the Revision Division

EDUCATIONREALIST: The SAT is Corrupt. No One Wants to Know.

The SAT is basically corrupt in the international market. I’ve already written about test and grade corruption among recent Asian immigrants over here, particularly in regards to the Advanced Placement tests and grades.

Yet no one seems to really care. Sure, people disapprove of the SAT, but for all the wrong reasons: it’s racist, it’s nothing more than an income test, whatever. But that it’s this huge money funnel, taking money from states and parents and shoveling it into the College Board or the companies who have essentially broken the test? Eh. Whatever.

The people who are hurt by this: middle and lower middle class whites and Asian Americans. So naturally, who gives a damn?

SO MUCH FOR “JUDGMENT FREE”: Planet Fitness Expels Man Wearing Pro-life T-shirt. It’s their right, but the least they could do is to stop billing themselves as a “Judgement Free Zone®.”

CRY WOLF: Woman claims rape after strangers fail to fix her ATV, almost gets them killed.

A man who stormed into a bonfire party with a handgun, believing his girlfriend had been raped by the men there, came out of the whole mess the worst for wear.

Janos Papp, 57, ended up being viciously beaten by the men at the party — who had not raped his girlfriend, it turned out. She had made the story up after her ATV broke down and she was angry the men at the party were too incompetent to help her.

Earlier: Women Who Lied About Being Raped And Why They Did It.

THE QUEST for the Optimal Cooking Oil.

STEVE SAILER: The Dunedin Study: Nature v. Nurture Across 40 Years.

If Herrnstein and Murray are wrong, we now have 20 more years of data from the NLSY79 tracking, which now includes thousands of children of females in the original study, including both mother and child IQ-like scores. You can access NLSY79 data here. The most recent published update is from 2012.

Plus we have the NLSY97 tracking study from 18 years later that has now been running for 17 years.

And we have lots of other long-term tracking samples, such as ADD Health.

Overseas, there is the Dunedin sample. The medical and dental school in the New Zealand city of Dunedin enrolled virtually every child born in Dunedin over a 12-month period in 1972-73 into this lifelong study. The subjects are now in their early 40s and their children are being enrolled as they reach age 15. A sizable documentary is being prepared on the results called “The Science of Us.”

COOL: Byzantine Shipwrecks Shed Light on Shipbuilding History.

Archaeological excavations in Turkey that began in 2004 have yielded a unique historical treasure — 37 shipwrecks from the Byzantine Empire, eight of which are now described in a new report.

The shipwrecks were discovered at a site called Yenikapi, in Istanbul, in what was a port of the ancient city, then called Constantinople. The ships date back to the fifth to 11th centuries, and are in exceptionally good condition, archaeologists say.

“Never before has such a large number and types of well-preserved vessels been found at a single location,” said study author Cemal Pulak, of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University.

YEP: Ryan Bell’s year of atheism testimony shows need for apologetics.

He says that the Christian worldview is “a way of approaching reality” and “creating meaning” and “identifying meaning in the experiences we have”. And he says that there are “other ways of experiencing meaning”. He talks a lot about his correspondence with people and reading atheists, but nothing about reading Christian scholars who deal with evidence, like William Lane Craig, Stephen C. Meyer or Mike Licona.

Literal, literal quote [from a podcast]: (23:35) “Well I think the only access we have to the question of God’s existence or not is how we feel. I mean there’s no falsifiable data that says God either exists or doesn’t exist. It’s all within the realm of our personal experience”. “If living as though God exists makes you happy and comforts you, then by all means, go for it”. This attitude is so popular in our churches today, and where does it end? In atheism.

The above is a repost from February, toward the beginning of Bell’s experimenting with living “as an atheist,” whatever that means. And the experiment did end in atheism.

BOOK REVIEW: A Christian Man’s Guide to Love and Marriage in the 21st Century by Don Riefstahl.

DOUBLETHINK: Netherlands: Female executive quotas: Move over men (it’s for your own good).

A female directors quota automatically implies a male directors quota.

False. The female quota is a floor, so in theory, there could be no men at all.

And that is a good thing because it will, of necessity, improve the quality of male administrators. Not all male top executives are good executives. Some are excellent and get top marks while others are just scraping by. The latter climbed to the top during the boom years but, faced with a recession, they seem incapable of changing their approach. They stand in the way of necessary change and the company suffers. . . .

Fewer places at the top mean a tougher selection process.

So, if the number of men in executive positions is higher, that’s bad, because it means having more unqualified men. But if the number of women in such positions is higher, that’s good for some reason.

And if lowering the number of men is “for [their] own good,” then why not keep the number of women low for their own good?

ANOTHER FAKE “HATE CRIME”: Muslim vandalizes Fresno mosque.

On Christmas Day someone vandalized a mosque in Fresno. The police and the media immediately labeled the incident a “hate crime” against Muslims, before they even had time to dust the doorknobs or check the surveillance cameras at the mosque.

Yesterday they had to start walking their stories back when it emerged that the confessed perpetrator of the vicious Islamophobic attack was one Asif Mohammad Khan, giving the crime a Mohammed Coefficient of 100%. . . .

When everyone thought the evil vandal liked Geert Wilders and Robert Spencer, they were looking at a hate crime. When he turned out to be a practicing Muslim who was also a fan of Osama and Hitler, the police and the media fell all over themselves to point out that he was a loony.

Not only that, he was a victim of bullies, which gives him at least two pair in politically correct poker. Maybe tomorrow we’ll find out he’s gay, making it a full house. Throw in the fact that he’s brown, and you’re looking at a royal flush.

I do believe we have a case of reverse reverse bigotry on our hands here. To avoid being perceived as bigoted, reporters and commentators blame circumstances (e.g., being poor or having experienced discrimination) when the alleged perpetrator is in an approved victim group, rather than blame the individual himself. In doing so, they deny free will to such individuals. The white heterosexual male oppressors, on the other hand, can be blamed because they have free will and thus can consciously make decisions for themselves. The oppressors are adults, and the oppressed are children.

LET’S NOT TALK ABOUT IT: Alert Issued After Likely HIV Porn Set Infection. “The Department of Public Health said the male actor tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS after engaging in unprotected sex with several other male actors during two separate film shoots. He had tested negative before the shoot.”

Any other industry that operated as dangerously for its employees would be shut down or heavily regulated.

Earlier: Porn HIV Shutdown, It’s the Gays Again. “The media will never delve into this HIV shutdown or others, and they have a wonderful cover story, ‘protect the identity of the afflicted’. When has that ever stopped the media? Well, when the afflicted is a member of a protected group.”

GERMANY: German news video on PEGIDA demonstrations in Dresden. “The media is still trying to demonize anyone objecting to Islam and its influence in Europe but it appears in this video that at least they are being slightly more cautious about it and allowing the odd reasonable person to speak a few words at the camera.”

SWEDEN: Church to offer legal advice to asylum seekers. “In the Diocese of Lund, local priests and deacons are meeting an increasing number of refugees and migrants who have had their applications for asylum rejected. It is at their request that the diocese is now investing SEK 400,000 to provide legal advice to asylum seekers.”

AUSTIN RUSE: Fifteen Minutes for the New Homophiles.

Conservative Christians, opponents of the gay agenda, opponents particularly of gay marriage, are so eager not to be considered bigots that the New Homophiles are acceptable to them. What a welcome relief. See, we’re not bigots. . . . Christians still need to take a closer look at New Homophile claims. . . .

The New Homophiles hold that their same-sex attraction was not only given to them by God but that along with the attraction God gave them uniquely “gay” spiritual gifts. Such language was actually used in the first draft of the document at the Extraordinary Synod in October, language quickly excised.

One of these special gifts is supposedly this ability to form close friendships, though from what I have read of refugees, there are fewer lonelier places on earth than in the “gay” community.

Earlier posts have touched on this point:

• The Real Lives of Gay Men
• An interview with a “former gay porn actor”
• Homosexuals and bisexuals more likely to be involved in intimate partner violence

Ruse continues,

Yes, they want the Church to be gay-positive; more than that though, they want Church doctrine to recognize their “gayness” as gifts from God and through their gayness they’ve been given unique spiritual gifts. The New Homophiles will deny all of this, but it is in their now voluminous writings.

Without a doubt this is an important debate to have, but it is an important debate to actually have.

Earlier: The New Homophiles: A Closer Look.

SWEDEN: Swedish Prime Minister Cancels Snap Election.

Speaking at a news conference in Stockholm, [Prime Minister Stefan] Löfven identified three areas–pensions, defense and energy–where the government and the opposition would seek common ground on policy. Finding common ground would make it easier for the minority government to push its economic policy through parliament and get at least passive support from the opposition, potentially avoiding a recurrence of the political turbulence Sweden suffered this fall.

The agreement implies that the opposition would abstain where necessary to allow the government to get its budget approved by parliament.

Related commentary: “The snap election was cancelled because the formerly conservative opposition agreed to roll over and blindly adopt socialism.”

Sweden Democrats’ continued success in the polls is obviously one of the main reasons that Stefan Löfven made a 180-degree turn and reneged on his promised snap election. There was a risk that some of the conservative parties would get kicked out of parliament and the Sweden Democrats would strengthen its position.

However, this is an extremely short-term perspective. By jumping into bed with the Social Democrats and the Green Party[,] . . . the established political parties cemented the image that the Sweden Democrats have long tried to maintain: The Sweden Democrats is the only opposition party.

UK: Man denied entrance to son’s Christmas play by Head of School and police.

She was not “happy” to let me watch the play, so she attacked me physically, called the police. Even after establishing that the Head of School’s “happiness” or otherwise for me to attend my son’s school play was the only reason for her agenda (since the court order she told the police she had, turned out not [to] exist, as I had always insisted was the case), the police did her bidding, and assaulted me. . . .

The video catches on film a flagrant abuse of family rights on the part of the highly unprofessional (and downright mean-spirited) Head of School at my son’s infants’ school, both mine and his.

HEH: Lionized Ferguson ‘Peace’ Protester Confesses to Arson, Burglary.

STUDY: “Healthy men who did 20 minutes of daily weight training had less increase in age-related abdominal fat than men who spent the same amount of time doing aerobic activities.”

“Because aging is associated with sarcopenia, the loss of skeletal muscle mass, relying on body weight alone is insufficient for the study of healthy aging,” said lead author Rania Mekary . . . “Measuring waist circumference is a better indicator of healthy body composition among older adults. Engaging in resistance training or, ideally, combining it with aerobic exercise, could help older adults lessen abdominal fat while increasing or preserving muscle mass.”

Prior studies had been focused on a specific population (e.g., overweight people or type 2 diabetics), were of short duration, and had mixed results. The new study was long-term with a large sample of healthy men with a wide range of body mass indexes (BMI).

ROBERT OSCAR LOPEZ on shutting down the English Manif blog:

With unforeseen success has come, unfortunately, a lot of challenges for which I was not prepared. Due to some of these challenges, and in the interest of protecting contributors and correspondents, we have had to take down and archive the 2,000 posts that were published here; we have warehoused them somewhere safe but cannot leave them as open-source resources to the reading public anymore.

We will be publishing the most important essays from English Manif as books. Our goal going forward is to ensure that the work we do here is disseminated with proper contextualization and having gone through as careful an editing process as possible.

English Manif has been linked from here in the past. See previous posts here.

Presumably, Lopez is concerned with his fellow English Manif contributors receiving the same treatment that he has over the years: (more…)

ANTHONY WATTS: NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory shows surprising CO2 emissions in Southern Hemisphere.

A global map covering Oct. 1 through Nov. 17 shows elevated carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere above northern Australia, southern Africa and eastern Brazil.

“Preliminary analysis shows these signals are largely driven by the seasonal burning of savannas and forests,” said OCO-2 Deputy Project Scientist Annmarie Eldering, of JPL. The team is comparing these measurements with data from other satellites to clarify how much of the observed concentration is likely due to biomass burning.

The time period covered by the new maps is spring in the Southern Hemisphere, when agricultural fires and land clearing are widespread. The impact of these activities on global carbon dioxide has not been well quantified.

VERMONT Abandons Single-Payer Health Care; Press Coverage Muted.

Based on the list of supporters identified at the beginning of this post, the AP’s reference to Vermont’s efforts being “rooted for by single-payer health care supporters around the country” is no exaggeration.

What is far less known is that a statewide single-payer success is considered critical to national implementation of single-payer by its advocates, including one of Obamacare’s key architects. A post later this morning demonstrates just how devastating — and of course, virtually unreported — Vermont’s failure is to their cause.

D.C. bans gay conversion therapy of minors. “Gay apostacy” (or “apostgaycy”) would be a more accurate term than “gay conversion.” The ban only works one way. As far as I know, no where in the U.S. is it illegal for therapists to encourage young people to be homosexual. It is only ever illegal to encourage them to be heterosexual, even at their behest.

Earlier: Hope and Change? Not for Gays.

COOL: “Israeli archeologists have uncovered an impressive entrance to Herod’s palace at Herodium.”

JANET BLOOMFIELD: One man’s fight to see his son – the broken family court system.

This is an interesting blog written by a personal friend of mine who has spent the last 11 years paying child support for a son he seen only a handful of times.

http://whereismyson.wordpress.com/

Please follow this blog if you want a detailed story about how corrupt family courts can be, and how one rapacious, cruel woman can ruin the lives of everyone she touches.

Here’s an excerpt from an informative post:

As she interfered with my custody and then eventually fled the jurisdiction of the court, I have never, ever had my son on one overnight. Ms. Slattery has intentionally and wantonly interfered with my custody of my son, preventing any relationship whatsoever. . . .

No matter how many times I have contacted the court, complaining and begging for assistance with Enforcement of my valid Court Order, I am advised that I must continue to pay my Child Support as ordered, rewarding Trish for refusing to comply with a legal court order, or I will [lose] all of my State and Federally issued licenses and certifications and go to jail. . . . There was a time I continued to overpay my support by one month, so that there was never an issue with a late payment. The State of Florida actually sent me a check on more than one occasion for having a credit in my child support account.

I worked a detail once that technically made me an employee. The employer failed to garnish my support payment quickly enough. After many years of a credit, one half of a payment was one week late due to the payroll department. Within 6 days, I received official notification that my licenses and certifications were being suspended, that I was going to be held in contempt of court and must immediately pay the HALF PAYMENT for the first two weeks of the month or go to jail.

The fact that my ex had now been in violation of the court order for years by this point, and that I have begged the court for assistance for years with negative results meant nothing to the department of Revenue. “Parenting time is a totally separate issue from the Payment of Child Support”. Bluntly…? She can with-hold my son from me and no one will touch her. If I miss one payment, I’m going to jail.

HOW PRIVATE PHILANTHROPY Saved the Founders’ Homes. “Mount Vernon and Monticello nearly vanished.”

STUDY: Peer review isn’t good at “dealing with exceptional or unconventional submissions.” “Hindsight reveals numerous questionable gatekeeping decisions. Of the 808 eventually published articles in our dataset, our three focal journals rejected many highly cited manuscripts, including the 14 most popular; roughly the top 2 percent. Of those 14 articles, 12 were desk-rejected. This finding raises concerns regarding whether peer review is ill-suited to recognize and gestate the most impactful ideas and research.”

DON’T BLAME ME, HONEY — IT’S IN THE BIBLE! Frequent denial of sex breaks the marriage covenant as much as adultery. “I actually had a conversation with a Christian woman once who said that women should not be obligated to do things that they didn’t feel like doing. I asked her if men were obligated to go to work when they didn’t feel like going. She said yes, and acted as though I were crazy for asking. I just laughed, because she didn’t even see the inconsistency. The truth is that men often don’t feel like working, but they get up and go to work anyway, whether they like it or not (in most cases). Similarly, a women should feel obligated to have sex with her husband, even if she is not in a perfect mood for it (in most cases). Sometimes, a man stays home from work, and it’s OK. And sometimes a woman says no to sex, and it’s OK. But it’s not OK to stop doing it for months and months with no good reason.”

WESLEY J. SMITH: Driving Pro-Lifers Out of Medicine.

The Canadian province of Ontario is the latest example. Today, rules permit dissenting doctors from having to participate in abortions. New rules will force all doctors to be complicit in abortion by either forcing them to do the deed or refer to an abortionist they know will make the unwanted fetus dead. . . .

Should assisted suicide/euthanasia become legal throughout Canada–which its Supreme Court may soon impose–doctor-prescribed death will be quickly included in the complicity mandate. That’s already the law under Quebec’s new euthanasia legalization.

The headline can be somewhat misleading, because it’s not referring to people with certain political opinions, but to people with certain personal convictions. You don’t have to be a “pro-lifer” to not want to be complicit in murder. But there is no ready term for people who don’t want to murder; that’s just called being normal.

WHOOPS: Researchers Find Northeast Pacific Surface Warming (1900-2012) Caused By Changes in Atmospheric Circulation, NOT Manmade Forcings. “The extraordinary sea surface temperatures of the Northeast Pacific are known to be responsible for the record high global surface temperatures in 2014. (See the post Axel Timmermann and Kevin Trenberth Highlight the Importance of Natural Variability in Global Warming… and the post On The Recent Record-High Global Sea Surface Temperatures – The Wheres and Whys.) A well-timed paper reveals that the warming of sea surfaces in that region is governed not by manmade greenhouse gases but by changes in atmospheric circulation.”

COSMOLOGISTS attack untestable cosmological theories in Nature.

RELIGION OF PIECES: Muslim Persecution of Christians, September 2014.

I haven’t been keeping up with this series very well. Here are the links that I’ve missed:

• Muslim Persecution of Christians, April, 2014.
• Muslim Persecution of Christians, May 2014.
• Muslim Persecution of Christians, June 2014.
• Muslim Persecution of Christians, July 2014.
• Muslim Persecution of Christians, August 2014.

MANGAN on the benefits of alcohol.

The so-called “French paradox” purports to explain the fact that the French, depsite eating lots of saturated fat, have low rates of heart disease, and this is allegedly because they drink red wine. . . .

There is no French paradox, for the simple reason that dietary saturated fat is not the cause of heart disease. . . .

In order to prove cause and effect with regard to alcohol and health, you would need a randomized controlled trial in which people were randomized to an alcohol group and an abstainer group, and then see what health outcomes are like years down the road. To my knowledge, such a study has not been done, and seems unlikely to ever be done. So for now all we have is an association, and I’m skeptical that alcohol causes better health, however much I’d really like to believe it.

But is there any evidence, contra to what I’ve just laid out, that alcohol produces benefits to health? Yes, there is, in animals.

BAH, HUMBUG! Passenger tossed after flipping out over staff’s ‘Merry Christmas’.

USEFUL: How to Rock a Pocket Square: An Illustrated Guide.

Related: How To Wear A Pocket Square.

CHANGE: Third of Italians back anti-immigrant party. “More than one third of Italians – including many in the once-hostile south – are ready to vote for the anti-EU, anti-immigration Northern League, a poll showed on Sunday.”

MONEY HOLE: A decade of Western aid in Afghanistan – mission unsustainable?

Rebuilding security forces soaked up nearly two-thirds of U.S. funding, leaving tens of billions of dollars for civilian projects, which, according to the U.S. reconstruction watchdog, have not always been spent wisely.

“Evidence strongly suggests that Afghanistan lacks the capacity – financial, technical, managerial, or otherwise – to maintain, support, and execute much of what has been built or established during more than a decade of international assistance,” the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said.

Related: U.S. aid to Afghanistan exceeds Marshall Plan in costs, not results.

U.S. spending on the Afghanistan nation-building project over the last dozen years now exceeds $104 billion, surpassing the $103.4 billion current-dollar value of Marshall Plan expenditures, which helped rebuild European nations after World War II. The spending helped a vanquished Germany emerge as the economic engine of Western Europe.

“SIGAR calculates that by the end of 2014, the United States will have committed more funds to reconstruct Afghanistan, in inflation-adjusted terms, than it spent on 16 European countries after World War II under the Marshall Plan,” says the report.

KILLJOYS: French feminists insert warnings into children’s Christmas toys.

“We targeted games that are emblematic of boy-girl stereotypes,” Delphine Asian, a legal representative for the feminist group, told The Telegraph. “We have caused no damage or ripped any plastic. We simply slipped the message in boxes, or in books.”

“Around 500” of such pamphlets were inserted into a range of toys in about a dozen shops in Paris, according to The Telegraph. The pamphlets requests parents sign a petition and send it to those “responsible.”

Asian added that the purpose of the operation was not to “make parents feel guilty,” but to “raise awareness about the fact that toymakers and sellers play a part in the fact that not a single little girl asks Father Christmas for a sword.”

Why is it okay for feminists to influence what children are interested in, but not anyone else? Also, why do these women think that they’re combating stereotypes when all they do is whine and nag, which are stereotypically female activities?

AUSTRALIA: Bar and grill offends people on the internet for ‘sorry, no Muslims’ sign.

Mr Hawke . . . stopped short of apologising to those offended by the sign.

“I sincerely hope I don’t end up sanitising my every thought to the robotic degree that is evident in commercial life around us.”

NEWSFLASH: Your car isn’t a magical shield to protect you from murderous thugs.

First, a lot of people criticized George Zimmerman for getting out of his car, going so far as to claim, erroneously, that he was ordered not to by a police dispatcher (as if that would have any bearing on his guilt or innocence for murder). They said he wasn’t a policeman, and thus shouldn’t have pursued a suspect.

But then an actual policeman did pursue a suspect. And what happened then? George Stephanopoulos asked Darren Wilson, “Why not stay in the car?” — because it’s not like it’s a policeman’s job to pursue an alleged thief who just assaulted him.

Months before that, this headline was written: Family Of Cop-Killer: If Officer Had Stayed In His Car, He Wouldn’t Have Been Shot.

And just recently, we got this headline: New York Police Officers Shot Dead In Squad Car ‘Assassination’.

Maybe, just maybe, being attacked by a murderous thug isn’t dependent on whether one is inside or outside a car.

PEW: Less than half of U.S. kids today live in a ‘traditional’ family. “One of the largest shifts in family structure is this: 34% of children today are living with an unmarried parent—up from just 9% in 1960, and 19% in 1980. In most cases, these unmarried parents are single.”

A RETROSPECTIVE: Top 10 feminist fiascoes of 2014.

RECORD EVERYTHING: Drunk girl tries to accuse boyfriend, but fails because CAM.

A QUESTION FOR THE AGES: Fed or fasted workouts?

MEDIA MEGAPHONE Contributed to the Brooklyn Cop Killing.

Woven into the Michael Brown narrative is the cops hunting blacks narrative. This has received pushback from people with the statistics that most blacks killed by cops are in the act of a crime or shooting at cops themselves. Like the deserving vs. undeserving poor, there is some agency for those killed by cops. Grasping for anything, Nate Silver’s 538 noted a “much higher” cops killing citizens body count. It is around 1500 annually (that’s 10% of new HIV infections a year, Nate). Wow, Reuben Fischer-Baum, three people killed by cops a day in a nation of 315 million with millions of cop-citizen interactions a week. I dislike the militarization of cops, and their slow transformation into a standing army, but let us be frank about this cops hunting blacks idea. It isn’t real.

What is real and unnoticed by the New York Times are cop deaths at the hands of blacks. Do you know Perry Renn or Jeffrey Westerfield? Those are two cops shot and killed by blacks this summer in Indiana. Closer to New York than Ferguson, somehow these cops’ deaths did not make it to the Times pages. Adding insult to injury, the family of the accused killer of Renn said Renn did not have to get out of his car when he responded to the call. The black mind that doesn’t think Brown or Garner had to follow cops orders thinks cops should think of random possibilities and stay in their cars. Indianapolis has had two cops killed in the last 18 months; the prior death was similar to these two. All three cops were answering domestic violence calls. The police take their lumps, but that does not fit the who/whom. See, cops, magically turned white by the blue uniform, are racist killers from Ferguson to Boston per the protest signs in Beantown. These deaths do not make the national media.

TWIN STUDY: Heritability and genome-wide analyses of problematic peer relationships during childhood and adolescence. “Our findings suggest that problematic peer relationships are heritable but genetically complex and heterogeneous from age to age, with an increase in common measurable genetic variation during adolescence.”

FRANCE shaken up by Zemmour and ‘new reactionaries’.

There is a new intellectual force in France – giving shape and weight to ideas that challenge the disastrous post-1968 left-wing consensus.

That at least is the hope of the so-called neo-reactionnaires (new reactionaries) – a loose group of writers and thinkers who want to shake up debate on issues like immigration, Islam and national identity.

Earlier: French suicide: ‘Racist’ author taps into malaise.

JOHN LEO: College Campuses’ Feelings-Based Tyranny.

For more than 20 years, campus speech and behavior codes have been written in the language of feelings, banning “offensive language,” “hurtful comments,” “disparaging remarks,” or anything that would render a student “uncomfortable.” Though many of these codes have been ruled unconstitutional, the language tends to pop up again in various campus rules. The University of California’s sexual-harassment “info sheet” defines sexual harassment as, among other things, “Humor and jokes about sex in general that make someone feel uncomfortable or that they did not consent to . . . ” A particularly gross example of feelings-based regulation: recently Yale grounds for initiating a sexual-assault complaint to include a student’s “worry” about possible rape.

Feelings in effect are the measure of student misconduct, and causing a student to feel bad is viewed as a form of assault (at least if the offended student is gay, female or a member of a non-Asian minority). Hypersensitivity accounts for new concerns about “trigger warnings” on potentially traumatic material and “microaggressions” (hard-to-notice little snubs on race and identity), plus the trauma some Wellesley students reported this year upon seeing a statue of a man in his underwear planted on campus.

Chris Rock drew attention to the campus hurt-feelings movement as an obstacle to comedy, telling Frank Rich of New York magazine that he no longer performs on campuses because ”everything offends students these days.”

Key line: “Causing a student to feel bad is viewed as a form of assault (at least if the offended student is gay, female or a member of a non-Asian minority).”

It all depends on whose feelings are hurt, whose sensibilities are being offended.

ANN COULTER: The ROLLING STONE And False Rape Claims–2 In 5 Women Who Claim Rape Are Lying. There is a lot worth reading here, but I thought that this was a particularly good point:

It’s crucial that we get a letter in the file that says, “This was total B.S.” Otherwise, the UVA hoax will remain in an open file, marked “unresolved.”

All we’re hearing now is, Enough! Enough! Don’t be a bad winner. All this coverage is putting Jackie in a precarious emotional state. If you were a gentleman, you would drop the subject.

Then in three months, they’ll be bringing up the UVA gang rape as proof of a college rape epidemic. In six months, the case will show up in feminist textbooks.

Wait a minute! That was a hoax!

We didn’t agree it was a hoax. We conceded nothing.

HOW ACADEMIA’S LIBERAL BIAS is killing social science. “A study that sought to show that conservatives reach their beliefs only through denying reality achieved that result by describing ideological liberal beliefs as ‘reality,’ surveying people on whether they agreed with them, and then concluding that those who disagree with them are in denial of reality — and lo, people in that group are much more likely to be conservative! This has nothing to do with science, and yet in a field with such groupthink, it can get published in peer-reviewed journals and passed off as ‘science’ . . . A field where this is possible is in dire straits indeed.”

Earlier: Is Social Psychology Biased Against Republicans?

A PEEK AT THE FAMILY COURT SYSTEM: Federal Judge Finds NJ Family Court Gag Order Violates First Amendment.

In a 2011 Judge Sivilli stripped Surender Malhan, a New Jersey father, of his custody rights on a mere two hours’ notice without affording him an opportunity to refute his estranged wife’s allegations.

Sivilli prohibited Malhan from cross examining his wife or presenting physical evidence that would further demonstrate his parental fitness. The mother retained sole custody of the children for sixteen months until she agreed to joint custody in June 2012; during that time Malhan was never granted a plenary hearing.

Malhan, along with five other parents, filed a class action lawsuit in Federal Court that is currently pending. The class action suit alleges that the New Jersey family court system fails to provide adequate due process rights to parents in child custody proceedings.

In February 2014, a New Jersey affiliate of a major news broadcasting company interviewed Malhan and two other plaintiffs regarding their experiences in family court and their allegations that the family court deprived them of their constitutional rights. In response, Malhan’s wife initiated proceedings against Malhan, which resulted in Judge Sivilli entering a Gag Order.

So, the same judge who takes children away from their father tells that same father that he can’t speak about the taking. And the justification? “The best interest of the children.”