DOG BITES MAN: Export-Import Bank Revolving Door: Staffer helps renew Ex-Im charter, Ex-Im hires her. “So maybe Cantwell was right when she said the Export-Import Bank creates jobs.”
RASMUSSEN: Voters Strongly Oppose Legal Rights, Government Benefits for Illegal Immigrants.
Democrats . . . tend to agree with the others when it comes to legal rights and government benefits for illegal immigrants but not nearly as strongly. For example, while 89% of GOP voters and 70% of unaffiliateds think illegals should not have the same legal rights and protections that U.S. citizens have, just a plurality (49%) of voters in the president’s party agree.
Similarly, 51% of Democrats do not think illegal immigrants should be eligible for government services and benefits, but that compares to 91% of Republicans and 75% of unaffiliated voters.
STUDY: Maternal Working Hours and the Well-Being of Adolescent Children.
This study investigates how maternal working hours are related to various outcomes in children aged 11 to 15 using a sample of mothers and adolescents in the British Household Panel Survey. Research that examines the effects of maternal employment on children has been motivated by the rapid increase of female participation rates in the labour market and increased shares of children living in female-headed or single-mother households. The existing literature on this issue is very limited, mostly based on American data, and provides conflicting results. Fixed effects have been used in the present analysis to control for characteristics of children and families that do not vary over time.
The results suggest that full-time maternal employment (as opposed to part-time) has little or no effect on the propensity of adolescents to smoke, their life satisfaction, self-esteem, or intention to leave school at 16. These results are stable and consistent across various specifications of the model and different socio-economic status.
ACT OF LOVE: Immigrants from Ebola outbreak nations caught along the border. The numbers are from 2013, but should we expect them to be any lower now?
WHO’D HAVE THOUGHT? Secret Service Requires Female Agents to Meet Lower Physical Strength Standards Than Male Agents.
As the New York Times reported on Monday, the jumper, Omar Gonzalez, “overpower[ed] a female Secret Service agent inside the North Portico entrance” of the White House and then ran past the stairway to the presidential living quarters and into the East Room where he was finally tackled by an off-duty agent. Without explanation, the Times deleted the word “female” from the opening paragraph of its story (the Washington Post similarly edited the word “female” out of its story). . . .
According to the Secret Service [PDF], male recruits in their twenties need to perform 11 chin-ups to receive an “excellent” rating; performing four chin-ups or fewer would disqualify him from serving as a Secret Service agent.
But for a female recruit in her twenties, four chin-ups would earn her an “excellent” rating; just one chin-up is enough for her to avoid the disqualifying [PDF] “very poor” rating.
Upper body strength is overrated anyway.
Here’s an informative exchange at the “Times deleted” link, concerning the deletion:
Idiot: Good. Her gender [sic] is immaterial. Plenty of male agents have been overpowered.
Sensible Person: Name one incident in which a male Secret Service agent was overpowered.
Idiot: Stop the woman hating
Sensible Person: Is THIS another example of ‘woman hating’? 3 people died. http://murderpedia.org/male.N/n/nichols-brian-gene.htm
Grrl power.
And: Washington Post Stealth Edits Out Gender [sic] Of Female Secret Service Agent.
Also: Savage Boards Naval Destroyer Guarded by a Woman — and Kills Sailor.
PAR FOR THE COURSE: Dallas Ebola Patient Was Another Visa Mistake.
According to his Facebook page and other reports, Duncan is a 40-something, single, unemployed Liberian living in Ghana who applied sometime in the last year for a visa to visit his sister in the United States. It was reportedly his first time visiting this country.
That is six strikes against his application:
- Single
- Unemployed
- Liberian (5th highest overstay rate of any country in the world)
- Living outside country of citizenship
- First time traveler to the United States
- Sister living in the United States.
Together, all these factors should have weighed very heavily against the issuance of a visitor’s visa to Duncan. He clearly appears unqualified.
Ebola was just the cherry on top.
MARK PERRY: Women earned majority of doctoral degrees in 2013 for 5th straight year, and outnumber men in grad school 137.5 to 100. Are the degrees really worth anything, though?
THANKS, AMAZON: Tom and Jerry cartoons carry racism warning.
Amazon’s streaming subscription service . . . includes the cartoons in its comedy collection.
But Tom and Jerry: The Complete Second Volume is accompanied by the caution: “Tom and Jerry shorts may depict some ethnic and racial prejudices that were once commonplace in American society. Such depictions were wrong then and are wrong today.” . . .
The warning was attacked as “empty-headed” by cultural commentator and professor of sociology, Frank Furedi, who said it was a form of a “false piousness” and a type of censorship which “seems to be sweeping cultural life”.
“We’re reading history backwards, judging people in the past by our values,” said Prof Furedi from the University of Kent. . . .
Prof Furedi said calls for such trigger warnings were a form of “narcissism”, with the concerns not really being about the content of a book or work of art but about individual students asserting their own importance.
HOW AMERICA Helped ISIS.
There were 26,000 detainees at the height of the war, and over 100,000 individuals passed through the gates of Camps Bucca, Cropper and Taji. Quite a few were dangerous insurgents; many others were innocent.
Small-time criminals, violent terrorists and unknown personalities were separated only along sectarian lines. This provided a space for extremists to spread their message. The detainees who rejected the radicals in their cells faced retribution from other prisoners through “Shariah courts” that infested the facilities.
The radicalization of the prison population was evident to anyone who paid attention. Unfortunately, few military leaders did.
I hear that there are a lot of other places where “extremists” teach “moderates.” They’re called mosques.
NOT THE ONION: University Of Michigan: Withholding Sex, Discounting Feelings Are ‘Sexual Violence’.
Examples of abuse listed on the University of Michigan’s domestic violence awareness website say “sexual violence” includes “withholding sex and affection” and “discounting the partner’s feelings regarding sex” . . .
The terms, found under the heading “definitions,” also suggest verbal or psychological abuse[, and] include: “insulting the partner; ignoring the partner’s feelings; withholding approval as a form of punishment; yelling at the partner; labeling the partner with terms like crazy [and] stupid.”
And the kicker:
Also included in the definition of sexual violence is the example of having “sex with other people.”
HERE WE GO: California adopts historic ‘yes means yes’ rule on sexual consent.
De Leon has said the legislation will begin a paradigm shift in how college campuses in California prevent and investigate sexual assaults. Rather than using the refrain “no means no,” the definition of consent under the bill requires “an affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.” . . .
The legislation says silence or lack of resistance does not constitute consent. Under the bill, someone who is drunk, drugged, unconscious or asleep cannot grant consent.
Lawmakers say [but does the law say?] consent can be nonverbal, and universities with similar policies have outlined examples as a nod of the head or moving in closer to the person.
This presents a wonderful opportunity for convoluted legal arguments in rape cases. If both parties are drunk, then both are rapists. Or, if the man lies on his back and doesn’t indicate consent, then he can claim that he was raped.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN ACTION: White House Intruder Got Farther Than First Reported, Official Says. “A man who jumped the White House fence this month made it far deeper into the president’s home than previously disclosed, overpowering a female Secret Service agent inside the North Portico entrance and running through the East Room before he was tackled, according to a congressional official familiar with the details of the incident.”
Wait, what?
overpowering a female Secret Service agent
Why was there a female Secret Service agent defending the White House?
The new development, first reported by The Washington Post, will create an explosive hearing on Tuesday when a bipartisan panel of lawmakers intends to grill Julia Pierson, the director of the Secret Service, about whether a lax and undisciplined culture inside the long-heralded agency has badly eroded its ability to protect the president and his family, several members of Congress said Monday.
Here are some questions for Julia Pierson that no one of importance will ask: What physical requirements are there for entry into the Secret Service? [UPDATE: Public documents indicate lower requirements for women.] Did the female Secret Service agent who was overpowered in the White House pass these requirements? Were there other candidates who performed better than she who were then passed over in hiring? [UPDATE: Presumably yes, due to low requirements for women.] Why? There should also be demands for any internal communications about hiring women into the Secret Service.
UPDATE: Pierson herself was an affirmative action hire, possibly chosen for politically-correct public relations reasons. As one 2013 article puts it, “Ms. Pierson, the chief of staff to Mark J. Sullivan, who retired as director last month, will take over at a time when the Secret Service is still recovering from a prostitution scandal last year that held it up to public ridicule, generated Congressional hearings and cost a number of agents their jobs.”
Earlier: Savage Boards Naval Destroyer Guarded by a Woman — and Kills Sailor.
TOM JAMES on covenant marriage: “A major problem with covenant marriage laws is that they are easy to evade. In theory, a spouse in a covenant marriage could get a no-fault divorce simply by filing for a divorce in a state that does not authorize covenant marriages, i.e., in a pure no-fault state. Of course, that state’s residency requirements would need to be met. In some states, though, the residency period for divorce jurisdiction is fairly short. In Nevada and Idaho, for example, the required residency period is only six weeks. This prospect also raises some constitutional issues, such as whether the Full Faith and Credit Clause requires a no-fault state to deny no-fault divorces to couples that have entered into covenant marriages in other states.”
In England’s second city of Birmingham, of 278,623 youngsters, 97,099 were registered as Muslim compared with 93,828 as Christian. The rest were of other faiths such as Hindu or Jewish, or none.
A similar trend has emerged in the cities of Bradford and Leicester, the towns of Luton, in Bedfordshire, and Slough in Berkshire, as well as the London boroughs Newham, Redbridge and Tower Hamlets, where nearly two-thirds of children are Islamic.
Last night experts said more must be done to ensure that society does not become polarised along religious lines.
To avoid religious polarization, either keep out the Muslims and stop providing them welfare, or submit, which has been the going policy.
JAMES O’KEEFE Releases Second Video Exposé On Battleground Texas.
Under Texas law, voter registration can only be performed deputized voter registrars. Volunteer deputy registrars must deliver completed forms to the registrar, and they must receive proper training.
These rules are “very important. It’s a crime to handle a completed registration form without being officially certified as a [volunteer deputy registrar],” Mimi Marziani, the Voter Protection Director for BGTX says in a video on the organization’s website.
“We wondered how seriously they took their own advice, and the laws of Texas,” O’Keefe said.
So Project Veritas sent an undercover investigator, identified as “Ronnie,” to find out.
STEVE SAILER: The Rise of the Lumpenintelligentsia: former NYT editorial Person of Color writes perfect Salon piece.
Institutions hear that they need People of Color for the brilliant new perspectives they would bring, so they go out and hire homosexuals of color like Daisy Hernandez and Jayson Blair only to find out that their brilliant new perspectives are largely limited to:
– There should be more special privileges for people like me
– I hate white men
NEW HAMPSHIRE: State representative Christina Ayala arrested on 19 voting fraud charges.
According to the Connecticut Post, Ayala’s mother, Santa, was also investigated by the Elections Enforcement Commission. The commission also recommended criminal charges be filed against Santa Ayala, the Democratic registrar of voters in Bridgeport, but none have been filed as of Friday.
Christina Ayala was charged with eight counts of fraudulent voting, 10 counts of primary or enrollment violations and one count of tampering with or fabricating physical evidence.
Related: Eric Holder says voter fraud problem ‘doesn’t exist’. “Just a day after announcing his resignation as Attorney General, Eric Holder told the Congressional Black Caucus that voter ID laws are an answer to a problem that ‘doesn’t exist.'”
ADVENTURES IN EUPHEMISM: MSNBC’s Harris-Perry: Muslim Beheading In Oklahoma Was ‘Workplace Violence’. Hmm, sounds familiar.
UK: Stay-at-home mothers ‘have the most worthwhile lives’.
When responses to the question on how “worthwhile” people consider what they do in life to be were analysed, those looking after home or family emerged well ahead of other groups, scoring 8.03 out of 10 on average.
Overall 83 per cent of full-time parents and carers rated their sense of worth as high or very high.
Laura Perrin, a barrister turned full-time mother who campaigns from the group Mothers At Home Matter said the figures showed that government policies designed to encourage more parents to work full time could be doing more harm than good.
“This just goes to show that the idea that we are all at home depressed and unhappy looking after our own children – which a lot of politicians would like to believe – is simply wrong,” she said.
VOX DAY: Science restates the obvious. From Finland: “Straight men of all ages tend to have their romantic sights set on women in their mid-twenties, while women prefer men who are about the same age as they are, according to a new study.”
Related: The Difference Between Men And Women In Two Charts. “Men have always been simpler to analyze from a sexual market perspective. Female youth+beauty = high fertility, which men dig. Or, more precisely, which men’s genetic directive digs.”
BREAKING NEWS FROM 2010: Obama’s Promise to Pro-Life Democrats Wasn’t Worth the Paper It Was Written On.
DON’T TRUST THE PRESS: Texas Court Makes Upskirts Mandatory, Outlaws Kittens, Hates Your Mother.
If you read those articles — if you read most of the coverage of this decision — you would conclude that (1) Texas had a law banning upskirt photos, and (2) a Texas court struck down the law because upskirt photos are protected by the First Amendment and can’t be banned.
Or, you could, you know, read the actual court decision to see what the court said. Mike Masnick at Techdirt did so, and found that the decision didn’t much resemble its coverage.
SCIENCE HERESY: Yes, it’s official, men are from Mars and women from Venus, and here’s the science to prove it. “There are also fundamental differences in brain development between men and women, which are clear from the early behaviour of children. A few hours after birth, girls are more sensitive than boys to touch, and 40 hours after birth girls look longer at a face than boys, while boys look longer at a suspended mechanical mobile. At four months old, if babies are frightened in a strange room, twice as many girls as boys cry. Children’s play provides further evidence for genetic differences. At 12, 18 or 24 months, girls look at dolls much more than boys, while boys look at cars much more than girls. It is hard to attribute these basic differences at such young ages to purely social influences.”
Patriarchy sure is clever.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Processed Meat Is Bad For You, But Only If You Are Already A Type II Diabetic.
Don’t fall for the tricks of vegetarian bloggers and mainstream science journalists who abuse hand-picked data from the study at hand to “prove” their personal (or the public) conviction that meat is bad and vegetarian meat “alternatives” are good for all of us . . .
If there is anything the study at hand “proves”, it is the already well-known, but commonly ignored fact that overweight individuals with a BMI of 33kg/m² or more and significantly elevated HbA1c levels (indicative of full-blown type II diabetes) react totally different to foods than the ever-shrinking majority of people with normal insulin sensitivity.
BILL ZEISER: The Left’s unprincipled campaign against philanthropic privacy.
This is really a dispute over the value of donor privacy, no matter what the politics involved. “So-called ‘dark money’ illuminates our society,” writes Adam Meyerson of the Philanthropy Roundtable, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to protecting donor intent. He points to the 1958 Supreme Court case of NAACP v. Alabama, in which the Court unanimously ruled that if the civil-rights organization were forced to disclose its membership, supporters might be subjected to “economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility,” thereby restraining “their right to freedom of association.” Meyerson extended this justification to philanthropic privacy, reminding critics of both DonorsTrust and Tides that “the right to privacy enjoyed by contributors to donor-advised funds is no different than the right to privacy that governs the overwhelming majority of charitable giving.” Meyerson listed some of the reasons donors might wish to remain anonymous, including “to protect themselves from unwanted solicitations, to protect their children from knowledge of their family’s wealth,” and most resoundingly to protect their “freedom to support controversial organizations without fear of reprisal or ostracism” like NAACP donors of old.
TODD STARNES: School accused of ‘purging’ Christian books.
Springs Charter Schools in Temecula, Calif., not only had a problem with “The Hiding Place,” they also took issue with any other book that was written by a Christian author or included a Christian message.
“We do not purchase sectarian educational materials and do not allow sectarian materials on our state-authorized lending shelves,” Superintendent Kathleen Hermsmeyer wrote in a letter to attorneys at the Pacific Justice Institute (PJI).
Pacific Justice Institute is representing a parent who discovered what they called a “Christian purging” of the charter school’s library.
“She was told by one of the library attendants that the library has been instructed to remove all books with a Christian message, authored by Christians, or published by a Christian publishing company,” read a letter PJI sent to the public charter school. “The attendant advised that the library would no longer be carrying those books. Indeed, our client was told that the library was giving those books away, and she actually took some.”
HERE’S AN IDEA: STOP TRYING TO HELP. Eight reported dead in attack on Ebola workers in Guinea.
The Guinean government said Thursday that eight delegation members had been killed, including several journalists, news agencies reported. There also were reports that 21 people had been injured.
“It’s very sad and hard to believe, but they were killed in cold blood by the villagers,” government spokesman Albert Damantang Camara said, according to Agence France-Presse.
A local police officer, Richard Haba, said the villagers believed that Ebola “is nothing more than an invention of white people to kill black people.”
HERE WE GO: Fifth Circuit Okays Lawsuits From Mexico Against Border Patrol.
The war against America is escalating—and the courts don’t care if law enforcement personnel become the literal casualties.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals opened the door to this terrifying possibility when it ruled that a Mexican teenager killed by Border Patrol agent Jesus Mesa “was protected by the U.S. Constitution, even though the teen was on Mexican soil when he was shot.”
This means, of course, that the Hernandez family, and their gangster treason tort plaintiff attorneys, can sue agent Mesa and possibly the U.S, government.
PUSHOVER: Promotional video removed after academic feminists argue that slow-motion is misogynistic.
“It was never our intention to offend anybody,” Whitecaps president Bobby Lenarduzzi said Wednesday, announcing the cancellation of the clip. “It was just one of a series of eight videos we are using to promote our upcoming season-ticket campaign. The fact that because there were people offended, we just thought the right thing to do was to pull it.”
All three women featured in the video have said they are confused as to how it could have possibly been construed as offensive.
One of the women, Emily Guedes, said she wasn’t just OK with the video — she was offended that it was taken down.
“What’s misogynistic is the fact that men are in the videos . . . but not a couple of women,” she said.
Classic reverse reverse sexism. The ad series sought to be inclusive of women, and now, in the name of anti-sexism, women aren’t represented among the fans. Good work, feminists.
DALROCK: “It isn’t difficult to spot the modern Christian embrace of divorce if you look for it.” “As just one example, traditional Catholics have expressed great concern with the explosion in annulments the RCC grants in the United States. In response to these concerns, the Archdioceses of Boston has published a document defending the explosion in annulments. The document explains that the explosion in US annulments is a positive development, a sign of justice and progress. The problem is not that too many marriages in the US are being declared null by the RCC, the real problem is the rest of the world is behind the times and doesn’t grant enough annulments.”
Related: Pope orders review of annulment process to simplify procedure.
STUDY: The Evolution of Culturally-Variable Sex Differences: Men and Women Are Not Always Different, but When They Are…It Appears Not to Result from Patriarchy or Sex Role Socialization. “Empirically, sex differences in most psychological traits—in personality, sexuality, attitudes, emotions, behaviors, and cognitive abilities—are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian sex role socialization and greater sociopolitical gender equity. Even sex differences in many physical traits such as height, obesity, and blood pressure are larger in cultures with more egalitarian sex role socialization and greater sociopolitical gender equity.”
ACT OF LOVE: “Apparently the word got out throughout Africa and elsewhere—get to Maine and you can get social services while you wait for your asylum application to be processed. So they came.” “Asylum seekers get into the US on their own (visa overstays etc.) and then apply for asylum (claiming to be persecuted at home). If granted asylum they become ‘refugees’ in the full sense of the word and get federal taxpayer goodies and help from a federal resettlement contractor. But, thanks to the border crashers an already over full asylum court can’t get to cases for years.”
UK: Rotherham abuse scandal: Children’s services director Joyce Thacker quits.
The council’s leadership had been accused of “blatant” collective failures in a report detailing the sexual abuse mainly by gangs of men of Pakistani heritage from 1997 to 2013. . . .
Ms Thacker’s is the latest in a series of resignations prompted by the report.
Thacker had earlier ordered that some foster children be taken from parents who were members of UKIP:
A Rotherham couple, by all accounts exemplary foster parents for nearly seven years, took on two children and a baby in an emergency placement.
Eight weeks later, social workers came and took the children away — despite the fact that they were thriving — on the grounds that because the couple belonged to the UK Independence Party this was not ‘the right cultural match’.
Astonishingly, the official in charge is still unrepentant. 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’.
MALLORY MILLETT: Marxist Feminism’s Ruined Lives.
It was 1969. . . . They called the assemblage a “consciousness-raising-group,” a typical communist exercise, something practiced in Maoist China. We gathered at a large table as the chairperson opened the meeting with a back-and-forth recitation, like a Litany, a type of prayer done in Catholic Church. But now it was Marxism, the Church of the Left, mimicking religious practice:
“Why are we here today?” she asked.
“To make revolution,” they answered.
“What kind of revolution?” she replied.
“The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.
“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” she demanded.
“By destroying the American family!” they answered.
“How do we destroy the family?” she came back.
“By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.
“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she replied.
“By taking away his power!”
“How do we do that?”
“By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.
“How can we destroy monogamy?” . . .
“By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution and homosexuality!” they resounded.
HAL SALZMAN: Those who claim there’s a STEM skills shortage are ignoring the evidence. “Cries that ‘the STEM sky is falling’ are just the latest in a cyclical pattern of shortage predictions over the past half-century, none of which were even remotely accurate. In a desert of evidence [PDF], the growth of STEM shortage claims is driven by heavy industry funding for lobbyists and think tanks. Their goal is government intervention in the market under the guise of solving national economic problems. The highly profitable IT industry, for example, is devoting millions to convince Congress and the White House to provide its employers with more low-cost, foreign guestworkers instead of trying to attract and retain employees from an ample domestic labor pool of native and immigrant citizens and permanent residents. Guestworkers currently make up two-thirds of all new IT hires, but employers are demanding further increases. If such lobbying efforts succeed, firms will have enough guestworkers for at least 100 percent of their new hiring and can continue to legally substitute these younger workers for current employees, holding down wages for both them and new hires.”
JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER: Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault.
Conventional wisdom in the West blames the Ukraine crisis on Russian aggression. But this account is wrong: Washington and its European allies actually share most of the responsibility, having spent decades pushing east into Russia’s natural sphere of interest. . . .
The West’s final tool for peeling Kiev away from Moscow has been its efforts to spread Western values and promote democracy in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, a plan that often entails funding pro-Western individuals and organizations. Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, estimated in December 2013 that the United States had invested more than $5 billion since 1991 to help Ukraine achieve “the future it deserves.” As part of that effort, the U.S. government has bankrolled the National Endowment for Democracy. The nonprofit foundation has funded more than 60 projects aimed at promoting civil society in Ukraine, and the NED’s president, Carl Gershman, has called that country “the biggest prize.” After Yanukovych won Ukraine’s presidential election in February 2010, the NED decided he was undermining its goals, and so it stepped up its efforts to support the opposition and strengthen the country’s democratic institutions. . . .
Although the full extent of U.S. involvement has not yet come to light, it is clear that Washington backed the coup. Nuland and Republican Senator John McCain participated in antigovernment demonstrations, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, proclaimed after Yanukovych’s toppling that it was “a day for the history books.” As a leaked telephone recording revealed, Nuland had advocated regime change and wanted the Ukrainian politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk to become prime minister in the new government, which he did. No wonder Russians of all persuasions think the West played a role in Yanukovych’s ouster.
ADVENTURES IN EUPHEMISM: Nurse Accused of Having “Unsolicited” Sex With Patient. “While a man was lying in his bed in a southwest suburban hospital, medicated and waiting for a heart transplant, a nurse entered his room and ‘initiated unsolicited sexual relations, including intercourse,’ according to lawsuit filed Monday.” Remember, it’s only rape if she regrets it.
THE POLITICIZATION OF EVERYTHING: The end of its “gay ban” will open the St. Patrick’s Day Parade to political causes of every stripe.
STUDY: Amicable divorces might not be any better for children than hostile divorces. “The cluster analysis resulted in three types of coparenting relationships: cooperative and involved, moderately engaged, and infrequent but conflictual. Despite the expectation that children fare better if their divorced parents’ develop a cooperative coparenting relationship, the authors found that parents’ reports of their children’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors and their social skills did not significantly differ by type of postdivorce coparental relationships. Results, therefore, suggest that the direct influence of postdivorce coparenting on children’s adjustment may not as robust as predicted in the literature.”
PROTEST: Indiana Brewhouse Complies with Dumb State Law Using Microwaved Hot Dogs and Canned Soup.
The Bank Street Brewhouse in New Albany, Indiana, encourages hungry patrons to order from local takeout joints and local food trucks. But that’s not good enough for state liquor authorities, which require brewpubs to offer a weirdly specific configuration of food.
Thus the “Bank Street Brewhouse Indiana Statutory Compliance Restaurant Menu” was born.
NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT: Gay activist pleads guilty to sexually assaulting boys.
Williams taught anthropology, gender studies and history at USC for about two decades until he quit in 2011. Under the guise of academic research on sexuality in the Southeast Asia/Pacific region, he repeatedly traveled to the area.
Federal prosecutors alleged that the author and Fulbright Award winner used those trips to sexually assault underage boys. Investigators believe he has at least 10 victims across Southeast Asia, aged 9 to 17. . . .
An attorney for USC last year provided the FBI with materials the professor donated to the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives that contained “lascivious visual depictions of minors,” according to the plea agreement. FBI agents also obtained similar images from Williams’ former home.
The article leaves out the “gay activist” details. For those, see this bio.
And here’s an interesting tidbit from his Wikipedia page:
He was affiliated with a religious organization known as the Buddhist Universal Association in Los Angeles. FBI spokeswoman Eimiller said the group espoused an ideology of “extreme sexual freedoms.” During investigations information surfaced concerning the practices of the group which included that members took a vow of celibacy, but were still allowed to have sex with young boys.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
SWEDEN: Far right gains leave new PM in limbo.
The anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats were by far the biggest winners of the night. They doubled their votes, to about 13 percent.
The group was a virtual non-entity less than a decade ago, and only entered parliament in the 2010 election, winning 5.7 percent of the vote and 20 seats in the 349-seat legislature. . . .
Sweden Democrat’s huge advances are seen due to growing concern in Sweden over an accelerating influx of refugees, with up to 90,000 expected to travel to the Nordic country this year. . . .
The electoral gain for the Sweden Democrats confirms a Europe-wide trend of soaring popularity for populist right-wing parties.
The eurosceptic Alternative for Germany, which has flirted with populist positions on immigration and law and order, made gains in elections Sunday in the eastern states of Thuringia and Brandenburg.
USEFUL: Questions to Ask in a Job Interview. “When it comes to job interviews, we often see it as a one-way street, with the interviewer holding all the cards. In reality, though, it’s a two-way interaction. You are also interviewing them to see if their company is the right fit for you.”
COOL: Panasonic subsidiary develops suit device to assist in heavy lifting. “With sensors that detect movements of the trunk, the AWN-02 operates motors at the lower back in accordance with the user’s intended movements, thereby reducing the burden on the lower back when lifting heavy items.”
VOX DAY: Ghosts of the Alpha Widow. “Observe that it is obviously not male insecurity that is to blame when women are literally questioning their multi-decade commitments to their husbands due to their past sexual experience. The simple and observable fact is that sexual experienced women find it harder to bond to their husbands and to live up to their marital commitments.”