HOW to look smart. Alternatively, “How to look like someone trying to look smart.”
THE NEW TOLERANCE: Group pushes Kroger to ban open-carry. This is a cultural battle. Guns are supposed to be strange and foreign, not familiar and ubiquitous. If children see enough people walking around armed, then they might start thinking that — God forbid — it’s normal. Next thing you know, they’ll be chiding their parents to be more accepting of gun culture, to keep an open mind, not to knock it ’til you’ve tried it, etc.
WARREN MEYER: The Other Shoe Drops on Businesses From Obamacare: Reporting.
Despite the fact that the employer mandate was supposed to kick in almost 9 months ago, until recently the government had still not released the reporting requirements for companies vis a vis the mandate. Well, apparently the draft reporting requirements [were] released a few weeks ago. I may be missing something, but the key requirement for companies like mine is that every employee must receive a new form in January called an IRS 1095-C, which is parallel to the W-2 we all get to report income.
I know that many of you have probably been puzzled as to what some of those boxes mean on the W-2. Well, you are going to love the 1095C.
STUDY: Coping with mate poaching: gender [sic] differences in detection of infidelity-related threats. “Women displayed greater alertness to cues of potential partner unfaithfulness than did men, were quicker and more accurate in detecting cues of infidelity, but were not better than men in detecting other threats. Women also focused their attention on potential rivals (other women), whereas men’s attention was specifically directed at monitoring their own partner’s intents.”
YOU DON’T SAY: Child Porn Bust Provides Insight Into Gay Adoption. “These aren’t isolated cases. See [1] here and [2] here and [3] here for more examples. The homosexual community is well known for its fixation on the corruption of youth. No healthy civilization would allow them to adopt children, but that is the inevitable result of the official normalization of their aberrant sexual practices.”
Interestingly, an attempt at a critical comment makes the point in an even more effective manner: “Keep your young daughters away from straight men!” Okay, let’s say two heterosexual male roommates apply to adopt a young girl. Should they get one? The answer, of course, is no. Then why should two homosexual male roommates get a boy, let alone nine boys, as was the case with Harasz and Wirth (see [2])? Granted, those two haven’t gone to trial yet. Even so, the press seems reluctant to investigate why the two wanted nine boys and how they received two waivers allowing them more and more adopted children in one household. Imagine two heterosexual male roommates being given legal guardianship of nine young girls. It could never happen.
Meanwhile, black social workers prevent non-black couples from adopting black children — excepting roommates Frank Lombard of Duke University and Kenneth Shipp (see [1]), the former of whom ran live streams of himself molesting his five-year-old black “son” and offered the boy to be molested by an undercover cop. How did these two homosexual male roommates get two children? Reporters don’t seem much interested in such a question.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Protein Timing Does Matter! Yet Only in Trained Men. “A comparison of the net protein balance in the two groups during the immediate post vs. 6h post consumption periods clearly indicates that protein timing does matter, even if it’s just for the experienced resistance trainee.”
FRED SIEGEL: Activists and journalists are stuck in the racial resentments of the 1960s.
The virtue of disruption, academics and observers argue, is that it gives African-Americans a crisis with which to bargain. But after 50 years, what has this bargain achieved, except to cultivate a community that excels in resentment?
It’s not just African-Americans who are stuck in the sixties. Reporters are still seeking out the Kerner Commission’s white racists, who are ultimately to blame for all racial problems. Historians and sociologists are offering structural explanations for the violence; whites in general, and small businesses in particular, have little to say but simply flee to safer climes. . . .
Historian Colin Gordon has revived the old chestnut that the rioting owes to the failure of big cities to incorporate suburbs. The problem, argues Gordon, is that small towns and cities compete with each other to attract businesses. If they had higher taxes, it’s implied, they could afford to spend more on social services. But does anyone think that Ferguson would be better off incorporated into a dysfunctional St. Louis? The vast city of Los Angeles, with its 469 square miles (compared with St. Louis’s 69) saw two of the most violent “rebellions” of the last 50 years. What, in Gordon’s estimation, accounts for that?
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Magnesium improves athletic performance.
REPRODUCTIVE SUCCESS: Japanese man “linked to 15 babies born to surrogate mothers in Thailand, and is also believed to have engaged surrogates in India.”
At this stage, the Japanese businessman does not face any criminal charges. Authorities from the Metropolitan Police Bureau as well as the Ministry of Health say that surrogacy and human trafficking are two separate issues, and they were still trying to piece together Mr Shigeta’s motives for fathering so many children. . . .
It seems money is an unlikely factor. The 24-year-old is rumoured to be the son of Japanese billionaire Yasumitsu Shigeta, founder of mobile phone distribution company Hikari Tsushin Inc.
Mr Yasumitsu was once one of the world’s richest men before losing much of his fortune in the dotcom crash. He has since restored at least some of his former US$42 billion wealth, and now sits at No 16 on Japan’s rich list.
A Mitsutoki Shigeta is named as a shareholder in Hikari Tsushin, but it has not been possible to confirm if it is the same person tied to the surrogacy case.
COOL: Earliest evidence for the structure of Homo sapiens populations in Africa.
They have discovered there are marked differences in the way stone tools were made, reflecting a diversity of cultural traditions. The study has also identified at least four distinct populations, each relatively isolated from each other with their own different cultural characteristics.
The research paper also suggests that early populations took advantage of rivers and lakes that criss-crossed the Saharan desert. A climate model coupled with data about these ancient water courses was matched with the new findings on stone tools to reveal that populations connected by rivers had similarities in their cultures. This could be the earliest evidence of different populations ‘budding’ across the Sahara, using the rivers to disperse and meet people from other populations, says the paper published in the journal, Quaternary Science Reviews. . . .
A crucial next step involves fieldwork in areas such as the Arabian Peninsula to understand how these populations spread into Eurasia.
RIGHTS exclusive to women. “I’m sure there are more examples out there to buttress the assertion that feminism long ago ceased being about ‘equality’, and instead is seeks to advantage one sex over the other.”
Was it ever about equality?
Arguably not: “The resolutions quoted above make it clear that first-wave feminism was not entirely, or even primarily, an ‘equal rights’ movement. Although an equal right to vote was part of the platform, the ultimate objective seems to have been to ensure women’s primacy in the law, not mere equality.”
It seeks solutions only for those aspects of unfair laws that are unfair to women, while insisting that unfairness to men and boys must be ignored. This is why we have laws against female genital mutilation instead of laws against genital mutilation; challenges to the exclusion of women from combat positions but no challenges to the exemption of women from Selective Service registration requirements (at least, not any coming from women); a Violence Against Women Act instead of a Violence Against People Act; and so on and so on.
A growing number of people are beginning to realize that the truth is that some laws have been, and are unfair to women, while other laws have been, and are unfair to men. Unfairness is neither a contest nor a zero-sum game. There is plenty of it to go around. Portraying men as evil-doers and women as innocent victims in order to capitalize on societal expectations that men should serve and protect women, and should never be heard to complain about it, can be an effective strategy for making short-term gains. At the same time, though, it damages the credibility of women who talk about equality, or who say that feminism is “about equality.” It would be prudent to consider whether the short-term advantages that women gain from this approach outweigh what is lost in the long-term.
JOHN LOTT: Armed doctor saved lives.
The attacker, Richard Plotts, is a convicted felon, which bans him from legally owning a gun. But Pennsylvania’s universal background check law did not stop him. Neither did the hospital’s signs banning guns. . . .
At Mercy Fitzgerald, caseworker Theresa Hunt was killed when Plotts opened fire during a regularly scheduled appointment with Dr. Lee Silverman. Fortunately, the doctor had his own gun and returned fire, hitting Plotts three times and critically wounding him.
After firing all the bullets in his gun, Plotts still had 39 bullets on him . . .
Yeadon Police Chief Donald Molineux was clear: “Without a doubt, I believe the doctor saved lives. … Without that firearm, this guy [Plotts] could have went out in the hallway and just walked down the offices until he ran out of ammunition.” . . .
Silverman, the hero here, apparently broke the gun-free zone rule the hospital had imposed, but he appears to be in no danger of disciplinary action and the hospital announced it was thankful for the “brave and difficult action” of Silverman and his colleagues. The hospital specifically noted: “We look forward to Dr. Silverman’s return to serving patients at our hospital.”
INTERESTING: States ranked by SPM (supplemental poverty measure) rates. “The SPM adjusts for things like effective household size, housing costs (for which there is enormous geographic variation), taxes, etc.”
ADVENTURES IN EUPHEMISM: Mistaken punctuation, misreferencing, and other euphemisms for plagiarism.
JUST WHAT THE MODELS PREDICTED! Massive Increase In Arctic Ice Over The Past Two Years.
Related: Why ‘Deniers’ are Always Wrong – Models can’t be falsified.
IRELAND and parental rights.
Imagine that, following the death of a child’s father, the entirely irreproachable mother was required to enter into a competition with the girlfriend of the deceased man to win the right to continue parenting her own child. Imagine if she were to lose. . . .
Relax, my liberal friends. This has not happened.
But here’s the thing: the essence of the story has in fact unfolded in this country in the past few months – just the other way around. In the above hypothesis, substitute the word ‘father’ for ‘mother’, and the word ‘boyfriend’ for ‘girlfriend’.
FERTILITY ISN’T FOREVER: Career woman writes about other career women’s woeful tales of barrenness. The headline is “When childless isn’t a choice” — but if a woman waits too long, then she has made a choice.
Theatre executive Jessica Hepburn is 43 and has been trying to have a baby for nine years with her partner, Peter. “It’s like a bruise,” says Jessica about the emotional impact of failing to have a biological child, “whenever you press it, it hurts. I often wonder what our kids would have looked like – Peter’s hair, my eyes? I always imagined motherhood would be part of my life. Creating a child with the person you love – it’s a very natural, strong desire for me.”
And yet she waited until 34 to give it a shot.
Jessica, whose infertility is unexplained [hint: she’s old], chose to undergo 11 rounds of gruelling IVF treatment, at a cost of £70,000. She has only recently paid off the debt.
She chose not to tell her friends and family everything she was going through, including a life threatening ectopic pregnancy and several miscarriages.
“I kept it absolutely away from my colleagues and I would go and have egg collection very early in the morning and be back at my desk by 10am. My ectopic pregnancy was discovered at three months and even though I was rushed to hospital, no one knew the full story. I also had a miscarriage at nine weeks and several biochemical pregnancies,which are very early miscarriages, and then of course a few unsuccessful rounds of IVF as well. Because we always felt so close, I couldn’t give up.”
The author of this article, Sangita Myska, is in her forties. (In this article from 2009, she is identified as 36 years old and a “Miss.”)
Earlier: 5 percent at 40.
GAVIN MCINNES: Transphobia [sic] is perfectly natural.
We’re all transphobic [sic]. We aren’t blind. We see there are no old trannies. They die of drug overdoses and suicide way before they’re 40 and nobody notices because nobody knows them. They are mentally ill gays who need help, and that help doesn’t include being maimed by physicians. These aren’t women trapped in a man’s body. They are nuts trapped in a crazy person’s body. . . .
Buying woman parts from a hospital and calling yourself a broad trivializes what it is to be a woman. Womanhood is not on a shelf next to wigs and makeup. Similarly, being a dude is quite involved. Ripping your vaginal canal out of your fly doesn’t mean you are going to start inventing sh*t and knowing how cement works. Being a man is awesome. So is being a woman. We should revere these creations, not revel in their bastardization.
UPDATE: McInnes responds to fan mail: “I’d like to formally apologize to all the trannies threatening to kill my family and ‘eat me alive.’ You are NOT mentally ill.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Simple Exercises That Undo the Damage of Sitting.
JUMPING THE SHARK: Feminist Journalist: Standing Outside a Window With a Boombox Is Rape Culture. “Liberal columnist and commentator Zerlina Maxwell said this iconic gesture is actually so terrifying that if it happened to her, she would think she ‘was on a real life episode of Criminal Minds, and call the police.'”
In other words, she would call on strong men to protect her, because she’s physically and emotionally weak. ‘Hello, police? Send someone soon. He’s playing music. I never even liked this song. No, I haven’t asked him to leave yet. No, he’s just standing there. What’s with all these questions? You’re victim-shaming. Stop raping me!’
In the same piece, Maxwell also said it is “fairly obvious” that Beauty and the Beast is “at its heart, a textbook story of abuse,” and letting your kids watch is setting them up for a future of domestic violence.
“Don’t let the dancing teacups fool you — this narrative is part of a dangerous cycle playing itself out in relationships nationwide,” she wrote. “According to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly 10 percent of teens report being slapped or hit by a romantic partner.”
I guess “rape culture” is pushed by women. Women would be the first to show young people either Say Anything (with its well-known boombox scene) or Beauty and the Beast (with its notorious dancing teacups).
DECEIT: Handful of activists responsible for anti-Limbaugh crusade.
Clear Channel Networks president Darren Davis claims that after an exhaustive investigation into the social media campaign against talk radio titan Rush Limbaugh and his advertisers, they found that 70 percent of the attacks were coming from just 10 highly organized individuals.
Apparently these activists are full-timers who use social media (Facebook, Twiter) to intimidate any small local business that advertises during Limbaugh’s show on their local station. These activists go so far as to pose as local customers when the truth is that 80 percent of the complaints about Limbaugh come from a state different from the one the business is located in.
IF I HAD A SON, he would look like Donmard.
STEVE SAILER: The Flight from White, Cont. “As all the talk in the media about the benefits of White Privilege reaches a crescendo, various groups of white people are acting as if they don’t actually believe it. Instead, they are looking for ways to stop being white in the eyes of the government.”
VOX DAY: No one cares when you kill yourself . . . if you are a middle-aged white man.
There are 39,518 annual suicides in the USA. About 25,000 are middle-aged white men. That’s only 14,000 fewer deaths than there are every year from female breast cancer. Meanwhile, there are 145 annual deaths from anorexia nervosa, of which about 129 are young women.
And yet we are subject to an unending barrage of media propaganda concerning the terrible societal problem of young girls feeling bad because they erroneously think they are fat.
DESPERATION: Career gals are having ‘egg-freezing’ parties.
“I don’t have a significant other . . . but I hope to one day and have kids,” said attendee, Donna Kanze, 35, of Manhattan, who has a career in the technology sector. She’s already signed up for egg freezing.
“I want to take my fertility into my own hands, rather than put pressure on the person I have my next relationship with,” she said.
“I don’t want to be in the position when I’m in my late 30s and panicking because I haven’t found the right man and I’d compromise and take anyone off the street!”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Intermittent fasting for fat loss or anti-aging?
[Those seeking to lose fat and build or retain muscle] use branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs), or leucine (one of the BCAAs) or perhaps whey (which is rich in BCAAs) during their fast. BCAAs are powerful signals that tell cells to ramp up muscle protein anabolism and to decrease muscle protein catabolism. So the use of BCAAs while fasting is the practice that will give one the best shot at retaining or even building muscle, even while doing regular, periodic IF.
However, one thing that BCAAs, whey, or leucine do is to stop autophagy, the cellular self-cleaning process. This process is radically enhanced by fasting, and it is responsible for the beneficial effects of calorie restriction and fasting. No autophagy, no anti-aging benefit from fasting.
REUTERS: Even Obama opposes Obama. “President Barack Obama is loosening restrictions on lobbyists who want to serve on federal advisory boards, a White House official said on Tuesday, a setback to the president’s efforts to tamp down special interest influence in Washington.”
HOW NOVEL: Southern Baptists encourage marrying younger, avoiding sexual sin.
The denomination has always believed that marriage is fundamental to a just, healthy and happy society. But in recent years, it has changed its messaging about when couples should get married.
The Southern Baptist Convention used to tell couples to wait until they reach financial stability, said Jon Akin, pastor of Fairview Church in Lebanon. “What we’ve communicated to our young people is finances are more important than sexual sin, and the Bible seems to say the exact opposite of that.”
Now, the denomination is emphasizing practical and theological reasons to marry younger. Marriage helps keep young people from sexual sin in the midst of their sexual maturity, Akin said, and helps them fulfill God’s design for men and women as complementary beings.
“Fulfill God’s design for men and women as complementary beings” means making babies. The advice isn’t just smart for couples, it’s smart for the denomination. Making babies early and often provides groups with a demographic edge.
MARK REGNERUS: “At a glance, there is a pretty obvious fissure between Christians who do and do not oppose same-sex marriage.”
More than seven times as many of the latter think pornography is OK. Three times as many back cohabiting as a good idea, six times as many are OK with no-strings-attached sex, five times as many think adultery could be permissible, thirteen times as many have no issue with polyamorous relationships, and six times as many support abortion rights. The closest the two come together is over the wisdom of a married couple staying together at all costs (except in cases of abuse).
Churchgoing Christians who support same-sex marriage look very much like the country as a whole—the population average (visible in the third column). That answers my original question. What would a pro-SSM Christian sexual morality look like? The national average—the norm—that’s what.
WISHFUL THINKING: Should women who get pregnant after premarital sex expect the men to marry them? “Mike [Adams] seems to be telling women that it is normal for them to expect that marriage will follow from premarital sex with men who have not been vetted for the roles of provider, protector and leader As if marriage is natural for men who don’t even have jobs and who are surrounded by women willing to have sex with them on the first date. Any man who will have recreational premarital sex with a woman is exactly the kind of person who will not commit to lifelong providing and fidelity – he is having sex before marriage because he wants recreation, without the commitment and self-sacrifice that marriage requires. Rationally speaking, it makes no sense for men to buy the cow, and to keep buying the cow with 40 years of labor, when they can get the milk for free. And that’s what we need to tell women – think with your minds, not with your emotions.”
PHYS.ORG: Specialized Retinal Cells Are a “Design Feature,” Showing that the Argument for Suboptimal Design of the Eye “Is Folly”. “Having the photoreceptors at the back of the retina is not a design constraint, it is a design feature. The idea that the vertebrate eye, like a traditional front-illuminated camera, might have been improved somehow if it had only been able to orient its wiring behind the photoreceptor layer, like a cephalopod, is folly. Indeed in simply engineered systems, like CMOS or CCD image sensors, a back-illuminated design manufactured by flipping the silicon wafer and thinning it so that light hits the photocathode without having to navigate the wiring layer can improve photon capture across a wide wavelength band. But real eyes are much more crafty than that.”
WHO YOU GONNA BELIEVE, the model or your own eyes? “’We have been building models and there are now robust contradictions,’ says Liu, a professor in the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research. ‘Data from observation says global cooling. The physical model says it has to be warming.’”
INTERESTING: Push-ups just as good as bench presses for strength building.
Of course you can train harder by doing bench presses than push-ups. The researchers got [a]round this by making the push-ups heavier for the students by using a resistance band. This meant that the subjects in the push-up group did just as heavy sets, and the same number of reps, as the students in the bench-press group.
The researchers measured the electrical activity in the students’ chest and shoulder muscles, so that they knew for sure that the push-up and the bench-press trainings were equally heavy.
STUDY: Testosterone in healthy men increases their brains’ response to threat.
Data analyses revealed that, compared with placebo, testosterone increased reactivity of the amygdala, hypothalamus and periaqueductal grey when viewing angry facial expressions.
“We were able to show for the first time that increasing levels of testosterone within the normal physiological range can have a profound effect on brain circuits that are involved in threat-processing and human aggression,” said Carré, Assistant Professor at Nipissing University.
THE MOST VIOLENT ERA IN AMERICA Was Before Europeans Arrived.
A new paper finds that the 20th century, with its hundreds of millions dead in wars and, in the case of Germany, China, Russia and other dictatorships, genocide, was not the most violent – on a per-capita basis that honor may belong to the central Mesa Verde of southwest Colorado and the Pueblo Indians.
Writing in the journal American Antiquity, Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler and colleagues document how nearly 90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms.
“If we’re identifying that much trauma, many were dying a violent death,” said Kohler. The study also offers new clues to the mysterious depopulation of the northern Southwest, from a population of about 40,000 people in the mid-1200s to 0 in 30 years.
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Should tampons be free? There is a way for women to get stuff for free. It’s called getting a man. If you can’t do that because you’re an unlovable feminist, don’t commandeer everyone else’s man through public policy. This principle should apply to all welfare payments.
WHAT IT TAKES TO GET DEPORTED: defrauding rich people.
A collector was sentenced to 10 years in prison in New York Thursday for making bogus vintage wine in his California kitchen, and selling it for millions of dollars. . . .
Before he was sentenced, Kurniawan twice apologized, saying “I’m really sorry” and expressing a desire to take care of his mother, who lives in California after receiving asylum.
Kurniawan, who moved to the United States at age 16, had his own request for political asylum turned down, and he was ordered deported in 2001. He continued to live in the United States after his appeal was rejected in 2003. He will be deported after he serves his sentence.
Alternatively, one can also be convicted 37 times: U.S. Border Patrol Deporting Illegal Alien with 37 Criminal Convictions in USA.
Agents determined that the suspect was in the United States illegally, and a check of the database showed that he has 37 convictions, ranging from misdemeanors to felonies, on charges such as narcotics violations, assault on a federal officer, burglary and robbery.
A spokesman for the Buffalo CBP sector told CNSNews.com that the suspect’s first conviction came in 1982; the most recent was in 2007. Border Patrol says it first learned of the man on Saturday.
MARK PERRY: Chart: 10 most conferred bachelor’s degrees by sex. “Note that in 2012 women earned a majority of the top 7 most conferred bachelor’s degrees (health, psychology, education, biology, visual/performing arts, communication and English) and a slight minority in business (48%) and social sciences (49%). Men earned a solid majority in only one degree – engineering. And yet which of the gender [sic] imbalances gets all of the attention?”
WOMEN WHO ‘LEAN IN’ often soon leave engineering careers. “‘Current women engineers become a flight risk when they experience a career plateau with few advancement opportunities, poor treatment by managers and co-workers and a culture that stresses taking work home or working on weekends with no support for managing multiple life roles,’ Fouad said.” In other words, they aren’t mollycoddled. Cry me a river.
W.F. PRICE: The Myth of the Empowered Working Class Single Mother.
Back in the bad old days, women had two realistic choices when they got pregnant out of wedlock: marriage or adoption. The alternative – becoming a “single mom” – was not generally supported by parents, and for good reason — they usually ended up paying for it. But there has been a new development since then: a huge, comprehensive welfare state. Instead of having to buy groceries for the child grandma can now be added to WIC checks, use the EBT and sign up for a childcare voucher. Yes, states will actually pay grandmothers, if they take a couple remedial classes, to watch their daughters’ kids. With a little planning, mother, daughter and grandmother can all get a piece of the pie. Carl, for his part, is eligible for nothing, although as non-custodial father he may well be forced to reimburse the state for paying his child’s grandmother…
This puts the women’s willingness to eject Carl from the situation in some perspective. Why share with him if they don’t have to and on top of that he can be forced to pay them? Lily has zero financial incentive to create a traditional family, and her mother – a so-called Christian – has an incentive to discourage her from doing so. It all sounds very trashy, and unfortunately it is, but before we lay all the blame on Lily and her mother, we must remember that highly-educated people from “good families” came up with the legislation that created these incentives.
BIOLOGICAL WARFARE OPPORTUNITY: Feds Bend CDC Rules For Sick Illegal Immigrants.
Individuals and families immigrating to the U.S. legally are required to pay for and undergo medical examinations by approved physicians; those who are deemed as having “inadmissible health-related conditions” are not allowed into the country. But the same standards are not applied to illegal immigrants, many of whom remain in the U.S. despite testing positive for diseases that would prevent law-abiding migrants from entering. . . .
The CDC website also claims that tuberculosis (TB) is a “disease of public health significance” that “would cause an applicant to fail a medical examination or be inadmissible” to the U.S.
TB has also been identified within the illegal immigrant population; the TB-infected individuals remain in the U.S. and receive subsidized medical treatment.
In some cases, Border Patrol agents and other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) staff have contracted diseases from infected migrants.
THE GUTSY Ann Coulter.
Ann Coulter wrote a column raising hard questions about the sort of global philanthropy practiced by Dr. Kent Brantly, who went to Liberia to help and ended up contracting the Ebola virus and being flown home, together with his nurse, for treatment, at the cost to his charity of $2,000,000 and counting. This column has enraged many, including many of the evangelical Christians Coulter surely knows comprise a large percentage of her readers. But Coulter’s wondering why Dr. Brantly couldn’t serve Christ in America echoes Mother Teresa, who told a Milwaukee woman offering to volunteer in India “to do good in her own hometown, to find Calcutta in Milwaukee.”
I am quoting not Mother Teresa but Tom Fleming, who devotes chapter 3 of his excellent The Morality of Everyday Life to a critique of global philanthropy. Fleming states the problem succinctly: “Many people who actually prefer to live in a traditional society have nonetheless come to believe that life on the human scale might be selfish and immoral. Taking care of our families, doing our jobs well, giving alms to beggars, and being loyal to our friends is not enough. We are called upon to cultivate global awareness and to accept responsibility for the entire world.” Fleming proceeds to show how such “global awareness” can all too easily lead us astray, and notes that “the private efforts of charitable individuals in their own neighborhoods and cities will never attract newspaper headlines.” Fleming also reminds us that Thomas Aquinas wrote that “In what concerns nature we should love our kinsmen most, . . . and we are more closely bound to provide them with the necessities of life.”
The column in question: Ebola Doc’s Condition Downgraded To ‘idiotic’.
CHATEAU HEARTISTE: Beauty Is Objective, Fair-Skinned, And White-ish. “The first thing that jumps out at you is just how similar very beautiful women look. Beautiful women from all races resemble each other more than they resemble the uglies of their own races. The big wide-set eyes, the bright smiles, the good teeth, the high foreheads and cheekbones, the dainty noses…. it’s almost as if there’s a universal objective standard of beauty that exists in the world inhabited by humans!”
Perhaps the most interesting thing in this post is a link to a recent post by Peter Frost, “Perception of skin color in sub-Saharan Africa”:
Women are in fact lighter-skinned than men throughout the world . . . Girls become lighter-skinned than boys from puberty onward, apparently as part of sexual maturation. . . . This post-pubescent lightening correlates in girls with the post-pubescent thickening of subcutaneous fat . . . [and] with the digit ratio—a marker of the degree of prenatal estrogenization . . .
This sexual dimorphism is paralleled by a traditional tendency to associate women with the lighter end of the local spectrum of complexions. Hence, the ideal woman was said to be “white” in Europe and East Asia, “golden” in South-East Asia, and “red” in sub-Saharan Africa.
The term “red” may puzzle non-Africans. It actually means a reddish-brown-orange complexion, which is the lightest color that occurs locally in normal individuals.
UK: Navy commander stripped of post [and awarded another] over affair claims.
The first female commander of a frontline warship in the history of the Royal Navy has been stripped of her post amid allegations she had an affair with a shipmate.
The Royal Navy confirmed that Commander Sarah West had been “removed from command”, but said she would remain in the service and be reappointed to another post.
If she didn’t do it, why remove her from command? And if she did do it, why appoint her to another post?
The first female commander of a frontline warship in the history of the Royal Navy
Oh, okay.
TAR, FEATHERS: Sober driver arrested for DUI when deputy blows through stop sign, hits her.
Officers arrested Weyker and initially accused her of five charges, including drunk driving causing injury.
The deput[y’s] report stated he stopped at the sign and then pulled out into the street.
However, a surveillance camera showed his car rolling through the stop sign without stopping.
According to WITI, that didn’t stop the county from sending threatening letters saying it would take legal action if Weyker didn’t pay for the damages.
Months later, tests results showed Weyker was sober during the accident.
But . . . she still faced charges.
Prosecutors didn’t drop charges until the deputy gave statements contradicting his original story another five months later.