Europe Napped For Years While ISIS Built Up Their Terror Force
The U.S. has done the same, quite frankly.
And what has contributed to that here is our desperation to deny that Islam is anything different from Judaism and Christianity; we like to believe there are just some bad people, not that it is a pernicious ideology. (It is not practiced that way by all -- or even understood by all Muslims for the pernicious slaughter/convert and conquer ideology it is.)
But it it is understood and practiced by enough Muslims to be a danger to life as we know it, where you used to be able to go to a Paris café or concert hall without wondering whether you'd make it home alive afterward.
Rukmini Callamachi writes for The New York Times:
In an audio recording released on Sept. 22, 2014, Mr. Adnani, the ISIS spokesman and chief of the external operations wing, addressed the West."We will strike you in your homeland," he promised, calling on Muslims everywhere to kill Europeans, "especially the spiteful and filthy French." And he urged them to do it in any manner they could: "Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car," he said, according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist propaganda.
In the months that followed, a man decapitated his employer near the French city of Lyon, sending a snapshot of the severed head to the Islamic State. Another man stormed a police station in Paris, carrying a butcher's knife and a photocopy of the Islamic State's flag.
These are among around two dozen plots linked to the Islamic State that were documented in the year after Mr. Adnani's speech. In most, there were no direct operational ties back to Syria, but there were clear signs that the attacker had consumed the terrorist group's propaganda online.
The low potency of these attacks, with single-digit death tolls, combined with the fact that many of the perpetrators had a history of mental illness, prompted analysts and officials to conclude that the Islamic State remained a distant second to Al Qaeda in its ability to carry out attacks on Western soil.
Experts now believe that the Islamic State was actually adopting a strategy first put forward by an earlier operations leader for Al Qaeda, who argued that the group would become obsolete if it worked only on 9/11-size plots that took months or years to mount. He instead called for Al Qaeda to also carry out a patter of small- and medium-size plots, and to use propaganda to inspire self-directed attacks by supporters overseas.
In a recent issue of its online magazine in French, Dar al-Islam, the Islamic State explained the approach. "The Islamic State has deployed its resources to generate three types of terrorist attacks," the article states, specifying that they include large-scale plots coordinated by the group's leaders, down to "isolated actions of self-radicalized people, who have absolutely no direct contact with ISIS, and yet who will consciously act in its name."
One small positive -- there's a level of dumbshittery that sometimes allows would-be murderers to be stopped:
Mr. Boudina had been sloppy enough to keep using his Facebook account, and his voluminous chat history allowed French officials to determine his allegiance to the Islamic State. Wiretaps of his friends and relatives, later detailed in French court records obtained by The Times and confirmed by security officials, further outlined his plot, which officials believe was going to target the annual carnival on the French Riviera.
The slaughter is driven by Islamic doctrine, explains William DiPuccio, Ph.D.:
Those who maintain that traditional Islam is a "religion of peace," labor under the naïve assumption that jihad (Islamic holy war) is only permitted in self-defense, so Muslims would never strike unless they are threatened or attacked first. But, what constitutes a threat or an attack - or any perceived "offense" - can be a cartoon, a movie trailer, or even children in kindergarten naming a toy teddy bear, Mohammed.[49] Throughout Islamic history, the invasive nature of jihad was so evident as to be beyond all question. But modern Muslim apologists have muddied the water with interpretations of the Quran which obfuscate or sanitize the original meaning. According to the widely respected Dictionary of Islam (1885), which is still available from Islamic publishers, jihad is defined as (emphasis mine):A religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad. It is an incumbent religious duty, established in the Qur'an and in the Traditions as a divine institution, and enjoined specially for the purpose of advancing Islam and of repelling evil from Muslims... [Quoting from the Hanafi school, Hedaya, 2:140, 141.], "The destruction of the sword is incurred by infidels, although they be not the first aggressors, as appears from various passages in the traditions which are generally received to this effect."[50]
If infidels refuse the call to Islam and do not agree to pay the dhimmi tax, called jizya, in recognition of their subservience, Muslims are required to make war upon them, "set fire to their habitations ... inundate them with water and tear up their plantations and tread down their grain," to weaken their resolve.[51] Muslims are directed to engage in a perpetual holy war against unbelievers until they submit to Islamic rule. This longstanding historical interpretation is fully supported by modern Islamists and serves as the propelling force behind their aggression.[52]
When Islamists call their religion "a religion of peace," they mean something quite different than the commonly received Western understanding of "peace" or harmony among people of differing loyalties. Saudi Shaykh Muhammad Saalih al-Munajjid explains in his fatwa (religious ruling), "Yes, it is the religion of peace but in the sense of saving all of mankind from worshipping anything other than Allaah and submitting all of mankind to the rule of Allaah."[53] In other words, once the world submits to Islam, there will be peace - Pax Islama.
More from his piece:
Islamists use the United States, the "Great Satan," as a foil for their hatred of "decadent" Western civilization and Christianity; and they use Israel, the "Little Satan," as a foil for their hatred of Jews, who, according to the Quran (5:60),[56] were cursed by Allah and turned into apes and pigs for their disobedience. The stated goal of Islamic extremists is not simply to free Arab lands from Western interference and to annihilate Israel (which has no right to exist in their view), but to consolidate the global "Ummah" (Islamic nation), and establish a Muslim empire ruled by a universal Caliph. While this may seem rather improbable, if not unbelievable, to Westerners, the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, Hamas, and the Mujahideen regard the restoration of the Caliphate as one of their main objectives.[57] These organizations have outspokenly devoted themselves to a violent, never-ending struggle to bring about this end. In the well-known words of the Muslim Brotherhood's creed, "Allah is our objective; the Quran is our law, the Prophet is our leader; Jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations."[58]Another cause of terrorism among Muslim factions is internal strife. Islamists seem to be driven not only to establish the hegemony of Islam by supplanting secular governments and legal systems, but also by enforcing religious purity according to their own standards. Violence between Sunni and Shiite extremists has been ongoing in Muslim countries for over a millennium. Wahhabi and Salafist purists export violence and terrorism to Islamic states and Muslim communities around the world, while imposing strict compliance with Shariah law on other Muslims. Over the past five years, 82% - 97% of terrorism victims worldwide have been Muslims. Most of these casualties were the result of Islamic factional violence. Last year, the greatest number of major terrorist attacks (that is, involving 10 or more deaths) took place in Muslim-majority countries.[59]
Most of the violence carried out by Islamic supremacists has no direct connection to Israel or the U.S., and little or nothing to do with economic and political oppression. If both Israel and the U.S. were to disappear today, Boko Haram (the name means, "Western Education is Forbidden") terrorists would continue to slaughter Muslims and Christians in Nigeria and burn churches to the ground. Islamists in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh would still persecute and kill Hindus, as they have for centuries. The Janjaweed Islamic militia would carry on its genocidal slaughter against Christians in Sudan. Iraq's Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish factions would persist in their violent struggle for power. The persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt would press ahead uninhibited. Oppression and violence against Muslim women under Shariah law would most likely increase. The Taliban in Afghanistan would keep on poisoning and shooting Muslim girls for attending school and affirming their right to be educated. The cadence of misery inflicted upon the world by Islamic extremists would not miss a beat.[60]
As Robert Durie Osborn, a British major who served in India during the nineteenth century, put it: "They are strong only for destruction. When that work is over, they either prey upon each other, or beat themselves to death against the bars of their prison-house."[61]
Indifference is Not an Option
Islamic supremacism likely poses a multi-generational threat to the existence of Western civilization - perhaps the greatest threat it has ever faced. As members of American society, Muslims - most of whom were undoubtedly fleeing abuse, not trying to bring it with them - should of course be treated with respect, and their religion afforded the same deference we extend to other religions. But our civility should not blind us to the potential for extremism in the Muslim community - a concern shared by 60% of Muslim Americans - or to the religious connections between Islam and terrorism. Considering the magnitude of the threat, we can no longer afford to entertain the naïve and dangerous premise, which argues that all religions are essentially the same: Islam is different.
Somebody Forgot To Pay A Fine? Well, Send Out The SWAT Team
We see too much of this lately -- maybe because there's so much media now, but maybe because there is too much of this.
A pediatric practice got raided last week, as police in Cottonwood, Arizona pulled together to arrest a dangerous...um...a person who still owed a bit of money to the state.
J.D. Tucille writes at Reason:
My wife, Dr. Wendy Tuccille, was on her way to the office in Cottonwood, Arizona, when her phone rang. Frantic staff called to tell her that the clinic's parking lot was full of cops, there to arrest one of her employees, C.H. (it's a small town so we'll stick with her initials), on an outstanding warrant.When my wife arrived she found a gaggle of cops--12 to 15 she told me, some in battle jammies--in plain view at the rear corner of the building. The parking lot was full of police vehicles, in sight of families and children arriving to be seen and treated.
"Who's in charge here?" she asked, demanding that they move the Fallujah reenactment out of view.
"We were already in the process of moving the vehicles at this time," Cottonwood Detective Sergeant Tod Moore insisted in a statement to me. "It should be noted only 1 marked police unit was in the main parking lot area of the business." (The clinic's staff dispute that point.) Moore also claimed that only 10 officers were present. They included three detectives dressed in civilian clothes--and tactical vests--who arrived to initiate the arrest, joined by seven additional officers, including SWAT members, who transported another suspect with them on the trip to deliver the arrest warrant that the detectives hadn't brought along.
C.H.'s crime? It was an eight-year-old "amended charge of 28-1381A1 DUI to the Slightest Degree," according to Court Clerk and Associate Magistrate Anna M. Kirton. Kirton signed C.H.'s release order after my wife paid $1,300 to spare her employee 26 days in jail. More accurately, C.H. was arrested for making only partial payment of the fines and fees she'd been assessed, and for missing a court appointment that she never knew about.
The alternative -- that works in many of these cases Tucille writes about -- is leaving a note for somebody to pay.
Oh, but that's not half as much fun as putting on that SWAT gear and taking somebody down. Also, that pays better:
The receipt for the payment that got C.H. sprung details a "base fine" charge of $163.05. On top of that the court added a "probation surcharge" of $6.52, other surcharges of $130.43, a $500.00 contribution to the "prison construction" fund, and another $500.00 for "public safety equipment" (I asked the cops if that's how they paid for SWAT's battle jammies, but didn't get an answer). The total came to $1,300--a pretty hefty sum, to be paid immediately on pain of "26 days in jail starting today. No work or early release," according to the court record.
Rather disgusting, huh?
The upshot:
"Imposing 'small fines' for our (often objectively harmless in and of itself) behavior as we move through the world or through traffic is one of the most significant ways Americans interact with the state. Even if the fines don't balloon to bigger fines and eventual arrest warrants, such interactions open up Americans to violations of dignity (like being publicly jacked up and handcuffed), privacy (you are supposed to identify yourself and give the cops a chance to look into your background), and possibly liberty," wrote Reason's Brian Doherty in a 2014 piece on the legal minefield that petty law enforcement creates for all of us--but especially the poor and powerless.
Dragging Links
Loved this.
How Affirmative Consent Laws Deny The Ambiguity That Actually Comes With Sex -- And How "That's Victim Blaming!" Increases Sexual Assault
Carol Tavris -- a researcher I have great respect for -- has a long piece up at Skeptic.com.
Tavris notes that Affirmative Consent laws fail to take into account the "subtleties" in "the gray zone of human interaction":
The vast majority of all reports of rape--about 85%--occur between people who know each other. Some of these encounters are unambiguously coerced, but many are not. And while the goal of getting expressed consent is admirable, it's not entirely realistic--partly because people often don't know what they want.Sex researchers repeatedly find that people rarely say directly what they mean at the start of a sexual encounter, and they often don't mean what they say. They find it difficult to say what they dislike because they don't want to hurt the other person's feelings. They may think they want intercourse and then change their minds. They may think they don't want intercourse and change their minds.
They are, in short, engaging in what social psychologist Deborah Davis calls a "dance of ambiguity." It occurs because the intersection between consensual and nonconsensual sex is often not marked with flashing lights and traffic signals that say Slow! Stop! Yield! This is the territory of "he said/she said" and the polarized interpretations that cause such heated debate.
The reality from sex research:
As sexologists know from research and clinical experience, most straight couples, even long-term couples, communicate sexual intentions--including a wish not to have sex--indirectly and ambiguously, through hints, body language, eye contact, "testing the waters," and mind reading (which is about as accurate as...mind reading).This dance of ambiguity actually has benefits for both partners: Through vagueness and indirection, each party's ego is protected in case the other says no. Indirection saves a lot of hurt feelings, but also causes problems: The woman really thinks the man should have known to stop, and he really thinks she gave consent.
Davis and her colleagues Guillermo Villalobos and Richard Leo have suggested that the primary reason for the many "he said/she said" reports that make the news is not that one side is lying. Rather, each partner is providing "honest false testimony" about what happened between them.
That is, both parties believe they are telling the truth, but one or both may be wrong because of the unreliability of memory and perception, and because both are motivated to justify their actions.
Because memory is reconstructive in nature, and susceptible to suggestion, and because we distort or rewrite our memories to conform to our views of ourselves, people can "remember" saying things that they only thought about or intended to say at the time.
As a result, a woman might falsely remember saying things that she thought about (but did not say) to stop the situation, because she sees herself as an assertive person who would stand up for herself.
A man might falsely remember what he did to verify the woman's consent that he did not do, because he sees himself as a decent guy who would never rape a woman. She's not necessarily lying; she's misremembering. He's not necessarily lying; he's self-justifying.
And then there's alcohol:
By far, the most well-traveled pathway from uncomfortable sexual negotiations to honest false testimony is alcohol. For some women, alcohol is the solution to the sex decision: If they are inebriated, they haven't said "yes," and if they haven't explicitly said "yes," no one can call them a slut.Alcohol, of course, reduces inhibitions and makes "yes," for both parties, more likely. But it also significantly impairs the cognitive interpretation of the other person's behavior: men who are drunk are less likely to interpret non-consent messages accurately and women who are drunk convey less emphatic signs of refusal. And alcohol severely impairs both partners' memory of what actually happened.
If our goal is really to reduce sexual assault of all kinds, therefore, it is not helpful to label all forms of sexual misconduct, including unwanted touches and sloppy kisses, as "rape." We need to draw distinctions between behavior that is criminal, behavior that is stupid, and behavior that results from the dance of ambiguity.
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons have an excellent book out -- The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us -- that explains some of the ways our intuitions mess us up, and how in the dark we are about this. My radio show on the book with Chabris is here. An example from the book description:
We write traffic laws and build criminal cases on the assumption that people will notice when something unusual happens right in front of them.
Here are Chabris and Simons from their book on why "the illusion of knowledge" persists -- how we respect people who seem certain and sneer at people who say they aren't sure:
Scientists, architects, and hedge fund managers are respected, but weather forecasters are parodied. Yet weather forecasters have fewer illusions about their own knowledge than do members of these other professions.In Chapter 3 we saw that doctors who consulted books and computers were underappreciated by patients, whereas a rape victim who expressed no doubt in her testimony was praised as a model witness.
There we argued that our love of confidence can reward people for acting as though they are more skilled and accurate than they really are.
The illusion of knowledge has similar consequences: We seem to prefer the advice of experts who act like they know more than they really do -- or who honestly believe their knowledge is greater than it is.
Tavris herself has a great book out on cognitive biases -- Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) -- coauthored with Elliot Aronson. Here's my radio show on the book with Tavris.
Tavris's note on alcohol and how that leads to sex acts one may, um, regret the next day, suggests that the single best way to stop unwanted sex or unwanted sex after the fact is, no, not campus kangaroo courts that remove due process from men.
It's discontinuing our counterproductive alcohol prohibitions for people "underage" that lead to binge-drinking on campus that isn't seen in countries with less strict alcohol policies.
And it's telling women that they have to take responsibility for themselves and not overdrink -- and stop seeing doing that as "blaming the victim." It's instead telling women how not to be victims -- telling them that yes, as new adults, the territory comes with taking responsibility for yourself.
Secret SJW Rules Of What You Can't Do, Say, Or Wear: No Dreadlocks For White Men!
At San Francisco State University, a black woman attacks a white man -- physically attacks him -- because he's wearing dreadlocks.
The story -- from CBSSF:
22 year old SF State Senior Cory Goldstein says he was walking on campus, and wanted a flier the woman was passing out. Goldstein says the woman told him, "We don't want people with your hair coming to our event," because it belongs to her culture.Goldstein of San Diego - asks, "You're saying I can't have a hairstyle because of your culture? Why?"
The woman, identified in published reports and on social media as student employee Bonita Tindle, respond, "Because it's my culture."
More words are exchanged, but tension escalates when she tries to stop him from walking away.
"Yo, girl, stop touching me now, I don't need your disrespect."
What, no screeching over appropriation of the word "Yo"?
At the end the girl sees someone is capturing the scene on video and asks, "why are you filming this?"A voice says off-camera replies, "for everyone's safety," and she reaches for the camera.
That's when the video ends.
Goldstein said he won't be pressing charges.
"The police said I could file charges if I wanted to, and that it was considered battery and a hate crime. I did not file any criminal charges," he told KPIX 5.
This country is founded on the blendo principle, and I love that. I take from what I see around me that I like, from whatever culture -- as I see most people around me doing.
As I explain in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," since air travel became affordable for the multitudes, blendo culture has become global culture.
I wear my scarves slip-knotted like people do in France, for example.
Luckily, no French people see me doing that and come and, oh, hurl croissants at me.
By the way, girliepoo should pick up a book before she claims dreadlocks as a black thing. They wore them in ancient Greece and in a bunch of places.
Eeeeeek! Cultural appropriation!
Yes, dear -- we call it modern life.
Lurky
Dark cornery links.
How About Nobody Gets Punished First In The Press?
Sexual assault victims get to have their names kept out of the press; it's those accused whose names get dragged around the media.
Well, this isn't right. Merely being accused of a crime isn't the same thing as being judged guilty of it -- that is, in the criminal justice system, not the kangaroo court system now in place on campuses, where due process and really any flecks of fairness have been removed from men.
Ashe Schow writes at the WashEx about rape shield laws (against naming victims):
They're meant to protect victims, but it's now becoming clear that the "victim" in many accusations is actually the accused. Activists often claim that the number of false accusations is between 2 percent and 10 percent. But these statistics refer only to accusations that are proven false. An equally small number of cases result in convictions, so following the same logic, we should also be claiming that just 2 percent of rape accusations are true....Activists want to err on the side of assuming everyone accused is a monster.
There are major problems to this. First and foremost, it encourages false accusations. We've seen on college campuses that the presumption of innocence is no longer the norm, and colleges are expelling students even when evidence suggests they are innocent.
If you don't get to drag somebody through the media, maybe there's an important incentive removed from false accusations.
As it should be.
Schow notes:
And we've seen so many reports recently where the charges are dropped but the accused's name makes it into the media, forever tarnishing him as an "accused rapist." Those who subscribe to the "listen and believe" mantra will never believe the accused is innocent. That's as bad as disbelieving every accusation.Merely being accused of rape carries life-damaging consequences. Beyond the emotional trauma of being accused for something one didn't do, there are real world consequences: The loss of job and relationship prospects, support and the suspicion that hangs over one's life forever.
Check out the Jian Ghomeshi case. Noel Erinjeri writes at MimesisLaw that the former CBC journalist and host was recently found "not guilty of five counts of sexual assault against three women in a high profile trial that just concluded in Toronto."
The evidence just didn't support his guilt. For example, there was the accuser who said he assaulted her in a yellow VW Beetle -- a card he didn't even own until seven months after the alleged incident.
As the judge put it:
Her description of his car was an important feature of her recollection of the first date. And yet we know that this memory is simply wrong. The impossibility of this memory makes one seriously question, what else might be honestly remembered by her and yet actually be equally wrong? This demonstrably false memory weighs in the balance against the general reliability of L.R.'s evidence as a whole.
Can Ghomeshi ever again get a job in broadcasting? I would doubt it. And I suspect his life has been transformed in some pretty awful ways.
Too Many Who Write About Islam In Western Society Know Too Little About It
I read a lot about Islam in the news lately -- and it's the rare writer who's actually read in or about the religion to any comprehensive degree (and this often includes people who call themselves Muslim).
(For the record, I've been reading in and about Islam since 9/11 -- and before I started, like so many people, I wanted to believe that Islam was just another religion, and not what it is: A violent, totalitarian system masquerading as a religion.)
Matthew Hennessey writes at City Journal that, while the Brussels slaughter was predictable, it shouldn't be considered inevitable (which is where he's wrong):
Yes, I suppose that we must concede that an attack on Brussels was likely, considering that the city had become known in recent months as the incubator of the terrorist cell that attacked Paris in November 2015. This past weekend, Belgian authorities finally nabbed Salah Abdeslam, a 26-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent alleged to have participated in the attacks. He had been hiding out for the last four months in Molenbeek, the Brussels neighborhood and hotbed of Islamic radicalism.But nothing about Islamic terrorism in Western Europe is inevitable. Multiculturalism has invited the problem. Decades of failure to assimilate young male Muslims into the European cultural mainstream have produced a generation of angry misfits, vulnerable to radicalization and eager to express its dissatisfaction through Islamist violence.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. A commenter at City Journal:
Michael Steinberg
Your criticism is a bit glib, Mr. Hennessey. Many young male Muslims don't WANT to "assimilate ... into the European cultural mainstream." So now what? Do you favor mass deportation? Forced conversion? If not, what exactly DO you want Brussels (and ultimately the rest of Europe) to do?
My comment to Steinberg:
Michael Steinberg, you bring up a good point. The problem is that Islam is a totalitarian political ideology incompatible with Western laws, rights, and freedoms. It masquerades as a religion -- which gives it cover in Western society. It also has failsafes built in -- like how the Quran is considered to be the unquestionable word of Allah and how mass-murdering, raping, looting, psychopath Mohammed is to be emulated (per the chronicle of his behavior in the Hadiths). So calls to not find the terror inevitable are ultimately empty without solutions -- and P.S. it's not like I have any simple solution, either. The failsafes of Islam make reform perhaps impossible.
Another comment from City Journal:
Richard Biondi
Muslims pray five times a day; they are harangued about Muhammet and Allah from dawn till dusk. Their preferred education comes in the madras, where they are similarly harangued to hate infidels, encouraged to lie to them, kill them, enslave them, all in the name of the fantasy "world caliphate". No wonder these are wild eyed crazies are out of control in the modern world. There should be no place in Western Civilization for people who follow this poltical movement. Otherwise, how's "diversity' working out for you?
Here's Islam.
And here's something else -- a comparison that I think puts this in perspective. The comparison is below. The Economist:
The Brussels bombers struck days after police arrested Salah Abdeslam, a chief suspect in last year's attacks in Paris in which 130 people died. For four months he had found haven with sympathetic friends and neighbours just a few streets away from his home in Molenbeek, a Brussels suburb. Plainly, some people are prepared to endorse Mr Abdeslam's methods even if they are not yet ready to dip their own hands in their compatriots' blood.
How many of you would hide a mass murderer from your particular religion or lack thereof?
This lecture by Mary Habeck, Associate Professor of Strategic Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, will explain why this happens under Islam. The talk is out of her book, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror.
Linkery Dinkery
Doc.
The Roots Of The Drug War: Going After Black People And The Anti-War Movement
Dan Baum, who was writing a book on the politics of drug prohibition, writes at Harpers of his interview with disgraced Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and Erlichman's words on the drug war:
"You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying?""We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news."
"Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
The government has no right to tell you what plants or powders you can and cannot put in your body.
Also, from Baum's piece:
What exactly is our drug problem? It isn't simply drug use. Lots of Americans drink, but relatively few become alcoholics. It's hard to imagine people enjoying a little heroin now and then, or a hit of methamphetamine, without going off the deep end, but they do it all the time. The government's own data, from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, shatters the myth of "instantly addictive" drugs. Although about half of all Americans older than twelve have tried an illegal drug, only 20 percent of those have used one in the past month. In the majority of those monthly-use cases, the drug was cannabis. Only tiny percentages of people who have sampled one of the Big Four -- heroin, cocaine, crack, and methamphetamine -- have used that drug in the past month. (For heroin, the number is 8 percent; for cocaine, 4 percent; for crack, 3 percent; for meth, 4 percent.) It isn't even clear that using a drug once a month amounts to having a drug problem. The portion of lifetime alcohol drinkers who become alcoholics is about 8 percent, and we don't think of someone who drinks alcohol monthly as an alcoholic.
And what has happened in Portugal with decriminalization?
So consider Portugal, which in 2001 took the radical step of decriminalizing not only pot but cocaine, heroin, and the rest of the drug spectrum. Decriminalization in Portugal means that the drugs remain technically prohibited -- selling them is a major crime -- but the purchase, use, and possession of up to ten days' supply are administrative offenses.No other country has gone so far, and the results have been astounding. The expected wave of drug tourists never materialized. Teenage use went up shortly before and after decriminalization, but then it settled down, perhaps as the novelty wore off. (Teenagers -- particularly eighth graders -- are considered harbingers of future societal drug use.)
The lifetime prevalence of adult drug use in Portugal rose slightly, but problem drug use -- that is, habitual use of hard drugs -- declined after Portugal decriminalized, from 7.6 to 6.8 per 1,000 people. Compare that with nearby Italy, which didn't decriminalize, where the rates rose from 6.0 to 8.6 per 1,000 people over the same time span.
Because addicts can now legally obtain sterile syringes in Portugal, decriminalization seems to have cut radically the number of addicts infected with H.I.V., from 907 in 2000 to 267 in 2008, while cases of full-blown AIDS among addicts fell from 506 to 108 during the same period.
The new Portuguese law has also had a striking effect on the size of the country's prison population. The number of inmates serving time for drug offenses fell by more than half, and today they make up only 21 percent of those incarcerated. A similar reduction in the United States would free 260,000 people -- the equivalent of letting the entire population of Buffalo out of jail.
When applying the lessons of Portugal to the United States, it's important to note that the Portuguese didn't just throw open access to dangerous drugs without planning for people who couldn't handle them. Portugal poured money into drug treatment, expanding the number of addicts served by more than 50 percent. It established Commissions for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction, each of which is composed of three people -- often a doctor, a social worker, and an attorney -- who are authorized to refer a drug user to treatment and in some cases impose a relatively small fine.
Nor did Portugal's decriminalization experiment happen in a vacuum. The country has been increasing its spending on social services since the 1970s, and even instituted a guaranteed minimum income in the late 1990s. The rapid expansion of the welfare state may have contributed to Portugal's well-publicized economic troubles, but it can probably also share credit for the drop in problem drug use.
For more on this subject, science journalist Maia Szalavitz has an excellent book about to be published, The Unbroken Brain, arguing that addictions are learning disorders. It's smart and it's very moving -- she chronicles her own struggle with addiction.
I've read it and will have her on my podcast (just as soon as I dig out from finishing a particularly hard chapter for my next book and editing a researcher's book on rush -- probably in mid-April).
via Lenona
24th Time's The Charm!
It isn't that we just ignore illegal immigration. After you get caught illegally crossing the border, oh, 24 times, we get a little fed up and finally do something.
Teri Figueroa writes for the LA Times:
A career smuggler nabbed while guiding four immigrants through the Otay Mountains last year was sentenced Friday to five years in prison.U.S. Border Patrol agents had caught Efrain Delgado Rosales with undocumented immigrants 23 times in less than 17 years, according to the U.S. attorney's office.
...Federal prosecutors said agents have apprehended Delgado 24 times since 1999, and in all but one instance, he was found with at least two and up to 46 undocumented immigrants.
via @OfficerDunphy
Time To Put The Blame For Islamic Terrorism In The Right Place
That place is not on the innocent people who are being slaughtered. Douglas Murray makes some great points in The Telegraph/UK about all the ridiculous self-blaming we do:
"It is your foreign policy," [people] say. Perhaps after Brussels people might question this response a little more searchingly. Aside from Bhutan, Belgium probably has the least interventionist foreign policy of any country in the world.Other apologists answer that terrorists are moved to blow up trains and gun down people in cafes because they feel disenfranchised and ostracised, with few employment opportunities. This is particularly strange when you consider that there is record unemployment in Southern Europe right now and none of our cities has yet been visited by a jobless Catholic Italian modelling a suicide vest. It is about poverty, excuse-seekers say. Yet nobody from the most deprived estates of Glasgow has yet carried this idea to its illogical conclusion.
Indeed, people like to think that deprivation and radicalisation go hand in hand; they claim that the areas these young men are forced to live in aren't nice enough and it makes them feel marginalised. Molenbeek in Belgium lacked "gentrification", apparently, and this was a causal factor. If only we could only find them somewhere nice to live, they would find it easier to integrate.
What nonsense. Earlier this month I was in Holland, visiting their predominantly Muslim ghettos, including the one where Mohamed Bouyeri was living when he assassinated the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004 for making a film which criticised Islam. This mini-Morocco was not Mayfair, but it was a lot nicer than most estates in Britain. We really have gone mad if we're blaming the mass-murder of fellow citizens on inadequate social housing.
It all tracks back to this infuriating idea that we have not done enough to "integrate" people. But immigrant groups nearly always want to stick together. Some Muslims in Britain want to live in entirely parallel societies with their own system of laws and customs. "Perhaps they don't want to live with us because we're racist" is the final fail-safe of the self-abuser. In fact, it is more commonly the other way around.
...The problem of Islamic extremism is caused - astonishingly enough - by Islamic extremism. As France, Belgium and many other societies can now attest, the larger your Muslim population, the larger your Islamic extremism problem. Not because most Muslims are terrorists. Obviously not. But because that "small minority" we always hear about grows proportionally bigger the larger the community is.
The real problem is Islam, which commands Muslims to slaughter the "infidel," and tells them they'll get a special pass to salvation for doing it. There are myriad violence-commanding passages from the Quran at the bottom of this post, if you'd like to see for yourself.
Linkslippery
Step your watch!
Fed Court: Guess What, Cops -- You Could Be Sued For Using Taser Against Suspects Posing No Threat
In Seattle, cops used a Taser on a pregnant woman -- seven months pregnant -- when she refused to sign a speeding ticket.
This is just one of many such situations across the country: cops turning on Tasers and lighting a person up because they were less than "Yessir, Officer Cop, Sir!" in the face of some cop command.
Well, there's been a court ruling to stop them from using it when there isn't some threat to them.
Doug Donovan and Mark Puente write for the Baltimore Sun about the Fourth Circuit Court's ruling:
A federal court recently put police on notice: They could lose on-the-job immunity from civil lawsuits if they use a Taser to shock suspects in the face of nonviolent resistance....The case centers on a North Carolina man, 43-year-old Ronald Armstrong. The bipolar and schizophrenic man was drive-stunned five times by Pinehurst, N.C., police because he would not let go of a pole to be escorted across the street to the hospital where he was being involuntarily committed. He died shortly after being handcuffed.
The unarmed man did not pose an immediate danger to officers or the public, the court said.
"At bottom, 'physical resistance' is not synonymous with 'risk of immediate danger,'" the court wrote.
More:
The Baltimore Sun found that nearly 60 percent of those hit by Tasers from 2012 to 2014 were described by police as "non-compliant and non-threatening." As part of a six-month investigation, The Sun created a database with information obtained from the state through public records requests.The weapon fires two electrified darts that incapacitate suspects long enough to be handcuffed. An alternative "drive-stun" method allows officers to press the hand-held device against a suspect's body to inflict localized pain or to complete the electrical circuit when a dart fails to pierce the skin.
The Sun also found that in one out of every 10 incidents over the three year-period, police discharged the weapon for longer than 15 seconds -- a duration that exceeds recommendations from Taser, the U.S. Department of Justice and policing experts.
In addition, officers failed to heed other recommendations, including to avoid repeated drive-stunning and chest shots. They fired the weapons at the chest 119 times in 2014.
Eleven people have died in Maryland since 2009 after encounters in which police used Tasers, including five who died after being shocked for longer than what is now recommended. Three people died after being repeatedly hit by a Taser in "drive-stun" mode, according to police reports and other accounts. One died after being hit in the chest.
Cops need to stop using the "because we can!" logic for Tasering people. This is the problem with "nifty" weapons -- including all that paramilitary stuff: what you have you tend to want to use, and, as I point out in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" about the Internet, we tend to be like chimps with our fingers on the button of the info-nuke: Press first; think later.
This can have tragic consequences when your finger on the button delivers a megawad of electricity to some non-violent suspect you haven't first sent for a heart check.
About the ruling, tweet from Maggie McNeill:
Not good enough; cities don't mind paying out on cop lawsuits. Court needs to declare these cops open to prosecution
via @Maggie_McNeill
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.
Where Trump's Support Comes From
Bo and Ben Winegard piece at Quillette. They feel his appeal "lies in the refuse of postindustrial America where the White working class struggles for esteem in a rapidly changing, multicultural society":
Imagine that you were born in a modest Prairie style home in small town Kentucky. Beyond the shadows of the maple trees that surrounded your house, farmland stretched down the highway, interrupted only by small Country homes with white fences, bright gardens, and sunny porches. After high school, you stayed in your hometown and had a family. But jobs were difficult to find. In your father's day, there were plenty of good manufacturing jobs. But those had left. And the town was changing. The houses that you remembered as warm and sunny were now faded with rotting fences and unkempt lawns. Buildings that used to house hundreds of workers were empty and dilapidated with shattered windows. After a long struggle, you found a job at Pizza Hut making 9 dollars an hour. It wasn't enough to support the family, so you began to supplement it with government assistance.You had been a Republican for many years because you thought it was important to talk about God and to discourage free riders from taking advantage of the country. Furthermore, you believed in traditional marriage and family values. But you had been growing more and more frustrated with Republicans as the years passed. In magazines, in films, and on television, people openly denigrated your culture, ridiculing rednecks, hillbillies, and bible thumpers. NASCAR, your favorite sport, was still mocked by suburban elites. And Walmart. And country music. And the military. And action films. And smoking cigarettes. And chewing tobacco. And eating meat. You despised the so-called experts who were always telling you how to live your life, the film critics who were always sneering at your favorite films, and the haughty politicians who were always lecturing you about tolerance.
Things were getting worse. You knew several people who had lost their jobs to Mexican immigrants who had just arrived in your town. You heard many more complaining about this on the radio, lamenting that immigrants had replaced them at the factory. Many of those immigrants were probably in the U.S. illegally. Why did the police and the government allow rich business owners to use cheap, illegal labor when so many Americans were out of jobs? You didn't hate Mexicans, but it did perturb you that many of your phone calls asked you if you wanted English or Spanish. Wasn't this an English speaking country? But nobody cared about your concerns. In fact, on television, you heard many commentators calling your opinions bigoted and racist.
And free trade deals. They were causing jobs to relocate to Mexico, to China, to India. Whenever you had a problem with Comcast, for example, you now had to talk to somebody in some other country, somebody who struggled with English and was not very helpful. Apparently, politicians just didn't care about Americans anymore. Both Republicans and Democrats seemed to promote free trade and even some kind of immigration reform. You wondered: Why should millions of people who broke American laws, who stole American jobs, be allowed to stay here, to get taxpayer supported handouts, to become American citizens? So, that was it--your town would continue to decay while politicians continued to pursue policies that hurt you and everyone you knew. And worse still, you weren't even allowed to say anything about it--weren't allowed to voice your real political opinions--without being denounced. If you were white, what did you have to complain about? You were privileged. You weren't a victim. It was time you had gotten with the program. Embraced diversity. And stopped complaining about lower wages, fewer jobs, and changing cultural norms.
...Instead of mocking Trump's supporters, it would be useful (and morally decent) to understand them and their complaints. It is easy for the educated to dismiss concerns about free trade as ignorant nationalism, to chastise concerns about immigration or terrorism as repugnant racism, and to ridicule concerns about elite collusion as paranoid conspiracism. Easy. But perhaps not wise. The White working class has, in fact, struggled for many years. And they are legitimately angry. Although the reasons for their struggles are myriad, many experts do believe that free trade deals and immigration policies have contributed. Reasonable people might decide that the costs of trade deals and lenient immigration policies are vastly outweighed by their benefits, but to deny those costs, is not to promote social harmony or justice. And to accuse of mindless xenophobia those who have been hurt most by such policies, is probably far worse--and quite possibly, completely counterproductive.
Trump has parlayed the fear, loathing, and restlessness of those who feel left behind by postindustrial America into an impressive presidential campaign. He may be detestable, but so long as cocooned elites ignore the anxiety he has channeled, he will keep winning.
Related: Why Utah was impervious to Trump, from a @jonhaidt tweet quoting Michael Brendan Dougherty's piece:
"Voters who are well integrated into the mediating institutions of society don't buy what Trump is selling."
Quillette via @stevestuwill
How The TSA's Pretend Security Endangers Us All
Sean Higgins writes in the WashEx -- as I've said over and over -- that having a whole bunch of passengers all lined up like sitting ducks, waiting to get through the TSA's "security" line, makes them, well, sitting ducks for terrorists.
That's because the unskilled workers hired by the TSA have never been more than a show of security.
I believe the TSA is set up to do a number of things:
- Line the pockets of former government workers like slimy Michael Chertoff, representing businesses that sell to the TSA;
- Be a jobs program for people who are not exactly in high demand elsewhere;
- Provide a gullible, "don't wanna be bothered" American public the sense that security is being provided;
- Train the American public to be docile in the face of having our rights yanked from us.
And we've done remarkably well on that last one -- and all the others.
As Higgins reports -- quoting the respected Bill Jenkins, whom I've heard speak at Rand:
"Airport security is front-loaded as much as possible towards prevention of an event taking place on an airplane," said Bill Jenkins, a terrorism policy expert with the Rand Corporation. But making it impossible for terrorists to get on a plane doesn't prevent them from trying a different attack. They then look for other "mass casualty" targets, such as the airport terminal....Tuesday's attacks by three terrorists in the main terminal of the Brussels airport resulted in 11 deaths. There is no indication that the terrorists had any interest in boarding a plane. They simply made a direct attack on the crowds in the main area. Another 20 people were killed in an attack at nearly the same time on a nearby commuter rail system.
...A 2004 Rand study on security risks at LAX said airports should limit crowds in unsecured areas as much as possible. "Overall airport efficiency, including the operations of [the airport], the airlines and TSA, is not enhanced by having people stand in line," it found.
Robert Poole, director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, a nonprofit free-market think tank, argues that the TSA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, has been lax in adapting to changes in terrorists' plots.
"TSA is still far too focused on fighting the last war -- i.e., preventing a repeat of the 9/11 attack. That's why the vast majority of TSA's budget is focused on passenger and baggage screening, with basically no attention to the vulnerabilities to airports and their passengers that Rand has higlighted," Poole said.
Poole is exactly right.
And then there's this:
An internal investigation by DHS's Inspector General's Office last year found that undercover investigators were able to board planes at some of the nation's busiest airports while carrying mock weapons or explosives 95 percent of the time. The agency responded with an improvement plan calling for stricter examinations of passengers.
The problem is that we are treating every single person who flies as a reasonable suspect for terrorism. This is idiocy. We should be doing probable cause-based policing, using trained intelligence officers, not often power-mad repurposed mall food court workers who get their rocks off telling CEOs to "assume the position" so they can grope their balls.
Lottie
Lottie Linkie.
There's A Reason We Call Them "Children" -- Not "Short Adults"
In 3rd Grade, I battered a classmate. Okay, that's what they would have called it -- "battery" -- if I had been arrested. (If that had happened, I'd probably still be in tears.)
What I actually did is bonk a classmate on the head with a dustpan. We were supposed to sweep up and she wasn't sleeping. BONK!
I got in trouble, which is to say I got sent to the principal's office and my mom got called.
I was made to understand the error of my ways (simply being sent principal-ward did that) and I apologized.
And that was the extent of my criminal past -- well, to be honest, save for a little minor fake ID and permission slip forgery in my teens. But I've kept my freckled nose clean since then.
It helped that schools didn't go overboard then -- having kids arrested for stuff that should be corrected with a stern talking to and a call to a kid's parents.
Robby Soave writes at Reason that because some jerk of a mom demanded a girl be arrested -- for, at 12, pinching her son's butt -- the school and cops complied:
Breana's actions were wrong. She should not have violated that boy's personal space. It was appropriate for the school to tell her to keep her hands to herself, and even to give her some light punishment. But a suspension seems a tad overboard, unless the boy was deeply humiliated or scarred. Nothing in the story suggests that this was the case.Part of growing up is learning to respect other people's boundaries, and schools should play a role in instructing kids to behave like adults.
The police, on the other hand, have no role to play in the lives of non-violent, non-troubled kids who are making typical kid mistakes. It is ludicrous to charge Breana with a crime. She's not a criminal, she's a normal pre-teen. Kids push each other around. They mess with each other. Police should interfere only when such conduct is actually threatening. A kid who repeatedly punches another kid might deserve a visit to juvenile detention. A kid who pinches another kid deserves a time-out.
But given the new obsession with child safety, and paranoia about sex crimes, I'm actually a bit surprised Breana hasn't also been charged with sexual harassment. If Breanna were a boy and the victim a girl, perhaps the authorities would have imposed a harsher sentence. (A 13-year-old boy in Maryland who kissed a 14-year-old girl on a dare was charged with second-degree assault.)
"Lord, lord, lord, what's this world come to?" asked Breana's father. "Kid can't even be a kid."
And that's exactly the problem. When we expect perfect behavior from children, we set them up for failure. If they're not allowed to make mistakes, then they're not allowed to grow up. Putting a kid in jail for a one-off physical encounter is cruel, it's unnecessary, and it betrays a profound naivety about the social development of young people.
Oh, and you want to do right by your kid? Don't have him be the reason some other kid gets arrested for what amounts to normal asshole kid behavior.
P.S. I say that as someone who was bullied as a kid. Even then, my dad went to the principal of my junior high school and said the behavior had to stop; and it was stopped. He didn't demand all the girls be packed off to jail.
(One of these girls later wrote to me and apologized, which I appreciated.)
Glorifying Murder Versus Prosecuting It
Here is the difference between Palestinian values -- glorifying and celebrating murder of Jews and Israelis -- and Israeli values: Deeming murder -- whether of a Palestinian or an Israeli -- terrible and criminal and worthy of prosecution.
Quote from the LA Times piece:
Israeli military spokesman Peter Lerner said it was a "grave incident" and the soldier who shot the Palestinian in the head had been arrested and detained. After a preliminary investigation, they "found the soldier breached military practice and values," he said.
Palestinians who murder Israelis, on the other hand, are given monthly stipends as a reward for their crimes -- very likely some of it money from dim Americans who see the Israelis as not quite underdoggy enough to be for. (Plus, of course, Israelis are Jooos.)
Campus Gun Rules Do Not Stop Shootings From Happening
However, people with guns stop them from continuing.
The notion that by prohibiting guns on campus you will stop some nutjob from taking out a professor or others is just ridiculous.
I am neither on the left or right, but one of the things I laugh about regarding views on the left is the idea that gun laws or rules are magical lines that the government or a college draws that will deter people from crossing to shoot anyone. This thinking is on the level of a child's idea that if they close their eyes, you can't see them, or if they tell everyone where "out of bounds" is, that no one will step over it.
There's an LA Times story by Molly Hennessy-Fiske on a new law allowing concealed guns on campus at U of Texas. Panties, of course, are bunching all over campus -- along with a lot of sub-rational thought:
Siva Vaidhyanathan was thrilled when he learned he was a finalist to become dean of the communication school at the University of Texas' flagship campus in Austin.He considered it a "plum job" and liked the idea of returning to his alma matter.
But shortly after his interview, the 49-year-old professor at the University of Virginia took himself out of the running.
The reason: He was unwilling to step into the middle of an increasingly contentious debate over guns on campus.
Public colleges and universities in Texas will no longer be able to ban the concealed carrying of handguns when a new law takes effect in August. Though the schools can impose some restrictions, they must generally honor a state-issued concealed handgun license on campus.
The biggest outcry has been at the Austin campus of the University of Texas, where students and faculty have protested and at least two professors have already resigned over the law.
...One was Daniel Hamermesh, who taught an introductory economics course and said he feared that "a disgruntled student with a gun would 'lose it,' pull out the gun and shoot the instructor."
"With 500 students in my class, this did not seem impossible," Hamermesh, who now teaches at the Royal Holloway University of London, said in an e-mail.
Dude, it's still not impossible, even in the UK, where guns are banned -- which sure doesn't stop people looking to do criminal acts from getting them.
And frankly, you're probably more likely there to get blown up by some guy looking to get his supply of "virgins" from "Allah."
By the way, all of you believers in that magical line, people in Texas have been "packing" all over the place for eons -- probably on campus, too.
Lumpenlink
Proleletarialinks.
Um, If You Choose To Take A Class Called "Deviance In Society," Do You Next File A Complaint About The Sexual Content?
What a surprise -- all these demands for trigger warnings and other attempts to comply with the government's Title IX interpretations are catching up with professors who aren't exactly white men on the right.
In The New York Times, Anemona Hartocollis writes that a professors' group, the American Assoc. of University Women, says speech is being squashed on campus, and guess whose:
Yes, that's right -- it's especially problematic for "female professors in areas like gender studies":
The report says that in the last few years, the government has been regulating not just sexual conduct but also sexual speech, and that the emphasis on complying with federal law has led to some professors being investigated by universities for making statements that some students find offensive but that the report says should be protected. A heightened focus on speech, the report said, has led to episodes like one in which students demanded trigger warnings before being exposed to graphic lesbian sex in "Fun Home," the memoir by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel."We need to protect academic speech and the freedom that goes with academic speech, as well as due process," Risa L. Lieberwitz, general counsel of the association and chairwoman of the subcommittee that drafted the report, said in an interview Wednesday. "Universities are acting in a way that is overly precipitous as well as applying overly broad definitions of sexual harassment because they are afraid of scrutiny."
How nice that the AAUW came out for due process -- only when it started to affect women.
This is my problem with feminism, too.
If you are for equal rights -- and not just special rights for women under the guise of equal rights -- you do as I have done and advocate for men to have due process rights when you see that they are now constantly violated on college campuses across this country.
Men are being suspended and expelled after judgments by campus kangaroo courts where the evidence standard is basically "You did it" and "Don't bother bringing any."
More from the piece:
In recent years, student advocates have pushed the federal government to more strongly police university compliance with Title IX, and the government has tightened its standards and increased enforcement. But the report said there should be a clearer distinction made between speech that is sexual harassment because it creates a hostile environment and speech discussing controversial or emotional subjects....Recently, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, was investigated for writing an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education in which she talked about "sexual paranoia" on campus. She was investigated by the university's Title IX office and exonerated.
The report says the matter should have been viewed as an intellectual disagreement, not a violation of education law. But it says university administrators understood the rules "to mean that once a complaint (however questionable) had been filed, an investigation had to be pursued."
In an email, Ms. Kipnis said: "After I wrote about being brought up on Title IX charges, I got dozens of emails from other professors around the country who'd been though similar things. It's truly out of control."
Via @AliceDreger (who stands up for free speech, among other things)
"Socialism" Is A Nice Word For "Howdja Like A Long, Drawn Out Death By Starvation?!"
Marian L. Tupy writes at CapX about the new trendiness of socialism, especially amongst millennials -- millennials clueless that the "utopia of equality and abundance" promised by socialist governments actually gets delivered in the form of tyranny and starvation. (Six out of the 10 worst famines of the 20th Century happened in socialist countries -- the others being Rwanda, Somalia, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia.):
The American students growing interested in "socialism" today are too young to remember what the world actually looked like the last time socialism held sway. In their lifetimes, famine has all but disappeared. Today, there is not a single ongoing case of famine in the world - not even in war-torn places like Syria.Why did famines disappear? First, because agricultural production is at an all-time high and food has been getting cheaper, not dearer. Between 1960 and 2015, the world's population increased by 143 percent. Over the same time period, the price of food has gone down by 22 percent. Second, humanity has grown richer and can afford to buy more food. Over the last 55 years, the real average annual per capita income in the world rose by 163 percent. Third, communications and transport have massively improved and it is now possible to deliver food aid anywhere in the world in a relatively short time. Fourth, globalization and trade ensure that food can be purchased by anyone, anywhere.
Africa has been the main beneficiary of that salutary development. In 1961, Africans consumed 1,993 calories per person per day. In 2011, which is the last year for which the World Bank provides data, they consumed 2,618 calories. Globally, food consumption increased from 2,196 calories to 2,870 calories. Even in Ethiopia, food consumption has increased. In 1993, two years after the overthrow of the Derg, Ethiopians consumed 1,508 calories per person per day. In 2013, they consumed 2,131 calories.
Zimbabwe, which still suffers from Marxist rule, has not been so lucky. In 1961, Zimbabweans consumed 2,115 calories per person per day. By 2013, that number fell to 2,110.
Wherever it has been tried, from the Soviet Union in 1917 to Venezuela in 2015, socialism has failed. Socialists have promised a utopia marked by equality and abundance. Instead, they have delivered tyranny and starvation. Young Americans should keep that in mind.
They won't.
via @SteveStuWill
Honest About Islam
Dr. Nabeel Qureshi writes in USA today about the role of the Quran and Hadith (the tales of Mohammed's violent, psychopathic actions, which are to be emulated) in inspiring the slaughter in Belgium:
As a Muslim growing up in the United States, I was taught by my imams and the community around me that Islam is a religion of peace. ...Yet as I began to investigate the Quran and the traditions of Muhammad's life for myself in college, I found to my genuine surprise that the pages of Islamic history are filled with violence.
...As a young Muslim boy growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, it was impossible for me to look up a hadith unless I traveled to an Islamic library, something I would have never thought to do. For all intents and purposes, if I wanted to know about the traditions of Muhammad, I had to ask imams or elders in my tradition of Islam. That is no longer the case today. Just as radical Islamists may spread their message far and wide online, so, too, the Internet has made the traditions of Muhammad readily available for whoever wishes to look them up, even in English. When everyday Muslims investigate the Quran and hadith for themselves, bypassing centuries of tradition and their imams' interpretations, they are confronted with the reality of violent jihad in the very foundations of their faith.
The Quran itself reveals a trajectory of jihad reflected in the almost 23 years of Muhammad's prophetic career. As I demonstrate carefully in my book, Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward, starting with peaceful teachings and proclamations of monotheism, Muhammad's message featured violence with increasing intensity, culminating in surah 9, chronologically the last major chapter of the Quran, and its most expansively violent teaching. Throughout history, Muslim theologians have understood and taught this progression, that the message of the Quran culminates in its ninth chapter.
The later verses of the Quran "abrogate" -- erase -- the earlier ones, which is why the peacey-weacey ones are basically just there for show. What matters -- for action, that is -- is all the "death to the Jews and Christians!" stuff.
Also, unlike the Bible, the Quran is to be taken literally, as the word of Allah, and is not to be questioned. And horrible, lying, raping, plundering, enslaving, mass-murdering Mohammed is to be emulated by Muslims. (As an atheist and a non-violent person, I have no problem if anyone wants to emulate Jesus and be all "feed the poor!" "Heal the sick!")
Back to lovely Surah 9:
Surah 9 is a command to disavow all treaties with polytheists and to subjugate Jews and Christians (9.29) so that Islam may "prevail over all religions" (9.33). It is fair to wonder whether any non-Muslims in the world are immune from being attacked, subdued or assimilated under this command. Muslims must fight, according to this final chapter of the Quran, and if they do not, then their faith is called into question and they are counted among the hypocrites (9.44-45). If they do fight, they are promised one of two rewards, either spoils of war or heaven through martyrdom. Allah has made a bargain with the mujahid who obeys: Kill or be killed in battle, and paradise awaits (9.111).Muslim thought leaders agree that the Quran promotes such violence. Maajid Nawaz, co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation in the United Kingdom, has said, "We Muslims must admit there are challenging Koranic passages that require reinterpretation today. ... Only by rejecting vacuous literalism are we able to condemn, in principle, ISIS-style slavery, beheading, lashing, amputation & other medieval practices forever (all of which are in the Quran). ... Reformers either win, and get religion-neutral politics, or lose, and get ISIL-style theocracy." In other words, Muslims must depart from the literal reading of the Quran in order to create a jihad-free Islamic world.
This is not at all to say that most Muslims are violent. The vast majority of Muslims do not live their lives based on chapter 9 of the Quran or on the books of jihad in the hadith. My point is not to question the faith of such Muslims nor to imply that radical Muslims are the true Muslims. Rather, I simply want to make clear that while ISIL may lure youth through a variety of methods, it radicalizes them primarily by urging them to follow the literal teachings of the Quran and the hadith, interpreted consistently and in light of the violent trajectory of early Islam. As long as the Islamic world focuses on its foundational texts, we will continue to see violent jihadi movements.
A commenter, Andy Rus, at USA Today:
Regardless of how you reconcile Isalm as a peaceful religion, it is not. People can be peaceful, but a religion that commands death and destruction of any non believer is a propaganda machine for evil. This is not the dark ages. Year upon year, for hundreds of years, this peacful religion has killed and destroyed, in Muhammads name, picking and choosing its reasons for violence to acheive an Islamic state, based on writings of a long different time.
Linkchoo!
Cover your mouth when you link.
Absolutely Appalling Case Of Little Girl Being Removed From Loving Foster Family For Being 1/64th Native American
Family are people who treat you like family -- and that's what this little girl found with the Page family, her foster parents and siblings of four years.
Elisha Fieldstadt writes at NBC News:
A 6-year-old girl was removed from the California home of the foster family she has lived with for four years because she has a tiny sliver of Native American heritage -- despite resistance from her foster parents and their tens of thousands of supporters.Rusty and Summer Page of Santa Clarita, California, have long fought to gain custody of Lexi, 6, who is 1.56 percent Choctaw Native American. That figure means that Lexi's home placement is dictated by the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.
That law "seeks to keep American Indian children with American Indian families," according to its own language.
The child's birth parents struggled with substance abuse, according to court documents. Her father, who had a criminal history, never lived on a Choctaw reservation and didn't have any social, political, or cultural ties to the tribe, according to the court documents. But officials determined that Lexi is 1/64th Choctaw based on his ancestry.
Lexi was placed with the Pages -- who have three other children -- in December 2011 after two unsuccessful foster homes, including one where she was taken out of because of a black eye and a scrape on her face, the court documents said.
The family loves the little girl and wanted to adopt her.
"The foster family was well aware years ago this girl is an Indian child, whose case is subject to the requirements of the Indian Child Welfare Act," the National Indian Child Welfare Association said in a statement."The Pages were always aware that the goal was to place Lexi with her family, and her permanent placement has been delayed due to the Pages' opposition to the Indian Child Welfare Act," the Choctaw Nation echoed in a statement. "We believe that following the Choctaw Nation's values is in Lexi's best interest."
Absolutely sick. Multi-culti politics over a child's welfare.
I spoke to anthropologist Sarah Hrdy a few years back at an ev psych conference, trying to figure out what goes missing for kids when their parents get divorced. It is my sense that a big part of the problem is the stability that's removed from them. No, that certainly isn't the only problem, but hearing Hrdy and reading on this leads me to believe that this may be the primary problem.
Combine this with how this girl had a loving family that she had become a part of and that she, at 4, has been ripped away from them -- well, this is truly a tragic and horrible thing.
Ridiculous Fed Ed Loans Coming Home To Roost (And Garnish Borrowers' Paychecks)
If you are in the business of granting loans and I come to you telling you I want to start a car company tomorrow and need $3 billion to do it, well, actually, I would probably not come to you, because I would probably not even get a meeting.
The problem with the the loans being so easy to get -- beyond soaring college costs and bloated administrations -- is that loans are so easy to get.
If you have very little money and no parental support and decide to go to some pricey school, there's a good chance you can get hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans.
Nobody says to you, "Hey, little girl...how are you possibly going to pay that back, given how there aren't a whole lot of jobs in the humanities and those that there are pay enough for you to pay back your loans -- that is, if you live to be about 312.
Well, there's a piece at Market Watch by Jill Berman, "Americans just had $176 million in wages garnished by the government due to unpaid student loans":
Despite more programs available to federal student loan borrowers to manage their loans, borrowers are still struggling. In fact, between October 1 and December 31, 2015, private debt collection companies hired by the Department of Education garnished more than $176 million in wages from defaulted student loan borrowers in order to pay back their debts, according to data released last week.Though the government provides a variety of options to help student loan borrowers manage their payments, it also has extraordinary powers -- including wage garnishment -- to collect on the debt if a borrower defaults.
...Still, the sheer size of the pot taken from borrower's wages is "horrifying" said Chris Hicks, an independent researcher who focuses on student debt. "These are people who can't afford to pay their student loans and they've garnished $176 million in three months from them," said Hicks, who also works as a consultant for progressive organizations. "You have to wonder what conditions people are living in when they're seeing that much of their wages garnished."
Well, maybe terrible. But the size of the pot actually doesn't say anything about the individual's situation. Maybe they're just irresponsible and thought they could get away with it.
That said, government meddling in markets tends to make them worse. The real estate market is another example. Thank goodness for how I have rudimentary math skills and midwestern parents, so I didn't get the idea I could buy a house with an adjustable rate mortgage (as if the piper would never come demanding payment).
via @reasonpolicy
Greetings, Pathetic Losers! (AKA Emory University Class Of 2018 Or So)
I don't know how I managed it, but I have spent all these years seeing political posters and hearing urgings to vote for this candidate or that, and I never once burst into tears or took to my bed for weeks to recover from the terrible trauma.
Yet, the other day, at Emory University, as The Emory Wheel's Sam Budnyk reports, students felt wounded and attacked because -- gasp! -- people on campus used their First Amendment right to chalk pro-Trump messages on the ground.
A student:
"I'm supposed to feel comfortable and safe [here]," one student said. "But this man is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it as well ... I don't deserve to feel afraid at my school," she added.
Here, I'll help you: Disagreeing with someone's point of view is not a cause for fear. If it makes you feel afraid, you have mental health issues that are keeping you from normal functioning. Check into your mental health co-pays and find yourself a nice sympathetic psychiatrist.
Another whineypants:
"How can you not [disavow Trump] when Trump's platform and his values undermine Emory's values that I believe are diversity and inclusivity when they are obviously not [something that Trump supports]" one student said tearfully. "Banning Muslims? How is that something Emory supports?" asked yet another.
More idiocy:
Singh reported having seen multiple chalkings that read "Trump 2016" between Cox Hall Bridge and the Dobbs University Center (DUC). "What I also saw on the steps near Cox [Hall] Bridge was 'Accept the Inevitable: Trump 2016,'" he said. "That was a bit alarming. What exactly is the inevitable? Why does it have to be accepted?"
Um, do you go around worrying that the world will end because somebody's bumper sticker says it's about to?
You are too stupid to be worthy of a college education. Please drop out and donate your place in school to someone who will benefit from it.
Gotta love the "pools of safety" thing:
While the University has not released an official response as of press time, Donald Trump obviously remains a flashpoint for many students, but according to Singh there is comfort to be found for those who feel oppressed. "For the students, it's reassuring to see how they are able to voice out their opinions and, although it might be safe or uncomfortable, we know that we have a community behind us, whether that be the Latin[x] community, the Muslim community or the black student community -- there are pools of safety we can go to," Singh said.
When I was in Berlin at an ev psych conference, I sometimes imagined what it must have been like for Jews. Did they hide in somebody's tomato garden to duck out of being sent to Auschwitz and thrown into an oven?
If you're in that sort of situation, where you're actually marked for death, then yes, there's a need for a "pool of safety."
If, however, you can't hear that somebody doesn't like you -- or isn't totally supportive of your group's views -- without turning into a human puddle...well, we have a nice single bed for you with some sturdy straps on the side until you're ready to function in normal society.
via @jonhaidt
Lotusinky
Assume the linksition.
The Tragedy In Belgium Shows Up The Utter Fallacy That The TSA Will Keep You Safe
The big pretend that costuming and repurposing mall food court workers as "security" will be anything approaching that has fooled the lazy American public that takes its civil liberties for granted.
They miss most of the items in DHL tests of their detection abilities, and really, it is clear that this is not security but a jobs program for unskilled earners, a cash program for former government employees like Michael Chertoff and the companies they are associated with, and obedience training for the American public -- to be docile in the face of their rights being yanked from them.
I have said for years that the people waiting in the TSA line have been made sitting ducks for terrorists, and today, tragically, this was the case in Belgium.
I have one very dear friend there, though not exactly in Brussels, and just wrote her in hopes of finding out that she and her husband and people she cares about are okay.
The news from Bill Chappell at NPR, as of 5 a.m. Pacific Time today:
At Brussels' Zaventem airport, a suicide attacker struck around 8 a.m. local time, according to a federal prosecutor. The explosions hit near the departure gates, collapsing ceiling panels and shattering glass windows. The blasts sent smoke billowing from the airport and set off a panic as people ran from the airport with whatever they could carry. The facility has now been evacuated and closed....At least 26 people are dead and more than 100 wounded, after explosions struck Brussels during the Tuesday morning rush hour, Belgian officials say. Two blasts hit the international airport; another struck a metro station. Belgium has issued a Level 4 alert, denoting "serious and imminent attack."
Condolences to all in Belgium and those who have lost loved ones or had them hurt in the attack.
The answer, of course, has never been having unskilled, often power-mad workers treat millions of people as likely terrorists but having skilled intelligence officers do investigative work and probable-cause-based policing.
The sad truth is that we can never be "safe" -- and pretending we can be by dressing people up in cop costumes gives us the illusion of safety that leaves us sitting ducks for people who want to blow us up to follow Mohammed's directives for Muslims.
P.S. This is what Islam calls for -- violence against "the infidel" -- and the installation of The New Caliphate (and the removal of Western civil liberties) around the globe. If you don't believe that -- because you have not read in Islam or because you prefer not to think that -- get reading.
Bill Warner is helpful:
A longer video -- an hour long -- from Warner. On it, Warner answers a number of questions:
(What are) reliable Hadith; How to push back against Islam; Difference between a Muslim and Islam; What is the Islamic chain of authority; Sweet and kind Muslims; Muslim literacy; Mohammed and Jesus; Why are we afraid? Immigration; Koran; Catholics and the creation of Islam; Well meaning Muslims; Why do we have to obey Ramadan rules; Archeology and Islamic history; The corruption of the Koran.
Another hour with Gad Saad, a Lebanon-born professor I know, talking to former physics professor Bill Warner.
Here's Warner's book, The Life of Mohammed (A Taste of Islam)
Other helpful Bill Warner books on Islam. A good book I have: A Simple Koran (The Islamic Trilogy Book 3)
And here are the first two books: Mohammed and the Unbelievers (The Islamic Trilogy Book 1)
TSA's Gitmo Grope Of Passengers
One of the particularly disgusting things about the violation of our civil liberties every day at airports by the unskilled thugs known as the TSA is how they give us the sort of frisk we'd get if we were going into jail or prison.
I sometimes make a remark about that -- like, "Shall I assume the position, like you're frisking me for prison?"
James Bovard writes in USA Today about his experience with the TSA's groin-groping civil liberties violators:
Flying home from Portland, Ore., on Thanksgiving morning, I had a too-close encounter with TSA agents that spurred me to file a Freedom of Information Act request. On March 5, I finally received a bevy of TSA documents and video footage with a grope-by-grope timeline.As a silent assertion of my rights, I opted out that morning from passing through the "nudie" full-body scanners. A TSA agent instead did a vigorous pat-down and then, after running his glove through an explosive trace detector (ETD), announced that I showed a positive alert for explosives. He did not know what type of explosive was detected and refused to disclose how often that machine spewed false alarms. Regardless, I was told I would have to undergo a an additional special pat-down to resolve the explosive alert. I was marched off by three TSA agents to a closed room. TSA states that "a companion of his or her choosing may accompany the passenger" but I was never notified of that right.
TSA disclosed exhaustive video coverage of my every movement in the Portland airport, even detailing which chair I chose after getting a Starbucks coffee. But there is a tell-tale gap. The video timeline notes "7:50:29 group arrives at Private Security room. 7:50:55. Door Closes. 7:57:28 Door Opens." The seven-minute gap in the recording is where travelers' rights vanish.
TSA's power is effectively unlimited behind closed doors. The lead Transportation Security officer (LTSO) proceeded to carry out a far more aggressive patdown, tugging on my shirt as if he thought it was a tear-away football jersey. The procedure was only mildly aggravating until he jammed his palm into my groin three times. Perhaps that pointless procedure was retribution for opting-out or my scoffing at their security theater.
And how great that he did that -- as opposed to going through like a compliant sheep the way most passengers do.
He had used hand sanitizer that morning -- which is apparently "notorious for spawning TSA explosive alerts." Genius.
Two comments from the site at the link:
Andrea Frymire
This happened to me in March of 2012. I was escorted between two agents like a criminal. Unable to put my shoes back on or touch my purse. I was taken to a back room that I never knew existed and BOLTED in with two TSA women. If what happened in there happened in public by a man it would be sexual assault. I was wearing skinny jeans had has to unbutton them. After being left alone for 10 min while the retested outside, they came back and set me free and said I tested negative the second time. They told me lotions from bath and body works give false positives (I don't use that brand).Lois Halbert
After being stopped by TSA for long periods several times over the years, I think I have finally figured out what is causing my triggering alarms for explosives. Before I go through security I often go into the restroom. The glycerin in the handsoaps at the airports trigger it. I have tested it twice now and nothing causes a problem if I don't wash my hands, use hand sanitizers, or hand lotions before going through security. I'm about to test it again in the future.
Gives you kind of a sense of how moronic our "security" is.
Bovard continues:
Millions of airline passengers use hand sanitizer every week. Yet, TSA entitles itself to treat anyone who triggers false alerts more intrusively than the Pentagon was allowed in 2013 to treat accused enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay. A Justice Department lawyer, Edward Himmelfarb, told a federal judge that intrusive searches at Gitmo were no big deal: "It's basically like a TSA ... supplemental search ... The genital area is touched through the clothing with a flat hand, the way the TSA does." Federal judge Royce Lamberth ordered "the military to stop touching the groins of detainees," the New York Times reported.
Lamberth's decision got overturned, but for a while -- yes, that's right -- American citizens for whom there was no evidence of wrongdoing were being treated worse than enemy combatants held at Guantanamo.
Bovard:
TSA's Federal Register self-vindication omitted any mention of treating American travelers like Gitmo detainees. But even 44,000 words of bureaucratic wind cannot blow away the fact that TSA continues to be far more effective at hassling travelers than at assuring airline safety.
Sommer Gentry gets it right:
Sommer Gentry
Associate professor at United States Naval Academy
The point is that the secondary search is punitive, violent, traumatizing, and conducted without the slightest acknowledgment or care for the humanity of the search victim. I experienced worse treatment at the hands of the TSA; the TSA inserted a foreign object into my body and then claimed in a euphemism-filled letter after I complained about this rape to my congressman that it's difficult to search the lower torso without sexually abusing passengers. Considering the TSA has never, ever located an explosive on a passenger, including when the passenger had C4 in his luggage, the least they can do is stop traumatizing and violating people whose only crime was to buy an airline ticket.
My TSA fun, courtesy of my government gropenfrau, Thedala Magee -- with First Amendment ninja Marc Randazza's biting and comprehensive defense of my civil liberties (and, in turn, all of ours).
And my failed piece asking Americans to stand up for our civil liberties.
And finally, Bovard and I shared a few tweets:
@amyalkon
@JimBovard Thank you ... Appreciate so much that you aren't one of the glassy-eyed sheep, simply complying and taking it.@JimBovard
@amyalkon Thanks! I appreciate the shots you've taken at TSA. No sheep - more of a surly SOB who kept telling them how idiotic they were@amyalkon
@JimBovard Thank you -- and I'm all for surly civil-liberties-defending SOBs!
Skinky
I know you are, but what am I?
The Government's Creeping Control Over What Drugs Doctors Can Prescribe For You
I get terribly motion-sick -- from my own driving, even, if I go more than short distances and if there's traffic.
I love when people suggest that I take Dramamine. They mean well, but that's like asking somebody to stop a speeding car by throwing pebbles at it.
Even Scopolamine -- the patch -- isn't entirely effective in me.
Well, a friend in Paris had suffered temporarily from vertigo and was prescribed Serc (betahistine) for it. She told me about this, but I found that it is no longer sold in the USA; it was deemed to not be effective in some clinical trial.
I read that and didn't get it because of that, and then my motion sickness really started affecting me. (Thomas Stoffregen, a researcher who's been very kind to me, has, with his colleagues, published research on sexual dimorphism in motion sickness -- how it seems to affect women more than men, possibly having to do with estrogen, and possibly with differences in "postural sway.")
Anyway, I ended up getting this drug over eBay from overseas. Yes, I know -- eekers. However, back when I was in advertising, I produced commercials, and I had to order "color-corrected product": Reproduced packaging made to look good on TV. It was extremely expensive. It's cheaper now to make packaging, but I decided that, for $19 or, most recently $15, it probably wasn't worth it, and the stuff was probably real. (Nobody snorts anti-motion-sickness drugs.)
Well, the stuff is pretty miraculous. It doesn't make you drowsy and only gives me a slight rumbly feeling in my stomach from taking it. The very slightest, that is. And at the end of January, I drove two hours in hellish LA traffic (that would, sans Serc, have taken me out in about 20 minutes). In fact, I went all the way over windy Beverly Glen to Sherman Oaks. I was queasy when I got there, but for a two-hour hell-ride over hills...well, that was pretty amazing.
Anyway, this post relates to drug availability. Yeah, that's kind of funny, considering I had to get mine over eBay; I don't get it from the doctor. But I am desperate to have it. Because it is the only thing that can help me have a sort of normal life vis a vis how we in this society get around in motor vehicles, not by particle-beaming.
Scott Gottlieb writes at Forbes that the government is using an "elaborate scheme that Medicare unveiled this week to give federal regulators the power to restrict use of prescription drugs."
President Obama used vast authorities he garnered under ObamaCare to change how doctors are paid to prescribe injectable drugs like chemotherapy to Medicare patients. This "Part I" of the plan aims at a small and fixed percentage that doctors are paid off the total price of the drugs they prescribe. That money is meant to cover the cost of infusing injectable drugs in a doctors' office. The aim of the new policy is to eliminate any financial incentive doctors might have to select costlier drugs.But the biggest effect of the change will be to saddle more doctors with losses when they infuse drugs in their offices, forcing this medical care into hospitals where it's easier to finance, and also easier to federally regulate. This will be especially true for oncologists, who have already been merging their once-independent practices into hospitals as a result of declining reimbursement. The new plan will hasten this shift.
Yet it's "Part II" of the new regulation, which kicks in as early as January 2017, that's getting far less attention but is even more profound. Under this second part of the plan, Medicare gains the authority to stipulate when they believe that drugs are similar enough that they can be used in place of one another. The agency would then say that within a group of different medicines that the Medicare staff judges to be clinically "similar," the agency would only pay for the cheapest therapeutic option.
This plan is the culmination of ObamaCare's aspiration to exert more control over the practice of medicine. Under the scheme, Medicare would have the ability to stipulate when the agency believes that drugs are clinically interchangeable, even though in most of these cases, the Food and Drug Administration will never have made a similar judgment.
In other words, your health care decisions will be removed -- even more than they already are by other regulations -- from your doctor and handed to the government.
Here's some fun:
The Medicare agency is widely recognized as lacking clinical expertise to draw credible clinical distinctions between drugs. Here the new regulation reveals the ultimate intention of these schemes. The idea is to selectively outsource some of the politically hot policy work of making the clinical judgments to third parties, and then peg federal payment to these conclusions....The collective goal is to get more control of how doctors prescribe injectable drugs like cancer medicines. In this way, Medicare can get more leverage not only over the how these drugs are priced, but also how doctors use them.
...The Obama team is trying to control costs more directly; by regulating the clinical choices doctors make to sometimes use costlier medicines.
These constructs have long been liberal dogma when it comes to our relatively free market for drug development. Turning over the determination of "comparative value" to third parties, and then tying federal reimbursement to these subjective conclusions, represents a circuitous way to exert government control over how drugs are priced and prescribed. Only with far fewer fingerprints affixed.
The Sex Police Are Coming For You, Kinskters
Can this country rush backward any faster, yanking civil liberties from us, one after the next?
Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes at Reason about a recent court decision (the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia) that came out of an alleged case of campus sexual assault at George Mason University.
A male student ("John Doe") accused of sexual misconduct was expelled from GMU with little concern for due process. According to his accuser ("Jane Roe"), a female non-student with whom he had been in a relationship, Doe deliberately kept going with a sexual encounter after she tried to stop him. Doe said he didn't know she was serious, since she hadn't use the "safe word" they had chosen to stand in for "stop" when they were engaging in BDSM activity....After he was expelled, Doe filed suit against GMU. In February, the district court granted summary judgment to Doe, agreeing that his constitutional rights had been violated. But while the court's decision may be a win for campus due process, it also delves beyond the particulars of this case in a way that should scare advocates of sexual autonomy.
In his lawsuit against the school, Doe had suggested that GMU administrators "disregarded" the context of his relationship with Roe and instead acted like BDSM sex was "per se sexual misconduct." This, argues Doe, stands in violation of Lawrence v. Texas, in which the Supreme Court held that states couldn't criminalize consensual intimate activity between adults. The court, however, granted GMU's motion to dismiss this claim.
"Engaging in BDSM sexual activity is clearly not protected" under the U.S. Constitution, the court wrote. While Doe essentially asserts "a freedom from state regulation of consensual BDSM sexual activity," the court said nope: "there is no basis to conclude that tying up a willing submissive sex partner and subjecting him or her to whipping, choking, or other forms of domination is deeply rooted in the nation's history and traditions or implicit in the concept of ordered liberty."
Because BDSM activity "poses certain inherent risks to personal safety," the court concluded, state governments could claim a legitimate interest in regulating it for "the protection of vulnerable persons" who have chosen to enter BDSM relationships.
Wow. There are people who are too "vulnerable" for certain activities -- sexual and otherwise.
There's an answer for protecting them, and it's, well, protecting them, not removing the sexual freedom of the entire population -- or, at least, giving government one more thing to prosecute us for.
And the practices any of us choose to engage in in bed are none of the government's fucking business.
Every Day, Countless Grown Adults Pretend The TSA Is Providing Security
Lenore Skenazy writes in the New York Post:
As you inch your way through security at the airport, you'll be relieved of your penknife and terrifying tube of Pepsodent. Your unopened can of Coke will, of course, be thrown in the trash, along with any snow globes, and off go your shoes.When at last you're reshod and passing the duty-free shop, you can buy a well-deserved bottle of Scotch . . . which you can then bring on board, crack against the cabin wall and use as you would a machete.
Schlinky
There's a can of Schlitz hiding in there somewhere.
The Unintended Consequences Of Sex Offender Registries
Peter Van Doren reports at Cato that public notification requirements for sex offenders "deters those who are not already registered but increases recidivism among those who are" on the sex offender registry. He quotes the work of Professor J. J. Prescott of the University of Michigan Law School:
"... For a registry of average size, instituting a notification regime has the aggregate effect in these data of increasing the number of sex offenses by more than 1.57 percent, with all deterrence gains more than offset.""... the more difficult, lonely, and unstable our laws make a registered sex offender's life, the more likely he is to return to crime--and the less he has to lose by committing these new crimes."
"...if these laws impose significant burdens on a large share of former offenders, and if only a limited number of potential victims benefit from knowing who and where sex offenders are, then we should not be surprised to observe more recidivism under notification, with recidivism rates rising as notification expands."
Some on the registry people don't give a lot of thought to are teens who had consensual sex with other teens but were branded sex offenders because they violated the letter of the law.
Sure, yes, they broke a law (like by being, oh, 16, and having sex with a 15 and a half year old girlfriend in a state where 16 is the age of consent).
But kids who do this are not dangerous predators. They were just horny teenagers who got chronologically caught up.
Another example of who's on the list from a New Yorker piece by Sarah Stillman:
In Charla Roberts's living room, not far from Paris, Texas, I learned how, at the age of ten, Roberts had pulled down the pants of a male classmate at her public elementary school. She was prosecuted for "indecency with a child," and added to the state's online offender database for the next ten years. The terms of her probation barred her from leaving her mother's house after six in the evening, leaving the county, or living in proximity to "minor children," which ruled out most apartments. When I spoke to the victim, he was shocked to learn of Roberts's fate. He described the playground offense as an act of "public humiliation, instead of a sexual act"--a hurtful prank, but hardly a sex crime. Roberts can still be found on a commercial database online, her photo featured below a banner that reads, "PROTECT YOUR CHILD FROM SEX OFFENDERS."
More from Prescott:
In an article in Regulation Professor J. J. Prescott of the University of Michigan Law School examines the separate effects of police registration and public notification requirements on the incidence of sexual attacks.He concludes that "each additional sex offender registered per 10,000 people reduces the annual number of sex offenses reported per 10,000 people on average by 0.098 crimes (from a starting point of 9.17 crimes).
This sizeable reduction (1.07 percent) buttresses the idea that we may be able to use law enforcement supervision to combat sex offender recidivism." But the reduction is confined to friends and neighbors and has no effect on sex offenses against strangers.
And then there's this:
But even if registration and notification laws succeed at reducing the relative incidence of crimes against particular classes of victims believed to be especially vulnerable, one cannot assume that the overall recidivism rate--much less the sex offense rate across the board--has also fallen. This counterintuitive claim is true for at least two reasons.First, sex offenders may respond to registration and notifica- tion by seeking out victims who are not protected by these laws. A registered offender who visits another jurisdiction or perhaps even another neighborhood will not be "known" there by either the public or the police.
In theory, SORN laws may, as forensic psychologist Robert Prentky has observed, "accomplish nothing more than changing the neighborhood in which the offender looks for victims." If the offenses that would have been com- mitted against the now-informed or newly supervised potential victims are simply displaced onto "strangers," overall recidivism levels will not change.
The upshot:
It is easy to see, therefore, that the effect on recidivism of noti- fication laws (and of most sex offender post-release laws generally) is an empirical question: the effectiveness of these laws will depend on how they are structured and applied.If notification and its associated burdens make it more difficult for a registered sex offender to find victims, while at the same time not aggravating the risk factors known to lead to recidivism and not reducing a registered offender's desire to avoid prison, then recidivism rates should drop.
But if these laws impose significant burdens on a large share of former offenders, and if only a limited number of potential victims benefit from knowing who and where sex offenders are, then we should not be surprised to observe more recidivism under notification, with recidivism rates rising as notification expands.
A Bit On The Realities Of Islam From That Right-Wing Hater, John Quincy Adams
"John Quincy Adams (our most learned President) ... studied Islam in depth," notes Hugh Fitzgerald at JW in an interesting long read, "Apologists for Islam and History."
A quote from Adams's observations about Islam:
The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God. The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute; the victorious may be appeased by a false and delusive promise of peace; and the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force.
Linkaballoo
You were expecting Hulla?
The Babyification Of Our Society
Becoming an adult is supposed to mean you make your own choices, not that government takes over where mommy left off.
Well, in Chicago, grown adults are now banned from using smokeless tobacco at sports venues. Including those players -- no more chipmunk cheeks of the stuff.
Jesse Rogers writes for ESPN that there would be fines for players caught using:
"It's going to be hard because you're an addict, pretty much," catcher Miguel Montero said after being informed of the ban on Wednesday. "It'll be tough to quit cold turkey. Hopefully (this) will help me to quit."But Montero also joined others, including pitcher John Lackey and manager Joe Maddon, in expressing disappointment that the city of Chicago is telling players what they can or cannot do with a legal substance.
"We're grown men," Lackey said. "People in the stands can have a beer, but we can't do what we want? That's a little messed up."
Chicago became the fourth city to ban smokeless tobacco at sports venues, joining San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston in attempting to reduce its use in athletics.
Maybe people are thinking, well, I don't chew tobacco; it's gross; so...whatever.
Wrong thinking. It's a slippery slope, all this regulatin'.
Your thingie is next. Or soon.
P.S. Will they have inspectors going around doing mouth checks at the stadium?
Crony Capitalism: H & R Blocking Independent Tax Preparers From Doing Your Taxes
James Sherk reports at The Daily Signal that scummy H & R Block is lobbying Congress to bring more regulation to the tax prep industry.
This seems surreal. How often do businesses lobby Congress for more regulation?It is no accident that small business owners report government regulations and red tape as one of their greatest problems.
Quite often, actually.
Large companies can afford to comply with expensive regulations. Many of their small-business competitors cannot. So big businesses frequently lobby for stricter regulations in order to drive out small-business competition.
Here's the deal:
Legally, anyone can prepare his own taxes. Anyone can also prepare someone else's taxes for him. Approximately 350,000 independent tax preparers do exactly that.Most of these independent tax preparers are small mom-and-pop businesses active only in tax season. Often they serve minority and disadvantaged communities. In many cases, independent tax preparers provide basic and inexpensive services, such as reviewing clients' returns for math errors. Collectively, these independent preparers process millions of tax returns with relatively few problems.
Nonetheless, H&R Block wants Congress to require tax preparers pass a government exam, pay for continuing education, and pass a background check. These requirements would make working as a tax preparer much more expensive. The continuing education requirement would particularly burden seasonal tax preparers, who work other jobs the rest of the year.
H&R Block argues that these regulations would protect taxpayers from scam artists and fraud. But these are fairly small problems. Out of the tens of millions of tax returns filed each year, the IRS brings charges against only a few hundred.
Also, the IRS has a list of skilled, credentialed tax preparers.
Whoops, so H & R Block's move is superfluous -- that is, unless their real aim is not to make the tax prep industry safer, but more profitable for themselves.
Me? I think one screwing -- the one we get from Uncle Sam and all the elected lobbyist suckups who vote in all sorts of everything -- is enough.
linky
Lost the S, somewhere on the stairs.
We Were Experiencing Temporary Difficulties
Comments now seem be appearing. I deleted the duplicates.
Sorry about this.
Gregg is retooling the site so it'll read on mobile. This would be easier if I hadn't started blogging (and amassing entries) back when dinosaurs were strolling where the Culver City Costco now is.
WHO: The International Nanny Of Your Children's Eyeballs
Yes, the World Health Organization says children should not be allowed to watch films with smoking in them without a guardian present, and they want them given an adult rating. As Walter Olson points out at Overlawyered:
That would exclude kids from many of the kid-oriented classics of the past, from Alice in Wonderland (hookah-smoking caterpillar) to Peter Pan (Captain Hook), to say nothing of more recent films such as "Lord of the Rings (Gandalf and his pipe) or X-Men (Wolverine and his cigar).
Meanwhile, though bread and sugary foods cause the insulin secretion that puts on fat and leads to obesity and diabetes, nobody's trying to ban any movie that shows anyone eating a piece of toast.
Not that they should.
But amazingly, I manage to avoid eating toast and other starchy carbs despite how prevalent toast- and starchy carb-eating is in so many movies -- and in our society.
(Haven't had a French fry since March of 2009. Haven't had a cigarette since I smoked a partial butt when I was 12 in the park near my parents' house.)
More on the story here in the Guardian and from Brian Doherty at Reason, who points this out:
They've spend their precious time in a world where Zika is on the spread to research and publish an entire monograph on the topic of characters in movies smoking.
P.S. Parenting doesn't involve hiding all the temptation but guiding kids to avoid it. And no, you don't have to chain yourself to your child like Ulysses to the mast to help them avoid temptation. You simply do your best to raise them with good values.
Hey, You Can "Start A Conversation" Without Falsely Accusing Someone Of Racism -- Or Rape
Ashe Schow notes at the WashEx that there's a recent slew of false accusations in which the upshot is basically the same -- the perpetrators and/or others saying that at least it led to a "conversation":
In the recent race hoax at State University of New York at Albany, where three black women started a fight on a bus and accused a dozen white people of attacking them for being black, a professor at the school claimed they were justified because they started a conversation on race."My white students have said this has opened up conversations," said Sami Schalk, an assistant professor in SUNY Albany's English department. "Things that are inadvertent, small, but that these white students have no experience with, not being a person of color on this campus."
Criminal behavior -- and often, life-wrecking harm to the falsely accused, and it's okay because people are talking?
There are fair ways to get attention and they don't involve lying and claiming you're a victim and/or making an innocent person your pawn.
What these situations have in common is the notion that any tactic -- no matter how ethically bankrupt -- is justified, as long as it fits within SJW notions of views that need to be advanced.
Link On Your Sweater
We'll just roll you on a giant piece of tape.
Lack Of The Irish
What's with all you lazy Irish people, failing to get your panties in a bunch over "cultural appropriation"?
The Answer On Campus: Just Don't Speak -- Ever
The only way to be sure you won't "microaggress" somebody is to remain silent. Daphne Patai writes at Minding The Campus about identity politics spreading "like a contagious disease" and all the lame-brained notions passing for policy or at least suggested policy on campus these days. The root is speech squashing:
Firmly Stamping out Unwanted SpeechOf course, none of the above shifts could occur successfully without policing of everyday language. And as the very notion of discrimination (which was initially the legal basis for criminalizing "sexual harassment") underwent extensive concept-stretching, demands for verbal conformity have intensified, proscribing certain terms and prescribing others.
Schools have sometimes tried to create lists of offensive and impermissible terms, and though these have no legal standing, such details don't seem to have dissuaded many colleges. But even where certain terms are not officially prohibited, conformity has been expected for decades now.
I remember a speaker in the early 1990s, at a Women's Studies brown-bag lunch, in passing using the expression "to see" in the sense of "to understand." A student in the audience interrupted her to say this was "ablest." The speaker apologized. As categories of oppression have multiplied, so, obviously, are the terms that must be avoided. For several decades now, students and faculty have gotten into serious trouble for saying something perceived as offensive.
And she calls it right:
Creeping TotalitarianismOver the past few decades, then, we have seen a massive normalization of bad ideas that were first promoted by identity programs such as Women's Studies and Black Studies. This could not have been accomplished without academic institutions willingly, and by now enthusiastically, embracing what Lawrence Summers (and he should know) recently called academe's "creeping totalitarianism." Far from embracing free debate of challenging ideas and the free speech necessary to pursue them, university life today is characterized by policies governing every aspect of college life, in the classroom and out, and offices to enforce them.
At the macro level, universities have adopted "social justice" as a supposed core mission, in the name of which policing of speech and behavior has become ever more intense. Education itself may be more debased and less demanding, yet universities focus not on this extremely serious problem but on the level of comfort of those supersensitive souls who are empowered by identity politics.
Again, I see this creeping totalitarianism as a way to unearned power over others. You can't compete fairly (compete on achievement) if you're majoring in some form of feminist bullshit.
All you can do is try get hired to, uh, teach that feminist bullshit to others -- probably, these days, others who are your co-workers at Starbucks, if you're canny enough to keep your mouth shut about your SJW bullshit during your interview.
The new way to be somebody, these days, is to be somebody with a grievance.
TheFIRE.org does a lot to fight the results of this on campus, when students are suspended or expelled and professors lose their jobs over language spoken in class as a matter of discussion of an issue -- even that of professors on the side of the SJWs.
Since Federal money goes to campuses that fall in line with the removal of due process from men on campus (and who knows -- perhaps there will be "hate speech" Dear Colleague letters to come), it's incumbent upon individual donors who give big money to campus to withhold it from colleges with poor records on speech and due process.
They should also be vocal in telling them why their money is going -- well, I suggest -- to theFIRE.org until the college cleans up its act.
By the way, "microaggressions" used to be called "normal conversation" -- in which people often say things that don't completely bathe you in warm fuzzies. You have a choice: Say something or suck it up.
Do you really need speech police to manage this for you?
Exactly Whose Boys Are We Cotting In The Middle East?
A tweet from my favorite Sicilian ninja for the First Amendment, Marc Randazza:
@marcorandazza Am I the only one who thinks it is weird that there is a Boycott Israel movement, but not a Boycott Saudi Arabia movement?
But What If The "White Dude Who Went To Harvard" Is The Most Qualified For The Job?
Part of the problem with "diversity hiring" is that it isn't diverse at all -- not in who gets considered for jobs.
In fact, "diversity hiring" should be called "prejudice-driven hiring," because the goal in it is to hire non-white people and typically, non-male people.
This relates to a tweet I saw:
@magnusvk
Initial reaction: Disappointed that Obama nominated another white dude who went to Harvard.
This isn't to say President Obama's choice of nominee for Supreme Court justice is the best guy for the job.
But the notion that it's "disappointing" to have a white guy nominated is, well, disappointing for someone like me who believes in merit-based hiring.
My belief echoes Martin Luther King's "judge a man by the content of his character..." thing.
And yes, there are ways that people have unequal opportunity -- like in how poor children tend to go to poor schools. But there are ways to remedy that -- like with charter schools.
All differences in opportunity will never be flattened out.
But for me, the answer has always been "work harder" -- and work harder at working smarter, which may take social skills or productivity techniques, among other things. This doesn't mean that with hard work (and the "luck" that often comes from it) that the sky's the limit for me -- or anyone.
But that kind of thinking is likely to take you far or at least take you places.
Kinky
Ballgaggylinks.
The Government vs. The Terrorist's iPhone Is Much More Than That
We lay down our constitutional rights so easily these days...like tired sheep at airports across America, just for starters.
Luckily, we have Apple standing up for our civil liberties in this case. Details of the story -- and the implications -- here at CNET, by Sean Hollister. In brief, as the subhead says:
Apple won't change its mobile software to help the feds unlock a terrorist's phone, saying that would set a dangerous precedent and undermine security and privacy.
Forensic scientist Jonathan Ździarski blogs:
Much has happened since a California magistrate court originally granted an order for Apple to assist the FBI under the All Writs Act. For one, most of us now know what the All Writs Act is: An ancient law that was passed before the Fourth Amendment even existed, now somehow relevant to modern technology a few hundred years later. Use of this act has exploded into a legal argument about whether or not it grants carte blanche rights of the government to demand anything and everything from private companies (and incidentally, individuals) if it helps them prosecute crimes. Of course, that's just the tip of the iceberg. We've seen strong debates about whether any person should be allowed to have private conversations, thoughts, or ideas that can't later be searched, whether forcing others to work for the government violates the constitution, whether other countries will line up to exploit technology if America does, and ultimately - at the heart of all of these - whether fear of the word "terrorism" is enough to cause us all to burn our constitution.Over the past few weeks, the entire tech community has gotten behind Apple, filing a barrage of friend-of-the-court briefs on Apple's behalf. Security experts such as myself, Crypto "Rock Stars", constitutionalists, technologists, lawyers, and 30 Helens all agree that Apple is in the right, and that backdooring iOS would cause irreparable damage to the security, privacy, and safety of hundreds of millions of diplomats, judges, doctors, CEOs, teenage girls, victims of crimes, parents, celebrities, politicians, and all men and women around the world.
About the demand that Apple do this for the government:
Should the government have carte blanche rights to force anyone to work for them? Should the privacy of people's entire past be subject to a warrant? Should people be allowed to have private conversations, private thoughts, private ideas - all things stored on people's iPhones - subject to search by the government? I am honestly in shock, and saddened by the fact that any of these questions could be raised at all in this country. The fundamental construct of our constitution, and the basic human rights they were based on, have answered these questions for hundreds of years - a free society cannot live without privacy. A free society cannot live without freedom from tyranny. A free society cannot live without free speech, or under the fear that your speech and thoughts will be used to imprison you. The questions that the Department of Justice is posing, at the very core of the matter, are questions of whether or not we should be a free people. The very government that we founded to protect our liberties is now, in a very raw way, questioning them.This should shock you. It should shock every American, and it is no doubt shocking the rest of the watching world. How can the freest country in the world, a beacon for those in oppressive countries, lay down their speech, their privacy, their identities over a dead terrorist's iPhone? The shootings that took place in San Bernardino were horrible and flat out evil, and I mourned for the victims... but the greatest damage that Syed Farook stands to cause is to our country and our constitutional rights as a whole; giving up our rights will ultimately affect the liberty and safety of generations to come. Make no mistake about it - Syed Farook would be pleased to see this agenda being played out in the court system today. We should not be pleased. We should be indignant. We should be deeply offended. Offended that anyone would attempt to curtail rights that our families have died, and continue dying, to protect.
I love this man.
Z blog post via @BoingBoing
Running For Scold Of The Free World
Boyfriend: When I hear Hillary saying, "And I told you eight years ago..." the voice I hear is, "And I told you...clean your room!"
Feel free to give your thoughts on the pathetic crop running for President and all the related events.
Linkey
Turkey without the stuffing.
Some Prejudice Is More Ignorable Than Others
Academic norm smasher and social psychologist Lee Jussim blogs at Psychology Today about "the gaps" -- racial, gender, and other group-based gaps -- and the assumptions made by the academic left that gaps equal discrimination (when the gap happens to a "protected" group).
Some examples of the gaps?
Women earn about 75-80% of men. On intelligence and standardized achievement tests, Asian Americans score higher than Whites, who score higher than Latinos, who score higher than Blacks......Where do these gaps come from? The selective go-to explanation in the social sciences is discrimination. It is selective, because it is typically only applied when the group is one the left deems both oppressed and protected in some way (racial and ethnic minorities, women, LGBT, and so on). There is some, but not much, scholarship on why schools so consistently disadvantage boys, though understanding the gender gap in science fields is a hot topic.
...Sometimes gaps do result from discrimination. In rare cases, they may result exclusively from discrimination. In many cases, they probably result in part from discrimination. They rarely, however, result exclusively from discrimination.
Because gaps are often complex, simplistic, single-cause explanations, such as "discrimination," are rarely justified.
And consider:
...forms of discrimination against high status groups that the left, including leftist academics, routinely ignore. These are important because, in their very different way, they undermine the "gap=discrimination" assumption.There is, for example, ample evidence of prejudice against Asian Americans and Jews, which receives little attention in social science research, because of an attitude among academics that only prejudice against lower status groups matters (never mind that genocide and mass murder have often been committed against successful minority groups--Jews, Armenians, Tutsis, Kurds, Kulaks, and the teachers/professionals/intellectuals in China [during the Cultural Revolution], and Cambodia [during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror]).
via @SteveStuWill
Affirmative Action Isn't Enough: Black Student Debater Calls For What's Basically "Affirmative Suicide" By Whites
This is a debate, and it occurs to me that the sides might be taking a position they don't really believe in. That's possible. I looked for more on the subject of the debate -- whether that might be the case -- but didn't find it.
This is an excerpt with the bit calling for white people to kill themselves. Lovely.
From the YouTube descrip:
This debate about whether white people should be exterminated was held at Harvard University.The pro-genocide team, Damiyr Davis and Miguel Feliciano, is from the University of West Georgia.Amazingly, the University of West Georgia brags about these two anti-white debaters on its website. Their argument for white extermination has made them No. 2 in the country! http://www.westga.edu/ucmassets/news/...
Worse, white genocide is being taught to high-school students. Miguel Feliciano works as an instructor at Coppin State University's Eddie Conway Liberation Institute, run by Professor Shanara Reid-Brinkley of the University of Pittsburg.
Black students at every major university in the country, including Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins, have joined the "Black Liberation Collective" which endorses the murder of whites in a manifesto called "On Violence."
The original, unedited recording of the debate at Harvard is available at these links below. There's some weird crazy fast talk to start on this one. If speaking comprehensibly is part of debating, this starts off with a fail. (Or is my speed-hearing failing?)
The white guy does the crazytalk, too. Weird. The crazyfast talkers answer questions after their crazyfast talk.
Two more segments from the debate:
https://vimeo.com/52352262
http://vimeo.com/52351098
via @lauren_southern
Miss Linky
Kermy's dirty girl.
What Parent Wants To Send Their Kid To A College Where The Focus Is On Protesting, Not Learning?
University of Missouri has seen better days. Blake Neff writes at The Daily Caller that after caving to a bunch of protestors demands, Mizzou has a huge budget gap:
The University of Missouri (MU) is losing about 1500 students and is facing a huge $32 million budget shortfall four months after it attracted national attention as the site of massive race-based campus protests....Because of the abrupt and unexpected nature of the shortfall, Foley is taking immediate and severe steps to fix the situation: The school budget is being cut 5 percent across the board, all hiring is being frozen (barring exceptional circumstances), and annual raises have been canceled. He has also announced a new, more intensive effort to recruit potential Mizzou students by phone, email, and even via Skype.
What do those calls say, "Come to Mizzou, where you can stand outside and yell about discrimination, keeping yourself -- and other students -- from getting an education"?
Meanwhile, the freshman class enrollment is down 20 percent. What's not down? The protestors continue "to engage in very public protests while demanding even more concessions from the school."
via Lastango
The Deadly Phony Compassion Of Hillary And Bernie
Doug McIntyre, in the LA Daily News, gets it right on immigration -- or as he puts it, Hill and Bern's "can-you-top-this contest to see who could win the most votes by further weakening our already phantom border security":
While Clinton and Sanders had plenty to say last week about our nation's "cruel" policy of "splitting up immigrant families", not one word was said about the families of Jamiel Shaw, Drew Rosenberg, Kathryn Steinle, Anthony, Michael and Matthew Bologna, or Michael Capps, Jeremy Waters, Randy Nordman and Clint and Austin Harter, all murdered by illegal immigrants; the last five victims were allegedly killed by Pablo Antonio Serrano-Vitorino while Clinton and Sanders were on-stage polishing their compassion bonafides.Mrs. Clinton is at least willing to concede "we should be deporting criminals." But what happens when we actually do deport a criminal?
Pablo Serrano-Vitorino had been deported.
He was sent packing from Los Angeles to Mexico in 2004 after his felony conviction for making a terrorist threat. But back he came and he continued to have run-ins with the law.
In November of 2014 Serrano-Vitorino was convicted of drunk driving in Kansas. ICE was never notified. On June 15th, 2015 he was arrested for domestic assault. This time ICE was notified but Kansas officials released him before ICE arrived. On September 14th, 2015 he was fingerprinted for driving without a license. His prints triggered an immigration hold but a processing error sent him back to the streets. Now five innocents are dead.
Talk about splitting up families.
How porous are our borders?
The daughter of the most wanted man in the western hemisphere claims her father, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, visited her twice in California while on the run from authorities after escaping from a Mexican prison.
Why don't we just put up signs along the border, "Welcome, ISIS!"?
Limpy
Stub-toe-lacious.
"Emoji Feminism": Why Investigate And Create When You Can Just Whine About How Awful Things Are For Women?
You can create your own emojis. Easily. With imoji, a free app for iOS and Android, that lets you turn any picture -- including a photo you've taken -- into an emoji.
Somebody who wasn't satisfied with the current crop of emojis figured that out.
Meanwhile, in The New York Times, we've got an op-ed-length whine by a woman who feels, uh, oppressed by the standard crop of emojis on her phone.
This imagination-lacking lady is Amy Butcher, an assistant professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University, and she writes:
I began to scroll through the emojis on my phone. Yes, there were women's faces, and tiny women's bodies. But for the women actually engaged in an activity or profession, there were only archetypes: the flamenco dancer in her red gown, the bride in her flowing veil, the princess in her gold tiara. There was a set of ballet dancers complete with bunny ears and black leotards, their smiles indicating that, gosh, they were so grateful to God and everyone, really, for this opportunity to pose for Playboy. There was a woman getting her hair cut, and another with her arm out, Valley Girl, osmosis ditz, as if to say, Tenure? What is tenure? That sounds like an injury! Ow-i!Where, I wanted to know, was the fierce professor working her way to tenure?
Where was the lawyer? The accountant? The surgeon? How was there space for both a bento box and a single fried coconut shrimp, and yet women were restricted to a smattering of tired, beauty-centric roles?
This was not a problem for our male emoji brethren. Men were serving on the police force, working construction and being Santa. Meanwhile, on our phones, it was Saturday at the Mall of America -- women shopping while men wrote the checks.
We are told we are the new generation of American women; no longer a minority, we are, in fact, the majority of breadwinners in American homes. And yet the best we can get is the flamenco.
Indeed, it's the flamenco dancer I find I send most often when a friend has achieved greatness. Her one arm in the air, she suggests an attitude of self-assurance, of cool-minded confidence.
Flamenco! I sent recently when a friend sold her book for $50,000.
Flamenco! I sent when another secured a grant to conduct research in Ireland.
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Flamenco! I sent when another broke up with her boyfriend who had, for months, been eating all her food.
Flamenco! Flamenco! Flamenco! You are impressive and you are kicking butt!
If, instead of identifying as victimized, your orientation is "How can I make what I want happen?" maybe you're more likely to search for, discover, or even create solutions -- instead of whining about how you're discriminated against.
I don't deny that there's discrimination -- sexual, racial, and other kinds -- but I've never found whining about it to be anything more than depressing.
Life is too short to just sit around complaining instead of working to make change.
The Push To Make Boys Behave Like Girls
Welcome to the feminist denial of biological sex differences.
As sex differences researcher Joyce Benenson explains in her terrific book, Warrors and Worriers, men and women evolved to be psychologically and behaviorally different due to their physiological differences, like how women get pregnant and are more physically fragile because of it.
Women evolved to avoid physical violence. It absolutely does not pay for two women to get in a physical altercation, which is why it happens so infrequently. Women do compete with each other -- but in less direct and more Mean Girl ways.
Boys and men are the warriors of the species -- defending their groups from harm by outsiders. They form groups and are comfortable with hierarchies and competition in a way women are not. When they aren't competing against each other -- when there's a common enemy, they band together in coalitions. Men, if they have a problem with each other, will duke it out. There's no covert whispering about what ugly shoes a guy has.Girls and women form groups of two. They bond through shared vulnerabilities, and nobody's supposed to stand out as better. When somebody does, girls and women will go on attack -- in covert ways -- like by gossiping behind another girl or woman's back and by ostracizing her.
Anthropologist David C. Geary writes in a paper about how we respond to the evolved sex differences in social relationships.
There is often an implicit assumption that the relationship style that emerges among girls is somehow preferable to the style that emerges among boys.Corollaries to this assumption can be stated as two questions:
Why don't boys behave like girls?
What might be done to change the tendency toward physical aggression and social dominance common in boys' social behavior?
There are, of course, individual differences, but if you look at -- and admit -- that there are sex differences, a lot about male and female behavior and advancement (or lack of advancement) in corporate situations and elsewhere starts to make sense.
What are your thoughts on and experiences with how this plays out in the workplace?
Who Says Islam Doesn't Modernize?
Rukmini Callimachi writes in The New York Times that ISIS is pushing birth control pills and Depo Provera shots on the "infidel" women they're raping -- in order to maintain their supply of sex slaves:
In its official publications, the Islamic State has stated that it is legal for a man to rape the women he enslaves under just about any circumstance. Even sex with a child is permissible, according to a pamphlet published by the group. The injunction against raping a pregnant slave is functionally the only protection for the captured women.
The reporter is clearly clueless about Islam and didn't bother doing that reportery thing, but yes, this is what Islamic law says -- that Muslim men can turn the non-Muslim women they capture into sex slaves.
In fact:
Muslims are encouraged to live in the way of Muhammad, who was a slave owner and trader. He captured slaves in battle; he had sex with his slaves; and he instructed his men to do the same. The Quran actually devotes more verses to making sure that Muslim men know they can keep women as sex slaves (4) than it does to telling them to pray five times a day (zero).
But whoopsy, there's a problem. That NYT story:
The Islamic State cites centuries-old rulings stating that the owner of a female slave can have sex with her only after she has undergone istibra' -- "the process of ensuring that the womb is empty," according to the Princeton University professor Bernard Haykel, one of several experts on Islamic law consulted on the topic. The purpose of this is to guarantee there is no confusion over a child's paternity....Most of the Sunni scholars who ruled on the issue argued that the requirement could be met by respecting a period of sexual abstinence whenever the captive changes hands, proposing a duration of at least one menstrual cycle, according to Brill's Encyclopedia of Islam.
How lovely...Islamic scholars ruling on when it's permissible to treat a woman like a piece of sex meat.
And really -- the barbarianism of this: "Not pregnant? Rape away!"
I'm an atheist, but I can get behind that "feed the poor; heal the sick" stuff Jesus said.
More and more, people are coming to understand that Islam is not just a slightly different flavor of Christianity and Judaism.
This guy, commenting at the The New York Times, gets it:
Tim Kane, Mesa, Az
Maybe most muslims, born into Islam, don't realize the totality of what they believe. Male sexual privilege is near the core of Islam.Like Judaism, Islam is a legalistic religion. Like most such systems it follows a last in time doctrine: later doctrines have more authority than earlierones. Unlike most systems, the later doctrines in Islam are harsher/less humane than earlier.
According to Bernard Wiess' "The Spirit of Islamic Law" Islamic jurisprudence works like this: God is not a matter of faith, but of certainty. Creation is evidence of a creator. God is the creator, man the creature. God is the sovereign, man the subject. Man's duty is to follow God's law. The source of Law is the Koran. The Koran says to follow Mohammed's example.
From age 6 Mohammed was an orphan in a vendetta law society so his life was vulnerable. Born into a high cast yet legally he was near the bottom. Its likely he was motivated to reverse this. Status was assigned to heads of tribes, religious sects, & poets. Mohammed endeavored to combine all 3 of these. 12 years he had only 160 followers. So his message grew more harsh towards. Then he moved to Medina & gained political office. There progressed from bantitry, to raiding, warfare & genocide. Constantly punching above his weight, he needed to recruit warriors of certain age. He promised those who died fighting for him would go directly to paradise & a god sanctioned orgy. Those that lived shared in the booty (got sex slaves). Either way=sex.
Here, from LidBlog, is Fatwa #64 on how to be a good rapist.
More from TROP:
A fatwa was recently issued by a mainstream Islamic source reminding Muslim males of their divine right to rape female slaves and "discipline" resisters in "whatever manner he thinks is appropriate". Not one peep of protest from Islamic apologists was recorded. In 2013, the same site prominently proclaimed that "there is no dispute (among the scholars) that it is permissible to take concubines and to have intercourse with one's slave woman, because Allah says so."In 2011, what passes for a women's rights activist in Kuwait suggested that Russian women be taken captive in battle and turned into sex slaves in order to keep Muslim husbands from committing adultery. (Other calls for turning non-Muslim women into sex slaves can be found here).
After the Islamic State kidnapped and pressed into slavery thousands of Yazidi women and children in 2014, the caliphate issued an FAQ of sorts on slavery, which included rules on sexually molesting children: "It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn't reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse; however, if she is not fit for intercourse, then it is enough to enjoy her without intercourse." The best that "mainstream" apologists could muster in response was a letter appealing to "the reality of contemporary times", meaning that Islam has no fixed moral position on the rape of woman and children.
In 2016, a scholar at Egypt's al-Azhar, the most prestigious Islamic school in the Sunni world, stated that non-Muslim women could be captured in a time of war become "property" and can be raped "in order to humiliate them."
A 12-year-old girl taken captive by the Islamic State explained that her 'master' would pray before he raped her: "He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to Allah." Other sex slaves have been forced to pray before the rape or recite passages from the Quran during. When a Yazidi woman begged a caliphate member not to rape a little girl, he responded, "She's a slave... and having sex with her pleases God."
A Quran memorization competition in 2015 offered slave girls as the top three prizes. Again, there were no voices of Muslim protest from elsewhere. As Uzy Bulut keenly observed, "A religion that encourages destructive rioting and killing over cartoons, but shows no sign of sorrow as little girls are sold and raped, does not have much to contribute to advancing civilization."
Link Quixote
Windmill 'em right up.
Lane Bryant Pretends TV Networks Hate Large Naked Ladies
The New York Post runs with that, with a piece by Timothy Mitchell headlined, "This plus-size model ad was deemed too hot for TV":
A new body-positive Lane Bryant TV commercial is reportedly getting the tsk-tsk treatment from several networks, including NBC and ABC, for being too racy....What are these ladies doing in the tightly edited 30-second clip? Kickboxing, stretching, breast-feeding a cute baby, wearing underwear -- you know, activities that typically warrant the stamp of public indecency.
The actual problem is the governanny standards:
"As part of the normal advertising standards process, we reviewed a rough cut of the ad and asked for minor edits to comply with broadcast indecency guidelines," a representative for NBC told People. "The ad was not rejected and we welcome the updated creative."
What's your body made for, they ask?
My body is made for consuming bacon instead of pancakes so I can stay out of Lane Bryant.
Waitressing In Canada: It's Like Child Labor In China!
Oh, the horror...women are expected to wear dresses and meet other very minor dress code requirements for waitressing jobs in Canada...
It's a CBC report, and it's pathetios -- somewhere between pathetic and pathetically hilarious.
These women act like this is some odious workplace horror -- their being expected to wear makeup, jewelry, and little black dresses. And not all that little, either, for what it's worth.
A nutbag humanities professor the CBC reporter talked to said the restaurants could be violating these women's human rights.
One of the women, in complaining about the dress code, sniffled: "I didn't serve because I wanted to. I served because I needed to pay my rent."
Right. Unlike that guy on the back of the garbage truck, who's doing it because he loves the smell of dirty diapers and three-day-old fish guts in the morning.
Don't like the dress code, dearies? Don't take the job.
P.S. Aren't there any real stories that need covering in Canada?
via @Lauren_Southern
Otter
Furry little linker.
Get The Government's Paws Off Other People's Consensual Behavior: Legalize Prostitution
It's a 2013 NRO piece by Charles C. Cooke that makes some very good points on the subject -- including historical ones -- starting with how ridiculous it is that it is "both permissible and socially acceptable to sleep with someone in pursuit of regular material comfort. Yet it is strictly felonious to have sex with someone else in direct exchange for cash."
Yet, whoops -- if you film yourself doing that, it becomes legal again.
To broach this topic in polite company is to invite someone, invariably under the mistaken impression that this constitutes a hammer blow, witlessly to parrot the banal old line that "nobody grows up wanting to be a prostitute."At best, this is a red herring. Certainly, few people grow up wishing to be prostitutes. But there are an awful lot of careers that escape the dreams of children. Many vegetarians mature with no intention whatsoever of becoming butchers and Christians rarely spend their childhoods wishing devoutly for a vocation as an imam.
The material question here is not whether one could foresee oneself ending up in an undesirable line of work, but whether or not that line of work is so undesirable that it should be prohibited by law.
On this, I am with Cornell's Sherry F. Colb, who has argued for legalization on the following grounds:
Prostitutes are not committing an inherently harmful act. While the spread of disease and other detriments are possible in the practice of prostitution, criminalization is a sure way of exacerbating rather than addressing such effects. We saw this quite clearly in the time of alcohol prohibition in this country.It is no accident that prostitution, which was almost uniformly legal in the United States from the period of colonization up until the start of the 20th century, was banned in almost every state within the same five-year period during which the Woman's Christian Temperance Union managed to convince the nation that alcohol should be constitutionally outlawed.
...Now, society may well elect to disapprove of prostitution. In fact, I rather do myself. But, then, while I have no desire to inject heroin into myself either, I reserve that right as a free man must. Indeed, this is one instance in which the pervasive pro-choice battle cry, "My body, my choice!" actually makes some sense. When wielded in defense of abortion, it is little more than a dysphemism, designed to distract from the fate of the other body being discussed. With prostitution, there is no such objection.
...If your political philosophy requires the micromanagement of all individual behavior as a means of achieving established societal aims, then you will presumably find little wrong with the status quo in this area. (Here, the progressive Left forms an unholy alliance with the moral majority.) But if you are of the view that republics are supposed to maximize the liberty of the individual and to privilege its protection above the vagaries of national schemers, then perhaps you might reconsider your position.
via @SteveStuWill
Feminism Vs. Egalitarianism: Paula Wright Picks The Difference Apart
Lee Jussim posted Paula Wright's thoughts on his Psychology Today blog.
Wright starts in with the OED definitions:
"Feminism: The advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of the equality of the sexes.""Egalitarianism: The doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities."
And for a more detailed discussion of these topics, she turns to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
The opening preamble to the egalitarian chapter dovetails nicely with the dictionary definition above. The feminist chapter, however, quickly diverges from the dictionary definition, running off into various strands where the key theme is internal disagreement within feminism about what feminism is. It takes just over 3,000 words before the term patriarchy first appears but when it does, it is neither problematic nor contested."Feminism, as liberation struggle, must exist apart from and as a part of the larger struggle to eradicate domination in all its forms. We must understand that patriarchal domination shares an ideological foundation with racism and other forms of group oppression, and that there is no hope that it can be eradicated while these systems remain intact. This knowledge should consistently inform the direction of feminist theory and practice. (hooks 1989, 22)"
Here is the first hint of what differentiates feminism from egalitarianism. You will note there is no mention of equality by hooks; the goal is "liberation" from "patriarchal domination."
Like the students sniveling on campus about how Israel must be boycotted -- but who don't quite put together all they'd have to go without if they truly boycotted Israeli products and innovations -- one wonders whether feminists would really be willing to go along with true "liberation" from "patriarchal domination."
So...ladies...no lightbulbs, cars, computers, cell phones, pasteurization, sterilizing in hospitals...that's just a list off the tippy top of my tired head.
Wright winds up like so:
We are all equal before the law under egalitarianism. This is not the case with feminism. It places ideology before people. Individual rights and choices are "problematic".[22] Women like myself who point out the logical inconsistencies and totalitarian mission creep of feminism are labelled anti-feminist and anti-woman; as if "feminist" and "woman" were synonyms. They aren't. Feminists are identified by their politics, not their sex or gender. They do not speak for women or the majority of egalitarians in society; they speak only for themselves. The dictionary definition of feminism is in serious need of a rewrite.The egalitarian quest for equality is tangential to feminism. So...which are you?
Related -- my post on the subject from the other day, "What's Wrong With Feminism: Why I Call Myself A Humanist, Not A Feminist."
Blinky
There's a big monkey eyelash in your link.
The New Sex Differences On Campus: If You're Female, You're A Victim; If You're Male, You're Guilty -- Of Something
Ashe Schow writes at the WashEx of how unbelievable it's gotten. This story is from Georgia Tech -- yet another young man on campus accused of sexual misconduct, and never mind that the supposed victim didn't feel victimized:
The young man let his female friend stay in his apartment while she waited for her roommate to return to their dorm because she had lost her keys. Instead of sending the drunk young woman to wait alone in the cold and dark early morning hours, the young man kept her safe at his apartment. Sometime later, a friend of the young woman accused the young man of holding the alleged victim against her will.Text messages from the young woman thanking the young man for allowing her to stay at his place while she waited were disallowed in the young man's hearing. The young woman didn't even believe she was a victim, yet because of the accusation of the third party, the young man was suspended.
So, women are men's equals, yet they can't even be allowed to decide for themselves whether they were victimized or not?
This is not women as equals; this is women as kittens.
A Georgia lawmaker, State Rep. Earl Ehrhart, is calling for the resignation of Georgia Tech's President over this and other Title IX-driven witch hunts.
But the real problem is the Dear Colleague letter that removed due process rights from the accused -- almost always a male -- and ties compliance with a college continuing to receive federal funds. Jake New writes at InsideHigherEd:
In 2011, the U.S. Department of Education issued a Dear Colleague letter that urged institutions to better investigate and adjudicate cases of campus sexual assault. The letter clarified how the department interprets Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and for the past five years it has been the guiding document for colleges hoping to avoid a federal civil rights investigation into how they handle complaints of sexual violence.Last week, the department clarified in a letter to a Republican senator that the Dear Colleague letter acts only as guidance for colleges and does not "carry the force of law." But many college presidents and lawyers argue that the department's Office for Civil Rights treats the guidance as far more than a series of recommendations. Instead, they say, OCR uses the letter to determine which colleges are in violation of Title IX and to threaten the federal funding of those that don't follow every suggestion.
The 2011 Dear Colleague letter states that colleges "must use a preponderance of evidence standard" when adjudicating cases of sexual assault.
"The 'clear and convincing' standard (i.e., it is highly probable or reasonably certain that the sexual harassment or violence occurred), currently used by some schools, is a higher standard of proof," the letter continues. "Grievance procedures that use this higher standard are inconsistent with the standard of proof established for violations of the civil rights laws, and are thus not equitable under Title IX. Therefore, preponderance of the evidence is the appropriate standard for investigating allegations of sexual harassment or violence."
Candidates need to be asked about whether they'd pull back this letter -- and the measures it calls for -- returning due process to males on campus and putting sexual assault investigation and punishment back where it belongs: in the province of law enforcement.
Meanwhile, as I've written before, if I were a parent sending a son to college, as I've said before, I'd send my son with a little extra money and advise him to timeshare escorts with his college buddies.
If You Ran Your Business Like Govt, You'd Be Living Under An Overpass
Our tax code is disgustingly complicated, and people have questions.
Our government's response: Tough titty. Or in call center-speak: "Your call is very important to us..."
Ali Meyer writes at The Free Beacon:
The IRS has answered only 15.6 percent of customer service calls during the 2016 tax-filing season so far, according to testimony from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.As of Feb. 27, 2016, there were 40.5 million attempted calls on toll-free assistance lines to contact the IRS. Agents answered only 6.3 million calls, or 15.6 percent of the total.
What's your idea for tax reform?
Oh, and also your realistic idea for tax reform?
US Pot Legalization Mean To Mexican Drug Cartels
Oscar Pascual writes at SF Gate about the sad state of affairs for Mexican drug cartels [annoying auto-play]:
Marijuana legalization may have accomplished what the War on Drugs has failed to do -- put the squeeze on Mexican drug cartel activity...."Two or three years ago, a kilogram [2.2 pounds] of marijuana was worth $60 to $90," a Mexican marijuana grower told NPR news in December 2014. "But now they're paying us $30 to $40 a kilo. It's a big difference. If the U.S. continues to legalize pot, they'll run us into the ground."
Poor dears.
Linkle
Please be neat, and wipe the seat.
Trickle-Down Humanity: The Strangers Who Surrounded Her In Whole Foods After Her Dad Committed Suicide
"Trickle-Down Humanity" is the title of my last chapter in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck."
It's a chapter about the way to achieve happiness (or contentment, to be less over the top) -- and it's not by chasing happiness, but by pursuing meaning.
As concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl noted -- and as a good deal of research later supports -- the way you bring meaning into your life is by extending yourself for other people, especially strangers.
Accordingly, Deborah Greene has a moving (as in, move to the Kleenex box before you read it) piece on The Mighty:
Dear Strangers,I remember you. 10 months ago, when my cell phone rang with news of my father's suicide, you were walking into Whole Foods, prepared to go about your food shopping, just as I had done only minutes before.
But I had already abandoned my cart full of groceries and I stood in the entryway of the store. My brother was on the other end of the line. He was telling me my father was dead, that he had taken his own life early that morning and through his own sobs, I remember my brother kept saying, "I'm sorry Deborah, I'm so sorry." I can't imagine how it must have felt for him to make that call.
And as we hung up the phone, I started to cry and scream as my whole body trembled. This just couldn't be true. It couldn't be happening. Only moments before I was filling my cart with groceries, going about my errands on a normal Monday morning. Only moments before my life felt intact. Overwhelmed with emotions, I fell to the floor, my knees buckling under the weight of what I had just learned. And you kind strangers, you were there.
You could have kept on walking, ignoring my cries, but you didn't. You could have simply stopped and stared at my primal display of pain, but you didn't. No, instead you surrounded me as I yelled through my sobs, "My father killed himself. He killed himself. He's dead." And the question that has plagued me since that moment came to my lips in a scream: "Why?" I must have asked it over and over and over again. I remember in that haze of emotions, one of you asked for my phone and asked who you should call. What was my password? You needed my husband's name as you searched through my contacts. I remember I could hear your words as you tried to reach my husband for me, leaving an urgent message for him to call me. I recall hearing you discuss among yourselves who would drive me home in my car and who would follow that person to bring them back to the store...
This is how it should be.
And not just in times of tragedy and extreme sadness.
It just takes a little practice to start looking for opportunities to extend yourself for other people. Once you start doing it, you'll see it makes you feel good -- as well as making the person you help feel good.
And you don't always have to help -- sometimes you can just smile or give someone a thumbs up.
We're a social species and a lot of people don't get a lot of notice, and sometimes a little notice means a lot.
The Self-Serving Confusion Of Western Feminists
Gyan Yankovich and Anna Mendoza write at BuzzFeed:
Last Sunday, the Sydney Opera House played host to All About Women, a festival that saw 30 speakers discuss a range of issues and ideas that matter to women.
Here's Julia Baird, an Australian "author and broadcaster," with her entry in what she thinks are "The Biggest Challenges Women Face."
Hmm, I'm having a bit of a hard time discovering the horror in her life, reflecting "The difficulty in talking, walking, working without being harassed, abused, assaulted, raped, silenced."
This is a thing -- no, not in the lives of women in free Western democracies -- well, save for those where thousands of migrants from Syria have come in...along with Islam-driven views on women as property (of men) -- or even meat.
And it does describe life in Muslim majority countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia -- but hey, it isn't P.C. to protest what brown(ish) people are doing.
As for Western countries, sure, terrible things can happen to a person, but let's be real: For how many is what Baird describes really the reality?
Don't we have it really, really good?
And isn't that why -- perhaps -- we have young women on college campuses howling about "microaggressions"...which, in another time, might be thought of as some minor cocktail party insensitivity...if they were thought of at all?
Maybe the real problem for Western women is that there isn't really so much to complain about anymore. Complaining gives a person an identity -- in fact, it's a shortcut to an identity and unearned power.
So perhaps it makes sense that women once demanded to be treated as equals and now -- full circle! -- they're demanding to be treated as infants.
Which do you want it to be, ladies? (Or whatever the fuck we're supposed to call you now, if we'd like to avoid being expelled from college or at least brought up on charges and pelted with old vegetables in the middle of the diag?)
National Snuggie, Uh, Science Foundation Grant
Elizabeth Harrington writes at the Free Beacon about our taxpayer dollars that were supposedly going to science -- if that's what you call the purchase of $1,179 in embroidered, personalized Snuggies:
The University of Washington used federal grant funding to buy thousands of dollars worth of custom embroidered Snuggies.Taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation grants were used to purchase Snuggies, pottery, and a trip to Hawaii. The agency's inspector general audited the University of Washington and found millions in unallowable salary costs, and numerous examples of "unreasonable transactions" from funds intended for scientific research.
The audit, released last month, identified $8,821 charged to five separate grants on unallowable promotional items and gifts, including personalized Snuggie blankets.
The wasteful expenditures included $3,920 on canvas bags, mini optical computer mice, and custom Snuggies, as well as $1,179 for the "purchase of embroidered Snuggies."
I looked at the report, and, disturbingly, many of these purchases were made about 12 seconds before researchers' grants expired.
Hello Linkitty
Have you ordered your Hello Kitty Uzi yet?
What's Wrong With Feminism: Why I Call Myself A Humanist, Not A Feminist
I am not a feminist. That's because I see, among other things:
1. Feminism is now about demanding special treatment under the guise of equal treatment;2. Feminism demeans men and women who want to stay home and raise their children;
3. Underlying feminism is the denial of biological sex differences (and the psychological differences that ensue from them).
4. Feminists now demand to be treated like eggshells, not equals.
5. Many or even most feminists do not stand up for the rights of men (or even express any concern when they are violated, like with the egregious removal of due process from men in sexual assault accusations on campus).
Claire Lehmann, at ABC Australia, lays some of these points out in similar ways, in greater detail:
The first feminist political position that is alienating to many is the idea that all differences between men and women are culturally determined or socially constructed. Also known as the Blank Slate view of human nature - a term popularised by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker - it is a view which has been debunked by decades of empirical inquiry.This "blank slate" view posits that there are few meaningful differences between men and women that cannot be explained by socialisation or enculturation. However, this is a view that has been discredited by independent literatures in psychology, neuroscience and genetics, which have all found that biology has pervasive and global effects on human behaviour, irrespective of the pressures of socialisation.
The second political belief that makes feminism problematic to many is the view that punishing dissent is a valid political goal. A desire to discipline and punish is common. In recent years, feminist activists have called for the censorship and regulation of social media, have organised public shaming and "no-platforming" campaigns, and have even lobbied to get people fired from their jobs.
The third position that feminism seems to uncritically endorse is the idea that the male career trajectory is the gold standard of human achievement. We see this with the constant hand-wringing over the gender pay gap, even when one of the major reasons for this gap is women forming and caring for their families. We see it with the constant pushing of girls and women into male-dominated spheres such as computer science or engineering, as if female-dominated pursuits such as psychology or education were somehow inferior.
Above all, I am for what feminism is said to be -- equal rights for men and women. Yes, men, too.
I see, far too often, that feminism is about hating, demeaning, and denying rights to men.
I am for rights -- like the First Amendment right -- for neo-nazis (who marched in Skokie back when I was a young teen), and for all sorts of people I think are assholes and idiots.
I am certainly for rights of people I like, and I like men.
The reality is, feminists who do not stand up for men's rights are not for equal rights at all. They're just a sisterhood special interest group that I want no part of.
The Latest In The Campus Idiocy Olympics: Replace The "His" In History With An "X"
"X" is appropriate in a way, because it's a sign of backwardness. (Illiterate people who couldn't write their name used to just mark with an X, like a chimp might do with a little training.)
Robby Soave, who noticed this adorbs new SJW-esque spelling, new writes at The Daily Beast that students at Western Washington University "have reached a turning point in their campus's hxstory."
Heh.
But it's actually worrisome, what they're calling for -- because it's all about unfree speech and turning back the clock on desegregation:
Activists are demanding the creation of a new college dedicated to social justice activism, a student committee to police offensive speech, and culturally segregated living arrangements at the school, which is in Bellingham, up in the very northwest corner of the state....Activists have also demanded the creation of an Office for Social Transformation, which would employ 15 students--young Robespierres in training--for the purposes of monitoring "racist, anti-black, transphobic, cissexist, misogynistic, ableist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and otherwise oppressive behavior on campus." (Anti-Semitism, one notes, is curiously omitted.) These students will be granted terrifying powers to discipline faculty members who commit microaggressions. Professors--even tenured professors--can and will be placed under investigation if they are accused of maintaining insufficiently safe spaces within their classrooms.
...Keep in mind that WWU is already an extremely liberal campus with a number of social justice-oriented activities: it has a department of Education and Social Justice, a Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, a Queer Resource Center, a Social Issues Resource Center, and an Ethnic Student Center.
And there's nothing wrong with that. These programs undoubtedly have much to offer, and contribute to the rich intellectual culture of the university. But there must come a point where adding more and more far-left instructional options actually detracts from the campus's intellectual diversity. Besides, the student-activists don't want to just add more options--they want to push them on everybody.
At the heart of this effort lies a bizarrely totalitarian ideology: student-activists think they have all the answers--everything is settled, and people who dissent are not merely wrong, but actually guilty of something approaching a crime. If they persist in this wrongness, they are perpetuating violence, activists will claim.
Rink
Icylinks.
Women Choosing Not To Participate As Wikipedia Editors Isn't The Same As "Erasing Women's Voices"
Nitwitted whine by Laura Hartnell at ABC Australia about "Why women are missing from history on Wikipedia":
A curious thing is happening over at Wikipedia: women are missing from its pages, both as subjects and editors.A 2010 survey found only 13 per cent of editors that contributed to Wikipedia identified as female. A follow-up study in 2013 found things were slowly improving, with women comprising 16 per cent of editors globally.
In an eerie echo of this figure, a 2015 study also found only 16 per cent of biographies on Wikipedia were of women.
Much like in the real world, the online gender gap is alive and well.
The fact that men write almost all the articles on Wikipedia is a problem. By erasing women's voices, it means that one of the world's most popular websites is failing to accurately reflect our society and history.
"Having men produce the lion's share of content ... perpetuates men's voices dominating the public space and ... continuing to be the authority on issues," says Dr Lauren Rosewarne, a senior lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
"Erasing women's voices"?
Oh. Please.
The real reasons women are "missing" from much of history -- on Wikipedia and in actual life -- is twofold:
1. Women were too busy getting pregnant and caring for children before the FDA approval of The Pill and the advent of other reliable birth control, in and after the 1960s.
2. Women didn't evolve to need to achieve to get guys; they just needed to be hot. Successful will often date the hot barista. Successful women, as I explain (according to evolutionary psychologists Buss and Schmitt on sexual strategies) in the dating chapter of "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," want more successful men.
Note that women are also missing from oil rigs and sanitation work. Where's the plaintive cry to have women in those arenas?
via @craignewmark
Close Your Open Letter And Think About What Your Kid Needs
This sounds to me like a mother who (proudly) exposes her child to situations that are too much for her.
Someone sent me this link, "Mom Pens Passionate Response to Shoppers' Comments During Daughter's Meltdown," with a piece by Elisabeth Brentano at The Mighty:
Sammi Ovington enjoys shopping with her 3-year-old daughter Skye, but these outings can become stressful if Skye experiences a meltdown. Skye has autism, pica and hypermobility syndrome, and after receiving a number of insensitive remarks from strangers while trying to help Skye through her meltdowns, Ovington took to Facebook to respond."To the people just staring at me, whispering to each other and the blatant judging of my parenting, I hope your children don't have bad days like this," she wrote in a Facebook post that has now been shared 3,800 times.
Ovington told the Daily Mail she wrote the post when she was angry, but she's pleased with the response she's received. "I love taking my little beauty shopping," she wrote at the end of her Facebook post. "I will not apologize if she is an inconvenience to your shopping trip!"
That Facebook post:
Dear passers by,This is Skye. She's 3 years old. She has autism spectrum disorder, pica and hypermobility syndrome.
To the lady in Paperchase telling me Skye was naughty, I'm irresponsible and I shouldn't give her things before I've paid for them, thanks for your input. Pica is a disorder where she feels the uncontrollable need to eat non edible things. Skye's thing is paper. I'm sorry she ate the barcode before we paid but she isn't naughty and I am not irresponsible.
To the member of staff in Wilko, no I wouldn't rather take my child who is in the middle of a meltdown outside and come back in a minute. I think that's what you would rather me do and I am disgusted with your attitude.To the man trying to get me to change my cable provider, I am already with Virgin, I already think your service is shit and can you not see I'm trying to comfort a screaming, scared and upset child?
To the people just staring at me, whispering to each other and the blatant judging of my parenting, I hope your children don't have bad days like this.
And to the old lady in Sainsburys who told me Skye was too old to be in a buggy and she should be walking, thank you for your input. Skye has hypermobility syndrome. Walking long distances for her is painful. So she goes in a buggy when she is too tired to save her little legs from hurting.
Today was hard. Never felt so judged by so many people. The noise of builders, cars, the beeping to cross the road and music in the shop was all too much for Skye. So she dealt with it the only way she knows how. To cover her ears, shake and cry. She was scared. She was upset. And she was panicking. She was NOT being naughty.
And despite this, I love taking my little beauty shopping. I will not apologise if she is an inconvenience to your shopping trip!
Again, this sounds to me like a mom who's bringing her 3-year-old into situations that she can't deal with. There were countless posts sympathizing with the mom on that Facebook page -- and none looking at what was appropriate for the daughter, the "screaming, scared, and upset" daughter.
Also to be considered is what's fair to the rest of us. Yes, that's right. If it's an emergency, and you need to bring out your child who's likely to throw a loud tantrum in a store, well, okay.
But "I love taking my little beauty shopping" isn't an emergency; it's an indulgence, when, for whatever reason, your child is likely to scream his or her guts out.
I wrote about this in I See Rude People. I have a friend with a child with autism, and one of the things I've always admired about her is how careful she has been -- bringing her son, when he was young, to select public engagements and alerting people there about his situation.
This helped people feel generosity of spirit and understanding instead of anger if he did have an outburst -- and I believe she and her husband would quickly take him out of the situation if he was disrupting people.
For his sixth birthday party, they had a family dinner at The Cheesecake Factory in Brentwood, in a room where you can barely hear yourself because of the marble floor and terrible acoustics. What they did by this was bring him out into the world -- but in a way where he wasn't bothering a lot of other people and in a way where it wasn't tormenting him. That's parenting -- at least as I see it.
Schwink
It don't mean a think if you ain't got...
Tonight's Podcast
My HumanLab -- The Science Between Us podcast, live tonight:
The Evolutionary Truth About Cats & Dogs (& Our Human Family Members) with Dr. Catherine Salmon.
Time: 7-7:30 pm PT, 10-10:30 pm ET (and at the link afterward).
The Approved Look Of Feminism: Lena Dunham Ugly
Lena Dunham accused the Spanish magazine Tentaciones, from the newspaper El Pais, of photoshopping her image. Here's the bit from her Instagram: 
In fact, they hadn't altered her image; they'd used an image approved by Dunham's own publicist, and they'd left it unretouched.
More of Dunham's remarks from another one of her Instagrams of the magazine cover:
Hey Tentaciones- thank you for sending the uncropped image (note to the confused: not unretouched, uncropped!) and for being so good natured about my request for accuracy. I understand that a whole bunch of people approved this photo before it got to you- and why wouldn't they? I look great. But it's a weird feeling to see a photo and not know if it's your own body anymore (and I'm pretty sure that will never be my thigh width but I honestly can't tell what's been slimmed and what hasn't.) I'm not blaming anyone (y'know, except society at large.) I have a long and complicated history with retouching. I wanna live in this wild world and play the game and get my work seen, and I also want to be honest about who I am and what I stand for. Maybe it's turning 30. Maybe it's seeing my candidate of choice get bashed as much for having a normal woman's body as she is for her policies. Maybe it's getting sick and realizing ALL that matters is that this body work, not that it be milky white and slim. But I want something different now. Thanks for helping me figure that out and sorry to make you the problem, you cool Spanish magazine you. Time to get to the bottom of this in a bigger way. Time to walk the talk. With endless love, Lena PS I'd love the Tentaciones subscription I was offered!
At The Spectator, Katie Glass nails it:
Dunham has criticised El Pais not because of something that actually happened, but because of something she felt. I suspect Dunham feels a few things. I suspect she feels pressure to look bad in photos. Because having a raw, un-retouched image is part of her brand. Although it's a shame - and feels very Seventies feminist - if she thinks you can't fight for gender equality and look hot. Dunham also seems to feel like a victim - at least that seems to be the mentality she has come into this interaction with. She joins the modern cult of victimhood, in which the overly sensitive are able to find grievances anywhere, in any micro-aggression, handclap or un-safe space. It is part of the same victim paranoia sweeping campuses. Key to this victimhood culture is how subjective it is. Someone can nominate themselves an aggrieved party regardless of fact. That is what Dunham has done in this case. It is interesting that in Dunham's 'apology' to El Pais she does not actually apologise. Instead she reiterates how the photograph makes her feel. 'That will never be my thigh gap,' she says - although then admits 'I honestly can't tell what's been slimmed and what hasn't.' Yet, if the picture hasn't been altered by El Pais, we must assume that this is how Dunham looks. If she cannot see this it is not the image at fault.
I would say that it's the narrow confines of modern feminism, where, say, trying to look attractive to men or wanting to stay home with your kids are crimes against the sisterhood.
Oh, The Horror: You Are A Female Scientist And A Senior Colleague Says He's Attracted To You
A. Hope Jahren writes in The New York Times about a supposedly terrible problem in science -- supposedly so terrible that it causes women to leave science -- and she deems it "sexual harassment."
She gives this as an example:
Last year, after one of my most talented students left to start her next adventure, she would text me now and then: "This is such a great place," "I am learning so much here" and "I know this is where I am supposed to be."Then, a month ago, she wrote and asked me what to do. She forwarded an email she had received from a senior colleague that opened, "Can I share something deeply personal with you?" Within the email, he detonates what he described as a "truth bomb": "All I know is that from the first day I talked to you, there hadn't been a single day or hour when you weren't on my mind." He tells her she is "incredibly attractive" and "adorably dorky." He reminds her, in detail, of how he has helped her professionally: "I couldn't believe the things I was compelled to do for you." He describes being near her as "exhilarating and frustrating at the same time" and himself as "utterly unable to get a grip" as a result. He closes by assuring her, "That's just the way things are and you're gonna have to deal with me until one of us leaves."
Sorry, but one letter does not meet the standard for sexual harassment.
Sexual harassment, legally, involves "severe" and "pervasive" behavior.
A letter like the one the woman got could lead to that -- but here's the adult way of dealing with it, from a comment at the NYT:
professor X, MA
The best advice I can give to any woman whom is the subject of an inappropriate advance, by a supervisor or otherwise; is to nip the problem right at the start. Something like: "I am flattered in your interest in me, and maybe we could learn to be friends, but there is no chance we will ever have a relationship beyond professional colleagues at this time. I trust you are mature enough to handle that and I look forward to a productive partnership. If you have any misunderstanding on this issue, I will be happy to arrange a meeting with your boss."
Yes, in life, people sometimes say or do things that will make you uncomfortable. In a corporation, in a soccer league, in a lab.
Part of being an adult is learning to deal with them. Part of being men's equals, in fact, is dealing.
The notion put forward here -- that it is horrible, terrible, and professionally debilitating to have a colleague or senior colleague express interest in you -- is right in line with the current infantilizing of women.
Another comment from a real worlder:
GRW Melbourne, Australia
The author gives no indication that she appreciates that occasionally men make proclamations of romantic feeling to female colleagues that are warmly received and reciprocated. Marriages, children and glittering joint-careers have been born from men making such efforts. Or that she understands that men are not mind-readers, so the first communication of romantic feelings unfortunately not appreciated cannot be objectively considered as sexual harassment. Or that she understands that if a woman says after such communication "Sorry but I just don't have feelings for you that way and I really don't think that's going to change" - that in contrast - any subsequent act demonstrating wilful ignorance of HER communication IS definitely objectionable behaviour.A biased, sad and non-adult piece.
If you are unable to set boundaries for yourself -- and if you crumble psychologically and leave science because of a man expressing interest in you in the workplace -- maybe science is too much for you. In fact, maybe you should repair to a less stressful environment, like the one where you'd be baking brownies in an apron instead of cooking up stuff in beakers in a lab.
As I've blogged over the past few years: Women now demand to be treated like eggshells, not equals.
Count me the fuck out.
via @j_real
Linksiepop
How many links to the center?
Helpful Student Baby Puts Himself On The "No Hire" List
Conservative and free speech activist Milo Yiannopoulos spoke to a crowd of about 350 at Pitt on Monday, invited by the Pitt College Republicans, reported Lauren Rosenblatt for the student newspaper:
During his talk, Yiannopoulos called students who believe in a gender wage gap "idiots," declared the Black Lives Matter movement a "supremacy" group, while feminists are "man-haters."
Students later spoke out about his talk at a Pitt Student Government meeting:
Marcus Robinson, president of Pitt's Rainbow Alliance, said after leaving the lecture on Monday, he felt unsafe on campus for the first time."So many of us shared in our pain. I felt I was in danger, and I felt so many people in that room were in danger. This event erased the great things we've done," Robinson said. "For the first time, I'm disappointed to be at Pitt."
Robinson suggested that the University should have provided counselors in a neighboring room to help students who felt "invalidated" or "traumatized" by the event.
Wait -- he felt he was "in danger" because a guy was moving his lips and making words come out?
And like when there is a horrible mass murder, a borderline controversial mass speaking event calls for counselors!! for the "traumatized"?
As First Amendment lawyer Marc Randazza said:
If you can't handle a Milo Yiannopolous lecture without bursting into tears or needing counseling, you do not belong in college.
Helpfully, Robinson has, with his statement, alerted employers to the sort of pussyman they'd be dealing with so they can hire somebody else instead.
Snippy
Lippylinks.
Hat Crime: Bowdoin Students' Attendance At Party Where...Yes...Tiny Sombreros Were Worn!
Yes, there are impeachment proceedings underway for two members of Bowdoin College's student government.
Catherine Rampell asks in the WaPo:
What heinous transgression did they commit? Theft, plagiarism, sexual assault?Nope. They attended a party where some guests wore tiny sombreros.
Two weeks ago, some students threw a birthday party for a friend. The email invitation read: "the theme is tequila, so do with that what you may. We're not saying it's a fiesta, but we're also not not saying that :)." The invitation -- sent by a student of Colombian descent, which may or may not be relevant here -- advertised games, music, cups and "other things that are conducive to a fun night."
Those "other things" included the miniature sombreros, several inches in diameter. And when photos of attendees wearing those mini-sombreros showed up on social media, students and administrators went ballistic.
...College administrators sent multiple schoolwide emails notifying the students about an "investigation" into a possible "act of ethnic stereotyping."
Partygoers ultimately were reprimanded or placed on "social probation," and the hosts have been kicked out of their dorm, according to friends.
What has to feel bad is to be a Latino person with normal psychology who's told that they are of a protected class -- kind of like endangered wildlife -- to the point where another student's wearing of a sombrero is a punishable offense on a college campus.
The money alumni would be giving to Bowdoin? Send it to campus free speech defenders theFIRE.org instead. (Donate to FIRE here.) And I recommend that to anyone whose alma mater is now speech-policing.
via @pebonilla
"Period Leave": Like Screaming To Supervisors, "Hire A Man! Hire A Man!"
My workplace is just me here, but when I worked at a big New York ad agency, I sure didn't want the focus on the doings of my vagina.
And I'm not talking about the fun randy stuff.
There's a company in the UK, Coexist, which manages event spaces, and is planning to offer paid leave for women who are on their periods. They see this like so:
Learn how to maximise the wellbeing of ALL your employees by fostering a positive approach to the menstrual cycle
Sorry, but I don't want to know that you're on the rag any more than I want to know about the doings of your intestines.
As Ashe Schow put it in the Wash Ex:
Surely, informing other employers that women aren't very productive when it's that time of the month will be a major win for women's equality and advancement in the workplace.And yet article after article has been written praising this policy. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Women complain of unequal treatment from their male colleagues, that they face discrimination in the workplace and that they can do anything that men can do. This strikes me as an acknowledgement that we can't.
Oh, boohoo, do you have cramps?
I once wrote my column while suffering from food poisoning. I put a bucket by my chair and threw up into it every now and then.
If I worked at a company with "period leave," I would be in a coma from period cramp pain before I took it.
Linkromat
Dirty linkery.
Breaking Moth
I'm having a "Breaking Bad" morning. No, I am not cooking meth to get ahead on the writing. It's the fly episode, only I just relived it with a sweater-eating fucker AKA a moth. (I think he may just have suffered death by broom. Let's hope so.)
P.S. For the record, I do not kill spiders. They do not eat clothes, which I think is damn polite of them.
MORE: About that fly episode, the most annoying one on "Breaking Bad," there's a name for that kind of thing -- a "bottle episode."
A "bottle episode" is designed to take up as little money as possible. The easiest way to go about this is to use only the regular cast (or even just part of the regular cast) and set it in a single location, especially if you have a main standing set. This keeps production costs down, because no one needs to scout locations, build new sets, or create fancy CGI graphics of the outside of the spaceship. Bottle episodes are often a chance for a slow, characterization-filled episode before/after a big special-effects-laden action episode. Of course, all this doesn't mean the episode will be cheap, just that it's meant to be; like any regular episode, unforeseen complications can cause the show to run over the scheduled budget.Note that the term has become synonymous with "single-location" episode, even though bottle episodes can (theoretically) have as many locations as a normal episode. All that matters is that it costs less, because the money is having to pass through a "bottleneck". The Star Trek cast and crew call this a "ship-in-a-bottle" episode, which is where the name originated.
Typically, effects-heavy shows such as Star Trek will hold off on the bottle episodes until near the end of a given season, saving the Big Money for mid-season cliffhangers and special guests.
Bottle episodes are known as a challenge and/or a chore, depending on the writer. Since most/all of the episode is set in a single location (sometimes even entirely in one room) with a smaller than usual cast, the dialogue (regarded as one of the harder things to write) needs to be better and tighter than in other episodes since the writer can't really do anything else with the cast. Depending on the writer and how well the premise works out, bottle episodes can range from terrible, to some of the best episodes of their shows and even their franchises.
The truly annoying thing about the fly episode? Here's this really smart guy, Walt -- a chemistry prof -- who can't figure out what I wrote in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck": "You catch more flies with a Dustbuster."
In today's case, it was a little early to get out the stepladder and get on my desk, plus I have neighbors eight feet away who might hear the Dustbuster, so I broomed the little bugger. (I hope.) He dropped behind something big and thousand-pound'y, so I'm he doesn't have one of those little "I've fallen down and I can't get up!" call buttons around his little fucking insect neck.
Teacher Could Face Charges For The Crime Of Being A Crime Victim
Say someone robs your house and makes off with a bunch of money. They buzz right on over to the liquor store, buy a bunch, get skunked, and then run somebody over. Kill them.
Naturally, we should charge you, try you, and throw you in jail, right?
Well, that's the tenor of things at a high school where a teacher left her phone unattended.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes at Reason:
A South Carolina high-school teacher may be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor after a student stole her cellphone and distributed partially nude photos from it around the school. Administrators say she should have password-protected the phone.The male student grabbed the phone from Union County Career and Technology Center teacher Leigh Ann Arthur's desk while she was making required hall-monitoring rounds between classes last week. After discovering the phone was unlocked, he went through Arthur's photos, eventually finding some sexually oriented shots that Arthur says she took for her husband. By the time she returned to the classroom, the student was texting the photos to other students. According to Arthur, he told her: "Your day of reckoning is coming."
One might think that the student would at least face disciplinary action from the school, if not criminal charges of some sort. But thus far, the school has not moved to hold the 16-year-old student accountable at all. Arthur, however, is another story. After teaching in Union County for 13 years, she resigned when district officials gave her the choice to do so immediately or start the firing process.
Interim superintendent David Eubanks said that Arthur might also be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. "I think we have a right to privacy, but when we take inappropriate information or pictures, we had best make sure it remains private," he told The State.
I do think she was kind of an idiot. But what's more idiotic is "zero tolerance" policies expanded to the teaching staff.
Oh, and my advice on the subject, from "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck":
Consider what you have to lose before you let someone--even someone you love, in a relationship you are sure will never end--turn a video camera on your naked patootie. Remember, times change; videos get mysteriously "lost." Your willingness to appear doggy style on video should be directly disproportionate to how much you like your job as an elementary-school principal.
This isn't to say it should be this way; but obviously, that's how it is.
And how lovely that the student isn't being held accountable at all. That'll teach him -- well, that his actions don't have much in the way of consequences.
Did the world somehow get stuck on Backwards Day and did nobody tell me?
Tortolinkini
Pasta made out of little turtles.
@s8mbI'll get into that below. But first, the story... Lavita Tuff writes at Blavity:
American universities are experiencing an epidemic of students lying about racial and sexual abuse. What's going on?
On January 30, 2016 three black female students at SUNY Albany, accused a group of 10 -12 white students of yelling racial slurs and physically attacking them after getting into an argument on the number 11 CDTA bus. Asha Burwell, one of the students attacked tweeted about her experience gaining support from the black community on and offline.Her tweet:
@AshaBurwellI sure wouldn't stand for that, and what person with any decency would? Whoopsy...turns out it didn't happen. In fact, it happened kind of the other way around. Tuff continues:
I just got jumped on a bus while people hit us and called us the "n" word and NO ONE helped us.
All three women were treated at a local medical center for scrapes on their faces but no major injuries. As with any attack, University police launched an investigation and after three weeks came back with startling evidence. Police found that the accusations made by the three young ladies stating that they were victimized were false and that the young ladies themselves had assaulted another female passenger on the bus. ... Interviews from 35 passengers on the bus, security camera footage from the bus and four videos taken by passengers on their mobile phones support the charges being brought forth.From the CNN report on this:
After the incident was reported, the hashtag #DefendBlackGirlsUAlbany appeared on social media.Um, defend them from having to earn attention and power in the world instead of scamming their way to it? And please note that my remark just above isn't about black girls in particular but all of the Victim Movement -- those declaring themselves, at a time when we've all never been freer or more privileged, to be deeply, constantly, and consumingly victimized? The unfortunate thing about the Victim Movement is that it drums up divisiveness between people while claiming to be about the seeking of equal treatment. It's the problem dressed up as the solution. via @YeyoZa
Can Someone Please Explain To Me Why Tampons Should Be Free? (Using Actual Logic)
There's an article in The New York Times to that effect by Roni Caryn Rabin:
Now a growing number of advocates, entrepreneurs and female lawmakers are challenging the taboo, talking about menstruation publicly (and, yes, in mixed company). They want periods put squarely on the public agenda, and are demanding that businesses and government take menstruation into consideration when they design facilities, develop budgets, supply schools or create anti-poverty programs. And they want tampons in every public restroom. And they want them to be free...."Tampons and pads should be treated just like toilet paper -- they're the equivalent," said Nancy Kramer, an entrepreneur from Columbus, Ohio, who started Free the Tampons, a campaign to make feminine products accessible in all restrooms. She said the cost of stocking restrooms at a school or business with sanitary supplies works out to $4.67 per girl per year. "Menstruation is a normal bodily function, and it should be treated like that."
Eating is a "normal bodily function," but I don't expect free food.
P.S. "Free!" isn't free. "Free!" just means the cost is spread out to non-users, which, unless we're talking about paying for tampons for people too physically or mentally disabled to work, just doesn't seem fair.
Sweetheart Capitalism: Daley Nephew And Obama Pal Squander $68 Mill In City Worker Pension Money
Crony capitalism isn't free market capitalism; it's wink-wink capitalism, where "some animals are more equal than others." These are the politically connected animals -- those connected to exactly the right people to position them under where the money comes out.
Tim Novak writes in the Chi Sun Times about two politically connected real estate speculators who took big risks with other people's pension money:
A real estate venture created by President Barack Obama's onetime boss and a nephew of former Mayor Richard M. Daley squandered $68 million it was given to invest on behalf of pension plans for Chicago teachers, cops, city employees and transit workers, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.The five public pension funds haven't made a dime on the investments they made nearly a decade ago with DV Urban Realty Partners, a company created by Obama's ex-boss Allison S. Davis and Daley nephew Robert G. Vanecko, records show.
In fact, the financially troubled pension plans have lost most of the money they gave DV Urban, which used the money to invest in risky real estate deals, primarily in neglected neighborhoods.
It invested in eight real estate deals that, for the most part, had gone belly up by Dec. 31, 2015, when the investment deals with the Chicago pension plans expired.
Though the pension funds lost out, DV Urban and its affiliated companies got about $9 million of the pension money for management fees. And they were in line for more until pension officials, facing losses, got a court order in 2012 to remove Davis and Vanecko from managing the retirement investments.
Yes, they had to pry them off that money spigot.
Tinkle
Linkle that's a little wet.
Oliver's Biting Take On President Trump
A friend sent this to me. As he put it: "Why should Hillary pay for Trump oppo research when John Oliver's already done it?"
It's good -- and funny. Trump's water toss is hilarious.
"Short-fingered vulgarian," which SPY magazine called Trump, is one of my all-time favorite remarks.
Angelo Codevilla, at The Federalist, calls Trump "the next Barack Obama":
Obama has been our first emperor. A Donald Trump presidency, far from reversing the ruling class's unaccountable hold over American life, would seal it. Because Trump would act as our second emperor, he would render well-nigh impossible our return to republicanism....Trump's claim to be an enemy of rule-by-inside-deal is counterintuitive. His career and fortune have been as participant and beneficiary in the process by which government grants privileges to some and inflicts burdens on others. Crony capitalism is the air he breathes, the only sea in which he swims, his second nature. His recipe for "fixing" America, he tells us, is to appoint "the best people"--he names some of his fellow crony capitalists--to exercise even more unaccountable power and to do so with "unbelievable speed." He assures us that, this time, it will be to "make America great again." Peanuts' Lucy might reply: "This time, for sure!"
...Trump touts his own capacity to make good deals. But good for whom? And who is to say what is good? Who or what causes would benefit from continuing government by secret deals? Who or what would lose? Trump's stated objective is to wield whatever power might be necessary to accomplish whatever objectives upon which he--in consultation with whomever--might choose from time to time. But the difference between Trump and Obama amounts only to whatever difference may exist between each emperor's set of cronies.
By contrast, the U.S. Constitution of 1789, as explained by James Madison, envisages a continuous mutual effort at persuasion among the American people's many parts, to "refine and enlarge the public views" and to result in "decisions based on the "cool and deliberate sense of the community." For two centuries, the government's main decisions have happened through open congressional proceedings and recorded votes. That's the republic we used to have.
...Like Obama, Trump is not about persuading anybody. Both are about firing up their supporters to impose their will on their opponents while insulting them. Throughout history, this style of politics has been the indispensable ingredient for wrecking republics, the "final cause" that transforms free citizens into the subjects of emperors.
Both are about firing up their supporters to impose their will on their opponents while insulting them.
This style of politics has grown, along with a ruling class that rejects the notion that no person may rule another without that person's consent. As I have shown at length elsewhere, America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party's elites into its satellites.This class's fatal feature is its belief that ordinary Americans are a lesser intellectual and social breed. Its increasing self-absorption, its growing contempt for whoever won't bow to it, its dependence for votes on sectors of society whose grievances it stokes, have led it to break the most basic rule of republican life: deeming its opposition illegitimate. The ruling class insists on driving down the throats of its opponents the agendas of each its constituencies and on injuring persons who stand in the way. This has spawned a Newtonian reaction, a hunger, among what may be called the "country class" for returning the favor with interest.
At Pomona College, Critical Thinking Comes A Distant Second To Critical Diapering
Much of good writing is good critical thinking -- understanding how to formulate logical arguments and to put them down on a page so other people understand them.
To me, that's a substantial part of any assistance program to help people better their writing -- especially people in college.
Well, not so at Pomona College (one of the Claremont Colleges, in Claremont, California, near Los Angeles). Their Writing Center's mission used to be teaching writing but now it's heaping on ideology.
Jennifer Kabbany writes at The College Fix:
Steven Glick, editor-in-chief of the conservative-leaning student publication The Claremont Independent, has resigned from his campus job at Pomona College's Writing Center, saying he's been being continually harassed by its progressive staff to a point where he can no longer take it -- despite his love for the job.In a Feb. 28 piece posted on the Independent titled "I resign: The Writing Center's mission is to teach writing, not ideology," he states that while his aim was simply to help strengthen peers' writing, its leaders had other goals.
Glick explained in The Claremont Independent:
I had genuinely thought the purpose of the Writing Center was to teach writing. I hadn't realized the writing instruction would be delivered with a side of ideology and that the ideology was not only mandatory but also more important than the actual teaching of writing. I've learned this over the past few months, which is the reason for my resignation.First, Ms. Snell, the Writing Center Team Coordinator, asked me to meet with her. She accused me of being an obstacle preventing the Writing Center from being a "safe space." This came in response to a news article I had written that detailed a series of no-whites-allowed "safe spaces" at the Claremont Colleges. Ms. Snell specifically mentioned my article, and noted she was concerned that my involvement with both the Writing Center and the Claremont Independent would lead students to associate the organizations with one another. Obviously, many other Writing Fellows contribute to campus publications. But as a far as I'm aware, no one else has been told that's a problem.
My next meeting was with Professor Bromley. She told me she was worried that I was not doing enough to make the Writing Center a space where students feel welcome. To rectify that, she canceled my appointments that night and asked me to read three packets about identity politics instead. One of the readings states that teaching English to non-native English speakers is an attack on free speech. Another criticizes "the hegemonic feminist theory produced by academic women, most of whom were white." The third, titled "Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy," states that capitalism is racist. I read all three packets, as I had been told to do. I did not agree with the opinions presented in any of them, nor did I see any connection between these readings and my work at the Writing Center.
Ms. Snell then asked to meet with me again to talk about what I had read, and what role identity politics should play in the Writing Center's mission. My peers have proposed their ideas for a new Writing Center mission statement, noting that we should aspire to "provide a space for students to work through their ideas with fellows trained in a writing pedagogy that considers how race, gender, sexuality, language, national-origin, and socioeconomic status influences and affects those ideas," "educate ourselves so that we better understand oppression, liberation, and dynamics of difference and power as they manifest themselves in the Writing Center," and "acknowledge and interrogate the ways in which the Writing Center, Pomona College, and academia itself perpetuate and have perpetuated injustice and oppression." I told Ms. Snell that, in my opinion, the goal of the Writing Center should remain unchanged: to provide "students with a community of experienced readers and writers, offering free, one-on-one consultations at any stage of the writing process--from generating a thesis and structuring an argument to fine-tuning a draft."
I guess that was the wrong answer, since the next day I was placed on probation and informed that I needed to meet with Professor Bromley and Ms. Liu-Rojas, the Writing Center's administrative assistant, the following week. I was told the reason for my probation was that I had missed a mandatory meeting for Writing Fellows, but at my meeting with Professor Bromley and Ms. Liu-Rojas, we did not discuss that at all. Rather, we talked about my prior meeting with Ms. Snell. Apparently, "her feelings had been hurt" because of my "tone." Professor Bromley and Ms. Liu-Rojas told me that if I did anything else they deemed wrong, I would be fired.
...I wish I could continue to work at the Writing Center because I feel that it's important for all students, whether black or white, on financial aid or not, conservative or liberal, to have a place to review and strengthen their writing. Unfortunately, the Writing Center no longer seems to be that place. Until the Writing Center can return to its apolitical mission and forsake its acceptance and appeasement of political harassment, I regret that I must resign my position as a Writing Fellow.
I can see from his writing that he had something to teach the students who came to the Writing Center -- the stuff they need to know to be clear writers and logical thinkers. Unfortunate that he's no longer there for them.
Donkey
Two flicks of a linkey's tail if by land; two if by sea. Then just toss a coin to figure it out.
