INDONESIA: Do women receive lighter sentences than men?
Well, they do in the U.S., anyway: Estimating Gender [sic] Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases.
VOX DAY: Holding the line.
Every time we refuse to back down, every time we refuse to accept their dogma as truth, we win. We reduce the amount of social pressure they are able to bring to bear. They know that. And it makes them furious. One need only read the foam-flecked rantings of their more outspoken members about me or about other members of the open resistance to see that. What makes them so angry about our very public resistance to their dogma is that their social pressure becomes less effective when it is seen to be resistible. That is why it is so important to resist openly rather than to do so in a private and covert manner.
Because regardless of what you think in the privacy of your own mind, the public acquiescence of your silence causes others to believe that you are in accordance with the dogma and thereby adds to the social pressure placed upon others.
ROBERT MUGABE: “Don’t they (whites) know where their ancestors came from? The British who are here should all go back to England.” He adds, “What is the problem? We now have aeroplanes which can take them back quicker than the ships used by their ancestors.”
BRENDAN O’NEILL: The gobsmacking hypocrisy of commentators crying over the leaking of celebrity pictures.
If the hacker had found a video of a famous woman being hateful he would have been hailed as heroic rather than branded a pervert. In recent months, you see, the private text messages, emails and telephone conversations of various well-known people have been leaked and pored over with widespread media approval. We have watched as the woman who leaked football chief Richard Scudamore’s private and embarrassing emails was celebrated for her bravery rather than denounced for her lack of respect for a man’s privacy. We heard the world cheer in unison as former American basketball boss Donald Sterling was expelled from his sport over an entirely private phone conversation he had, which was secretly recorded and leaked. More recently, some of the same media outlets now outraged by the leaking of private photos from female celebrities’ mobile phones were only too happy to republish and sternly condemn less-than-PC private text messages sent by two British football officials on their mobile phones.
There is currently fury with anyone who says that if these female celebs did not want their naked photos to be seen, then they shouldn’t have taken them in the first place. This is indeed a very stupid and intolerant thing to say. Yet the exact same thing was said of the above cases – that if you didn’t want your private offensive comments to be seen or heard by others, then you should never have said them. As a Washington Post columnist said in response to the Donald Sterling case: “If you don’t want your words broadcast in the public square, don’t say them … Such potential exposure forces us to more carefully select our words and edit our thoughts.” How is this any different to the horrible idea that if female celebrities don’t want their naked bodies seen in public, then they shouldn’t ever photograph them?
Female sexual expression is sacrosanct, and should be kept within bounds determined by the individual woman. So if she supplements her college funding with porn shoots (even if it was entirely superfluous) and wants to keep that part of her life separate from the rest, then by golly everyone ought to abide by her unexpressed desire.
On the other hand, male heterosexual expression, or the expression of unapproved opinions regarding race or sex or whatever, is forbidden and even private expressions ought to be rooted out and the offenders publicly shamed.
A call to “respect privacy” is just a smokescreen for the actual philosophy informing the commentators’ responses.
“EVERY MAJOR AMERICAN CHURCH that has taken steps towards liberalization on sexual issues has seen a steep decline in membership.”
HELEN SMITH: How the law punishes boys who are raped.
Imagine that your 14-year-old daughter engaged in sex with the 20-year-old man down the street. Anger would hardly begin to describe your feelings, but then imagine how you and your daughter would feel if she became pregnant and the man who abused her got custody of the child and your daughter had to pay him child support for the next 18 years.
This would not only be unthinkable in our society but most people would say that it bordered on abuse or worse. Yet, as reported in a recent Arizona Republic news story, this is what happened to Nick Olivas . . .
At the age of 21, Olivas found out he had a child and that he owed over $15,000 in back child support plus interest. . . .
When a state government finds out a 14-year-old girl is a statutory rape victim of a 20-year-old man, the common reaction would be to file criminal charges to put the predator in jail. But for male victims, child support laws turn state governments into the allies of abusers instead of advocates for the victims.
Why the double standard when the victim is male?
The main reason is that the law says so. According to a 2011 article in the Georgia Law Review “much of the law relating to child support is based on the fact that it is typically in a child’s best interest to receive financial support from mothers as well as fathers” even when there is “wrongful conduct by the mother.”
OUR WATCHDOG PRESS: Networks Refuse to Cover Dual IRS Developments; Haven’t Covered IRS Since July.
Some examples of what the networks covered instead of these new IRS scandal bombshells include ABC’s Good Morning America reporting during its Saturday show on a new giant rabbit made of rubber in Taiwan by the same person who made a massive rubber duck that has appeared in cities throughout the world since 2007.
Over on CBS This Morning Saturday and NBC’s Today on Saturday, both programs aired news briefs of two deer finding their way across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco during the height of rush hour.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Undenatured whey for health, muscle, and cancer prevention.
BEGGARS CAN BE CHOOSERS: Refugees protest against ‘monotonous’ Italian food.
For two days, a group of about 40 asylum-seekers staying at a refugee centre in the Veneto province of Belluno refused to eat the “pasta with tomato sauce, bread and eggs” meals they were given and called to be fed food from their own countries, Libero Quotidiano reported.
To reinforce their point, they blocked a street with a wooden bench, put their lunch on the ground along with bags of clothes and threatened to leave the centre in La Secca, a hamlet in Ponte nelle Alpi.
They reportedly said “we do not eat this stuff”.
FOR SCIENCE! Feds Still Studying Why Lesbians Are Obese. “Update: Total government funding now $2.87 million.”
ANN COULTER: Would it kill you to hire more black cops? (Yes).
In a massive, detailed 2000 study of the effect of court-ordered affirmative action plans on police departments, economist John Lott found that the more minorities on a police force, the higher the rates of murder, manslaughter, violent crime, robbery and aggravated assault will be. Violent crime increased by a minimum of 3.3 percent every year after affirmative action policies went into effect — and the spike in crime was highest in black neighborhoods.
The problem was not with black cops, Lott’s study showed, but rather with the lowering of standards across the board, resulting in less-qualified officers of every race. . . .
About a decade into a federal consent decree requiring the Los Angeles Police Department to hire more minority officers, the LAPD’S Rampart division was employing gang members in uniforms.
Training officer Jim Peasha told investigative reporter Jan Golab that he left his unit because of the preposterous recruits being sent to him as a result of affirmative action. “I had some fantastic minority recruits,” Peasha said. “One black kid was the best I ever had.” But he also had “one guy who I knew was on drugs and I couldn’t get him out. He wound up getting caught working as a guard at a rock (cocaine) house. An off-duty cop!” . . .
By the time of the Rampart scandal, two dozen black police officers in Los Angeles were suspected of gang activity. Most were forced out. Four officers were proved to have been engaging in criminal acts — including a bank robbery and an attempted murder. All were black and Hispanic.
PENANCE OVER PROFIT: Michael Sam and Denzel Washington: the Gay NFL and Black Equalizer.
Gays are 2.6% of the population, including Lesbians. Not much to hang a sports league on. But the motivation is essentially religious. Owners care more about being seen as one of the chosen, the Saved, the special, the “good White” who gloriously saves the downtrodden non-White, or Gay, or Muslim, or what have you, and thus performs the sado-masochistic (credit the tweeter Roissy/Heartiste retweeted) rituals of recycling, yoga, tofu, vegetarianism, jogging, etc. along with “racial cuckoldry” that makes up the religion of Racial Penance and Redemption. . . .
In a similar fashion, audiences seem to have rejected in test screenings the Denzel Washington remake of the Equalizer. . . .
The problem with Hollywood is that they are filled with religious dogma as much as the NFL owners. They believe that violence and action is only justified, if it is done by the religiously correct (i.e. Black) person and that the whole point of the Equalizer is a Black guy killing various (White) villains, while timing himself with a stop-watch. . . .
Note the sub themes. Criminals are always White, Black guys don’t hold up Home Depot stores, White guys do. White women can only be protected by macho Black bald guys. Black guys are ultimate fighting machines … but for good!
This is pretty much religious dogma of the Religion of Racial Penance and Redemption. Post Christianity taken to its logical limits.
GALLUP poll shows support for right-to-work laws — even from Democrats. “When asked if they would vote for right-to-work laws, 71 percent of Americans in the national survey said they would. That number included 65 percent of Democrats.”
CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS: Feminist Myths That Will Not Die.
“HEALTH FOODS” That Are Really Junk Foods in Disguise.
Even if you’re drinking 100% quality fruit juice, it is still a bad idea.
Fruit juice is like fruit, except with all the good stuff (like the fiber) taken out… the main thing left of the actual fruit is the sugar.
Also:
Margarine is not food… it is an assembly of chemicals and refined oils that have been made to look and taste like food.
Not surprisingly, the Framingham Heart Study showed that people who replace butter with margarine are actually more likely to die from heart disease.
VOX DAY: Immigration is rape culture. “Everywhere, from Australia to Norway, Muslim immigrants are gang-raping white girls en masse… so naturally the feminists are yammering on about the problem of college girls getting drunk and having consensual sex with young white men.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Overcoming anabolic resistance for the older man and the hardgainer. “It is not ‘age’ that causes anabolic resistance, but various metabolic derangements that accompany it.”
SOUNDTRACK for Your Thumos.
PROBABLY NOT: Did CNN, The Washington Post, and Time Actually Check Fareed Zakaria’s Work For Plagiarism? “These are all articles that were written before the plagiarism scandal in August of 2012. In other words, these passages ostensibly would have been part of the reviews conducted by CNN, TIME and the Washington Post.”
VOX DAY: That would be why they don’t hire women. “If a person proudly talks about championing this cause, leading that initiative, or launching any ‘effort’ that involves buzzwords like diversity, outreach, inclusivity, or whatever, then you know their focus in the future will be attacking the organization, not doing their job.”
GOVERNMENT IS JUST A WORD FOR THE THINGS WE DO TOGETHER: Hundreds of bioterror lab mishaps cloaked in secrecy.
In another incident, a cow in a disease-free herd next to a research facility studying the bacteria that cause brucellosis, became infected due to practices that violated federal regulations, resulting in regulators suspending the research and ordering a $425,000 fine, records show.
But the names of the labs that had mishaps or made mistakes, as well as most information about all of the incidents, must be kept secret because of federal bioterrorism laws, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which regulates the labs and co-authored the annual lab incident reports with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
RESPECTED SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL will print nonsense for a price:
Experimental & Clinical Cardiology was published in Oakville, Ont., for 17 years and had a solid reputation for printing original medical research. It was sold in 2013, and its new owners say they are in Switzerland, but do their banking in Turks and Caicos.
And for $1,200 U.S. they’ll print anything — even a garbled blend of fake cardiology, Latin grammar and missing graphs submitted by the [Ottawa] Citizen.
There are less expensive alternatives, evidently.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Performance Enhancing Gut Microbes – First Study to Show: Having (The Right?) Gut Bugs Doubles Exercise Endurance. “We could continue this discussion forever, but eventually the one result that may have a practical implication is the increased performance after mono-colonization in the germ-free mice. If nothing else, this result which happens to be the first evidence of performance enhancing effects of having a gut microbiome, would imply that you better recolonize your gut as soon as possible after a course of antibiotics. How the various different microbial status might regulate performance, on the other hand, will have to be elucidated in future studies – human (!) studies, that is.”
PLANNING IS NOT HER STRONG SUIT: E! TV host Giuliana Rancic admits struggle to have children shook her faith. Faith in what? The idea that waiting until the age of 34 to begin trying to conceive is stupid? (According to Wikipedia, she was born in August 1974, married in September 2007, and first attempted conception in the beginning of 2009.)
“My faith is strong and Bill and I go to church every Sunday, but I remember going to church and getting angry. I was asking God, ‘Why aren’t you giving us a child?'”
And God responded, “I gave you a body full of eggs. I gave you a Catholic upbringing. I gave you years of youthful fertility. I gave you man after man who desired to marry you. I gave you a man whom you finally decided to marry, and over a year of wedded bliss in which you could have stopped using contraception at any time. What more did you expect?”
BOOK REVIEW: Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone) by Elizabeth Green.
As Green reveals, for most of the past century, education schools have contributed little to the task of “building a better teacher.” In her opening chapter, Green notes that “somehow all those Ed schools’ professors had managed to learn nothing about teaching.” Moreover, “the most prestigious among them—the elite education researchers—ignored teaching altogether.” Green asks: “How did this happen? How had an entire field come to neglect the work at its heart?”
It happened, in part, because the founders of the twentieth-century education schools—iconic figures like William James, Edward Thorndike, and John Dewey—were disinterested in the nitty-gritty of the classroom and thought little about how to improve methods of instruction. (Thorndike abhorred school visits, calling them “a bore.”) Instead, they preferred to write and do research about more intellectually challenging subjects, such as psychology and human intelligence. What Green calls the uniquely American “myth of the natural-born teacher,” along with the corollary assumption that good teachers simply “know what to do to help their students learn,” also encouraged the ed schools’ inattention to the art of teaching.
The FDA is rumbling that wooden onion crates may need to give way to plastic, although defenders say wooden crates have a good safety record in actual use. . . .
In June, after an outcry, the FDA backed off hints that it would end the age-old practice of aging cheese on wooden boards.
I don’t know what to think of the idea that plastics are contaminating our food and thus harming us. But the FDA’s continued insistence that our food come into even more contact with plastic is beginning to convince me.
BILL VALLICELLA: Inheritance and Appropriation.
The high school I attended required each student to take two years of Latin. Years later the requirement was dropped. When a fundraiser contacted me for a donation, I said, “You eliminated Latin, why should I give you a donation?” He replied that the removal of Latin made room for Chinese.
What I should have said at that point was something like the following. “While the study of Asian languages and cultures and worldviews is wonderfully enriching, it must not come at the expense of the appropriation and transmission of our own culture which is Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman.”
VIDEO: Oakland Liquor Store Clerks Fight Back Against Aggressive Thief Whom Cops Ignored.
Onlookers can be heard in the background of the video saying the clerks were being too aggressive over a few bottles of alcohol, but the workers said it was at least the third time the same man had targeted their store.
“It doesn’t feel good, but something has to be done. Otherwise it gets worse and worse,” Eraja said.
Store workers said police don’t respond to this kind of petty crime, so they took matters into their own hands. . . .
Eraja also displayed surveillance video of an armed robbery of the store from two years ago, saying police investigators never took it as evidence when he offered.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The older you are, the more protein you need.
TROLLING HIGHER ED, or just business as usual? “Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm saw her state lose a half-million jobs under her watch, but that isn’t stopping her from teaching a graduate course this fall at University of California at Berkeley that will focus on developing job creation strategies.”
RELIGION OF PIECES: Muslim Persecution of Christians, March 2014.
ACT OF LOVE: No Prison Time, No Deportation for Illegal Immigrant Who Killed Two Girls. “A judge in Oregon has dismissed the deportation case against Cinthya Garcia-Cisneros, a 19-year-old illegal immigrant who killed two young girls in a hit-and-run car accident last year. Though Garcia-Cisneros was in the midst of removal proceedings, she is now released and will not face deportation. Garcia-Cisneros, who came from Mexico as a child, had permission to be in the country under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program instituted by President Obama in 2012.”
Now, if you really want to be deported, you actually have to do something serious, like sell fake vintage wine.
BOOK REVIEW: Maurice Casey’s Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? “A recurring theme is that the skeptics do not understand how historians work. The mythicist sees contradictory sources as evidence that the claims are false, while the ancient historian uses them to separate the plausible from the less plausible. The mythicist builds his reconstructions on what he finds in the sources, while the ancient historian considers the sources as incomplete and investigates what they represent. The mythicist wants something to be either true or false, while the ancient historian sees probabilities. The mythicist, Casey summarizes, thinks like a fundamentalist: the written sources contain all information you need and have to be consistent.”
EUGENE VOLOKH: Trial court restricts father from “doing anything in front of the children or around the children that … conflicts with the Catholic religion”. Funny, the mother faced no such restriction when she filed for divorce.
PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF: Mystery employee at EPA’s Denver office smears human waste and menstrual blood on the walls, clogs toilets and urinates on the floor.
‘A male supervisor … told her that management knows that it is a female on the [redacted] floor who has been wiping feces and menstrual blood on the walls (I’m really sorry, this is beyond gross) and that they are worried that her behavior is escalating,’ according to one email obtained by Greenwire.
Another email reported: ‘The incidents of urine on the seats and the floors are still occurring regularly in the women’s restrooms; however they are no longer limited to the 6th and 7th floors. Employees are now reporting incidents more frequently.’
The rewriting is extensive and amusing. The previous sentence “The central reason is Missouri state law” now reads “The central reason is a recent trend in many states’ criminal laws.” (Try “virtually all” instead of “many.”) The previous sentence “But in Missouri, these justifications barely require any evidence at all” now says “in states like Missouri” instead of just “Missouri.” The previous sentence “Not in Missouri” now becomes “Not in most states today, including Missouri.”
The piece still says it’s different in “other states” (plural) with only a link to Ohio — which is, again, the only state in the union that clearly and consistently puts the burden on the defendant.
MICHELLE MALKIN: The Jihadi Serial Killer No One’s Talking About. “When a detective asked him to clarify whether all four murders were ‘done for vengeance for the actions of the United States in the Middle East,’ Muhammad Brown stated unequivocally: ‘Yes.’ He added that he was ‘just doing (his) small part.'”
THE OPEN ENCYCLOPEDIA THAT ISN’T: Congressional staffers banned again from Wikipedia after “transphobic” edits. Note that this is only a story because the IP is a congressional one. Presumably, IPs are banned every day for heresy. And on Wikipedia, calling a man a man is heresy.
SPEAK FOR YOURSELF: Robert P. George: ISIS Is Committing Genocide; It Is Our Moral Obligation to Defeat Them. “The United States ‘doesn’t have any real moral choice,’ George said. It is ‘our moral obligation’ to stop the genocide.” George has a reputation for being a natural law thinker, so you’d think that he has some good argument as to why the American people have a moral obligation to do anything about people killing other people in faraway lands. But he doesn’t. Evidently, “genocide” is a magic word that permits — no, requires — foreign intervention.
PROGRESS: Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue Slams Islamists.
Up until now, the Pontifical Council has been excessively concerned with the sensibilities of Islamic religious leaders. The new tone suggests a recognition that they also have a responsibility for the lives of Christians who are threatened by Islamists. With its detailed list of unacceptable Islamist practices, the statement indicates a willingness to take a more realistic view of Islam.
On the other hand, there are a few indications that illusions die hard. The statement is hedged with language which suggests that the bishops still don’t get it—“it” being a clear understanding of Islamic faith, tradition, and history. . . .
The statement calls on “followers of all religions” to condemn a list of outrages committed by the Islamic State. It’s not clear, however, if the authors of the statement fully realize what they are asking. A devoted follower of the prophet can’t very well condemn these practices because most of them belong to the warp and woof of Islam. A Muslim who rejects them tears at the very fabric of the faith.
HERE WE GO AGAIN? Car Repos Soar 70% As Auto Subprime Bubble Pops; “It’s Contained” Promises Fed.
The auto loan subprime bubble may be the latest to burst (after student loans) as the rate of car repossessions jumped 70.2 percent in the second quarter, with much of that increase coming from finance companies not run by automakers, banks or credit unions. The good news: the percentage of auto loans that end in default is just 0.62% of all auto loans. However, as everyone but the Fed knows, what matters is the flow, not the stock, and the direction and acceleration in defaults simply means that the maximum saturation point has been reached and going forward lenders will experience ever greater losses, which in turn will limit their willingness to offer subprime loans to US consumers desperate to find a house (because clearly one doesn’t need to home when one can sleep in their Chevy Tahoe). . . .
The one reason we know the subprime auto loan bubble has burst and is about to lead to another round of devastation around the nation is one simple statement: “The New York Fed dove into lending data, and its economists found that the bubble fears may be misplaced.” In other words, it is “contained.”
Hm… where have we heard that before?
UK: How can rewarding the feckless and punishing the hardworking be the right way to support families?
Over recent decades, the British state has been engaged in a huge social experiment in which traditional family structures and moral values have been deliberately undermined by official policy.
In the name of progress, hard work and self-reliance have been punished through excessive taxation, while irresponsibility and idleness have been rewarded through unconditional welfare payments.
Sounds familiar.
FOR THE CHILDREN: The Hidden Half: School Employees Who Don’t Teach. “The number of non-teaching staff in the United States (those employed by school systems but not serving as classroom teachers) has grown by 130 percent since 1970. Non-teachers—more than three million strong—now comprise half of the public school workforce. Their salaries and benefits absorb one-quarter of current education expenditures.”