NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT: Teacher suspended for reading graphic gay sex poem to students.
REMINDER: When Ben Carson says being a homosexual is a choice, he’s terrible and should apologize, but when Barack Obama says being a homosexual is a choice, that’s fine and dandy.
ROBERT OSCAR LOPEZ: Buy Jephthah’s Daughters: Innocent Casualties of the War for Family “Equality”. “It’s not just about love. It was never just about that. It’s about all the groups – children, women, minorities, the developing world, gays, and intellectuals—who will have to be treated as collateral damage in order for the demands of a small elite for family ‘equality’ to be met. This is not speculation or a matter of ‘beliefs’—this book provides extensive documentation of all the impacts around the whole world, which have already been felt by the so-called marriage equality movement.”
Related: Children of Same-Sex Couples: A Turning Point, also by Lopez:
Children of gays, or COGs, are ready for a turning point. I recently ran a column in Daily Caller to begin a framework to understand what COGs’ stories, in our own words, can teach society about the stakes of redefining marriage. We just want to be heard — and we haven’t, up until now. . . .
After decades of decrying the pain of “the closet,” the gay community remains largely unwilling to uncover the true feelings of the children raised in their midst. It’s like saying, “I can’t live a lie but my kids must.”
POLITICS ON THE PLATE: The government’s dietary guidelines peddle an environmental agenda with no connection to health.
Washington’s dietary guidelines have been controversial from the outset, largely because they advised Americans on how to adjust their diets to reduce cardiovascular disease—chiefly heart attacks and stroke. . . .
In recent years, some researchers have attacked the notion that advising people to adopt a diet lower in meat and dairy products and higher in carbohydrates would be harmless at worst. . . . Americans have significantly cut their fat intake and increased consumption of carbohydrates over the last three decades. The result has been a sharp increase in obesity which “possibly laid the groundwork for a future increase in [cardiovascular disease].” . . .
Even as the scientific rationales for eating less meat and fewer dairy products have fallen away, the dietary guidelines committee has found a new reason to steer people away from these foods—but one that has little bearing on individual health. The nutrition experts now invoke the concept of “environmental sustainability” to advise Americans to adopt a more plant-based diet, which the committee claims will “ensure a healthy food supply will be available for future generations.” The committee made its recommendations despite a directive from Congress last year to the Obama administration to stick to nutritional advice and ignore “agricultural production practices and environmental factors” in the new dietary guidelines.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: L-citrulline increases virility.
NEWSFLASH: Men Are Stronger Than Women (On Average).
I saw an article which quantifies the difference in concrete ways. To be honest the difference shocked me. The paper is Hand-grip strength of young men, women and highly trained female athletes [PDF]. As you can see in the figure above the sample sizes are large. The N = 60 of top female athletes consisted of those who competed in judo and handball, to select for individuals who were already geared toward upper body activities. The very weakest male in the data set of nearly 1,700 males looks to be about at the 20th percentile for average women. . . .
Ten percent of women have stronger grips than the bottom five percent of men. The difference in distributions is big enough that the very strongest non-elite athlete female in the whole data set has a weaker grip than most of the men.
At this point the intelligent obscurantist will probably make an appeal to something about a confound. But the researchers had a data set of men and women in their early 20s, of a wide range of body types. To the right you see a plot of average grip strength as a function of lean body mass. The further to the right, the more muscular the individuals are. As you can see the more muscular men and women are, the stronger they are. But you can also observe that even the most muscular women can barely beat the least muscular men.
See also the earlier comparison here regarding track and field:
These two links show two sets of track and field records. This one is for female world record holders and this one is for U.S. amateur high school boys.
The boys win in every category… by a wide margin. And those are just high-school age male children in one country that has about 5% of the world’s population, compared to the best adult female athletes in the entire world.
HEARTISTE: The Female Ovulatory Sexual Preference Cycle Holds: A Study In Flawed Meta-Analyses.
Not too long ago, a couple of “””academic””” feminists tenured at a New Scandinavia university compiled a study which they asserted disproved all the preceding studies which showed that women’s mate preferences change according to their ovulation cycles. . . .
Meta-analysis studies started to crop up that were 180 degrees at odds with the hundreds of individual studies purportedly examined in the relevant meta-analysis.
Now it turns out my doubts about the accuracy of meta-analyses have some foundation. A more recent study was published [PDF] in response to the anti-cycle shift feminist meta-analysis and reconfirmed the original theory.
Related: Your Friend Menstruation.
DOG BITES MAN: Ohio Gay Rights Activist Faked His Own Kidnapping. When the “hate crimes” that they claim are so rampant turn out not to be, they have to make them up.
Related, from last year: Eleven Hate-Crime Hoaxes: Bogus baiting, retracted rape, and homophobic hokum.
CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: Oxford grooming: 10 things we now know about the ‘indescribably awful’ abuse of hundreds of children. “A report into hundreds of cases of ‘indescribably awful’ child sexual exploitation in Oxfordshire has revealed a series of grave failings by the authorities – showing that social workers and police effectively turned a blind eye to the endemic abuse.”
According to Wikipedia, “As in the similar Rochdale, Rotherham, Derby and Telford prosecutions, the majority of gang members were of Muslim backgrounds, and the girls were white.”
ATTENTION WHORING CAN BE DEADLY: ‘Mommy blogger’ convicted of slowly poisoning toddler while she wrote about his illness.
A jury on Monday convicted a “mommy blogger” of slowly poisoning her son to death while she wrote about his health struggles online. . . .
Investigators stumbled across other apparent lies. Perhaps the most notable: Spears told readers that the father of her son was a police officer who was killed in a car crash. But in reality, Garnett’s father is a garage door mechanic who is still alive. He claims that Spears lied to him about whose child she was carrying and then moved his son hundreds of miles away from him without his knowledge.
From the link about Garnett’s father:
“She went from wanting to be married to saying ‘He’s not your kid,'” he said. . . .
Chris Hill wasn’t in any pictures when Garnett was born . . . In fact, he never met the blonde and bubbly little boy his mother called “Garnett the Great,” even though Hill lived one floor down from Lacey and the newborn boy. He would catch glimpses of him when he and Lacey were coming and going.
“We had already split up, and she was saying he wasn’t mine, and to leave her alone. I only saw her, and him, when she would get out of her car to walk upstairs. I would hear her car door shut, and hear him cry. Then I would look out of my window to try and get a look at him.”
Hill said Lacey threatened to call police if he didn’t keep his distance.
Related: Marriage: Still the Safest Place For Women and Children. “Children of divorced or never-married mothers are six to 30 times more likely to suffer from serious child abuse than are children raised by both biological parents in marriage.”
PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY: Democrats Plan To Win Elections With Illegal Alien Votes.
Just get the new Republican Congress (under Speaker John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell) to pass a full-funding bill for Homeland Security without any exception for the funding of Obama’s illegal executive amnesty, which will allow Obama to give work permits, Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses to 5 million illegal aliens.
Once the 5 million so-called undocumented persons are given those valuable documents, there is no way to stop them from voting. That conclusion is drawn from the testimony of voting experts such as Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who told the U.S. House Oversight Committee on Feb. 12, “It’s a guarantee it will happen.”
Kobach’s warning was reinforced by testimony before the same committee by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, who noted that the 5 million non-citizens would receive the “same documents that federal law requires the states to recognize as valid forms of identification for voter registration.” And once an alien registers to vote, Kobach said, it is “virtually impossible” to remove him from the voter rolls.
A third witness, Hans von Spakovsky, suggested that Social Security numbers issued to the 5 million illegal aliens should contain a code (such as “N” for non-citizen) that would instantly reveal their ineligibility to vote. But that simple fix would happen only if the Obama administration sincerely wants to keep them from voting, which I doubt.
Earlier: Obama amnesty creates loophole for illegal immigrants to vote in elections. “Is it still a loophole if it’s done on purpose?”
REPENT: Preacher’s Wife Works at Local Abortion Clinic, She Says “God’s a Forgiving God”.
“I’ve spoken to her one-on-one, and she tells me that women know what they’re doing—they know what [abortion] is—but she says that there’s no sin greater [than God’s forgiveness], that we’re not to judge and that God forgives,” he outlined. “It’s always the same thing: We’re not to judge and God forgives. There’s none of us without sin, is what she says.”
I’ve noticed that, every time someone is quick to point out that everyone sins, what he really means is that the sin that was under discussion is not actually a sin. He’s really just telling you to shut up and stop calling it a sin.
“You know, preacher been teaching that the wages of sin is death,” she says. “Not many of them know that God is a forgiving God. So if they ask me if I think they’ll go to hell, I tell them what Jesus say: ‘I do not condemn thee. Go and sin no more.’ I tell them not to make the same mistake—and how not to make the same mistake.”
Which mistake? If abortion is the mistake, why not warn them beforehand? If getting pregnant is the mistake, then this really isn’t about repentance for the abortion, is it?
Note that the pastor’s wife is black and works at an abortion clinic in Montgomery, Alabama whose clientelle likely consists mostly of black women.
GOVERNMENT IS JUST A WORD FOR THE THINGS WE DO TOGETHER: Shocking report exposes neglect & abuse at NYC Head Start schools.
PRIVACY: Which VPN Services Take Your Anonymity Seriously? 2015 Edition. “Not all VPN services are as anonymous as they claim, as several incidents have shown in the past.” And yet the post is about what VPNs claim.
NOPE: Did St Nicholas of Myra / Santa Claus punch Arius at the Council of Nicaea? “There is no ancient evidence whatever that St Nicholas punched or slapped Arius at the First Council of Nicaea. The story is not found in any text before the late 14th century, and even that one mentions only “a certain Arian”. In the next two centuries the legend mutates into Nicholas slapping Arius; and is then disseminated in works of popular fiction, and by the paintings of icons. It has no historical basis whatever.”
NO, REALLY? The FCC’s Big Internet Power Grab Comes Directly From the White House.
Activists had pressured Wheeler throughout last year to pursue Title II reclassification of broadband service, which would make its regulatory treatment more like a utility, but Wheeler resisted.
Then in November, President Obama unexpectedly weighed in, siding firmly with the activists who wanted reclassification in a video calling for the FCC to adopt the “strongest possible rules” to protect net neutrality.
The FCC chief swiftly changed his views.
HERETIC: Roger Pielke, Jr. Being Investigated by Representative Grijalva for Presenting Inconvenient Data. “The incessant attacks and smears are effective, no doubt, I have already shifted all of my academic work away from climate issues. I am simply not initiating any new research or papers on the topic and I have ring-fenced my slowly diminishing blogging on the subject. I am a full professor with tenure, so no one need worry about me — I’ll be just fine as there are plenty of interesting, research-able policy issues to occupy my time. But I can’t imagine the message being sent to younger scientists. Actually, I can: ‘when people are producing work in line with the scientific consensus there’s no reason to go on a witch hunt.'”
WARREN MEYER: My Response to Triumphalism over Turning the Internet into a Utility.
Since when has “free” ever meant “tightly controlled by the government”? Regulation like this always locks in current competitors and business models. Hate Comcast? You just guaranteed them their infinite existence and profitability. They will be the Ma Bell of your generation.
New competitive models and technologies will now have to be vetted by government bureaucrats who will soon be captured by the industry itself. It literally always happens this way. How much innovation did you ever see in the landline phone business? My telephone at my birth in 1962 was identical to the one in my dorm room in 1984. Power companies? Water companies? Cell voice service? What innovation have you ever seen? What new competitors have you seen pop up to challenge the old guys? Only in cellular data has there been any innovation, and that is to date the one place in phone communications the FCC has not regulated with this model.
STUDY: Randomized Trial of Peanut Consumption in Infants at Risk for Peanut Allergy. “The early introduction of peanuts significantly decreased the frequency of the development of peanut allergy among children at high risk for this allergy and modulated immune responses to peanuts.”
NO, REALLY? Eric Garner’s daughter on Al Sharpton: ‘He’s all about the money’. “In the video, Sharpton is also criticized by leaders and supporters involved in the Michael Brown-police shooting case in Ferguson, Mo., and the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida, according to the Project Veritas videotapes.”
NOT THE ONION: Sweden’s Multicultural Center Expert on Islamophobia Joins ISIS. “And if the whole ISIS thing doesn’t work out, he can always go back to Sweden and lecture the natives on how they’re Islamophobes for associating Islam with terrorism.”
ADVENTURES IN EUPHEMISM: “Asian Americans are learning to deal with diversity in the changing landscape of college admissions.” Yes, they are learning to deal with being discriminated against on the basis of race in college admissions, which we’ll call “diversity.”
Lee says that she usually tries to at least mention arguments in favor of diversity at her free college seminars. She mentions how the black student population at UCLA has declined precipitously and how student bodies at elite universities probably shouldn’t be 100% of Asian descent. When she looks to see the response, she sees mostly slowly shaking heads.
“It’s really hard for me to explain diversity to parents whose only goal is getting their son into Harvard,” Lee says.
No kidding? It’s hard for these parents to accept arguments justifying discrimination against their children for the sake of “diversity”? Who’d have thought?
Democratic Assemblymen Phil Ting of San Francisco and Kevin Mullin of San Mateo say the clauses set a dangerous precedent for workers’ rights. . . .
The lawmakers asked the archbishop to remove the “divisive and discriminatory” clauses from a teachers’ handbook. . . .
The clauses outline the church’s teaching that sex outside of marriage, homosexual relations, abortion, masturbation and the viewing of pornography are “gravely evil.”
Can’t we just come out and say that the only acceptable expression of ethical ideals is of the leftist sort, and that all others shall be condemned as unlawful heresy? Let’s just be honest with ourselves that the phrase “divisive and discriminatory” as used above is a euphemism for “heretical.”
The call to ban Bibles mirrors action by the University of Huddersfield in 2013 – it said it wanted its properties to be “ethically neutral”.
Student John David Morgan raised the matter at a student council meeting that 50 people attended in January.
He claimed that the “inclusion of Bibles in university bedrooms is inappropriate in a multicultural university such as Aberystwyth”.
The student went on to say: “It could be offensive for some, and the university should provide a safe space for students to explore and develop their beliefs in a neutral environment”.
Public expressions of belief are unacceptable, unless they’re John David Morgan’s.
NO RESPECT: Dutch soccer fans branded ‘barbarians’ after damage to 500-year-old Rome fountain. “The Barcaccia, a boat-shaped fountain at the foot of the Spanish Steps, was chipped by beer bottles and kicked by fans of Rotterdam team Feyenoord before a Europa League match against AS Roma yesterday.”
New line for the tour guides: “And here we see the Fontana della Barcaccia, sculpted by Pietro Bernini in 1627. And in 2015, some Dutch *ssholes chipped it with beer bottles.”
A Hampshire police spokeswoman said: “Radbourne was arrested by the officer on suspicion of being drunk and disorderly. He had been placed in handcuffs and into a police car before additional units arrived.
“However, before officers arrived, Radbourne managed to strike out at Sgt Lawrence, viciously attacking her and banging her head on the ground several times.
“He was subsequently re-arrested by other officers nearby and taken into police custody.”
The attack is described as “disgusting” in the article. What about the decision to give this woman a dangerous job she couldn’t handle?
OF COURSE: White House Summit on Violent Extremism Opens With Muslim Prayer – No Other Faiths Represented. How apropriate. Oh, wait — it was about “countering violent extremism,” not engaging in it.
UPDATE: Related: DHS Report Warns of ‘Domestic Right-Wing Terror Threat’.
CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: Sweden: Child marriage authorized by tax authority.
A marriage between a 14-year-old girl and a 21-year-old man was authorized last year by Swedish authorities.
The two were asylum seekers . . .
Since 2013, three 15-year-olds, one 16-year-old and seven 17-year-olds have been registered as married in Sweden, all of them girls. . . .
After 2009, marriages of people under 15 are not allowed to be authorized. However, this marriage was mistakenly authorized by the tax authorities, making it official.
When the social services in the couple’s municipality notified the tax authorities of the marriage, however, the marriage was annulled and the girl was found different housing.
FIRST, DO HARM: Canadian Doctors Who Refuse to Kill Patients in Assisted Suicide Could Face Disciplinary Action.
According to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan, doctors in a Canadian province who refuse to cooperate with physician-assisted suicide could face disciplinary action. Bryan Salte, an associate registrar of the college said, “If a physician feels the directives are wrong, they will still, we would expect, they will still follow those directives, in spite of the fact they may not agree with them.”
He added, “Certainly with any physician we try to work with them to see if there is any mutually acceptable solution. But if there are physicians who engage in behavior which is regarded as unacceptable or unprofessional then that is a possible outcome.”
CANNIBALISM: Left-On-Left Aggression: Transgender Activists Troll Gay Rights Advocates.
Far from encouraging debate, Beard and Tatchell have themselves now been labelled “transphobic”, in part for co-signing a letter along with individuals who have already been deemed transphobic, which Tatchell has railed against. “The letter was about freedom of speech, and includes no attack on trans rights. When I signed the letter I didn’t know who else was going to sign it. Now I am being condemned by the McCarthyite tactic of guilt by association,” he told the Independent.
In the days following the letter’s publication, Beard says she was “bombarded” by tweets and emails, including one tweet in which she was called “an unrepentent bigot”.
THE NEW TOLERANCE: Judge Rules Against Grandma Florist For Refusing To Service Gay Wedding.
A Washington grandmother and florist of 40 years who refused to service gay weddings because of her faith will now be forced to arrange flowers for gay ceremonies, a judge ruled Wednesday. On top of that, the woman, Barronelle Stutzman, will have to pay the legal penalties imposed by the judge as well as attorney’s fees.
Benton County Superior Court Judge Alex Ekstrom ruled in a summary judgement that Stutzman violated anti-discrimination and consumer protection laws.
Ekstrom ruled that the gay couple could collect penalties not just from her business, but also from her personally, according to Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal group that represented Stutzman. That means she could lose her personal possessions and savings.
IS THIS A GOOD IDEA? Swedish ISIS fighters to have passports taken.
A new law to allow Swedish authorities to confiscate the passports of Swedes who are known to have fought alongside extremists in Syria or Iraq is being drafted by the government. . . .
The move to confiscate passports from known Swedish extremists follows similar strategies in the UK, France and Germany.
A similar policy did not pan out well in Canada. A man who attacked two Canadian soldiers with a car, killing one and injuring the other, had had his passport revoked by the authorities on suspicion he was going to join a militant group abroad. Another man killed a soldier while his passport application was being investigated. A police commissioner said that the “passport issue was central to what was driving” him. Presumably, his application would have been denied had he been suspected of wanting to fight for ISIS or a similar group.
“Heavy over-representation of men in violence” is a baffling piece of writing published on state-owned public service SVT. . . .
“[We must combat] the raised voices that argue that the threat comes from ‘outside’ and should be solved by increased border controls and increased police action. The problem in our society is not immigration, the problem is racism. . . . The problem is Islamophobia.
To respond to acts of terror by escalating violence and increasing militarization of the police force would lead to a vicious circle in which violence begets more violence.” . . .
“Men’s heavy over-representation in violence indicates that the socialization of boys is a part of the problem. Beliefs about masculinity are closely linked with violence, militarism and the nation.”
The eventual conclusion is that the country needs to fight terror by taking bold and decisive action in:
1. Maintaining open borders
2. Neuter and wussify the police force even further
3. Indoctrinate all boys to think like girls
Transcripts of telephone intercepts published in Italy claim to provide evidence that ISIS is threatening to send 500,000 migrants simultaneously out to sea in hundreds of boats in a ‘psychological weapon’ against Europe if there is military intervention against them in Libya.
Many would be at risk of drowning with rescue services unable to cope. But authorities fear that if numbers on this scale arrived, European cities could witness riots.
JANET BLOOMFIELD: 5 Reasons Women Love Rape Fantasies.
No matter how you slice it, rape culture allows women to imagine every man is a rapist. Every man wants her. Every man will do the unthinkable just to have her.
Pretty sweet, as far as fantasies go.
I like how she put it in a post linked from here a while back: “Is women’s sexuality profoundly narcissistic? That would explain a lot.”
Stranger rape is central to lust for many, many women.
Why? It’s all about the fantasy of being irresistible. Of controlling men so thoroughly. It’s about being the object of unendurable desire. . . . Rape culture is rape fantasy culture: it’s women imagining themselves to be objects of desire – to all men, all the time, everywhere.
It’s classic narcissism. Women’s lust proceeds from their own internal need to feel special, beautiful, wanted, high status – and not out of a desire to select the best genetic material for offspring.
ADAPTING TO THE HYSTERIA: Male Students Using Texts, Videotapes, Facebook to Beat Rape Charges.
News reports indicate that videotapes can often provide a successful defense to rape:
- Four students at Hofstra University were accused of gang raping a fellow student, but were freed when a cell phone video indicated that the sexual encounter was consensual.
- A San Francisco lawyer, charged with raping three women, had the charges regarding two women dismissed because he had videotaped those encounters.
- A man was found not guilty of an alleged gang rape after a Cook County, Illinois, jury was shown a videotape arguably showing some signs of consent as pointed out by an expert witness.
Although the Federal Wiretapping statute prohibits audio recording, it does not limit recording of video-only images. Moreover, the great majority of the states also do not criminalize videotaping.
In any event, the few state laws which criminalize it are full of restrictions and loopholes so they may not apply where a man videotapes his own sexual activities in his own room, not for sexual gratification, but rather as a legal defense to rape.
THEY GOT GAME: CNN Banner: ‘ISIS Lures Women with Kittens, Nutella’.
He should not be allowed to bring up his child because the boy needed ‘an environment that supports difference, equality and independence’, they said.
But Sir James Munby, the country’s most senior family judge, blocked the adoption, ruling that the father’s failure to be a good role model did not justify taking his child away. . . .
The charges laid by Darlington social workers against the father were that he lied about being present at a railway accident as a child, that when he was 17 he had sex with a 13-year-old and this was immoral, that he drank too much and used cannabis, and that he had briefly been an activist with the EDL.
They said he had ‘numerous’ criminal convictions when, in fact, he had two police cautions. . . .
One social worker recorded: ‘The distorted thinking of those within the EDL is barbaric and their actions inappropriate. Therefore the mentality of those involved has to be brought into question.’
The social worker also pointed out ‘the immoral nature of the values and beliefs’ of EDL members and the violence of their protests.
This reminds me of the Rotherham couple whose foster children were taken away over UKIP ties. “Joyce Thacker, the council’s director of children and young people’s services, has said that the children, who were from ‘EU migrant backgrounds’, had been removed to protect their ‘cultural and ethnic needs’ from UKIP’s ‘strong views’ and apparent ‘opposition to multiculturalism’.”
UK: 1 in 5 Muslims Never Held a Job. “The cries of racism will go up, but if the issue was racism, how do they explain why Hindus and Sikhs work and succeed? The issue isn’t something wrong with every country in Europe. This problem, like all the others, stems from Islam.”
IT’S GOOD TO LEARN EARLY: Black Lives Matter Protesters Bully & Harass White Children at Restaurants.
MANGAN: Organic food is a waste of money and a scam.
The idea behind eating organic food seems to be that pesticide residues in food cause harm to health. The idea makes some sort of sense; after all, pesticides are used to kill pests, so they must be toxic. But there are a few problems with this logic.
One is that conventional food doesn’t have enough pesticide residue to be of concern . . .
Furthermore, the quantity of natural pesticides that humans ingest daily is many orders of magnitude greater than the amount of synthetic pesticides.
IT’S A MAD WORLD: Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel in Title IX Enforcement.
I recently assisted a young man who was subjected by administrators at his small liberal arts university in Oregon to a month-long investigation into all his campus relationships, seeking information about his possible sexual misconduct in them (an immense invasion of his and his friends’ privacy), and who was ordered to stay away from a fellow student (cutting him off from his housing, his campus job, and educational opportunity) — all because he reminded her of the man who had raped her months before and thousands of miles away.
He was found to be completely innocent of any sexual misconduct and was informed of the basis of the complaint against him only by accident and off-hand. But the stay-away order remained in place, and was so broadly drawn up that he was at constant risk of violating it and coming under discipline for that.
JUST WHAT WE NEED: New High-School Physics Curriculum Includes Lessons on White Privilege. “I was jealous of my colleagues in English and History who got to talk every day in class about society and how it worked and how to be moral and caring and kind, whereas those conversations with students only happened for me outside the classroom.”
English and history teachers talk about that stuff because it’s easier to fake knowledge about “how society works” than about grammar, literature, and history. Just because they’re not doing their jobs doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do yours.
GEE, I WONDER WHY? When Craigslist comes to town, HIV infections go up, study says. “We argue that the introduction of Craigslist provides users with the ability to locate and socialize with specific groups of individuals who are inclined to engage in casual sex but are otherwise hard to locate in one’s day-to-day life and community.” Which groups might those be?
Related: Gay Dating Apps Become Messengers for Warnings on HIV. Heh. “Dating.” Anyway, why the apps for male homosexuals and not any others? We all know, but it’s impolite to say.
INTERESTING: The neural basis of ‘being in the mood’ (in female mice, anyway).
The researchers chose to focus their research on the hypothalamus. “The hypothalamus regulates many instinctive behaviours, including feeding, sleep and sexual behaviour”, says Kensaku Nomoto, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Susana Lima. “We recorded the activity of neurons in an area within the hypothalamus dedicated to socio-sexual behaviour. The activity of the neurons was observed while the females interacted with males or with other females.”
The researchers found that the activity of these neurons changed dramatically depending on the reproductive state of the female. “When the female was not in a receptive state, the activity of the neurons was similar for social encounters with males and females. However, when the female was in the receptive state, the activity of the neurons was enhanced only when interacting with males”, says Dr. Nomoto.
“This is the first time that the activity of these neurons is recorded in naturally cycling females, where we investigated the effect of the reproductive cycle on neuronal physiology.”