the Revision Division

ONLY THE NARRATIVE MATTERS: The truth behind America’s most famous gay-hate murder.

Jimenez found that Matthew [Shepard] was addicted to and dealing crystal meth and had dabbled in heroin. He also took significant sexual risks and was being pimped alongside Aaron McKinney, one of his killers, with whom he’d had occasional sexual encounters. He was HIV positive at the time of his death.

“This does not make the perfect poster boy for the gay-rights movement,” says Jimenez. “Which is a big part of the reason my book has been so trashed.”

Matthew’s drug abuse, and the fact that he knew one of his killers prior to the attack, was never explored in court. Neither was the rumour that the killers knew that he had access to a shipment of crystal meth with a street value of $10,000 which they wanted to steal. . . .

I spoke to [police officer Flint] Waters, who has since retired from the police, having seen him praise The Book of Matt on social media. “I believe to this day that McKinney and Henderson were trying to find Matthew’s house so they could steal his drugs. It was fairly well known in the Laramie community that McKinney wouldn’t be one that was striking out of a sense of homophobia. Some of the officers I worked with had caught him in a sexual act with another man, so it didn’t fit – none of that made any sense.”

But when Matthew’s friends Walt Boulden and Alex Trout heard of the attack they rushed to the hospital. They contacted the Associated Press and a number of local gay organisations that same day. Boulden, a 46-year-old college instructor who says he was the last person to talk to Matthew before he met McKinney and Henderson, linked the attack to Wyoming legislature’s failure to pass a hate-crimes bill. Boulden later said the assault was identified as a hate crime by a policeman.

Earlier: What If Matthew Shepard’s Murder Wasn’t an Anti-Gay Hate Crime?

NEW YORK: Man who attacked NYPD cops with hatchet wanted to kill white people, dad says.

“And he was taking one of y’all with him,” the elder Thompson added, later clarifying that the “y’all” was a reference to white people.

“He just said, ‘They have to pay for all their unfairness,'” Ralph Thompson added. “Unfairness for the way they treat black people.”

The Post reported that three of the four officers Thompson attacked are white, while the fourth is Hispanic.

UPDATE: The article linked above left out that the issue wasn’t strictly unfairness but slavery. See “Ax attacker wanted ‘white people to pay’ for slavery.” And, as a recent convert to Islam, the attacker evidently didn’t feel the need to punish Muslims for their slavery.

GEERT WILDERS: ‘Nothing is being done to make our own countries safe.’

But for good Canadian police work, it looks as if both of these Islam-inspired murderers would have left Canada and disappeared into the bloody maw of the Islamic State. Phew — that was close?

No, that was insane. Such a policy, which the Dutch government also follows, frustrates Geert Wilders to no end.

“Let them leave,” says Wilders. “Let them leave, or detain them. I find it incomprehensible that Western governments stop people who want to leave to fight for jihad in Syria or Iraq.” Let them go and never let them return, Wilders says, or, with sufficient evidence, detain them. While the West combats the Islamic State, he points out, “nothing is being done to make our own countries safe.”

DID WE NEED A BOOK TO KNOW THIS? Ex-CBS reporter’s book reveals how liberal media protects Obama. It’s not just about the president. It’s about a way of looking at the world:

Reporters on the ground aren’t necessarily ideological, Attkisson says, but the major network news decisions get made by a handful of New York execs who read the same papers and think the same thoughts.

Often they dream up stories beforehand and turn the reporters into “casting agents,” told “we need to find someone who will say . . .” that a given policy is good or bad. “We’re asked to create a reality that fits their New York image of what they believe,” she writes. . . .

One of her bosses had a rule that conservative analysts must always be labeled conservatives, but liberal analysts were simply “analysts.” “And if a conservative analyst’s opinion really rubbed the supervisor the wrong way,” says Attkisson, “she might rewrite the script to label him a ‘right-wing’ analyst.”

ANN CORCORAN: Top ten languages spoken by refugees to America in last seven fiscal years; Arabic is #1. “By the way, the US State Department’s Refugee Processing Center previously provided a lot of other very useful information—like what cities refugees were resettled in—which is no longer available to the public.”

PETER FROST on the white man’s burden.

Our universal morality has been turned against us, and it is in the name of our notions of fair play that we’re giving everything up, often to people, like Robert Mugabe, who make no pretence of believing in fair play. And we accept the logic of the situation. We think it normal to judge ourselves by a harsher standard and others by a more permissive one. . . .

Social media have become overwhelmingly opposed to quarantining of the Ebola outbreak (Alexander, 2014). At one time, quarantines were considered a progressive measure, the sort of thing you would support as a thinking man or woman. If you didn’t, people would assume you were a fool who knew nothing about modern science.

So what makes the Ebola outbreak different? The difference is simple. Quarantining means that light-skinned people will be detaining dark-skinned people. So we just can’t do it. Because? Because.

The same applies to Rotherham, which was about dark-skinned men seducing, confining and, ultimately, enslaving light-skinned women. That, too, triggers the same mental lockdown—Don’t go there! . . .

Unfortunately, we cannot make unpleasant truths go away by ignoring them. Sooner or later, we will have to confront them. We will especially have to confront our universal morality, including the assumption that only light-skinned folks have moral agency and only they are to be held accountable for their actions.

The notion that non-whites lack moral agency is perhaps the most pervasive example of reverse reverse racism, except in these examples it involves considerable harm to whites. So what we have here is a case of reverse reverse reverse racism.

JOHN FUND: James O’Keefe Strikes Again. “Today, he is releasing some new undercover footage that raises disturbing questions about ballot integrity in Colorado, the site of fiercely contested races for the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, and the governorship. When he raised the issue of filling out some of the unused ballots that are mailed to every household in the state this month, he was told by Meredith Hicks, the director of Work for Progress, a liberal group funded by Democratic Super PACS.: ‘That is not even like lying or something, if someone throws out a ballot, like if you want to fill it out you should do it.’ She then brazenly offered O’Keefe, disguised as a middle-aged college instructor, a job with her group.”

STUDY: Decreased sperm concentration and motility in a subpopulation of vegetarian males. “The results showed that the vegetarian diet reduced sperm concentration and motility but did not extend into the infertile range. The findings suggested that estrogenic compounds or chemical residues in the diet had a negative effect on sperm parameters.”

WHAT Keeps Men Out Of The Church? “When men are met with long feelings-sharing sessions that they are unsuited for, but are expected to participate in, what is going to be the response? Exactly.”

PART OF THE PLAN: The Enterovirus D68 and President Obama’s Executive Order #13295.

Back in July of 2014 we outlined how the “surprise influx” of Unaccompanied Alien Children from Central America was not in actuality “a surprise”. We knew it was not a surprise because the Obama Administration was specifically pre-planning for an influx a full seven months before the story began to reach the headlines:

On January 29th of this year, the federal government posted an advertisement seeking bids for a vendor contract to handle “Unaccompanied Alien Children“.

Not just any contract mind you, but a very specific contract – for a very specific number of unaccompanied minors: 65,000.

Obviously the key take-away was: How could DHS and HHS claim a surprise when they were specifically looking for contractors to handle a very specific number of UACs seven months earlier? . . .

Further research showed how in 2013 the administration projected the exact outcome as a result of broad policies they were pushing throughout Central America.

But something else happened in conjunction with that administration review. A study was conducted of virus strains throughout Central America; specifically relating to strains of respiratory diseases in the exact same Central American countries.

UH-HUH. SURE: The root problem of Muslim integration in Britain is alienation — caused by poverty and racism, of course.

British newspapers have begun to read like a highlights reel of what many perceive as an irreversible trend in Britain: The attacks on the London Transport in 2005 by British-born nationals, the brutal killing of Lee Rigby in 2013 by converted and radicalized Muslims of Nigerian descent, the heartbreaking beheading of journalist James Foley and others by a British-accented militant (a jihadist known as “John the Beatle”) along with an estimated 500 other Britons fighting for ISIL in Syria, not to mention almost two dozen women emigrating to become jihadi brides. Even domestic institutions seem to be vulnerable; Operation Trojan Horse revealed a detailed plan by hardline Muslim community leaders in Birmingham to remove head teachers hostile to Islamic principles in city schools. This pattern . . . reflects the continuation of a malignant and deep-seated problem: not all citizens of free societies value freedom, especially freedom for others. . . .

The root problem – where ideological extremism flourishes – is alienation. Disaffected, second- and third-generation immigrant youth are seeking alternative communities of belonging that conflict with a free society. To this problem, there is plenty of blame to go around.

Muslim youth are born into British society and socialized in British schools, or naturalized after years of residence and integration, but endure frustrating barriers to socioeconomic mobility and face discrimination as members of an ethnic minority.

“Barriers to socioeconomic mobility”? Let’s take each stated case in turn. (more…)

REVERSE REVERSE SEXISM: The Federalist Society Caves To “Rape Culture” Orthodoxy. “Anita Manur, director of the school’s Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program, argued that Will’s commentary could ‘re-victimize and re-traumatize some of our students.'”

You see, women are such delicate flowers that you can’t talk about facts around them when those facts are related to things that might make them feel uncomfortable. In other words, they shouldn’t be in college.

ALWAYS BE RECORDING: Lapel cam captures woman trying to frame police officer for sexually assaulting her.

PROTAGONIST OF THE U.S.A.: Limbaugh Theorem in Action: NY Times Front Page: Obama ‘Seethes’ at Government Ebola Failures.

The story is on the front page of Saturday’s edition of the Times with the headline, Amid Assurances on Ebola, Obama Is Said to Seethe.

This is in line with the Limbaugh Theorem that says Obama maintains popularity by portraying himself as opposed to the actions of his government and always trying to be seen as fixing them.

It’s also in line with Ace’s observation of press coverage in his 2013 post, The MacGuffinization of American Politics:

This is a movie. And Barack Obama is the Hero. And the Republicans are the Villains. And policy questions — and Obama’s myriad failures as an executive — are simply incidental. They are MacGuffins only, of no importance whatsoever, except to the extent they provide opportunities for Drama as the Hero fights in favor of them.

Watching Chris Matthews interview Obama, I was struck by just how uninterested in policy questions Matthews (and his panel) were, and how almost every question seemed to be, at heart, about Obama’s emotional response to difficulties– not about policy itself, but about Obama’s Hero’s Journey in navigating the plot of President Barack Obama: The Movie.

As with a MacGuffin in the movie, only the Hero’s emotional response to the MacGuffin matters.

Again and again, Matthews and his panel focused not on weighty questions of state, but on what toll these important-sounding MacGuffins took upon the Star of the Picture, Barack Obama.

THE NEW TOLERANCE: City Threatens to Arrest Ministers Who Refuse to Perform Same-Sex Weddings.

The wedding chapel is registered as a “religious corporation” limited to performing “one-man-one-woman marriages as defined by the Holy Bible.”

However, the chapel is also a for-profit business and city officials said that means the owners must comply with the local nondiscrimination ordinance.

That ordinance, passed in 2013, prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and it applies to housing, employment and public accommodation.

Presumably, the owners would refuse service to two heterosexuals of the same sex, so they aren’t actually discriminating on the basis of “sexual orientation.” But let’s crucify them anyway.

FRANCE: Jewish girl converts to Islam, tries to kill her parents. “The Jewish girl turned ISIS fanatic doesn’t fit the mold Bouzar reports seeing, in that ‘the overwhelming majority come from atheistic homes. It can be assumed that the lack of spiritual elements in education is one of the causes of extremism.’ However, Bouzar stresses [her] parents ‘are also believers and also open.'” Maybe they shouldn’t be “open,” whatever that means.

ALARM after vomiting passenger dies on flight from Nigeria to JFK.

CDC officials conducted a “cursory” exam before announcing there was no Ebola and turning the corpse over to Port Authority cops to remove, Rep. Peter King said on Thursday. . . .

“It was what I was told a cursory examination. The Port Authority cops and personnel from Customs and Border Protection were there, and they were told there was no danger because the person did not have Ebola,” King said.

“But their concern was, how could you tell so quickly? And what adds to the concern is how wrong the CDC has been over the past few weeks.”

DO AS I SAY: Seattle Socialist Group Pushing $20/hr Min. Wage Offers $13/hr for Web Developer.

PRIORITIES: CDC Director Tells House Chairman Travel Ban Would Hurt W. African Economy. “And he explained to me that what the concern was that these are fledgling democracies and if we put a travel ban that that may affect their economy and harm them.”

So, the economies of Ebola-ridden countries are of more concern to the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention than the lives and well-being of American citizens. Doesn’t that sound like a problem?

HERE WE GO: World’s Worst Legal Theory—Disparate Impact—Headed for Supreme Court.

Disparate impact is terrible policy because it assumes non-existent racial equality. Blacks have lower incomes, fewer assets and bad credit because they’re generally less intelligent, less hard-working, more dismissive of repayment schedules and more prone to credit purchases beyond their means. Whites bear the brunt in several ways—they’re falsely accused of being mean racists who are unfairly withholding jobs and credit from deserving blacks, and they pay for the “equalization” fallout (example: if a company must pay all workers equally to avoid a “disparate impact” claim, whites will get less than they would have gotten otherwise).

This is not likely to show up in an amicus brief filed the by the bankers’ association.

UH-HUH: CDC Director Frieden: If the US Bans Travel From West Africa, Ebola Will Spread.

IN SEARCH OF HERETICS: City of Houston demands pastors turn over sermons. “The city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding a group of pastors turn over any sermons dealing with homosexuality, gender identity or Annise Parker, the city’s first openly lesbian mayor. And those ministers who fail to comply could be held in contempt of court.”

“CRONY CHRISTIANITY”: When ‘religious’ charities reap tax dollars for their ‘good works’.

GERMANY: “There are by now legal proceedings against more than 200 suspects in connection to Islamic State.” “Whence this epidemic of misunderstanding of Islam? Can’t Barack Obama and John Kerry and David Cameron and Theresa May do something about this? After all, it is so clear to them that the Islamic State and jihad terror have nothing to do with Islam — surely they will find it easy to convince all these Muslims from Britain and Germany of that fact, no?”

THE NEW TOLERANCE: T-shirt company forced to print gay pride t-shirts and attend diversity training.

LAWYERS, TAKE NOTE: How to cite to Walter Sobchak.

We have arrived. Justice Debra H. Lehrmann of the Texas Supreme Court gave footnote 7 in Kinney v. Barnes, 57 Tex. Sup. J. 1428 (Tex. 2014).

The U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized that “prior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.” … This cornerstone of First Amendment protections has been reaffirmed time and again by the Supreme Court, this Court, Texas courts of appeals, legal treatises, and even popular culture(7). (citations and other footnotes omitted)

And that “7” brings us to this… get a handkerchief, because you’re gonna weep.

The Big Lebowski (PolyGram Filmed Entertainment & Working Title Films 1998) (“For your information, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint.”) . . .

So now, I’ll tell you how to cite this. . . .

Kinney v. Barnes, 57 Tex. Sup. J. 1428 at n.7, (Tex. 2014) (citing SOBCHAK, W., THE BIG LEBOWSKI, 1998).

PRUDES: Feminists: Remove WWII Sailor Statue Because It’s ‘Sexual Assault’.

Feminists are demanding that a statue based on a famous end–of–World War II photo of a sailor kissing a woman be removed from Normandy — because it’s actually a sexual-assault statue. . . .

“The sailor could have laughed with these women, hugged them, asked them if he could kiss them with joy,” the group told The Times of London.

“No, he chose to grab them with a firm hand to kiss them,” they continued. “It was an assault.” . . .

Friedman [the woman in the original photograph] has been quoted as saying: “I wasn’t kissing him. He was kissing me.” But she sharply rejected the assault claim after a 2012 blog post picked up on that quote to say the photo was an example of “The Selective Blindness of Rape Culture.”

“I can’t think of anybody who considered that as an assault,” Friedman told Navy Times, adding that she and Mendonsa — who were strangers at the time — stayed in touch over the years. “It was a happy event.”

THE NEW TOLERANCE: Ferguson Protesters: “Our Brothers Need to Break Some Cracker Skulls” and “Kill the White Crackers”.

HA: Austrian girl who joined ISIS in Syria ‘wants to come home’.

In a note the teens left behind, Samra and Sabina told their parents to not look for them. “We will serve Allah and we will die for him,” they wrote.

But a report from Austrian daily newspaper Österreich said both girls, who are believed to be in Islamic State-controlled Raqqa in northern Syria, are now in contact with family and friends after becoming “disillusioned” with their new lives. Both girls are said to have been married off to jihadists since their arrival in Raqqa and are now pregnant.

TREASON: NM Mayor: ‘All Of A Sudden’ Fed Gov Releasing Illegal Immigrants At 4-to-1 Ratio. “Very early on we saw numbers, a 138 immigrants deported and 12 released into the United states and given asylum. . . . That is a rate of 10-to-1 being deported, this past week, there were 68 releases verses 13 deportations so all of a sudden that’s a four-to-one ratio of people being released out into the United States.”

SJW ROUNDUP: How far do gay activists go in order to silence critics? “This is actually not unusual for some extreme gay activists. I’ve blogged about things like [this] before – e.g. – getting Frank Turek fired, forcing out Brendan Eich at Mozilla, expelling students from university, discriminating against foster parents, violence at student demonstrations, coercing Christian businesses, leaking the names of pro-marriage donors, closing down adoption agencies, threatening teachers with termination, terminating police chaplains, vandalizing businesses, vandalizing churches, or actually being convicted of committing domestic terrorism by attacking the Family Research Council building with GUNS. Any disagreement with the moral rightness of the gay lifestyle at all – no matter how caring, compassionate or rooted in evidence – could potentially draw a coercive response, or even violent response.”

WHAT IS A Social Justice Warrior (SJW)?

The true definition of SJW is up for debate, but most generally it has become a catch-all term that describes feminists and liberals who actively try to solve the perceived social injustices of modern society by organizing in online communities to disseminate propaganda, censor speech, and punish individuals by getting them terminated from their employment. They have also been successful at positioning themselves in the upper echelons of universities, media organizations, and tech companies. . . .

Using a “privilege” hierarchy, SJW’s calculate the worth of a human being based on perceived injustices or wrongs that group has suffered since the time of ancestral man, using selective and narrow interpretations of history. SJW’s elevate groups that they believe have received the least amount of “privilege” in the past, and then use internet activism in the form of mobs and community purges to target those who are determined to have greater amounts of privilege. The idea of privilege is so essential to SJW ideology that a common debate tactic they use is to say “check your privilege,” which roughly translates to, “you must immediately halt or change your speech because your ancestors may or may not have done bad things to women or minority races.” . . .

A big chunk of their activism depends on subjective feeling and perceived value of the parties involved. Before an SJW can make a decision on what is right or wrong, she must first know the race, gender, and sexuality of the involved participants so that she can decide whether or not to be outraged.

IF I HAD A SON, he would look like Macyo Joelle.

The Colorado teen accused of murdering a newlywed soldier and his pregnant wife was found guilty Tuesday following a 12-day trial, officials report. . . .

Dunlap and Butler were both shot from behind as they walked through the front door. Officials say evidence suggests that Butler was shot in the head as she leaned over her husband’s dead body, according to The Gazette.

HEH: How to Gird Up Your Loins: An Illustrated Guide.

TIM CARNEY: Dick Durbin and his lobbyist wife working together. “Among the areas of overlap in the Durbins’ careers: her firm getting a one-year contract with a housing nonprofit group around the time the senator went to bat for the organization and others like it; a state university receiving funds earmarked by Durbin when his wife was its lobbyist; and Durbin arranging federal money for a public health nonprofit when his wife was seeking state support for the same group.”

WHAT? Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings celebrates Liberian Ebola patient: ‘He’s our citizen now’. “Remember, this ‘citizen’ lied on his health screening questionnaire in Liberia, breaking the law and putting real U.S. citizens at risk.”

TEXAS: Man breaks law banning guns in bars, fends off armed robbers, killing two.

Just after closing around 2:30 Saturday morning, four armed men barged in at EJ’s Place demanding money.

Instead, a customer inside the bar . . . pulled out his gun and started exchanging fire with the robbers. He shot and killed two of them while the other two ran. Once the heated exchange ended, the patron left, too.

“We’re still trying to determine who he is, and why he left the scene,” said Harris County Sheriff’s Sgt. Robert Spurgeon. . . .

A sign in the bar window clearly states it’s a felony to carry a gun inside. Under Texas law, even licensed carriers can’t have guns in bars. That could explain why the patron left. . . .

Another longtime customer said that the patron who killed the robbers always stays until closing to walk the female bartenders to their cars. The friend said the man would never start anything, but would always protect his friends.

Earlier: Armed doctor saved lives. “Silverman, the hero here, apparently broke the gun-free zone rule the hospital had imposed.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Only Whey, Not Soy Works ‘Wheytloss Wonders’.

The study at hand is only one out of many experimental trials which refute the notion that plant proteins are healthier and eating plant instead of protein from animal sources would help you lose weight and improve your body composition. The latter is a myth that’s based on questionable epidemiological data, where confounding factors such as the “pizza salami = meat” factor (i.e. the way the meat intake is estimate) are hard to control.

Since I hope that we all put more faith in hard experimental vs. “soft” epidemiological data, it should be obvious that anyone (including your vegan friends) who is planning to lose body fat and improve his / her body composition is much better off with whey vs. soy protein; and that not just as a replacement for a complete meal, but rather as an addition that increases the total protein content of the diet and reduces the food and energy intake on ad-libitum meals, when the shake is consumed 30 minutes before a meal.

IT IS A MYSTERY: “The federal government is spending nearly a half a million dollars to find out why obese teenage girls have a hard time getting dates.”

PEW: Vatican synod on family highlights discord between church teachings and U.S. Catholics’ views.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2012 found that relatively few U.S. Catholics (19%) said that getting a divorce is morally wrong. About a third (32%) said divorce is morally acceptable, while 45% said it is not a moral issue. There were not significant differences on this question between Catholics who attend church weekly and those who attend less often. . . .

Most American Catholics do not object to the use of artificial birth control on moral grounds. In a survey we conducted earlier this year, 77% of U.S. Catholics said the church should sanction the use of birth control – and 56% think this change will definitely or probably happen by 2050.

HELPFUL: What’s Racist, What’s Not (As of Friday, Oct. 3, 2014).

Liberals tend to devote a significant portion of their daily lives to proving how not racist they are. One particularly expedient way of doing this is to declare that something a conservative has said or done is totally racist, and then to place oneself in opposition to the thing that was racist: “See, I’m not a racist!”

As result, the List of Things That Are Racist has grown incomprehensibly long. The Free Beacon‘s devotion to public service obligates us to provide this list (not exhaustive by any means) of what liberals do and do not consider to be racist.

CURIOUS: Feminist activist women are masculinized in terms of digit-ratio and social dominance.

If feminist activists, i.e., those that manufacture the public image of feminism, are indeed masculinized relative to women in general, this might explain why the views and preferences of these two groups are at variance with each other. We measured the 2D:4D digit ratios (collected from both hands) and a personality trait known as dominance (measured with the Directiveness scale) in a sample of women attending a feminist conference. The sample exhibited significantly more masculine 2D:4D and higher dominance ratings than comparison samples representative of women in general . . .

The activists who shape feminist attitudes and beliefs are themselves generally more physiologically and psychologically masculinized than is typical for women . . . This might . . . explain their belief in sex-role interchangeability, as they may perceive the behaviors and interests of sex-typical women as incomprehensible and at variance with their own more masculinized preferences in terms of child-rearing and status-seeking. This might then lead them to infer that women in general have been manipulated to become different from themselves by external forces, as embodied by notions of social constructions or gender systems.

CAUSE AND EFFECT: Ferguson resident: “There’s going to be hell to pay” if businesses don’t rebuild. “The common theme among those interviewed was outrage that local businesses–you know, the ones that had been relentlessly looted and vandalized by local residents–had not hurried to rebuild and offer jobs to local residents. Huh. Who knew that robbing and burning local businesses might prove a disincentive to them investing and hiring in the community!”

THE CONSISTENCY of the CDC. They’re tolerant of all diseases that can contribute to our diverse tapestry of death.

Although it’s received very little mainstream media coverage, the current outbreak of EV-D68 is common to El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, three countries where a bulk of the illegal immigrant children come from. These unaccompanied illegal immigrant children have been allowed into the nation’s school systems without medical screenings and without required vaccinations.

The CDC may be pretending that they have no idea where this outbreak came from, but for months now similar neurological illness outbreaks have been occurring in border towns throughout the U.S.. In fact, back in February of 2014, an outbreak of a polio-like illness caused as many as 25 children in California to come down with paralyzed limbs and little hope of recovery. According to the BBC, at least five of these cases were directly linked to enterovirus-68, proving the CDC has known about this outbreak for quite some time now.

Earlier: Feds Bend CDC Rules For Sick Illegal Immigrants.

DAVID BERNSTEIN: Does race really “matter” to Justice Sotomayor?

Judging from her dissent in the Schuette case last term, the answer is, “only when the concept can be manipulated to support her political agenda.” . . .

The breadth of Justice Sotomayor’s “race matters” concern is not some discernibly logical or empirical theory about for whom “race” or, for that matter, “different appearance from the mainstream” matters. Rather, being a “racial minority” is implicitly defined by an arbitrary combination of artificial census categories, university affirmative action admissions policies, and a sense of which minority groups, broadly construed, are not “making it.” The “making it” factor is itself highly problematic, given that some subgroups of the Asian category, not to mention some whites (as in Appalachia), have much worse socioeconomic indicators than some subgroups of Hispanics.

GLENN REYNOLDS: Teach Women Not to Rape, the Series. The latest installment gets to the point: “Note the way the story is written so that the 11-year-old boy seems to be the active party here: ‘An 11-year-old Auckland boy fathered a child after having sex with a friend’s 36-year-old mother.’ Now reverse the genders [sic] and try to imagine that.”

Just as in the Woman Gets Off Easy series here, there tends (in both the press and the courts) to be an emphasis on male initiative and female passivity. This is really just reverse reverse sexism, since women who are ostensibly being defended are instead robbed of their agency. It is a subset of reverse reverse bigotry, whereby an ideology of victimization ends up harming the very groups it intends to privilege.

Related: Vox Day: Teach women not to rape.

WE’VE ARRIVED: The $1,200 Machine That Lets Anyone Make a Metal Gun at Home.

BECAUSE THEY’RE PUSHOVERS: Why Women Are Rejecting “Perfect” Men.

We men learned how to change diapers and cook risotto. We learned to watch for barely perceptible nods of approval before opening doors for women. We even learned to manscape, for goodness sake.

Women were supposed to be happy with the new variety of men. Yet they are divorcing us . . .

After a few years of marriage, Steve was simply not the spirited man he had once been . . .

Privately, he complained that she was impossible to please. “She gripes about everything. I just can’t win.” He was blind to the fact that his efforts to please her had created a perverse cycle of disappointment. . . .

Finally, something astonishing happened on a Saturday morning when Jen instructed him to accompany her to a baby shower: he declined. “No thanks,” he said. “I’m going golfing. Give my best to the mother.”

That’s when Steve and Jen began to rediscover the joy they had known in the early days of their marriage. . . .

In his desperation to avoid disapproval, Steve had become, as he put it, a pandering milquetoast. What healthy person—male or female—wants to be hitched to that?

Unfortunately for the author’s egalitarian framing of the matter (“male or female”), he cannot supply anecdotes of men getting fed up with women concerned with serving them. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that the problem he’s discussing is entirely a one-sided one, due to men’s and women’s different preferences for the opposite sex.

TOM JAMES on no-fault divorce:

The argument about the need to protect the integrity of legal processes by reducing the incentive to commit perjury may be a good one as applied to divorces without children, may it is not necessarily a great argument when custody of children is involved. A no-fault divorce system coupled with a preference for awarding only one parent custody of the children provides just as much incentive to commit perjury as the old fault-based system did. “[N]o-fault grounds for divorce have only caused the lying to shift (as did the hostility) from the part of the proceeding dealing with the grounds for divorce to the collateral aspects, especially child custody and visitation disputes.” False accusations of child abuse, and especially child sexual abuse, increased with the advent of no-fault divorce.

The argument that no-fault divorce better protects family privacy, and protects individuals from embarrassing or humiliating disclosures about their personal lives, is not applicable to divorces in which child custody is an issue. Nearly every aspect and embarrassing detail of the parents’ personal lives is relevant in a custody case. It has been suggested that the state’s intrusion into family privacy, far from declining, has actually increased significantly since no-fault divorce was implemented. . . .

The idea that no-fault divorce would lighten court caseloads also seems to have been proven wrong in practice. There has not been a decline in litigation. Instead, there’s simply been a shift in what people litigate about. Family court caseloads are heavier than ever.

Footnotes at the link.

ACE: New York Times Readers React to Suggestion We Should Ban Travel from Outbreak Countries: Racism!, Racism!, Racism!