again. (This is a shame, considering that identifying drug seekers is difficult, leading to widespread -- and racially uneven -- under treatment of pain.) Some healthcare providers now sadly believe that ER patients with honest pain complaints are the minority.
And the solution? End the drug war:
I don't blame Richard. Under drug prohibition, he has two places to get his fix: medical outlets like emergency rooms, or the streets. Some are surprised that people like Richard favor hospitals with their bureaucratic hurdles, gatekeepers, and other annoyances. But on the streets, he faces violence, incarceration, job loss, and impure, expensive drugs.If there were a third option -- to buy drugs legally -- drug seekers would face a new equation. Under these new incentives, at least some (and probably most) ER drug seekers will prefer legal highs from salons and shops over clinical and bureaucratic emergency rooms and dangerous corner dealers. And as ER drug seekers disappear, so do all of their associated problems. So support an end to the Drug War, if not to right its other innumerable wrongs, then for anyone who will ever urgently need ER care -- like Nancy, your family, or yourself.
via @reasonpolicy
Way Too Much Govt: Woman Cited By NJ For Saving Baby Squirrels
Via @Overlawyered, there's a story at NJ.com by Paul Milo about a woman who did what probably at least some reading here have done or have had their parents do for hurt or orphaned animals:
A woman who nurtured two newborn squirrels separated from their mother said she was acting out of kindness. But state wildlife officials say she was also breaking the law.Maria Vaccarella came to the aid of a squirrel that had fallen out of a tree last year and then, unexpectedly, gave birth, WPVI 6 in Philadelphia reported. Vacacarella said she left the two outside in a cage for a day and when the mother failed to return, she brought them inside, bottle-feeding them and caring for them for four months after registered wildlife rehabilitators told her they could not take them in. Vaccarella named them "George and Lola."
In October, the Division of Fish and Wildlife contacted her after seeing posts on social media of her and the animals and seized them. Bob Considine, a state Department of Environmental Protection spokesman, said the agency was contacted about the social media posts by a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. The state was then obligated to follow up on the reported infraction, Considine said.
Shortly after, she received a $500 ticket charging her with "keeping captive game animals," UPI reported.
Vaccarella may also face a fine of as little as $100 or no fine at all if she is a first-time offender and pleads guilty, Considine said.
You're instead supposed to turn injured or orphaned wildlife to a "certified wildlife rehabilitator."
Yes, all it takes to care for baby squirrels you find in your backyard is meeting the licensing requirements (which, as those of you who read here know are a way to protect the income of those who already have licenses).
• One year minimum apprenticeship (see Apprenticeship definition below) with a New Jersey rehabilitator which shall begin upon submission of the apprentice's name, address, telephone number and start date by the sponsoring rehabilitator in writing to the Division within 30 days of their official start date, or as listed on the rehabilitator's annual report when submitted to the Division prior to start of apprenticeship.• One letter of recommendation from the sponsoring rehabilitator which details the understanding and proficiency of the apprentice in the following areas [which I won't list, but there are a slew of them at the link].
• Completion of initial rehabilitation permit application.
• Letter of commitment from a veterinarian willing to work with applying rehabilitator.
• Approval of an on-site inspection including proper caging and facility standards
• Secure applicable permits from United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) for avian species.
• Completion and submission of the Annual Report and Renewal Form along with required Documentation, when renewing the rehabilitation permit.
Meanwhile, note from the article that the woman tried to get one of these wonderful licensed wildlife rehab people to take the squirrels in, but they refused.
So...to be all cool under the law, she was supposed to just leave the little buggers out to die? Or New Jersey would go all Squirrel Inspector Javert on her?
Lovely.
Anything Is "Feminist" If You Say It Is
Women in academia discover some 10-step Korean beauty routine and then do intellectual contortions to deem it "feminist" so they can use it.
Oh, and this stuff is pricey as fuck.
Rebecca Schuman writes at Slate:
What I didn't realize until recently, however, is that K-beauty is also popular with self-identified feminist academics and scholars, several of whom told me that they view the elaborate routine not as vanity but rather as an act of radical feminist self-care.* Indeed, Stockton University English and digital humanities professor and Web designer Adeline Koh published an entire blog post on the subject. She wrote:I've started to view beauty as a form of self-care, instead of a patriarchal trap. One of my deepest inspirations, the writer and activist Audre Lorde, famously declared that "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." For many women, especially women of color, we're often told that we are only useful, only valuable when we devote ourselves to others; that caring for ourselves in the last thing that we should consider.Kim agrees. "Self-care, especially for a woman of color, is radical," she tells me. Korean beauty "is a little breath of relaxing joy and feminist community." She explains that this may also stem from the centuries-old tradition of spa and self-care in Korean culture. Kim emphasizes that "the Korean spa is also primarily about relaxing with other women and hanging out, rather than just 'go to the spa, get these things done to you, leave.' It's frequently a family affair. I remember going to the Korean spa with my cousins and aunts in Korea when I used to visit."
Schuman winds up with this:
So if you're a college student and you happen to surprise your ethics professor in her office and she's decked out like Jason, don't be alarmed--and don't dismiss her as vain. She's engaged in a political act of self-care and/or unwinding from the day's "bullshit." She might even be keeping her mental health intact while giving your latest essay precisely the correct amount of grading time.
A commenter on the article nutshells it well -- how pathetic this is:
PPBCKWRITER
How insecure and a slave to the opinions of others are you if you have to justify wanting to look and feel pretty as a radical feminist act? Also, how nutty has feminism gotten when you can blithely rationalize pole-dancing and prostitution as female empowerment but have to tie yourself in knots, do backflips through hoops and fabricate content in order to twist your skincare routine into some big, brave act of reclaiming one's power? So sad.
Another:
Anna Lebasce
Oh come ON. Just admit that you are as vain and concerned about aging gracefully as the women who make monthly facial appointments and buy $200 moisturizer, just with less means. It has to be radical feminism because as academics, you are too deep and insightful (and too broke) to follow all of the latest "innovations" in the snake oil (sorry, beauty) industry. Shame on Slate for publishing such a biased nonsense piece puffing up yet another poorly researched, unscientific "beauty regime."
Whoopsy, and the real reason for the piece:
thegraterpotato
I'm incredibly disappointed in Slate's decision to dedicate space to a poorly written article like this. You have chosen to give airtime to a columnist who spends a third of the article promoting a company without disclosing that she has a close personal relationship with the founder of the company. This same columnist then fabricates positions and opinions from prominent K-beauty bloggers that support her thesis, without even contacting them, let alone asking for their views. When she finally posts a retraction, she doesn't have the courtesy to apologize on the Slate website or admit that she made a mistake. She also deletes entire paragraphs without mentioning that she has done so.The result is an article that reflects the niche views of the columnist's tiny sample size - her self-selected group of friends - rather than an actual trend or phenomenon among female academics. There is no attempt to solicit a diversity of views, perhaps even a few dissenting ones, or apply any sort of journalistic rigour. Which is a pity, because this could have been a really interesting, thought-provoking discussion about how beauty standards, skincare regimens, and feminism can intersect.
Instead, we get a puff piece to hawk the wares of her friend's company (I quickly skimmed the Sabbatical Beauty site and realized that the founder doesn't have any sort of background in cosmetics or chemistry, which is another worrying tangent for another day - I would be nervous about putting that stuff on my face). I am sympathetic to Slate's business considerations of page views and ad revenue, but I promise there are better writers out there who would love to contribute. Ones who might even talk to the sources that they quote in their articles.
And my absolutely favorite comment:
Jack Strawb
I would have thought "a radical act of feminist self-care" involved masturbating with a crucifix while screaming "dead white men, DEAD WHITE MEN!!!"Was I wrong?
People are frequently amazed that I'm 51, going on 52.
There's only one thing that really matters for your skin, and it's sunscreen. For years, I've worn the best one out there, which is French: La Roche-Posay Anthelios
Otherwise, I do almost nothing. I wash my face with St Ives Scrub
Oh, and I suspect this "must wash your face daily" and "must do all this crap to it" is likely bullshit. Are you mud-wrestling? Probably not. If you aren't wearing a bunch of makeup, on days you aren't all sweaty from exercise or sex, do you really need to wash your face?
Put Away Your Electronic Binky, Mommy, And Pay Attention To Your Baby
Annoyingly, some "parent" was loitering outside my gate the other day, talking on her cellphone -- long enough and loudly enough for me to be able to be well-briefed on her life while seated (behind closed doors and windows) at my desk.
The woman had a stroller she had been pushing, but her kid was loose -- fiddling with pieces of somebody's car (not the woman's).
The woman was too engaged in her call to stop her kid from grabbing at and pulling at the person's car.
And frankly, from what I saw over my fence -- after I looked over it because of the persistent yakkity from her loud call and the sounds her kid was making -- her kid could have toddled into the street.
And sure, we all get distracted, but it's possible that when mothers are turning away from their infants and toddlers to attend to their cellphones, it may affect the children's brain development:
New research from a UCI press release:
Put the cellphone away! Fragmented baby care can affect brain development: UCI study shows maternal infant-rearing link to adolescent depression
In short:
UCI's Dr. Tallie Z. Baram and colleagues discovered that erratic maternal care of infants can increase the likelihood of risky behaviors, drug seeking and depression in adolescence and adult life.
And the study was conducted on children with whiskers and tails -- as in, on rodents. However:
Its findings imply that when mothers are nurturing their infants, numerous everyday interruptions - even those as seemingly harmless as phone calls and text messages - can have a long-lasting impact.Dr. Tallie Z. Baram and her colleagues at UCI's Conte Center on Brain Programming in Adolescent Vulnerabilities show that consistent rhythms and patterns of maternal care seem to be crucially important for the developing brain, which needs predictable and continuous stimuli to ensure the growth of robust neuron networks. Study results appear today in Translational Psychiatry.
The UCI researchers discovered that erratic maternal care of infants can increase the likelihood of risky behaviors, drug seeking and depression in adolescence and adult life. Because cellphones have become so ubiquitous and users have become so accustomed to frequently checking and utilizing them, the findings of this study are highly relevant to today's mothers and babies ... and tomorrow's adolescents and adults.
"It is known that vulnerability to emotional disorders, such as depression, derives from interactions between our genes and the environment, especially during sensitive developmental periods," said Baram, the Danette "Dee Dee" Shepard Chair in Neurological Studies.
"Our work builds on many studies showing that maternal care is important for future emotional health. Importantly, it shows that it is not how much maternal care that influences adolescent behavior but the avoidance of fragmented and unpredictable care that is crucial. We might wish to turn off the mobile phone when caring for baby and be predictable and consistent."
...The UCI team - which included Hal Stern, the Ted & Janice Smith Family Foundation Dean of Information & Computer Sciences - studied the emotional outcomes of adolescent rats reared in either calm or chaotic environments and used mathematical approaches to analyze the mothers' nurturing behaviors.
Despite the fact that quantity and typical qualities of maternal care were indistinguishable in the two environments, the patterns and rhythms of care differed drastically, which strongly influenced how the rodent pups developed. Specifically, in one environment, the mothers displayed "chopped up" and unpredictable behaviors.
During adolescence, their offspring exhibited little interest in sweet foods or peer play, two independent measures of the ability to experience pleasure. Known as anhedonia, the inability to feel happy is often a harbinger of later depression. In humans, it may also drive adolescents to seek pleasure from more extreme stimulation, such as risky driving, alcohol or drugs.
Why might disjointed maternal care generate this problem with the pleasure system? Baram said that the brain's dopamine-receptor pleasure circuits are not mature in newborns and infants and that these circuits are stimulated by predictable sequences of events, which seem to be critical for their maturation. If infants are not sufficiently exposed to such reliable patterns, their pleasure systems do not mature properly, provoking anhedonia.
Sloppy
Links all over everywhere.
Now, Even Professional Comedians Can't Take A Joke: Amy Schumer's Rotten, Nasty, Graceless Response
A teen film critic, Jackson Murphy, 17, took a photo with Amy Schumer, and then tweeted the shot -- trying to be funny -- with this remark:
@LCJReviews
Spent the night with @amyschumer. Certainly not the first guy to write that.
Gracelessly, Amy Schumer -- who has developed a comedic image as a slut -- slapped him down for it:
@amyschumer
@LCJReviews @jondaly I get it. Cause I'm a whore? Glad I took a photo with you. Hi to your dad.
He later tweeted an apology to her.
And again, about the Amy Schumer oeuvre:
Schumer is no shrinking violent when it comes to the topic of sex: both her standup act and her critically acclaimed Comedy Central show Inside Amy Schumer draw heavily from her sexual exploits and misadventures between the sheets.
Get this, from the link above:
Luckily for the fresh-faced film reviewer, Schumer was gracious and readily accepted his apology writing: 'that's really okay honey. I just remember thinking you and your dad were sweet and it was a bummer to read that.'
Really? You're an internationally known comedian, and you can't take a fucking C+ attempt at a sex joke from a teenager?
This, sadly, is not only what Amy Schumer is about, but also what feminism is too often about: pouncing on anything a male says or does as an opportunity to show him how wrong he is. About everything.
This once again suggests that even some of the most powerful women feel like victims deep down -- and. I'd venture, perhaps because they're always so busy identifying as victims. Even when they're celebrities, making millions of dollars, with over three million Twitter followers.
Poor, shat-on Amy Schumer. (Let's all hold hands for a moment of silence.)
On a positive note, this does give me yet another reason to stack up with the rest under the title "Why I Am Not A Feminist."
The Assumption That You -- Especially If You're A Woman -- Should Be Able To Have It All
These days, more men are primary caregivers than ever, but it still seems to be a pretty small number.
Women mainly seem to be the ones who spend more time in the Parent #1 role.
But if this doesn't work for you, vis a vis career costs, you need to either hash this out with your spouse or not have kids.
Well, that seems the reasonable thinking to me, anyway.
Yet, there's this amazing expectation that you should be able to have the same career while divided -- dividing your time between career and mommying -- that childless colleagues have.
And yes, some childless colleagues are drunks and layabouts or whatever.
But some childless colleagues are like me -- putting my work above everything else. For example, the next book I'm now writing turned out to be far harder scientifically than I'd anticipated. (I've been joking that it recently stopped trying to kill me.) And I basically have to stay home until September, working crazy hours every day, to get it done. But that's what it takes to write at the level of quality that works for me.
In short, it's a question of priorities. Mine is not (and has never been) having children, which would have sucked up an enormous amount of my time and energy.
Um, no.
In contrast, this post was inspired by a sniffly tweet I spotted Tuesday morning:
@thomroulet
"Researchers with children - a disadvantage in academia" http://kjonnsforskning.no/en/2015/12/researchers-children-disadvantage-academia ... via @Kilden
A quote from the link:
"It's challenging to be a researcher with caregiving responsibilities when you're competing with international researchers who don't have children and who have completely different life circumstances," says Sara Orning, Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Research.
Wow...really? What's odd to me is what I see as the implication that you should be able to have kids and be even steven with all of the researchers who are single-focused on their careers.
This finding is from a new study at the University of Oslo that sheds light on the relationship between having both a research career and responsibility for children. At first, the report was only supposed to include interviews with female doctoral students, but Orning decided to incorporate men into the study as well."The report planned to explore whether having responsibility for children makes it more difficult to pursue a career in academia, so it was natural for me to look at how men's situation has also changed."
"A male doctoral student in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences explained that he was divorced, which made it hard for him to simply take his children with him to a lab in Germany every other week when he had parental responsibility. The feeling of being passed over by an international elite without the same access to welfare benefits, such as parental leave and other adaptations, was often a topic of conversation with the students."
Academic supervisors find it difficult to give advice to doctoral students about their future careers.
Here, I'll help: You're not going to have the same career if you cut into it with kids.
And it's not fair for a business (or academia) to give you the same opportunities as those who give their all to their work.
RELATED: A gender gap no woman is looking to close -- the job fatality gap.
Slurpee
Brainfreezeelinks.
No Racial Diversity For Oscar Nominees -- Or The NBA's MVP Award
This wasn't my idea; it came from a Mark J. Perry tweet; but I love it.
@Mark_J_Perry
No Racial Diversity for Oscar Nominees; What About the Lack of Racial Diversity for NBA Most Valuable Player Award?
Yes...where are all the white Jewish women nominated for the NBA's MVP award? And why are none of the Social Justice Warriors demanding that white Jewish women -- and a least at few Chinese girls -- be brought into the NBA?
Will Jada Pinkett Smith boycott NBA games?
As Jada put it about the Oscars:
"Here's what I do know. Begging for acknowledgement, or even asking, diminishes dignity, and diminishes power, and we are a dignified people, and we are powerful, and let's not forget it."
Of course, a bunch of the Oscar voters are old white coots, and maybe they never vote for black people -- except, hmm...what explains last year?
The fact remains that plenty of actors (Kurt Russell, anyone?) and films get the old pass-over at Oscar time for whatever reason -- perhaps because the film wasn't political enough or was too political or because the voters thought all of Meryl Streep's Oscars were lonely for more company.
The fact that Jada is sitting this Oscars out will surely change fuck all. It will get her a little publicity, however, which maybe was the point.
And regarding the NBA, for the record, I can dunk a three-point shot (and yes, I actually know what that is!) if you set the basket up so the rim is at knee level.
You Get Free Speech, Not Free Stopping People From Getting Home Or To The Doctor
NBC Bay area reports (with annoying autoplay video) that protesters from an offshoot of Black Lives Matter blocked all westbound lanes of San Francisco's Bay Bridge:
Members of protest groups Black Seed and the Black Queer Liberation Collective took responsibility for the protest in a statement, citing recent police shootings. "We are here to move towards an increase in the health and wellbeing of all Black people in Oakland & San Francisco," the groups wrote in a statement.
They kept thousands of people stuck in traffic. Traffic was initially stopped for about 45 minutes and was backed up for hours afterward.
From the LA Times' Matt Hamilton:
Five cars were chained together across the multi-lane highway, with one sign reading, "Black Health Matters." Another sign stated, "Decriminalize Black." At its peak, about 30 people participated in the demonstration, CHP Officer Marc Johnston said....The demonstration was carried out by Black.Seed, which identifies itself as a "Black, queer liberation collective," according to a statement released by the Anti-Police Terror Project.
The collective "shut down the Bay Bridge as a show of resistance to a system that continues to oppress Black, Queer, Brown, Indigenous and other marginalized people throughout the Bay Area," according to the statement.
Aerial footage of the protest broadcast by the Bay Area station KGO-TV showed law enforcement detaining protesters and clipping the chains holding the cars together.
Dozens also chanted, "I believe that we will win. I believe that we will win." At least one protester held a sign that read, "Black Lives Matter."
25 of these assholes were taken into custody and "booked ... on misdemeanor counts of unlawful assembly, impeding free passage and committing a public nuisance."
Way to get people to care about your cause, assholes.
Martin Luther King, Integrationist ("All Lives Matter")
Roger L. Simon wrote on MLK Day about his connection to Martin Luther King and his message:
Once upon a time, I was a civil rights worker. That was 1966, fifty years ago now, when I was living in a Sumter, South Carolina, house belonging to the very MLK's cousin, the mortician for that small city's black population who was extremely gracious to my then-wife and me. We were young Northern grad students there registering voters, teaching black history to African-American children, directing those kids in what was undoubtedly the first local production of A Raisin in the Sun and helping to integrate public facilities that were still Jim Crow.So it should come as no surprise that Dr. King has meant a lot to me -- emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. Of all the ghastly political assassinations of my youth -- JFK, RFK and MLK -- King's was the one that affected me most deeply by far. I remember dropping to my knees and sobbing the moment I heard about it.
You may already suspect I believe Dr. King would not have taken so kindly to the "Black Lives Matter" movement, that he more likely would have avowed, unlike the cowardly Martin O'Malley, that "All Lives Matter." If you don't agree with that, consider these words from King's most famous speech -- in fact the most famous American speech since the "Gettysburg Address":
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.I have a dream today!
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today!
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."
Roger continues:
Pretty beautiful, isn't it? And it ends with that inspiring quote from Isaiah -- "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together." [emphasis mine]What inspired me, what inspired so many of us about Martin, is that he was an integrationist. He wanted the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners to "be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood."
The "Black Lives Matter" people are separatists. They are not the sons and daughters of MLK. They are the sons and daughters of Stokely Carmichael and, to some extent, even Huey P. Newton. They are an unhappy reprisal of the Black Power movement that rose up just about the time I was in South Carolina. (I remember meeting the young Julian Bond at the time and him proudly showing me a leaflet from the brand new Black Panther Party of Lowndes County, Alabama. I excused the black nationalism then as a phase. Unfortunately, I was naive. Well, I was only twenty-two years old.)
What's happening now is very sad for all of us, black and white.
I truly agree.
Lumpy
Potatomashlinks.
On "Cakeage" Fees At Restaurants -- A Result Of Patrons' Very Rude BYO Cake Trend
Appallingly, people eating out are now bringing their own cakes to restaurants, and feeling quite huffily entitled to do it.
Restaurants, reports Kim Severson in The New York Times, are countering with "cakeage" fees (a takeoff on "corkage" fees, charged by a restaurant when you BYO wine):
Cakes are meaningful, so it is no surprise that people sometimes bring them along to a restaurant as a celebratory coda to a special meal. And it's no surprise that restaurants don't always like it.So restaurants often charge customers to cut and plate the cake. Sometimes they add a scoop of ice cream. The practice has come to be called cakeage.
...Neal McCarthy, who owns the Atlanta restaurant Miller Union with the chef Steven Satterfield, takes things a step further. His private Instagram account is filled with photographs of cakes customers have carried into Miller Union. He pokes fun at grocery store monstrosities and cakes fashioned from chocolate chip cookie dough, cracking wise about garish icing and other questionable decorative choices.
"It's like my comic relief and my only way of getting back at people, even though I do it secretly," Mr. McCarthy said. "These people sought out a nice restaurant, yet they undermine it by bringing in the world's most hideous cakes."
People justifying this behavior complain that restaurants' cakes are expensive. Right.
It's like what I explain in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" about the bar/restaurant markup on drinks:
You're paying not just for that bottle of wine but for the atmosphere and the experience in a restaurant...
And if this is troubling to you, also from my book...
...There's an obvious solution: Stay home and snap your fingers at your cat to bring you your martini chop-chop.
What's that? You're "gluten intolerant"?
Right. Because you're one of, like, six people in the population with celiac disease, or -- more likely -- because you long for attention, and you figured the covert narcissism of being a total pain in the ass while ordering would be an easy way to get the job done.
Sorry -- I digress.
Say you actually are gluten intolerant.
Easy solution: Order the fucking ice cream and stick a candle in it.
No, that's not the perrrfectest cake ever in the history of mankind.
And so the fuck what.
Whatever happened to us as people that everything now must be absolutely perfect, down to the molecule, or...what...we'll shrivel up and die?
A restaurant is in business to make money, not to provide you with a platform to serve cheap grocery store cake or cake made with tofu toenails or whatever your particular special snowflake cake perversion happens to be.
Want your extwa special cakiepoo as the grand uglyass finale to your restaurant meal? Eat out and then serve the cake at home!
A comment on the NYT piece from the restauranteur:
Mr McCarthy
I think my point has been lost here. I have worked in restaurants my whole working life and love hospitality and people. My restaurant is based around the seasons harvest I have a pastry chef that bakes vegan, gluten free cakes upon request. What I have a problem with is people bringing supermarket cakes without calling ahead to ask if it is ok. If the people do so we don't always charge them to bring in the cake. If people spend the time to bake a cake themselves and it has meaning to them I am all for it. My instergram page is personal and is only funny to me and a small group of my friends. I have a very dry sense of humor.
Another comment, taking into account the litigiousness of so many in our society:
Lois
I owned a restaurant for 26 years. I did not allow food to be brought into my restaurant. Why? It was a health risk. If we served the cake we were held responsible. My insurance company strongly recommended that no food be brought into the establishment. In rural WI, it is common for people to bring food to funeral dinners. We had numerous problems with the food coming in as we had no idea what was in the cake or dessert, what were the conditions of the kitchen that the product was produced in and how long was the product without refrigeration. I was criticized for our policy but my restaurant never had a food safety issue or safety violation. Darn proud of that.
Getting Experience The Easier, Less Deadly Way
I had a horrible, friendless childhood, and two things kept me from being a kiddie suicide:
1. Being too chicken to off myself.
2. Reading books.
Books showed me that there was more of a world out there -- one I wanted to be a part of -- in addition to showing me how other human beings thought and felt and handled sticky life situations.
Accordingly, here's how Marine General James Mattis, on the verge of his 2004 Iraq deployment, responded an email from a colleague asking him about "importance of reading and military history for officers," many of whom found themselves "too busy to read."
That email, reprinted by Business Insider:
[Dear, "Bill"]The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men's experience), i.e. the hard way. By reading, you learn through others' experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.
Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. It doesn't give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.
With [Task Force] 58, I had w/ me Slim's book, books about the Russian and British experiences in [Afghanistan], and a couple others. Going into Iraq, "The Siege" (about the Brits' defeat at Al Kut in WW I) was req'd reading for field grade officers. I also had Slim's book; reviewed T.E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom"; a good book about the life of Gertrude Bell (the Brit archaeologist who virtually founded the modern Iraq state in the aftermath of WW I and the fall of the Ottoman empire); and "From Beirut to Jerusalem". I also went deeply into Liddell Hart's book on Sherman, and Fuller's book on Alexander the Great got a lot of my attention (although I never imagined that my HQ would end up only 500 meters from where he lay in state in Babylon).
Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun.
For all the "4th Generation of War" intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc, I must respectfully say ... "Not really": Alex the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying (studying, vice just reading) the men who have gone before us.
We have been fighting on this planet for 5000 years and we should take advantage of their experience. "Winging it" and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession. As commanders and staff officers, we are coaches and sentries for our units: how can we coach anything if we don't know a hell of a lot more than just the [Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures]? What happens when you're on a dynamic battlefield and things are changing faster than higher [Headquarters] can stay abreast? Do you not adapt because you cannot conceptualize faster than the enemy's adaptation? (Darwin has a pretty good theory about the outcome for those who cannot adapt to changing circumstance -- in the information age things can change rather abruptly and at warp speed, especially the moral high ground which our regimented thinkers cede far too quickly in our recent fights.) And how can you be a sentinel and not have your unit caught flat-footed if you don't know what the warning signs are -- that your unit's preps are not sufficient for the specifics of a tasking that you have not anticipated?
Perhaps if you are in support functions waiting on the warfighters to spell out the specifics of what you are to do, you can avoid the consequences of not reading. Those who must adapt to overcoming an independent enemy's will are not allowed that luxury.
This is not new to the USMC approach to warfighting -- Going into Kuwait 12 years ago, I read (and reread) Rommel's Papers (remember "Kampstaffel"?), Montgomery's book ("Eyes Officers"...), "Grant Takes Command" (need for commanders to get along, "commanders' relationships" being more important than "command relationships"), and some others.
As a result, the enemy has paid when I had the opportunity to go against them, and I believe that many of my young guys lived because I didn't waste their lives because I didn't have the vision in my mind of how to destroy the enemy at least cost to our guys and to the innocents on the battlefields.
Hope this answers your question.... I will cc my ADC in the event he can add to this. He is the only officer I know who has read more than I.
Semper Fi, Mattis
Lunky
Oafylinks.
No, Doing Nothing When A Guy Makes Moves On You Doesn't Make It Rape
And, of course, I'm not talking about a kid here. This is a woman.
If you truly don't want to have sex, you stop the guy. You don't just lie there out of some form of pissed off/"let's see if he'll go through with this"/not feeling up to doing anything about it.
Or whatever was going through this woman's head in this "Was I raped?" Jezebel post. It started out like this.
In 1998, I was 24 years old. Somehow, though I have zero musical talent, I found myself in a band--as the vocalist, no less. We didn't perform anywhere, although I think that might have been the ultimate goal. Really, we just met up at a studio in Jersey City, where I lived at the time, and jammed out on a few late '90s R&B songs.Dave, a friend-of-a-friend from college, was the guitarist and band Svengali, and my lack of vocal talent became a bit of an issue. So each Sunday morning, before band practice, I would meet Dave at his apartment in Jersey City so we could practice the songs (Mary J. Blige's My Life, Erykah Badu's, Tyrone, SWV's Love Like This) before wasting time and money rehearsing in the studio.
Dave had made a play for me from day one. I turned him down decidedly.
One day, at his apartment before rehearsal, he asked, sincerely, why I wouldn't have sex with him. I told him, sincerely, that I wasn't attracted to him in the least. And that was that. But Dave wanted to negotiate.
"Do you have to be attracted to me to have sex with me?" he asked, looking down at his guitar.
"Well. Yeah," I said. "That's usually how that goes."
Dave looked up at me, his face brightening: "How about you just have sex with me as a favor."
You've got to admire the guy for the tactic.
For the next hour, we practiced. At least five times, I swatted Dave away as he stopped playing and tried to lean in for a kiss or a hug. I never felt endangered. I was just annoyed. I wanted to hurry up and practice my songs so the rest of the band wouldn't be pissed because I couldn't hit that low note on the Mary J. Blige song and we'd have to do that part over and over.Finally, Dave put the guitar down and said we could take a break. He edged closer and closer to me on the couch. Touched my shoulder. Kissed my neck. I didn't say no. I didn't say yes. I didn't say anything. I just sat there and dealt with it. I figured once he saw I'd be as responsive as a corpse, he'd give up.
He didn't.
Dave leaned into me until I was on my back on the sofa. He pulled my pants down. He pulled my panties down. I provided zero assistance. (Picture trying to get a denim pantsuit off of a Barbie doll). Dave pulled his own pants down. He pulled his boxers down. He put on a condom, parted my legs with his own, held himself and guided his way inside me.
I said nothing. And I didn't move a single muscle from start to finish. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours. I just know I held my breath because his natural odor turned me off. And I stayed rigid because I didn't want him to think for one second that I was enjoying any part of it. I went blank. I thought we could just "get over with it," the way a woman might do if her husband or boyfriend was in the mood and she wasn't. Except he wasn't my husband, or my boyfriend, at all.
Then it was over. He pulled his boxers and pants up. I pulled my underwear and pants up. He kissed me on the cheek.
He got the guitar out. He played some chords. I sang Mary J. Blige's My Life while he played.
She didn't even run away, all upset.
She let it happen.
And sorry, not feeling like pushing back anymore does not make it rape.
If the result bothers you, you've learned something for the next time.
She's still not sure on the rape thing:
I belong to a private group of women writers on Facebook. I shared the story about Dave and asked them all point blank. Was I raped?None of us could come up with a clear answer.
Seventeen years later, I can't come up with a clear answer either.
I'll help: No.
Advice Goddess Free Swim
It's Saturday night, and I'm a little tired, so you pick the topics. I'll post more on Sunday.
P.S. One link per comment or my spam filter will eat your post.
It's Easier To "Not Care About Money" While Living In A $10.5 Million Apartment
And -- don't forget -- while having the connections and power of a daddy who used to be President and a mommy who was Secretary of State, among other things.
Yes, we're talking about Chelsea Clinton.
A New York Daily News headline:
Chelsea Clinton: I tried to care about money but couldn't
I feel for the girl. You?
Subhead of the Leslie Larson-reported story:
The daughter of former President Bill Clinton and ex-secretary of state Hillary Clinton explained in a recent interview why she left lucrative professions and opted for working with her family's philanthropic foundation. 'I was curious if I could care about (money) on some fundamental level, and I couldn't,' she said.
You know, I don't prioritize being wealthy enough to be in advertising or some other profession where I'd make a ton of it.
However, especially with the decline of newspapers and how people want to pay writers very little for their work (compared to what writing used to pay), I care about money. In fact, I worry about money all the time.
If I were independently wealthy, I'd do exactly what I'm doing now. I'd just do it without being so worried.
That isn't "not caring" about money. That's not needing to care.
What's Wrong With Feminism, From A Former Feminist
That headline is about the writer of the article I linked.
I've actually never been a feminist or described myself that way. I realized that I was not a feminist my freshman year at the University of Michigan, after I took a women's studies class that had us reading about how all men are rapists.
Feminists frequently get their panties in a bunch over my refusing to call myself a feminist -- a term I would be embarrassed to use to describe myself. In fact, on the Facebook page of an academic society I'm the president of, my explaining that I am not a feminist but a humanist -- for the fair treatment of any person, no matter their genitalia -- sparked a post by an aghast woman and a long conversation.
Well, Barnard student Toni Airaksinen, formerly "an obedient soldier in the crusade against the patriarchy," writes at Quillette that she is not a feminist (though she attends a women's college), and I'm with her on her reasoning:
Feminism is purported to be a movement towards equality. Fair enough. Most reasonable people support that. But feminism manifests itself differently; instead of the focus on rights and equal opportunity, it is on personal victimhood, political correctness, and attacking others. And, as with all movements, the parameters of feminism are defined by the loudest voices. It is this dominant ideology that I cannot associate myself with.Contemporary feminism inculcates adherents into a cult of victimhood and exquisite vulnerability--it panders to women's traumas and teaches them that they have been victimized solely because they are female. Women's only sin? Living in a world dominated by the patriarchy. The remedy, especially for college students? Trigger warnings, safe spaces, overblown statistics on assault, intolerance of dissent and vitriolic attacks on men.
...In one year, I took three Women's Studies classes. My professors taught me that, because I was a woman, I was victimized and oppressed. Prior to enrolling, I did not see myself that way. Students were told that we are supposed to be angry. Rage was a "normal" reaction. To dismantle the systems of oppression, confrontation was required. For me, and many of my peers, these classes made us feel heady with righteousness. The more strongly we identified with these feelings, the closer we came to a sense that liberation was possible. My growing awareness and attachment to the feminism movement felt powerful, exhilarating, and even erotic.
Yet, after a while, I became disillusioned. Mentioning anything that didn't support the notion that females were unilaterally oppressed would be akin to blasphemy. Offer a more nuanced reading of the pay gap? Traitor! Bring up the topic of males who suffer violence? That doesn't matter! Suggest that the term "rape culture" is inflammatory and doesn't reflect reality? Off with your dick!
In an exquisitely dazzling climax to one of my classes, after weeks of throbbing tension between the (white) professor and an outspoken (black) female student, the student accused the professor of being racist. (In contemporary intersectional feminism, notions of class and race are collapsed into the struggle for gender liberation). The student claimed that the professor was singling her out for inappropriate use of her laptop because she was black. Instead of defusing the student's accusations, (as was her responsibility as an adult and teacher) something extraordinary happened. In a paroxysm of indignation, the professor defended herself by saying that it was she that had experienced "the most" oppression in life, since she "once was a woman in the STEM field." The professor then claimed she could not have been racist, because she was "from Italy." Some students joined the argument, taking sides. Tears were shed. The professor lost control of the classroom. What began as a midterm day devolved into a match of Oppression Olympics.
Feminism, as I've said before, has become a way to have unearned power over men.
The identification as a victim that comes with is also an extremely pernicious form of thinking -- a self-fulfilling prophecy that I want no part of, and that no emotionally healthy woman should want any part of.
via @rsmccain
Immigration Realism
Ross Douhat has a thoughtful piece on immigration issues in The New York Times:
3. Culture is very real, and cultural inheritances tend to be enduring. Present-day America attests to that fact: We pride ourselves (justifiably) on our success assimilating immigrants, but centuries after their arrival various immigrant folkways still define our country's regions and their mores. The Scandinavian diaspora across the upper Midwest still looks a great deal like Scandinavia -- hardworking, gender egalitarian, with high levels of civic trust, higher-than-average educations and incomes, etc. The cavaliers, servants, and slaves migration to Tidewater Virginia obviously still shapes the Deep South's entrenched hierarchies of race and class. The Scots-Irish migration to Appalachia and its environs is still heavily responsible for America's sky-high-by-Western-standards murder rate. And of course the wider world is full of similarly striking case studies.What this implies is that accepting immigrants from a particular country or culture or region involves accepting that your own nation, or part of your own nation, will become at least a little more like their country of origin.
...5. Punctuated immigration encourages assimilation; constant immigration limits it. Salam's essay makes this point well:
In Replenished Ethnicity, Stanford sociologist Tomás Jiménez argues that one of the main differences between the Mexican-origin population in the U.S. and the white-ethnic descendants of immigrants who arrived in the early 1900s is that because mass European immigration ended more than 80 years ago, Italian Americans do not generally find themselves in social worlds dominated by recent Italian immigrants. The result is that Italian-American identity is largely symbolic and optional, and Italian Americans are perceived as indistinguishable from other white Anglos.
This is not the case with Muslim immigration in Europe.
And a comment on Douhat's piece:
schbrg, dallas, texas
Dear Mr. Douthat, thank you for writing this essay. It is the clearest, most concise writing I have seen on immigration and its intended, and above all, unintended consequences.I am a naturalized American citizen whose first language is Spanish, although I speak English better than Spanish now.
When I came to the United States at the age of 9, I was the only Spanish speaker and was surrounded by only English speakers. The condition in Dallas schools now is almost the opposite, and English proficiency suffers among its Hispanic students.
At a time when the phrase "melting pot" is considered racist by many social justice warriors, I am afraid that what is happening in the United States is the growth of parallel societies based on English proficiency, education, and of course, income. But the melting is much more attenuated.
via @SteveStuWill
Lookie
Linkie-eyed Jacks.
School Would Rather Your Kid Pass Out Than Use Another Kid's Asthma Inhaler
In yet another piece of evidence that the administrators are too stupid and unable to think to be in charge of anything more than getting the pigs back to the barn, there's an asthma-related story out of Garland, Texas.
A girl who suffered an asthma attack faces a month in an alternative school because she accepted a classmates offer for her use the classmate's asthma inhaler.
From Fox7Austin, the latest in zero tolerance moronism:
Alexis Kyle, 13, faces the sanctions for using her classmate's inhaler. Indiyah Rush, also in 7th grade, offered it to her in gym class Tuesday at Schrade Middle school after seeing her struggle to breathe."I'm getting in trouble, but the thing is, she's getting in trouble too. She tried to help me," Kyle said.
Alexis said she had no idea she was breaking a rule by accepting the inhaler. Both Alexis and Indiyah are A-B honor roll students. Alexis also is on the step team and in theater.
The district said 30 days at alternative school is the initial automatic punishment for sharing a controlled substance, including prescription drugs like inhalers, until the principal can meet with both girls and their parents.
Alexis and her parents met with the idiots, uh, administrators, and are now waiting to hear her fate.
There's Little Closer To The Salem Witch Trials Than Campus Kangaroo Courts For Sexual Assault Accusations
A decade ago, I would have thought my own headline above to be outrageous hyperbole.
Sadly, it's become real life for those men on campus unlucky enough to have sex with a woman who decides to accuse them of sexual assault afterward.
Now, rape, of course, does happen, and I believe those accusations should be investigated, and if there's a preponderance of evidence that they occurred, they should be prosecuted. However, this should be done by the legal system, not by a kangaroo court operating on a "guilty unless proven innocent" model, as is called for on campuses by Title IX. Or rather, the abuse of Title IX by the Obama administration.
Suddenly, what was supposed to get space for girls' soccer in high school is being used as a bludgeon to ruin the lives of men.
And with the abusive standard of "evidence," the campus kangaroo court proceeding for sexual assault really does compare to the Salem Witch Trials, in which a mere accusation was enough to deem people (mostly women) witches and take their lives from them.
And no, there's no hanging in the campus diag, but men's lives -- the lives they might have had pre-accusation and expulsion -- are being taken from them simply because a woman points the finger at them. As the sexual assault system is now set up on campus, per the Obama administration, there's no real chance for a man to defend himself.
This is how an Amherst man was expelled from school for sexual assault -- in a case where he was passed out drunk, given a blow job by a woman while unconscious, and said to have had nonconsensual sex with her...while unconscious. Yes, even the most absurd accusations stand under this system.
There's a letter in the Michigan State Newspaper from a woman whose male partner went through this -- and had his life ruined by it.
Some excerpts:
Several days ago, you chose to dismiss my partner from MSU based on a false allegation of sexual misconduct. The investigation leading up to this decision took over a year - 429 days, and for months my partner and I were fraught with anxiety over your decision.Now that your decision has been made, I am devastated and my life has been turned upside-down. MSU has committed a great injustice by continuing to pursue an allegation despite no credible evidence, despite months and months of insistence of innocence, despite our proving time and time again that the university has mistreated my partner, despite your own admittance that procedural errors had occurred, despite the fact my partner was never given a chance at a hearing, and despite the fact that the claimant themselves performed sexual acts on my partner without my partner's consent.
I should not, however, be surprised. The investigation by the OCR found a number of issues in MSU's process that have contributed to a false finding of guilt in the case of my partner. Most alarming to me was the claim MSU made to OCR that they "have not yet had a case where the administrator or hearing board believed that the respondent met his or her burden of proof" within the context of an appeal, which either indicates that every single respondent at MSU has indeed been guilty of the allegations against them, or that this university simply does not provide fair procedures to allow for respondents to actually prove they are innocent. Given my experiences with the process, it is almost certainly the latter option.
...This was extremely dangerous advice, and I fear for what may have happened if I were not around to support my partner and help them deal with the emotions this investigation has caused them to experience. Given the cost associated with outside counseling services, as well as my partner's equal right as a student to take advantage of university resources, I continue to find Mr. Shafer's advice to be horribly damaging.
...As a feminist, I am often critical of men who suggest the possibility of "reverse sexism" and I do still believe that it does not actually exist. However, gender discrimination in this context is a very real issue. Too often I hear stories about alleged assaults where both parties were heavily intoxicated, but one party (typically female) reports the incident as an assault, though it could very reasonably be argued that she had been the assailant because of the state of intoxication of both parties.
This bias stems from an antiquated notion of what it means to have sex, wherein a man receives sex from a woman. We still believe sex is a transaction, with one party gaining something and the other party losing. In this case, my partner engaged in mutually consensual and sober intercourse with the claimant and was assaulted by the claimant, but responsibility lies with my partner because of their gender. That is simply horrifying.
I write to you because I am disgusted by the way this university treats its students who are pleading for a chance to speak. I write to you because I am no longer comfortable with being silent in the face of injustice. I write to you because this system that is supposedly designed to be fair and "fact-finding" picks and chooses which facts to consider in order to find innocent people guilty. I write to you because this case has taught me that gender discrimination does exist. I write to you because I still do not believe this university should expel innocent students on nothing more than the words of another student without being given the chance to speak in person to defend themselves.
By the way, the Wash Ex's Ashe Schow reports that the editor of the paper vetted the woman and saw the documents from the university about the case.
via @instapundit
Bernie Sanders Gets A Feminist Spanking Over Campus Rape Views
At Slate, Nora Caplan-Bricker takes Sanders to task for being "out of step" with young feminists on his (wow, how crazy!) notion that campus rape accusations should not be funneled to a campus kangaroo court, but sent to the criminal justice system.
He said this on Monday night:
Rape and assault is rape or assault whether it takes place on a campus or on a dark street. And if a student rapes a fellow student, that has got to be understood to be a very serious crime. It has got to get outside of the school and have a police investigation. And that has got to take place.Too many schools now are saying, well, this is a student issue, let's deal with it. I disagree with that. It is a crime, and it has to be treated as a serious crime. And you are seeing now the real horror of many women who have been assaulted or raped sitting in a classroom alongside somebody who raped them. Rape is a very, very serious crime. It has to be prosecuted, and it has to be dealt with.
Caplan-Bricker:
Some campus rape survivors do go to the police and the courts, but many don't want to submit themselves to a grueling process that's highly unlikely to result in a conviction.
Yes, it's so much easier to just remove men's due process rights so you can have them expelled from school.
Because some woman said so.
Caplan-Bricker:
With his stumble this week, Sanders provided a reminder that Clinton isn't just running as our potential first woman president. She's also the candidate with the deepest genuine knowledge of the issues women face.
Because so many of us have been sneakily sending classified documents from private servers and have people questioning our role in the Benghazi terror attack, to just pull a few off the top.
via @CHSommers
Linkiedough
Raw, with chocolate chips.
You Might Need Zyrtec Because (Ancestral) Grandma Banged A Neanderthal
Your allergies may have mono-browed origins. So suggest two new studies in the American Journal of Human Genetics, reports Newser.
One of the studies reports three genes having to do with "innate immunity" in modern humans show more similarities to Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes than the rest.Innate immunity is the body's first response to pathogens and other foreign substances, NPR reports. The three genes from Neanderthals and Denisovans "are key components of innate immunity and provide an important first line of immune defense against bacteria, fungi, and parasites," according to the second study. But there's a "trade-off," as researcher Janet Kelso puts it. "I suppose that some of us can blame Neanderthals for our susceptibility to common allergies, like hay fever," she tells NPR. That's because these genes that helped ancient humans ward off disease in a new world can cause the body to overreact to minor foreign substances, such as pollen, according to the press release.
via @Instapundit
Warning: I Might Be A Sex Trafficker
When Gregg and I stay at a hotel, we don't get maid service, mainly because he puts out all his electronics and wants to leave them out and doesn't want anybody messing with them.
He was raised by a nice mama, and actually makes the bed on the days the maid doesn't come in. (I find this sweet, but do not participate!)
Well, this no maid service thing is apparently one of the ways the geniuses at DHS have determined means you could very well be a sex trafficker.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown reports at Reason that frequent minibar-restock requests and lots of used condoms are among other signs you might be a sex trafficker, and they plan to train hotel staff to spot the signs.
The minibar thing might be a sign -- that you're a total dumbshit to pay those prices instead of walking next door or whatever to 7-Eleven.
Some of the other signs:
garbage cans containing many used condomsfrequent use of "Do Not Disturb" sign on room door
excessive foot traffic in and out of a room
"excessive sex paraphernalia" in room
an "overly smelly room" that reeks of "cigarette, marijuana, sweat, bodily fluids, and musk"
a guest who "averts eyes or does not make eye contact"
individuals "dressed inappropriate for age" or with "lower quality clothing than companions"
guests with "suspicious tattoos"
"Suspicious tattoos"? Hilarious.
As are many of the rest, save for how the government has no business turning maids into spies before there is evidence that anyone has committed a crime.
Linky Doo
Ruh-roh!
How Government Meddling Raises The Cost Of College And Home Ownership And Messes Up Both
The problem is the sense that evvverybody is entitled to everything, and never mind whether you've earned it.
It's one thing for a few scholarships to deserving hardworking and brilliant poor kids -- which is how scholarships used to be handed out, with some money here and there for qualified kids from poorer families.
Kids who were not so top tier in smarts or promise were able to work and earn their way through college -- that is, before government's meddling distorted the cost of college, to the point where a college education now costs more than a home in many places.
It also means that kids who don't belong in college now go -- and often flunk out or aren't very employable afterward.
As Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan wrote in 2012 at USNews:
And the price of a college education soared--just as one would expect from a market flooded with cheap money. By law, lenders cannot even deny Stafford and Perkins loans (types of federal student loans) based on the borrower's credit or employment status. What other reason is there to deny a loan? And just as home buyers took out loans to speculate on houses they could never hope to afford, students are taking out loans to cover educations they often cannot complete and which often do not hold value in the market even when completed. Government meddling has again separated profit from risk. Universities get to keep the tuition profits while taxpayers are forced to shoulder the risk of students not paying back their loans.Once again government has created the conditions for wholesale failure, and failure is upon us.
From 1976 to 2010, the prices of all commodities rose 280 percent. The price of homes rose 400 percent. Private education? A whopping 1,000 percent.
...Even when homeowners got hopelessly behind on their mortgages, two options helped. First, they could declare bankruptcy and free themselves of their crippling debt; second, they could sell their houses to pay down most of their loans.
Students don't have either of these options. It's illegal to absolve student loan debt through bankruptcy, and you can't sell back an education.
The simple fact of the matter should be obvious by now: Government created this mess, in both instances, by forcing the market to provide loans it would not have granted otherwise. As is its custom, government did by force what no private lender would have ever done by choice. This is the breeding ground for bubbles, and this one will burst just as they all do. As with the last bubble, politicians will blame the "greed" of the marketplace. How many more bubbles must we endure before we realize that the problem isn't greed and it isn't markets? The problem is government interference.
More on how government jiggering of home ownership similarly distorted and messed it up.
As Glenn Reynolds put this:
The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we'll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren't causes of middle-class status, they're markers for possessing the kinds of traits -- self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. -- that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn't produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.
As Philo of Alexandria, who calls the above "Reynolds' Law," explains:
Reynolds' Law thus strikes at the heart of progressivism as a political ideology. Progressivism can't deliver on its central promise. In fact, it's guaranteed to make things worse in exactly that respect. It's not that it sacrifices some degree of one good (liberty or prosperity, say) to achieve a greater degree of another (equality). That suggests that the choice between conservatism and progressivism is a matter of tradeoffs, balances, and maybe even taste. Reynolds' Law implies that progressivism sacrifices some (actually considerable) degrees of liberty and prosperity to move us away from equality by undermining the characters and thus behavior patterns of those they promise to help.Not coincidentally, progressives accumulate power for themselves, not only by seizing it as a necessary means to their goals but by aggravating the very social problems they promise to address, thus creating an ever more powerful argument that something has to be done.
What else is there to do but create more government and meddle further into markets and citizens' lives -- making things worse for those who have earned their way into college and homes?
I could have used one of those risky loans to buy a home in very expensive LA. Had I done so, somebody else would now be living in that home after the bank foreclosed on me. I can't afford to do more than rent, and that's clear, so renter I am.
Saudi Men: Eyeshadow Causes Rape
From Daniel Greenfield at FrontPageMag:
Why are Saudi men attacking women? According to 9 out out of 10 Saudi men, it's all about the eyeshadow. It has to be the eyeshadow since there's not much else you can see of a traditional Saudi woman's face....Fortunately Saudi Arabia does have penalties for women who drive and wear too much eyeshadow.
Presumed Guilty: It's How Police Get To Stage Those Fun Swat Raids On Families Actually Guilty Of Nothing
We need police to protect us from people who try to injure us or take our property or our lives.
But our rights are increasingly eroded and violated by police going after crimes that should not be crimes -- like choosing to grow certain kinds of plants -- and by presuming citizens "guilty" because, wild guess, they could be doing something illegal.
Radley Balko writes in the WaPo about the "wet tea leaves" drug raid -- a case in which a family had their home raided by a tactical team.
Evidence of their "guilt" as pot growers?
Oh, well, the fact that the husband shopped at a hydroponic gardening store. And wet loose tea leaves in the garbage that later (wrongly) tested positive for pot.
Yes, instead of protecting people from actual crime, the cops are rooting through people's trash to find their kitchen leavings, hoping to find them guilty...of something.
As Balko puts it about the thinking here on the gardening supplies:
It's important to emphasize that it was Harte's completely legal, completely innocuous purchase of gardening supplies to grow tomatoes and vegetables with his son that made him a suspect in the first place. Prior to that, he was unknown to the police. He had done nothing else to arouse suspicion. This is a major source of a lot of the outrage about this case. If Harte had never gone to that particular store, or had bought the supplies at Walmart, there's no trash pull, no alleged false positives on the field tests and no raid.Moreover, Harte was with his children, then ages 6 and 12, when he went to the store. I suppose that there are some marijuana growers out there who might take their young children with them when they buy growing supplies. But maybe, just maybe, the presence of Harte's kids suggests he wasn't the sort of criminal worthy of a tactical team.
But that isn't how this investigation was conducted. Everyone observed by the officer staking out this store had his or her license plate recorded and turned over to local police. There was no effort to distinguish innocent customers from criminal suspects. (If there was, it's hard to see what Harte did to put himself among the latter.) The officer was in the parking lot, so there was no effort to even make distinctions based on what the customers had purchased. Even here, Harte was seen carrying a "small bag," which presumably wouldn't be large enough hold equipment for a major operation. His mere presence at the store made him a target of investigation.
One more point here. Dep. Burns notes in his affidavit that he knows "from personal past experience," this hydroponic gardening store sells equipment that customers use to grow marijuana. I'm sure that's true. But so do Walmart and Home Depot. As we'll see later in this post, of the hundreds of names Sgt. Wingo collected, the entire "Operation Constant Gardener" 2012 operation turned up less than a half dozen marijuana "grows." And all but a couple of those were either inactive, or had less than 10 plants. You'd probably find just as high a proportion of marijuana offenders by taking down license plates at Bonnaroo, or at a Bernie Sanders rally.
And get this:
The Hartes had to pay $25,000 in legal fees just to get a court to order the sheriff to turn over the documents related to their case. As I noted in a previous post, because of the Hartes, the Kansas legislature has since revised the law, but the new version is only marginally better. The targets of these investigations can now obtain documents related to their case without a court order, but police agencies can still deny open records requests from media outlets, watchdog groups, or attorneys interested in researching patterns or practices of possible misconduct.
And what this was really about? Not pot farming but press release farming:
The 4/20 publicity stunt"Operation Constant Gardener" was essentially a publicity stunt by a slew of law enforcement agencies in Kansas and Missouri. Sheriff Denning, along with other law enforcement officials across the state, had pre-planned press conferences on the afternoon of April 20th, which of course is the unofficial holiday of pot smokers. The press conferences were to announce all the busts and arrests produced by the operation. The public information officer for the Johnson County Sheriff's Department had already pre-drafted a press release under the heading ""Law Enforcement Celebrates 420 with Multitude of Arrests."
As somebody called hoodoof posted at HackerNews:
All drug raids are outrageous. The stupid war on drugs is tearing society apart, criminalising citizens, filling jails, ripping apart families, wasting police and court resources, throwing away tax on enforcement, missing out on tax revenue and funnelling billions to organised crime. All because people want to get high, which is (for most drugs) a personal choice health issue.
Listy
Bulletpointy links.
American Universities: Now The Place That Ideas Go To Be Buried
Alan Dershowitz notes that universities will no longer be places where ideas are exchanged.
In a Free Beacon piece by David Rutz, Dershowitz is quoted about what students are demanding:
"They may want superficial diversity of gender or superficial diversity of color, but they don't want diversity of ideas," he said. "I don't want to make analogies to the 1930s, but we have to remember that it was the students at universities who first started burning books during the Nazi regime, and these students are book burners. They don't want to hear diverse views on college campuses."..."It's the worst kind of hypocrisy," Dershowitz said. "They want complete freedom over their sex lives, over their personal lives, over the use of drugs, but they want Mommy and Daddy Dean and President to please give them a safe place, protect them from ideas that may be insensitive, maybe will make them think."
Dershowitz mentioned the double standard in what constitutes speech that should be banned in the eyes of angry students, mentioning the kerfuffle at Manhattan's Hunter College where pro-Palestinian activists blamed "Zionist administrators" for high tuition costs, a blatantly anti-Semitic remark. That didn't get national play at all, however.
"It is free speech for me, not for thee, and universities should not tolerate this kind of hypocrisy, double standard, and college administrators have to start treating students as adults," he said.
Unfortunately, I think this seems unlikely to happen without some big Free Speech Matters crisis.
Related: Not surprisingly, "adult" coloring books are increasingly popular on campuses.
Victim Chic: Black Students Demanding An On-Campus Blacks-Only Ghetto
There's reverse victimization now, and by that I mean there's power in being a victim, and identity, too.
For feminists, it's often a way to have unearned power, and for black students (or "students of color"), it is as well.
Yes, after so many fought segregation, black students are now demanding it on campuses across America -- "safe spaces" where only blacks can be or go; no white students allowed.
Alec Dent posts at The College Fix:
The requests for segregated spaces are found among some of the demand lists put forth by students who took part in protests this fall alleging their campuses are oppressive, discriminatory, and represent institutionalized racism.The demands have been presented to campus administrators and are chronicled by TheDemands.org, a website run by a racial advocacy group called the Black Liberation Collective.
Not all of the 76 demand lists, each from a different university, seek segregated spaces -- but several do.
At UCLA, the Afrikan Student Union is insisting upon an "Afrikan Diaspora floor" as well as an "Afro-house."
"Black students lack spaces where they feel safe and comfortable," the UCLA demands state. "The Afrikan Diaspora floor is a way for us to connect more to other Black students, the Afrikan Student Union, and the Afro-Am department. The floor should be branded as a safe space for all Black students."
As for the "creation and support of a UCLA Afro-house," the demands state "many Black students cannot afford to live in Westwood with the high prices of rent. An Afro-house would provide a cheaper alternative housing solution for Black students, that would also serve as a safe space for Black Bruins to congregate and learn from each other."
Um, idiots, having black skin doesn't mean you can't afford Westwood; having under-wealthy parents does. This happens -- to blacks and whites.
Should there be "whites only" and "blacks only" drinking fountains, too?
And a warning: Life doesn't come with "safe spaces" for only people with black skin, so you'd best mix with white and other colors of people.
Oh, and there already are "blacks only" spaces for college students: They're called "Morehouse" and "Howard."
Yokel
Neighborlinkie.
Gender-Rigid
I'm having a heteronormative day. You?
How A Free, Western Society Commits Suicide
It brings in people whose religious principles allow -- and encourage -- them to make the society less free for those who live in it.
From thelocal.at:
Vienna's police chief has caused outrage by advising women in the wake of sexual assaults over New Year not to go out on the streets alone.The advice by Vienna police boss Gerhard Pürstl came as it was revealed that several women in Salzburg reported being sexually assaulted by men on New Year's Eve.
Three men have since been arrested, with police saying in a statement that they are Syrian and Afghan nationals.
In neighbouring Germany, more than 100 women have come forward to say they were assaulted over New Year by groups of men who were reportedly of Arab or north African appearance.
In the wake of the German scandal, Pürstl was asked about the incidents and about the risks that women face. "Women should in general not go out on the streets at night alone, they should avoid suspicious looking areas and also when in pubs and clubs should only accept drinks from people they know," he told the Krone newspaper.
The statement immediately attracted criticism from Green party women's affairs spokesman Berivan Aslan who said: "Should women now only go out with bodyguards if they want to avoid being told it was their fault when they get into difficulties?"
Well, such is the case if refugees keep flooding in who have an ideology that calls for women to be men's property, under men's control, and contends that men cannot control themselves if women are not blocked out by cloth.
Remember this one from Australia's most senior Muslim cleric? (From a Daily Mail piece by Richard Shears.):
A Muslim cleric's claim that women who do not wear the veil are like 'uncovered meat' who attract sexual predators sparked outrage around Australia yesterday.Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, the nation's most senior Muslim cleric, compared immodestly-dressed women who do not wear the Islamic headdress with meat that is left uncovered in the street and is then eaten by cats.
...In a Ramadan sermon in a Sydney mosque, Sheik al-Hilali suggested that a group of Muslim men recently jailed for many years for gang rapes were not entirely to blame.
There were women, he said, who 'sway suggestively' and wore make-up and immodest dress "and then you get a judge without mercy and gives you 65 years. But the problem, but the problem all began with who?" he said, referring to the women victims.
Addressing 500 worshippers on the topic of adultery, Sheik al-Hilali added: "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it..whose fault is it - the cats or the uncovered meat?
"The uncovered meat is the problem."
He went on: "If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab (veil), no problem would have occurred."
Women, he said, were 'weapons' used by Satan to control men.
Another such view by a top cleric -- that women are responsible for being raped if they are not dressed modestly.
As Andrew McCarthy puts it:
If they want to be safe, Sheikh Qaradawi warns, they must submit to Islam's sartorial suffocation. If not, well, they have it coming.
I really don't know what the solution is for our society, because we also don't want to kill the principles this country was founded on as a means of trying to protect ourselves -- but we need to do something. Any ideas?
Kids Prosecuted For Sexting Are Victims Of Abuse -- By The Government Prosecuting Them
Enough with the laws that go after teens who sext each other, deeming them sex offenders...ruining their lives for what's become common teen behavior.
Robby Soave writes at USA Today:
While sending and receiving sexually explicit photographs of underage children is illegal everywhere in the U.S., most states fail to distinguish between truly evil, predatory behavior -- say, a 40-year-old sexting a 13-year-old -- and teens who are basically the same age participating in consensual relationships -- a 17-year-old sexting a 15-year-old, for instance. While some states consider the latter category of crimes to be misdemeanors, Virginia does not distinguish offenders by age. A Virginia teen who sends a nude picture of himself can receive three felony charges for creating, distributing and possessing child pornography. Convicted offenders -- even teen offenders -- are placed on the sex offender registry....Perhaps no case underlines the absurdities of these laws better than the witch hunt against a North Carolina 17-year-old boy, Cormega Copening, who exchanged sexts with his girlfriend, 16. Police searched his phone for unrelated reasons, found the pictures and charged him with sexually exploiting minors: his girlfriend, and himself. Indeed, North Carolina's child pornography laws consider teens to be minors until they turn 18. But the age of consent in North Carolina is 16, meaning that sex between them was legal -- just not filming or photographing it. Further complicating the picture, North Carolina is one of two states that sets the age of adulthood -- for sentencing purposes -- at 16. In other words, the state could charge Copening as an adult for exploiting a minor, though he was the minor. He could have been jailed up to 10 years and was fortunate to get off with probation.
Proponents of these laws claim they are necessary to protect kids from sex predators. They also frequently insist that teens shouldn't be sexting anyway, and that there's no harm in keeping the activity illegal. What they don't seem to understand is that sexts are ubiquitous -- more than half of college undergraduates surveyed sent them as minors, according to researchers at Drexel University. Are these kids taking on some risk? Sure. Should their parents and teachers caution them against sexting? Absolutely. But arresting them, expelling them from school, smearing their names in the news media and placing them on the sex offender registry are all punishments vastly disproportionate to the "crime." Funneling teens into the criminal justice system for expressing sexual interest in other teens is simply much more harmful to them than sexting is.
Michigan Governor And His Staff Treated Flint Like It Was Filled With Throwaway People
People in Flint, Michigan are now facing an irreversible health crisis due to lead in their water.
According to the date on an email -- July 2015 -- Snyder's then-chief of staff, Dennis Muchmore, knew at least this summer. Yet, only on Tuesday did the governor declare a state of emergency due to the lead in the water supply.
Text from that email from Muchmore to a health-department official in July 2015 (via the Graham story linked below):
I'm frustrated by the water issue in Flint I really don't think people are getting the benefit of the doubt. Now they are concerned and rightfully so about the lead level studies they are receiving. These folks are scared and worried about the health impacts and they are basically getting blown off by us (as a state we're just not sympathizing with their plight).
People don't want you to sympathize that their child is getting irreversible brain damage from lead in the water. They want you to stop it -- like it's your own child -- and that would be your responsibility as a public official; especially one in a position of power.
How anybody can just shrug off all those babies and others being ruined by the water, I just can't comprehend.
It gets worse. According to an Alana Semuels story in The Atlantic in July, 2015, residents believe that the city knew about the water problems as soon as May 2014.
David A. Graham writes in The Atlantic:
On Tuesday, Governor Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency due to lead in the water supply. The same day, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it is investigating what went wrong in the city. Several top officials have resigned, and Snyder apologized. But that's only so comforting for residents. They're drinking donated water supplies--though those donations are reportedly running dry--or using filters. Public schools have been ordered to shut off taps. Residents, and particularly children, are being poisoned by lead, which can cause irreversible brain damage and affect physical health. It could cost $1.5 billion to fix the problem, a staggering sum for any city, much less one already struggling as badly as Flint is....On Thursday, while declaring the state of emergency, Snyder wouldn't say when he became aware of the lead problem in Flint. The governor--a trained engineer who likes to portray himself as a can-do manager--reportedly grew testy when asked repeatedly about his own awareness.
Aging Pipes Are Poisoning America's Tap Water
The problem dates back to April 2014, when Flint was under the direction of an emergency manager appointed by the state to try to fix the broken city. (Michigan law provides for the governor to select managers, and the provision has been used in several places in recent years, most prominently Detroit.) To save money, the city began drawing its water from the Flint River, rather than from Detroit's system, which was deemed too costly. But the river's water was high in salt, which helped corrode Flint's aging pipes, leaching lead into the water supply.
The move saved millions, but the problems started becoming apparent almost immediately. The water starting smelling like rotten eggs. Engineers responded to that problem by jacking up the chlorine level, leading to dangerous toxicity. GM discovered that city water was corroding engines at a Flint factory and switched sources. Then children and others started getting rashes and falling sick. Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech environmental-engineering professor, found that the water had nearly 900 times the recommend EPA limit for lead particles. As my colleague Alana Semuels noted in a deeply reported feature in July 2015, residents believe the city knew about problems as soon as May 2014. Yet as late as February 2015, even after tests showed dangerous lead levels, officials were telling residents there was no threat.
You'd better believe that if this happened in Bloomfield Hills (richville), they'd have cared fast. But Flint is packed to the gills with the poor and uninfluential.
This shows -- in a truly sick and horrible way -- what I've seen locally and nationally: It's just bullshit that we get "equal representation." Money talks, and it's the rare elected official who doesn't jump when the money says jump -- and do very little when the money isn't there flapping in the direction of "Do something!"
Lumpy
Mashed linkies.
Live, Tonight, My HumanLab Podcast, 7 to 7:30 pm PT; 10-10:30 pm ET: Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman On Creativity
It's Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science.
On tonight's show, noted creativity and intelligence researcher Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman explains how creative brains work and, using findings from psychology and neuroscience, explains practices we can all use to function at our creative best.
Link to the show -- live at the times above, and available afterward at the same link (and on iTunes and Stitcher): http://tobtr.com/8197361
Kaufman's book, co-authored with Carolyn Gregoire, that we're discussing on the show: Wired To Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind.
Join me and all my fascinating guests every Sun from 7-7:30 pm PT and 10-10:30 pm ET, here at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
And please buy my science-based, funny book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck." (Only $11ish for a new copy -- which supports the work I do on this show.)
Bushwick Gallery Owner (To Activist) On "The Liberal Racism Of Low Expectations ... In Your Parochial Backwater Of A Mind..."
A Bushwick (long-deadly slum in Brooklyn) gallery owner -- Ethan Pettit -- who has been accused of "gentrification," takes on the activist, Anthony Rosado, saying that artists do gentrify a neighborhood, and that's a good thing.
At Gothamist, Emma Whitford writes:
Described in a Ted Talk bio as a "writer, performer, and cheerleader" in the early Williamsburg art scene in the 1980s, Pettit gave a talk at TedXBushwick in March 2015 entitled "Art Causes Gentrification." In the talk he posits that, "Artists seed in the neighborhood all of the essential elements we need to get the neighborhood going."...Pettit referred to Bushwick as a "blighted and crime-ridden community" and added later that "artists were the first wave of gentrifiers who turned this mess around."
Pettit also added, in a Facebook comment: 
And more from Whitford's post:
In response to a comment from Giron challenging the "Bushwick 200" event's inclusion of real estate as a category in light of "the endemic harassment and displacement of working class Black and Latino families from the neighborhood," Pettit wrote: "Your neighborhoods were in bad shape dude. It was not some magisterial Inca civilization I assure you."
Naturally, another activist responded by saying, "This is the fact of hipster racism."
And this is Bushwick circa 2000, from a New York Times story by Julian E. Barnes:
Today, most of the tracts of charred, vacant land have given way to new homes. Between 1990 and 1997, the neighborhood had a net gain of 738 new housing units, a number likely to increase in this year's census count. As in the rest of the city, crime has dropped sharply, as a result of a strong national economy, less crack cocaine use and more aggressive policing. In the last six years, murders are down 72 percent and robberies 58 percent.But for every gain, a problem lingers. Bushwick has the borough's highest number of children on public assistance and its second highest rate of hospitalization for asthma, and the city's highest rate of childhood lead poisoning. The graduation rate at Bushwick High School is 35 percent, compared with 61 percent for the borough.
Oh, what a charming ungentrified urban eden it was!
More on the changes (largely due to state money being poured into the hole that was Bushwick) here at Wikipedia (bottom of the entry).
A Rolling Penn Gathers A Mass-Murdering Drug Lord
As Popehat put it:
@Popehat
Rolling Stone is seriously running out of bed to shit.
In case you've fallen into a recent media coma, in the wake of the Rolling Stone false "rape" debacle, they published an "interview" by Sean Penn of vile drug kingpin and mass murderer Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman:
Chapo puts his arm over my shoulder and renews his request that I see him in eight days. "I'll be saying goodbye now," he says. At this moment, I expel a minor traveler's flatulence (sorry), and with it, I experience the same chivalry he'd offered when putting Kate to bed, as he pretends not to notice.
Awww! How sweet!
Xeni Jardin tweets:
@xeni
"An Interview With Sean Penn" will become a security industry shorthand joke for careless situational opsec, I called it first people
My response:
@amyalkon
I think it should be called "Jumping the Spiccoli."
On a happy note, it seems that ever-useful idiot Penn was the one who unwittingly led Mexican Marines tracking the drug cartel kingpin.
The New York Post on Penn's swooning over El Chapo.
West-Hating Western Elites And Jihadi Death Squadders Have Something In Common
Victor Davis Hanson writes at NRO that Western capitalist societies (largely driven by the inventions and advances of white men) are the attack targets of the multi-culti white privilege-accusing elites and jihadists alike -- as the elites remain here and the jihadists flock here:
Paradoxes arise in attacking the West in general and the so-called European diaspora in particular. First, there is the obvious question: "Compared to what?" There are plenty of alternative cultures unstained by past Western imperialism and colonialism. Are their legacies more congenial to the present politically correct progressive agendas?Do Islamic republics -- Iran, for example -- have a more reputable record of protecting gays or urban young women than does Europe or the United States? Is the venerable tradition of China more tolerant of religious and racial minorities? Would Michael Moore be permitted to be an edgier propagandist in Beijing? Are there safe spaces in Cuba or trigger warnings in Nicaragua?
In truth, the entire idea of self-criticism and self-reflection is mostly a Western aberration, not found elsewhere in the contemporary or indeed the ancient non-Western world. So critics of the West must resort to disparaging dead Westerners of a less liberal era even though there are plenty of present-day racist, homophobic, nativist, misogynist, and xenophobic cultures that would offer far easier targets for their wrath. Why pick on the fairly liberal Western societies of the past and ignore the thoroughly illiberal societies of the present?
It works the way communism did -- the rise unearned power by the undeserving over the many (or individuals unlucky enough to speak freely within earshot of the power-grabbing):
The hypocrisy of trashing what you take for granted is just a small inconvenience in what is otherwise a wise career investment. The trick is to shear the Western sheep, not kill it. Ultimately, campus radicals always end up as merchants haggling over a sale, as they call for more diversity czars and community organizers, more race- or gender-based hiring and admissions, more gut courses -- more agendas that benefit mostly themselves. Is there a college president in extremis who has not tried to survive the psychodramatic campus storm by pulling out his official checkbook and writing a check with someone else's money?
Oh, and conveniently:
Another reason for hating the West in the abstract is that it is easy to do so. Russians who might want to criticize Putin are either too busy trying to scrounge a living or too fearful for their lives. Try demonstrating for the construction of a Christian cathedral in Qatar. Read what the Mexican Constitution says about race and immigration into Mexico. Are there diversity deans in central-Mexican universities or in China?
In short, those jihadis and campus crybabies had best be careful what they're campaigning for:
Trashing the West is like tapping a maple tree for its syrup -- lucrative and tasty as long as too many holes do not kill the host.
Lulu
Linkielinkie.
Like "The Nutcracker Suite" For Trash Cans
Yes, we are totally unprepared here in Los Angeles for the sky to let out more than a single tear. But you do have to admit that it's pretty here.
Evidence of Tuesday's heavy rains was all too apparent in Highland Park, where a long line of toppled trash cans was swept down a residential street by a river of fast-moving water.Many other neighborhoods were also inundated with water as the first of a predicted series of powerful storms moved through Southern California.Read KTLA's story here: http://on.ktla.com/QjSyI
Posted by KTLA 5 News on Tuesday, 5 January 2016
Obama Labor Regulations May Eat Up All The Hippie Food Co-ops
These co-ops (like the co-op that sells yicky "health food" on Broadway in Santa Monica), give members a discount on their food if they put in a certain number of days per month doing work at the place. So, who loses from this? People who need food to be more affordable!
Conor D. Wolf writes at The Daily Caller:
A New York based food co-op is looking into ending it's well-known, volunteer-based model over concerns it leaves them open to federal complaints, according to reports Sunday.Federal agencies have moved to redefined employment under President Barack Obama. The definition has grown to include workers who were not traditionally considered employees. Some members at Honest Weight Food Co-Op are concerned the widening definition puts their business model at risk of federal scrutiny. Food co-ops work on a volunteer and sharing basis with few, if any, traditional employees.
"The time to make a change is now, before we have a complaint filed against us," Board Member Deborah Dennis told ABC News. "And I don't think our membership is there yet. I don't know what's going to happen."
If changes continue, federal labor officials could classify members as employees rather than volunteers, which could put the co-op in violation of minimum wage and worker protection laws.
These places can turn into stores with traditional employee relationships only -- and higher prices for people who used to be able to barter work for food.
Some of these people may be disabled and not able to work a full week, but able enough to work a few days a month.
Unintended consequences, once again roosting!
via @overlawyered
"My Marriage Didn't End When I Became a Widow"
Moving piece in The New York Times by Lucy Kalanithi, whose husband died of cancer in March at age 37. An excerpt from the first part:
I had loved Paul since we met in 2003 as first-year medical students. He was the kind of person who makes truly funny people laugh (as an undergraduate, he visited London in a full gorilla suit -- posing by the gates at Buckingham Palace, riding the tube). But he was also deeply intellectual. He considered following his master's degree in English literature with a Ph.D., but entered medical school instead, yearning, as he later wrote, "to find answers that are not in books ... to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay."We married on the shores of the Long Island Sound before driving across the country to start our residencies. In the hospital, we worked 80-hour weeks; outside of it, we hiked the winding trails near our California home, holding hands and planning our future.
Then, 10 years after we met, while we were finishing our final years of training at Stanford, Paul's health began to falter. After a battery of tests, we learned that his back pain and weight loss were not symptoms of exhaustion, but metastatic lung cancer. It was now our turn to face mortality and, more than ever, to follow the question of what makes human life meaningful.
...And Paul began to write. First, an essay -- about training as a neurosurgeon and then learning that he had only a year or two to live -- which led to a book proposal. When chemotherapy ravaged his skin, even typing became painful. I found silver-threaded, conductive gloves that protected his cracked fingertips while still allowing him to use his laptop's trackpad as he lay in bed.
By the time he had become too sick to continue working in the operating room, he was writing furiously about his struggles -- as a physician, a lover of literature and a terminally ill patient -- to continuously seek and live his values. Returning to writing kept him serving others and helped him to live well. I believe he died fulfilled -- not feeling he was leaving everything he wanted, but having everything he wanted.
Philly Shooter Was Right -- The Police Do Defend Laws Contrary To The Teachings Of Islam
According to a CNN story by Ray Sanchez, Jason Hanna and Shimon Prokupecz, Edward Archer, who fired into a police car at close range, seriously wounding Officer Jesse Hartnett, 33, later said:
"I follow Allah. I pledge my allegiance to the Islamic State and that's why I did what I did."
Not surprisingly, the Mayor, acting as if he is an expert on Islam, declared the shooting to have nothing to do with it:
Mayor Jim Kenney said the shooting had nothing to do with Islam."It is abhorrent," he said. "It does not represent the religion in any shape or form or any of the teachings. This is a criminal with a stolen gun who tried to kill one of our officers, and it has nothing to do with being a Muslim or following the Islamic faith."
I've been reading in Islam since 2001, and I can tell you the Mayor is quite wrong. Roger SImon gets it, writing at PJM:
Actually, the would-be cop killer/ISIS member in white Isla-drag (fortunately he did not achieve his goal) was correct in his evaluation. Our police do defend laws contrary to the Quran, such as monogamy, equal rights for women, separation of church and state, etc., etc.
He also notes that a Pew study informs us that Islam will be the second-largest religion of the USA before 2040.
Roger continues:
So along comes this supposedly vulgar guy Donald Trump, who has the audacity to say we should suspend Muslim immigration until we "figure things out." I'd like to say when I first heard him say that I winced. How Unconstitutional! How Un-PC! But I didn't. I stared at the television, nodded, and quietly said: "Right on!" I suspect a lot of other people did too, even some (maybe more than just some) who publicly wash their hands of him. We shall see.As for me, I agree with Trump 100%, quite publicly now. Something must be done. And like Trump, I have a number of Muslim friends who are just fine, some quite courageous. We should all respect people like that -- and we will. But we don't have the luxury of blind multiculturalism anymore. In any case, multiculturalism is nothing more than a big fascist lie. (If you do your homework and look into its roots in cultural relativism, you will see what I mean.) If we can't entirely cut off Muslim immigration (for Constitutional reasons or other), we must restrict it to such a degree that it is less than a dribble coming out of the spigot with every drop boiled down and inspected to the last molecule.
And, yes, I am aware Edward Archer -- the pathetic would-be cop killer -- is no immigrant and that cutting immigration will not cure everything, or even all that much. But you have to start somewhere and, sadly, there is no such thing as a real cure -- not one that is in any sense immediate. The root of the problem is Islam itself -- in dire need of a reformation that may be impossible within its own twisted ideology.
Lily
Linkieflower.
The "My Oppression Card Project": The Latest In Moochstarter Projects From The Land Of The Free To Be Big Sobby Pussies
It used to be that dealing with stuff that irked you was just part of life.
Now, people are said to be traumatized by "microaggressions" -- like "ableist" language.
Let me again remind people of my late quadriplegic cartoonist friend John Callahan, who felt that the way to remove the dividing lines between people who are disabled and the rest of us was to joke about disabled people. His thinking: The rest of us get poked fun of; disabled people aren't quite human if you can't say anything the slightest bit poke-funny about them.
The big problem socially for the disabled, of which I was reminded by a conversation I had online with Sai, who's in a wheelchair, is the way people don't look at them and/or treat them as if they don't quite exist or don't have functional brains because their bodies aren't as functional.
Do you fix that by handing someone a card that says, basically, "Fuck you"? Um, I don't think so.
In fact, aggression sets off defensiveness, not change. You change people's thinking by talking to them and explaining to them that you feel bad about something they said. As economist Adam Smith pointed out, sympathy is a strong motivator -- causing people to go beyond their own interests and care for the welfare of another.
And the inspiration for this post? Graphic designer Lauren Simkin Berke came up with a Moochstarter project, the "My Oppression Card Project" to make business cards:
The Front of the card reads: "I AM PLAYING MY OPPRESSION CARD" and the back: "Fuck your racist - sexist - heterosexist - cissexist - classist - anti-fat - Christian-centric - audist - ableist - ageist NONSENSE."In 2014 I did a small print run of 500 cards, and now I'd like to make the cards widely available by printing 5,000 (or more, depending on how much money is raised by this campaign). The only thing that's been changed from the first card design is a corrected spelling error where I'd put "ABELISM" instead of "ABLEISM."
Video of her talking about this at the link. And no, for the Moochstarter money, you don't even get typsetting: 
Note that there's no "Atheist-centric," probably because individual Christians' feelings aren't count, because they're part of a majority group.
And Christian-centric?
What, you say "Merry Christmas" to somebody and they fall to pieces?
P.S. There's nothing to make a person feel oppressed like identifying as a perma-victim.
I Support Your Stupid Speech
She's an idiot, but I support free speech for idiots, assholes, haters, and scumbags, as well as for geniuses who think exactly as I do.
Link above from the NYT's Liam Stack, who writes:
A New Jersey high school student found herself in a social media storm on Wednesday after she live-tweeted and apparently secretly recorded a trip to her principal's office.She said administrators warned her that her comments about Israel and a fellow student on Twitter might have violated a state law against bullying.
The student, Bethany Koval, a 16-year-old Israeli Jew, said she had been reprimanded by administrators at Fair Lawn High School in Bergen County for a tweet that contained a string of expletives directed at Israel and expressed happiness that a pro-Israel classmate had unfollowed her Twitter account.
...Administrators took particular interest in a tweet that Ms. Koval posted on Dec. 27 after a classmate who had taken offense at her political views unfollowed her, she said. She said they also reprimanded her for a second tweet in which she told a friend she would name the student in a private message. They also searched her phone, suspecting that she was recording the meeting and warned that she could face legal action, she said. They were right to be suspicious. She later posted audio clips on Twitter.
Ms. Koval said she believed neither statement constituted an act of bullying.
The only bullying here was done by the administrators.
Love how NYT leaves finding out what she tweeted to the reader and Google. What's with that?
Lucky
Gambling win links.
P.S. Vegas exists because you lose. If it were a city of broke-ass tents, I'd gamble there.
Chickens Clearly Watch Too Much Television: Prefer What Feminists Deem Arbitrary Western Standards Of Beauty
There's a persistent denial by feminists of biology -- of the notion, supported by piles of cross-cultural research, that we have evolved (innate) standards for what we find beautiful, along with other evolved sex differences.
I just love animal research -- like Sonya Kahlenberg and Richard Wrangham's, for example -- that shows that girl chimps out there in the jungle engage in "doll play" with sticks, holding them like babies, while boy chimps do not (99 percent of the time).
Of course, we know from feminists that that these girl chimps only behave this way because they see too many Barbie and baby doll ads on Saturday morning television.
Well, in light of some 2002 research I just saw posted on a science blog, it seems the parents of chickens need to cut down on their chicks' Saturday morning TV-watching as well.
Seriously Science posts at DiscoverMagazine about research exploring whether there might be an innate preference for certain types of features on human faces.
However, instead of asking humans what we find beautiful, they went to a bunch of chickens for a little change of pace:
To do so, they trained chickens to react to either an average human male or female face. They then showed the chickens a series of faces of different levels of attractiveness (see Figure 1 below) and measured how much the chickens pecked at each face (a measure of their preference for the face).Surprisingly, they found that the chickens preferred the same faces as did human volunteers (in this case university students asked to rate the faces for attractiveness), suggesting that something about these faces makes them inherently more attractive to our nervous systems.
So there you have it: the next time you want to know which photo to use for your profile picture, consider asking a chicken.
Screen shot from the research: 
via @SteveStuWill
Denouncing "White Male Privilege" Is The Fashionable Racism And Sexism Of Our Day
Smart piece by Brendan O'Neill at Spiked on the ugly agenda of those I call feminist grievance hunters:
Those young, opinionated new media feminists who get handsome advances to write books spluttering about 'white male privilege' are far more privileged than many of the white males they splutter about -- especially the ones who empty their bins or sweep their roads. It's almost Orwellian in its topsy-turviness -- the most well-connected, middle-class women denouncing the alleged privileges of some of the most derided people in society.Partly this is just bad science: feminists, leftists and others see that parliament and the boardroom still have a hefty number of white men in them and they extrapolate from this to argue that all white men must have lovely lives. Hence they always use the ridiculously sweeping terms 'white men' or 'male privilege', as if whiteness and maleness were inherently beneficial. As if loads of white men aren't dirt poor and awfully underprivileged. It's like seeing the Queen and thinking: 'Wow, white women in Britain have it good, don't they?'
... But there's something else going on too, something more pernicious: the way the politics of identity elbows aside anything to do with class. Unlike radicals of old, the new identitarians -- from feminists to shouty students -- do not see the world in terms of the haves and have nots, or the ruling class and the working class; in terms of work or wealth or clout. No, to them it's all about biology, race, gender: fixed traits, which they think define us as individuals and determine our destinies.
Such ugly, racial determinism is why they can use the blanket, dehumanising term 'white people' to refer to a vast group that contains all sorts of social classes and people: rich, poor, middling, left, right, good, bad, happy, sad, etc. The idea that all white men have a certain kind of life or outlook is as dumb, and foul, as saying all black men are criminals.
Identity politics doesn't totally smother class considerations, however; it helps to facilitate a new, PC version of class hatred. The bile spat by feminists and others at certain white men -- the uncouth, most derided ones -- is really old-fashioned loathing for the lower orders dolled up as a radical stand against 'male privilege'. When university students or media-based identity obsessives crow about drinking 'white male tears', they behave like modern-day Marie Antoinettes, laughing in the face of the less fortunate who will never experience the privileges enjoyed by these fashionable railers against privilege. 'White male privilege' is simply a myth.
via @SteveStuWill
Stockholm Hijabism: Non-Muslims Wearing A Hijab In "Solidarity"
Former WSJ reporter Asra Q. Nomani and Hala Arafa, a broadcaster, write in The New York Times that non-Muslims wearing the hijab in "solidarity" perpetuates oppression:
As mainstream Muslim women, we see the girl's headscarf not as a signal of "choice," but as a symbol of a dangerous purity culture, obsessed with honor and virginity, that has divided Muslim communities in our own civil war, or fitna, since the Saudi and Iranian regimes promulgated puritanical interpretations of Sunni and Shia Islam, after the 1970s Saudi oil boom and the 1979 Iranian Revolution.In the eight times the word hijab, or a derivative, appears in the Koran, it means a "barrier" or "curtain," with spiritual, not sartorial, meaning.
Today, well-intentioned women are wearing headscarves in interfaith "solidarity." But, to us, they stand on the wrong side of a lethal war of ideas that sexually objectifies women as vessels for honor and temptation, absolving men of personal responsibility.
This purity culture covers, segregates, subordinates, silences, jails and kills women and girls around the world. Recently, in Bareilly, India, a father killed his daughter, 4, smashing her head against the floor when her scarf slipped from her head during dinner. In Ontario, a few years ago, a man strangled his 16-year-old sister when she defied their father, including by refusing to cover her hair. In November, a former University of Missouri instructor dragged a female relative, 14, out of school "by the hair" when he discovered she hadn't covered her hair.
In the 1990s, journalist Arshia Malik escaped acid attacks and gunshots from men enforcing "hijab" in Kashmir. Today, in Iran, friends of the journalist Masih Alinejad dodge batons as they shoot photos of themselves, hair bare, in a campaign Alinejad started, #MyStealthyFreedom, to protest Iran's mandatory headscarf law.
Last month, after writing an essay arguing the headscarf isn't Islamically mandated, we received verbal abuse from American Muslim leaders and academics, calling us "despicable," "clinically delusional," "Satan" and "dajjal," the Muslim equivalent of anti-Christ.
But we believe women have a right to wear - or not wear - the headscarf. To that end, we heard from Muslims from Malaysia to Minnesota who told us again and again: "Thank you."
A Muslim girl, Shafiqah Othman, blogs about the hijab:
Non-hijabi women like myself have received countless condescending comparisons, like associating us with unwrapped candies, giving non-hijabis the perception that we're dirty.
She also offers a lot of references and a good explanation.
via @DJGrothe
Lookie
Linkie with eyeglasses borrowed from that billboard in The Great Gatsby.
Whether Warning (Whether You're In Los Angeles, That Is)
How do you know someone's Facebooking or tweeting from Los Angeles?
Easy.
They post about the rain.
Not tsunami-style rain. Regular old it's Wednesday in Michigan rain.
And then they talk about it in breathless tones, as if they just saw an extinct white leopard jogging through suburbia.
P.S. Should you be visiting Los Angeles, Angelenos are particularly shitty at driving in the rain. And by "driving in the rain," I also mean "the finest mist that barely frizzes your hair."
Morning Goal
Finding my desk. 
I hope this public service message made you feel better about your mess.
I Don't Really Get All The Gnashing About Facebook
It's that time of year -- that time when multiple people post announcements on Facebook that they're spending too much time on the thing and are getting off or will be spending far less time.
As if it's the Great Satan.
Yawnies.
I like Facebook. I get to see that a young academic got a great job and that somebody had a baby, and I get to watch another friend's little girl grow up in a way I actually wouldn't in real life. And I see photos from the days of a Paris-dwelling friend that aren't necessarily the stuff of "Ooh, amazeballs, let me email this to everybody," but mark the stuff of her life.
I do understand the power of habit.
But I also understand the power of just making yourself do stuff, and never mind your feelings.
It's why I write with a timer. It's why I wake up at 5 a.m. to write with a timer.
Personally, I just post links to post here on Facebook and the occasional gratuitous dog photo (which I usually post here, too). And I go on for a few minutes to look at everybody's life and then jump off.
What's with all these grown adults who are (and feel) so ruled by the thing?
How Come I Know The Law Better Than A Guy Who Taught Constitutional Law -- Who Also Happens To Be President?
I was listening to CNN from the bathroom while getting ready last night, and the President was talking about his new measures to tighten regulations on gun purchases.
Well, I couldn't believe it when I heard this: Seconds after bragging that he should know the law about the First and Second Amendments because he "taught constitutional law," he said it: that we "can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater."
Now, I'm no legal scholar, but I follow enough law bloggers and am interested enough in the law that I have heard NUMEROUS times that you, of course, CAN yell "fire" in a crowded theater...providing there is a fire.
Okay, so maybe he was using that in the colloquial way it's thrown around, but seconds after bragging that he was a constitutional law prof?
Also, about that quote, Trevor Tim writes at The Atlantic:
Oliver Wendell Holmes made the analogy during a controversial Supreme Court case that was overturned more than 40 years ago.
More:
Ninety-three years ago, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote what is perhaps the most well-known -- yet misquoted and misused -- phrase in Supreme Court history: "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."Without fail, whenever a free speech controversy hits, someone will cite this phrase as proof of limits on the First Amendment. And whatever that controversy may be, "the law"--as some have curiously called it--can be interpreted to suggest that we should err on the side of censorship. Holmes' quote has become a crutch for every censor in America, yet the quote is wildly misunderstood.
...But those who quote Holmes might want to actually read the case where the phrase originated before using it as their main defense. If they did, they'd realize it was never binding law, and the underlying case, U.S. v. Schenck, is not only one of the most odious free speech decisions in the Court's history, but was overturned over 40 years ago.
First, it's important to note U.S. v. Schenck had nothing to do with fires or theaters or false statements. Instead, the Court was deciding whether Charles Schenck, the Secretary of the Socialist Party of America, could be convicted under the Espionage Act for writing and distributing a pamphlet that expressed his opposition to the draft during World War I. As the ACLU's Gabe Rottman explains, "It did not call for violence. It did not even call for civil disobedience."
...In 1969, the Supreme Court's decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio effectively overturned Schenck and any authority the case still carried. There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action" (emphasis mine).
Today, despite the "crowded theater" quote's legal irrelevance, advocates of censorship have not stopped trotting it out as thefinal word on the lawful limits of the First Amendment. As Rottman wrote, for this reason, it's "worse than useless in defining the boundaries of constitutional speech. When used metaphorically, it can be deployed against any unpopular speech." Worse, its advocates are tacitly endorsing one of the broadest censorship decisions ever brought down by the Court. It is quite simply, as Ken White calls it, "the most famous and pervasive lazy cheat in American dialogue about free speech."
Ah hah -- Ken White -- that's surely one of the places I've seen it.
Liffey
A linky river in Ireland.
UC Santa Cruz's Official Tattletale Channel: College Is Now Nursery School With Beer
College is supposed to prepare students for adult life, but it's now just an extension of Miss Tibbett's preschool, with measures set up -- in this case, by the UC Santa Cruz Dean of Students' office -- for students to tattle on people who say mean things to them.
Students are now filing "Hate-Or-Bias Incident Reports." These are from 2014:
While walking to my car, I passed a Caucasian male going in the other direction who commented on my appearance. He said "You're a guy. Dress like a guy." I stopped, turned around and asked "Do you have something to say to me?" We stood looking at each other silently for a moment and then continued walking on. He then shouted "Yeah, you better keep walking."Incident Report Received: 4/18/2014
Confirmation Email Sent: 4/18/2014
Bias Category Reported: Sexual Identity
Action Requested: Information only, no action requested
Some people from my hall have been bothering me. They talk badly behind my back and text other people mean things about me. It has gotten to the point were my door remains closed and I don't feel comfortable in my own hall. They are 3 males and one female. The girl is named "female student", and the others are named "2 male students." The third student I don't know, but he's friends with them and he's like 5'8 or 5'9. I have felt bullied and feel that I am not safe because of the constant laughter and the constant glares.Incident Report Received: 5/23/2014
Confirmation Email Sent: 5/23/2014
Bias Category Reported: Creed, Socio-Economic Status
Action Requested: Review of possibly disciplinary action
Recently there was an SUA meeting that was discussing the Resolution to divest from companies that were violating the human rights of Palestinians by Israel. It was a very sensitive issue, and as a representative in the space, I felt very disrespected by the audience that was there. Earlier in the meeting we had discussed community agreements, and some of those were no snapping and clapping in respect. The Chair Shaz Umer had to remind people multiple times not to do this, but people continued to do this anyway. After we had voted and the resolution passed, there was celebration from the audience, but they did not respect the fact that SUA was still having the meeting and the fact that there were people hurt by the resolution.Incident Report Received: 5/30/2014
Confirmation Email Sent: 5/30/2014
Bias Category Reported: Campus Climate Issue
Action Requested: Have the DOS contact me
My dad, as a young man, enlisted in the army to go fight the Korean War. He never got sent over -- spent his whole time in the US -- but he did sign up for it.
Consider the difference between my dad and these crypussies.
There are still "a few good men" left in this country, but there are also an increasing number of younger people who, if attacked by a foreign power, or if simply called upon to do something borderline brave, would crawl under the bed and suck their thumb.
Also, I spent much of my life, into my 20s, socially excluded (with the exception being my time in my temple youth group as a teen). The answer wasn't to tattle on the perpetrators -- which would only have perpetuated the behavior that led to my exclusion. The answer -- the subject of my next book -- was to transform myself into somebody who had friends, wasn't a suckup, and could even stand up for herself (to the point where I will say something to rude bullies when everybody else is afraid to.)
For an adult way to take back the power when somebody tosses a cutting remark your way, here's an excerpt from my book "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck":
Fighting ugly with pity: An all-purpose comeback for cutting remarks. You're in some social situation when somebody says something seriously rude about your looks or maybe your intelligence, right to your face. Of course, you come up with the perfect comeback-- two days later while sitting on the toilet.The truth is, even professional comedians can find it hard to have a good comeback in a social situation. They're ready for the occasional heckler when they're onstage (and often have a fistful of preplanned comebacks, since how they'll be heckled is pretty predictable). But when they're standing in a group of people at a party and somebody puts them down, shock and anger can take hold, shutting down the smartass remark-building parts of the brain. (It's that "emotional hijacking" Daniel Goleman talks about in re-sponse to dignity violations.)
Sure, when you're loose from a few beers, maybe your wit will sometimes come through for you, but it's safest to assume that it will instead scurry off and hide behind a large piece of furniture. In other words, you should dispense with the notion that a winning reply to a rude remark involves a response so witty that it incinerates the rudester right where they're standing. Rather, keep in mind that there's a reason somebody is being so ugly and cutting. Happy people tend to be kind or, at least, uninterested in tearing other people down. Miserable people often want to lash out at the world--and there you are, so conveniently located as a target for their hate.
When one of these spitebags hurls a put-down at you, they expect that you'll either try to fight back or just stand there blinking and wishing you could disappear. Instead, you should do the last thing they'd expect: Look straight at them for a moment, and coolly call them on their rottenness with a remark like "Clearly, you must have had a pretty bad day to feel the need to say some- thing so nasty to me. I hope you feel better." (Sincerity is not required here--just believability--so say it devoid of anger, and sound like you mean it.) By expressing sympathy for them, you've accomplished three things:
1. You've refused to accept their turning you into their victim.2. You've come off classy and bigger than they are.
3. You still managed to stick it to them, sending the message, "Sorry your life is such a suckhole that your lone path to happiness is trying to make other people feel like shit."
The Brutality Of Islamic Culture (Though Mohammed Did Say To Wait Till Children Are Age 10 To Beat Them)
Children being beaten, ages 4, 5, 6.
Watch through for the man to give a tiny girl in pink a brutal little beating. Other adults are present, watching, including a woman with just her eyes peeking out from her burka. Sick.
Here's the story -- from back in 2011.
Here's another. Brutal and awful. And then he has them hit each other. Sick that an adult is leading this.
A commenter on an Islamic website writes about the practice of beating children to get them to memorize the Quran:
In the Name of Allah the Most Gracious The Most Merciful and peace and blessings be upon the Final Messenger to mankind MuhammadI have to adress an evil practice that has become widespread around the islamic world, and strangely enough accepted by the general masses, inspite of all the evil consequences that result because of it: Hitting children so they can memorize the Quran better, or read properly.
Here's a Hadith and some commentary about this:
Almost everyone knows the Hadeeth (narration) in which the Prophet, sallallaahu `alayhi wa sallam ( may Allah exalt his mention ), said: "Order your children to perform prayer when they are seven years old and beat them (for neglecting it) when they are ten."[Al-Albaani: Hasan]The Prophet, sallallaahu `alayhi wa sallam ( may Allah exalt his mention ), did not order beating children who neglect prayers before the age of ten, though, he ordered the parent to command his children to perform the prayers when they are seven. This means that there are three years left between the two stages. The Prophet, sallallaahu `alayhi wa sallam ( may Allah exalt his mention ), delayed using beating for three years and only allowed the parent to verbally direct and discipline during this period. He considered the negative consequences of beating that should be avoided by those who assume the upbringing of children.
If the parent keeps ordering his child to perform the prayers for three years and the child keeps refusing, this means that he is stubborn and therefore he deserves beating.
But 10, 7, what's the diff?
This Muslim mother beat her 7-year-old child to death for not memorizing the Quran.
More from a Muslim woman who says beatings for Muslim children are common -- especially if they dare to question Islam.
And in case you haven't had enough horror, here are the forced child brides -- with grown Muslim men emulating their "prophet," doing as Mohammed did and forcing children into sex slavery.
Cuckoo
Linkoo.
What Grocery Shopping Was Like In The Soviet Union -- And Where We're Headed
Here's a video of grocery shopping under Soviet rule. Note the women smelling the disgusting stuff in packages to see if it might possibly be edible and not totally stinking rotten.
As somebody said on Twitter:
@PaulDChristian
@GuyKawasaki @amyalkon yoinks, its like someone took the safe out of Safeway
(They took just about everything out but the floor tiles.)
There are out and proud Marxists (not a huge group) and then there are the Marxist-flavored. Marxist flavoring is pervasive.
Cliff Kincaid writes at AIM, quoting Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking official ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc:
But Pacepa speaks out, saying that, in addition to the White House hiring Van Jones, he saw the Marxist agenda at work in the agenda of the White House and the Democrat-controlled Congress during Obama's first two years, when they "began dutifully following in Marx's footsteps by redistributing our country's wealth and putting under government control a part of its health care, banking system, and automobile industry." His observation is this regard is not unique, but Pacepa goes further, citing evidence of how planks in the Communist Manifesto parallel the Obama legislative agenda. Yet, Romney doesn't want to call Obama a socialist because of what the liberal media will say about the charge.
Of course, under the redistribution of wealth, everybody is equal, but the people in power and people with connections are, uh, more equal.
Pacepa writes at PJM:
Economic determinism is a theory of survival rooted in Marx's Manifesto (another theory of survival), but it pretends that the economic organization of a society, not the socialist class war and the socialist redistribution of wealth, determines the nature of all other aspects of its life. Over the years, economic determinism has assumed different names. Khrushchev's dogonyat i peregonyat (catching up with and overtaking the West in ten years) and Gorbachev's perestroika are the best known.I wrote the script of Ceausescu's determinism, which was hidden behind the nickname "New Economic Order." Most Americans, who are not used to dealing with undercover Marxists, have problems recognizing one. In April 1978, President Carter hailed Ceausescu as a "great national and international leader who [had] taken on a role of leadership in the entire international community." At the time, I was standing next to Ceausescu at the White House, and I just smiled.
Three months later, I was granted political asylum in the United States, and I informed President Carter how Ceausescu had been feeding him a pack of lies. The admiration for Ceausescu's undercover Marxism had, however, taken on such a life of its own that the U.S. Congress, dominated by President Carter's Democratic Party, brought the United States a sui-generis version of Ceausescu's economic determinism. That move generated double-digit inflation. The U.S. prime rate hit 21.5%, the highest in U.S. history, and people had to spend long hours in line waiting to buy gas for their cars.
...In my other life I was involved in the process of spreading the destructive virus of Marxism disguised as benign economic determinism, and I have a few thoughts about how that veiled virus can be stopped from further infecting the United States. American essayist George Santayana, an immigrant like me, used to say that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Speech codes on campuses -- along with the push to force professors to give "trigger warnings" and other ways speech is becoming less free -- are other ways there's creep of Soviet-style into America.
The monitoring of citizens is another.
The use of "civil asset forfeiture" -- a euphemism for the government seizing your stuff without cause -- is another.
Presidential "signing statements" are another.
And finally, the demands to provide your papers sans probable cause -- one of the hallmarks of an unfree country -- is yet another.
There is increasing power of government over us and little to stop it.
But few notice or notice the cumulative effect of all these rights erosions. And in that, we are in serious trouble.
Want Freedom To Live As A Gay Arab? Live In Israel
In the Israeli part, that is.
Via Rihab Hafidhi writes at Elephant Journal:
In the majority of Arab countries, whether they are Sunni or Shiite, the act of homosexuality is punishable by law. The sentences range from imprisonment to flogging, and even the death penalty in countries like Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen.
Diaa Hadid writes in The New York Times that there's a liberal Palestinian culture blossoming in the Israeli city of Haifa. It is, she explains, an "Arab milieu that is secular, feminist and gay-friendly."
Arabs make up a fifth of Israel's population of eight million, and in recent years, they have grown more assertive in expressing their Palestinian identity, allied with their brethren in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.But their public life in Haifa is a striking secular counterpoint to the conservatism of many of Israel's Arab communities, where sex before marriage is taboo, and single men and women rarely date and tend to marry at relatively young ages, in matches often arranged by their mothers.
Haifa's relative liberalism is a product of its unique, cosmopolitan tradition. It is easy for young, single people to get out in this city, which is built on a steep coastal hill, with Jews tending to live on its heights and Arabs by the sea. The once working-class city of 280,000 has several universities and has embraced its diversity. The 30,000 Arab residents, around 10 percent of the population, include equal numbers of Muslims and Christians, and they are generally wealthier and better educated than Arabs elsewhere in Israel.
This makes Haifa a comfortable place for liberal Palestinians who want not only to escape the constraints of conservative Arab communities but also to be among their own people.
...Ayed Fadel runs Kabareet, a bar off a four-lane industrial road, through an alley and down some stairs. He envisions his out-of-the-way speakeasy with its red painted walls and old Arab movie posters as a place where people can truly be themselves.
"We want a gay couple to go to the dance floor and kiss each other, and nobody to even look at them," he said. "This is the new Palestinian society we are aiming for."
As @AG_Conservative tweeted:
Just another example of how Arabs have more freedom in Israel than almost any Arab country. (h/t @NathanWurtzel)
Fudging Stats On The Dangers Of Getting Killed By Muslim Terrorists: Politics First; Facts, Dead Last
Truly terrific post by ev psych doctoral student Jesse Marczyk at Psychology Today digging into confirmation bias and the dishonest way stats are presented to make an argument that doesn't hold water:
The first article on the chopping block was published on the New York Times website in June of last year. The article is entitled, "Homegrown extremists tied to deadlier toll than Jihadists in U.S. since 9/11," and it attempts to persuade the reader that we, as a nation, are all too worried about the threat Islamic terrorism poses. In other words, American fears of terrorism are wildly out of proportion to the actual threat it presents. This article attempted to highlight the fact that, in terms of the number of bodies, right-wing, anti-government violence was twice as dangerous as Jihadist attacks in the US since 9/11 (48 deaths from non-Muslims; 26 by Jihadists). Since we seem to dedicate more psychological worry to Islam, something was wrong there There are three important parts of that claim to be considered: first, a very important word in that last sentence is "was," as the body count evened out by early December (link is external) in that year (currently at 48 to 45). This updated statistic yields some interesting questions: were those people who feared both types of attacks equally (if they existed) being rational or not on December 1st? Were those who feared right-wing attacks more than Muslim ones suddenly being irrational on the 2nd? The idea these questions are targeting is whether or not fears can only be viewed as proportionate (or rational) with the aid of hindsight. If that's the case, rather than saying that some fears are overblown or irrational, a more accurate statement would be that such fears "have not yet been founded." Unless those fears have a specific cut-off date (e.g., the fear of being killed in a terrorist attack during a given time period), making claims about their validity is something that one cannot do particularly well.The second important point of the article to consider is that the count begins one day after a Muslim attack that killed over 3,000 people (immediately; that doesn't count those who were injured or later died as a consequence of the events). Accordingly, if that count is set back just slightly, the fear of being killed by a Muslim terrorist attack would be much more statistically founded, at least in a very general sense. This naturally raises the question of why the count starts when it does. The first explanation that comes to mind is that the people doing the counting (and reporting about the counting) are interested in presenting a rather selective and limited view of the facts that support their case. They want to denigrate the viewpoints of their political rivals first, and so they select the information that helps them do that while subtly brushing aside the information that does not.
...Saving the largest for last, the final important point of the article to consider is that it appears to neglect the matter of base rates entirely. The attacks labeled as "right-wing" left a greater absolute number of bodies (at least at the time it was written), but that does not mean we learned right-wing attacks (or individuals) are more dangerous. To see why, we need to consider another question: how many bodies should we have expected? The answer to that question is by no means simple, but we can do a (very) rough calculation. In the US, approximately 42% of the population self-identifies as Republican (our right-wing population), while about 1% identifies as Muslim. If both groups were equally likely to kill others, then we should expect that the right-wing terrorist groups leave 42 bodies for every 1 that the Muslim group do.
He points out more dishonest arguing in a New Yorker piece by Lawrence Krauss:
Lawrence goes on to say, the average Paris resident is about as likely to have been killed in a car accident during any given year than to have been killed during the mass shooting....This point about cars is yet another fine example of an author failing to account for base rates. Looking at the raw body count is not enough, as people in Paris likely interact with hundreds (or perhaps even thousands; I don't have any real sense for that number) of cars every day for extended periods of time. By contrast, I would imagine Paris residents interact markedly less frequently with Muslim extremists. Per unit of time spent around cars, they would pose what is likely a much, much lower threat of death than Muslim extremists.
via @SteveStuWill
Linkermore
Quoth the Raven...
Even Anti-Semitic Ignoramuses Should Have Their Free Speech Defended
A woman named Lisa Marie Mendez who works at Geffen UCLA Med Center posted some hate-filled, anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist rants on Facebook.
Pardes Seleh posted the story along with some of the rants at the Daily Wire:
Lisa Marie Mendez, a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) student and employee at the UCLA Medical Center, has made her extreme distaste for "fucking Zionist pigs" crystal clear this past month in her rant against Jews on Facebook. Mendez's racist comments in response to a pro-Israel Facebook post by Jewish actress Mayim Bialik, were picked up by a UCLA student and publicized to the UCLA community.The following are a few of Mendez's comments as discovered by Liat Menna, student president of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) at UCLA:
Fucking Jews. GTFOH with all your Zionist bullshit. Crazy ass fucking troglodyte albino monsters of cultural destruction. Fucking Jews. GTFOH with your whiny bullshit. Give the Palestinians back their land, go back to Poland or whatever freezer-state you're from, and realize that faith does not constitute race.Mendez elaborated on her bitter hatred against Jews, using a series of adjectives such as "capitalist colonizers" and "greedy lifeless pieces of shit." She begged for "public shaming of Zionists" and asked that all Jews leave "back to Israel."
More from her remarks:
Good for you to want to get me fired. I can imagine that colonialists like you can't have people like me with good jobs, especially when behind closed doors you treat us like all slaves. I'm Mexican, my family is from the land we stand on. You're the foreigners, locusts who steal resources and oppress people. I work with you people everyday. I go to school with your rotten children who have screamed obscenities in my face. The United States and the UN facilitated you taking this land from the Palestinians, with no other justification but that your religion entitles you to it. I've heard that before; the Spanish used that same logic when they came into the Americas. So don't sit here and tell me you're gonna get me fired, I'm an anti-Semite or whatever-- I'm here on social media which means absolutely nothing I don't know any of you from a ton of bricks, and you'll destroy my life because you're fucking trolls, armchair politicians who do nothing but pick your nose, scratch your ass and talk shit on FB. You never had your family dragged out of your house by the cops, or had to witness your children gunned down by them, have your family destroyed when they are deported, etc. You people don't care about any other culture's problems, of which you are participant when you come into our communities and destroy our small businesses.
Seleh continues:
Mendez alleged that she did not care if her comments were to get her fired and challenged critics to call her employer."I still have a job, so what's up?" she pointed out.
She wasn't fired, because, commendably, her supervisor, Josh Samuels, (and maybe others above him) said that the university will not police speech. Seleh quotes from Samuels's email:
"We must also keep in mind that the University cannot control the activities of individuals in their personal lives when not acting on behalf of the University, and that the First Amendment protects individual's private speech, however reprehensible the University finds it..."
Samuels is probably getting a lot of ugly email, so I wrote him as well:
subj: Kudos for supporting free speech (ugly as her comments were)I'm guessing from your name that, like me, you are Jewish.
This woman's remarks are ugly and ignorant. (I particularly loved the part about Jews never being dragged from their homes. Miss that Holocaust thingie, dearie? Never heard of the pogroms?)
By supporting free speech for the people whose speech we deplore, you help keep speech free for all of us.
Thank you. -Amy Alkon
Unfortunately, UCLA has treaded on the other side of the free speech line recently, with the university suspending a frat and a sorority over a "Kanye Western" party at which some attendees wore blackface.
And in October, at the link above, Conor Friedersdorf wrote in The Atlantic:
The university's governing Board of Regents, with the support of University President Janet Napolitano and egged on by the state's legislature, has been attempting to adopt new speech codes that--in the name of combating 'anti-Semitism'--would formally ban various forms of Israel criticism."
And in the WaPo, Sarah Kaplan writes:
Earlier this year, UC Santa Barbara sent a letter to students asking them to report to the administration "acts of intolerance, disrespect, bullying, or violence, especially regarding sexual orientation, race, gender, ethnicity or religion."FIRE, a college free speech group, highlighted the speech code as having a "powerful chilling effect."
"It's as if administrators believe that if only they can stop students from saying hurtful things, the underlying conflicts will go away. In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth," wrote Samantha Harris, the organization's director of speech code research. "By discouraging debate among new students out of the gate, UCSB is doing its students a terrible disservice in the name of tolerance and civility."
The UC system has also been alternately criticized and praised for its new guidelines on microaggressions
These other UC administrators need to be more like Samuels.
There's little as pernicious for a democracy (as well as for the supposed mission of a college -- and those kids it graduates) as a chill on free speech.
If haters gonna hate, it's better that that do it openly.
As the saying goes, the answer to speech you deplore is more speech.
Adele Scalps The Scalpers
Love this. From a New York Times article by Ben Sisario:
Adele has broken sales records with her new album, "25," but little noticed outside the concert business has been her war against ticket-scalping.For her world tour next year, Adele has teamed up with Songkick, a site that specializes in ticket sales through artists' websites and fan clubs, to manage thousands of her tickets and prevent as many as possible from ending up in the hands of scalpers.
For Adele's tour -- which sold out in Europe, and for which tickets went on sale in North America on Thursday -- Songkick said it sold 235,000 tickets through her website, Adele.com. By tracking the customers who tried to place orders, the company said it was able to block 53,000 sales to known or likely scalpers.
According to one estimate, Songkick's efforts saved Adele's fans more than $6.3 million in markups on secondary ticketing sites.
"By selling the highest number of tickets we were able to through our own channels, and working with Songkick and their technology, we have done everything within our power to get as many tickets as possible in the hands of the fans who have waited for years to see her live," Jonathan Dickins, Adele's manager, said in a news release.
In Britain, Songkick said it sold 40 percent of Adele's tickets. But the company's control is more limited in North America, where for some shows it handled as few as 8 percent of the available seats. When tickets to the North American shows went on sale Thursday, fans on social media complained about technical problems online and tickets that appeared to sell out in minutes.
StubHub, one of the largest secondary ticket markets, alerted customers to the availability of Adele seats on its site, with some tickets listed for as much as $11,000.
Limpy
Link with a hangnail on its big toe.
Dipshits Who Don't Understand The Free Market Livid About Uber Surge Pricing On New Year's Eve
Supply and demand. Increased demand raises prices on the supply.
It's one of the most basic economic principles that you pretty much just need to be a sentient adult person to understand, not a person who's taken econ. (I haven't.)
Not surprisingly, for anyone who actually uses their brain cells for more than reducing the echo in their skull, on New Year's Eve, Uber went into "surge pricing" -- sometimes 9.9 times the regular rate.
Personally, I worry about Uber surge pricing if I have to be somewhere at a time other than, oh, a 10 a.m. on a Wednesday, though I don't take Uber all that often (only if my car is having something done to it).
From Buzzfeed's Stephanie McNeal, who reports that some people spent $200 on a 15-minute ride:
"Surge pricing shouldn't be a surprise," the company wrote on its website. "Let's toast to you running a fare estimate in the app before you ride. To avoid the highest fares, head to the festivities early or catch a ride right after midnight."But that didn't stop riders from freaking out once they realized just how much they would be paying. In many cases, people wrote they wound up being charged hundreds of dollars for short trips.
When we paid $257.51 for a 15 minute Uber ride home...
-- Q (@quyenjadetran)...In addition, Uber's records show most of its riders weren't experiencing rates much higher than normal.
Paying $200 to get home is still far cheaper than driving drunk and injuring or killing somebody -- possibly yourself -- or having somebody else's death or injury on your conscience for the rest of your life. Or getting arrested for DUI.
And the other thing you're paying for with Uber is ease of use.
The alternative -- to drunkenly clicking an app on your phone -- is asking a friend like me (who avoids going out on New Year's Eve) to pick you up. I won't, because I don't want to be on the road with all the drunks who aren't using Uber. (Also, I hate holidays like New Year's Eve, and my kind of party is one with a bunch of nerdy writers. I cut out by 10 or get dragged out by Gregg so I can wake up at 5 a.m. to write.)
Another alternative to Uber is having somebody be the designated driver and not drinking.
But my old boss Eddie K. used to say about TV commercial production, "Good, cheap, fast" -- pick any two. There's a similar deal going on here.
Oh yeah -- you can also take a taxi...if you can find one or don't mind waiting an hour or so.
The State Is A Bully: Ugly Public Prying Into Private Giving
Jon Riches of the Goldwater Institute writes in the Sac Bee that California Attorney General Kamala Harris now wants to know who donated to what organization, what their address is, and how much they gave:
Several weeks ago, the organization for which I work, the Goldwater Institute, received a demand from Harris' office to turn over a copy of private tax information that includes the names and addresses of our contributors. Although this information is protected from disclosure under both the First Amendment and federal tax law, refusing to comply with this demand would presumably result in our organization losing its ability to solicit new members in California.Harris' demands are part of a broader national effort to force private nonprofit organizations that want to engage in political dialogue to turn their donors' names, addresses and contribution amounts over to the government. Couched as "transparency" measures, these mandates are actually a concerted effort to stifle speech with which disclosure advocates disagree.
Privacy rights are integral to a free society. Riches explains why:
Private giving also prevents retaliation against speakers by those who disagree, particularly when speaking truth to power. From the 1960s civil rights era to today's most contentious debates, groups have sought the identities of opponents to threaten, harass and intimidate them into silence. Privacy has been essential for unfettered dialogue in politics, literature, the arts and journalism, among many other fields.That's why the Constitution prevents these types of government intrusions.
...Harris claims a law enforcement purpose in collecting the names and addresses of donors, but this justification is no more persuasive than the National Security Agency's bulk collection of Americans' phone records without lawful authority. As the state's chief law enforcement officer, Harris should know that court warrants are required, lest we all fall within their dragnet.
Every American has the right to support the causes we believe in without the fear of harassment and retaliation. Disclosure mandates undermine this basic freedom, dry up donations to charities and silence political speech.
Linkery
The lottery, but without the scratch-off.
Starting The New Year Off With A "Duh!"
There's a Jaclyn Moyer article on Salon, "What Nobody Told Me About Small Farming: I Can't Make A Living."
The "go ugh!" subtitle:
People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable.
Moyer explains the romantic delusion that gets people into her sort of agri-mess:
On the radio this morning I heard a story about the growing number of young people choosing to become farmers. The farmers in the story sounded a lot like me -- in their late 20s to mid-30s, committed to organic practices, holding college degrees, and from middle-class non-farming backgrounds. Some raise animals or tend orchards. Others, like me, grow vegetables. The farmers' days sounded long but fulfilling, drenched in sun and dirt. The story was uplifting, a nice antidote to the constant reports of industrial ag gone wrong, of pink slime and herbicide-resistant super-weeds.What the reporter didn't ask the young farmers was: Do you make a living? Can you afford rent, healthcare? Can you pay your labor a living wage? If the reporter had asked me these questions, I would have said no.
How's she doing?
I grew 10 acres of organic vegetables, worked upward of 60 hours a week during the height of the season, and my total income last year was $2,451. Most of the kids probably earned more that this with a summer job.
Of course, things might be somewhat different if the government weren't in the mix. Those on the left are always calling for bigger government, more payouts (of that delicious OPM -- Other People's Money). There are unintended consequences from this, like how small farms may have to compete with unnaturally low prices of produce thanks to the big farms that get subsidies:
Then I looked into national statistics. According to USDA data from 2012, intermediate-size farms like mine, which gross more than $10,000 but less than $250,000, obtain only 10 percent of their household income from the farm, and 90 percent from an off-farm source. Smaller farms actually lost money farming and earned 109 percent of their household income from off-farm sources. Only the largest farms, which represent just 10 percent of farming households in the country and most of which received large government subsidies, earned the majority of their income from farm sources.
via @KevinNR
TSA: Sorry You Missed Your Flight; We're Short-Staffed Due To Pervos We Had To Fire. Also, We Don't Look At The Weather
The government claims the repurposed mall food court workers they have doing "security" at airports will keep us safe.
Of course, they can't even keep their own ranks safe from the myriad thieves, passenger sexual assaulters, and child pornography aficionados.
And last week, passengers missed their flights in Denver because "security" lines stretched two to four hours -- because the dipshits at the TSA didn't forecast the volume of travel there the Monday after Christmas.
Gary Leff writes at View From The Wing:
Only one security line was open late at night. TSA "(T)housands (S)tanding (A)round" used to refer to the agency's employees themselves, not the passengers.
Weather was also an issue:
The crux of the problem is that the TSA doesn't schedule staff based on changes in airline schedules and doesn't use weather forecasts in scheduling either.
More:
Passengers arriving at the airport two hours ahead of time were missing flights, but the TSA deflects blame "Travelers should contact their air carrier prior to proceeding to the airport, and schedule plenty of time to account for road conditions, parking and airport congestion." (As though 'road conditions' or 'parking' were the crux of the problem -- and only one security line open gets described as 'airport congestion'.)Even accounting for what I think of the TSA in general, it amazes me that the TSA doesn't account for peak holiday schedules or weather forecasts in staffing.
Although in fairness the TSA was short staffed, having fired screeners who conspired to identify attractive male passengers to be sexually groped.
Now, really, is there anyone smart enough to make change for a dollar who can't see that the TSA is largely a jobs program for unskilled workers and a big bucks benefits program for government lowlifes-turned-lobbyists like Michael Chertoff?
via @AdamKissel
Linky 2016
Happy, too!
