NEWS YOU CAN USE: Vitamin C supplementation increases physical activity, decreases colds.
TOM JAMES on “best interest factors and the “approximation rule.” “A significant shortcoming of the Model Marriage and Divorce Act and ‘best interest factors’ statutes in general is that they provide no guidance about how the factors are to be applied in particular cases. That decision is simply left to each individual judge’s discretion. This defeats the goals of uniformity and predictability. It also leaves plenty of room for the continued operation of the subjective judgments of individual judges. A judge who wishes to award custody to the mother in every case can usually find at least one statutory ‘best interest’ factor in her favor, and then cite it as the basis for the decision. By the same token, a judge who is more critical of a mother than a father for pursuing a career instead of being a stay-at-home parent might be able to find at least one ‘best interest’ factor to support his decision to award custody to the father.”
BE SKEPTICAL: Billionaires try to convince Americans it’s good to import foreign workers, increase immigration.
How do you convince Americans that it’s good for us to import millions of new foreign workers? Create a media blitz based on slogans, misinformation, political theater and guilt. . . .
This well-funded megaphone parrots the mantra that immigration will “make the economy grow.” It’s technically accurate but disguises the real issue: Will immigration increase per-capita income? No. Lower wages transfer wealth from workers to employers and investors, the happy 1 percent.
Related: Germany, U.S., Spain: Unemployment and Immigration.
VOX DAY: Weaponizing girls.
It is apparent that the cunning plan of Western liberals to destroy the Dar al-Islam by pushing secularized Western education on Islamic women has been comprehended by the strategists of the global Caliphate. The jihadists are responding in two ways, by infiltrating and taking over educational facilities in the West and by destroying Western educational facilities in the South and East. . . .
Now liberals like Kristof are aghast at the fact that the very young women they intentionally turned into cultural weapons on behalf of their secular ideals are being targeted for enslavement and destruction. But what else did they expect? It would appear they were misled by the widespread failure of the Christians of the West to respond to the successful capture of their daughters by the secular establishment into thinking that the Muslims of the South and East would be similarly complacent.
MEGAN MCARDLE: Rape on Campus Belongs in the Courts.
Of course, no one enjoys testifying about an assault — but you are rarely asked to prove that you didn’t consent to being pummeled. The shame and horror of it keep many victims from coming forward or pressing charges.
It’s understandable, then, that many people want to loosen the standards for prosecuting rapes. This can’t be done in a criminal trial, but it can in a college judiciary hearing — and that’s just what the government, and not a few people on campus, has been pressing colleges to do.
Yet as understandable this instinct is, it’s wrong. No one accused of a serious crime should have his fate in the hands of a single investigator with a mandate to err on the side of believing the people who are testifying against him. In fact, colleges shouldn’t be handling this sort of thing at all. If a college wouldn’t conduct a murder trial, it shouldn’t be conducting rape trials, either. We certainly shouldn’t press them to punish these crimes because we can’t get a conviction in a court of law, as it sometimes seems is happening.
JANET BLOOMFIELD: I am now officially sick of rape culture bullsh*t.
“Yeah!” my other friend chimed in, “That happens a lot. Like girls dressing all slutty then getting drunk at frat parties…” . . .
How is it that rape culture zealots can, on one hand, insist that any woman who reports a sexual assault must be believed with no questions asked, but women who appear to have some knowledge of false accusations of rape are to be shouted down and not believed for one second? Do you trust young women to give honest accounts of their own experiences, or do you not? Or is the case that you only choose to believe what matches your pre-conceived ideas? . . .
In a few sentences, my friends had epitomized slut and victim shaming. In that moment, I felt enraged that my female friends had perpetuated rape culture.
Or, you know, they critiqued it in a way not consistent with your particular ideological stance, which is apparently forbidden? Refusing to toe the party line makes them stupid and incapable of understanding?
DANISH HISTORIAN LARS HEDEGAARD Reflects on Danish Resistance to Nazi Totalitarianism & Acquiescence to Totalitarian Islam.
We are told that this ideology of conquest is an enrichment and if something is an enrichment, you cannot get enough of it. Consequently our political and spiritual masters see to it that Islam’s influence grows by the day and fall over each other to comply with every demand raised by the prophet’s strongmen. While doing this, our masters accuse everyone who refuses to toe the line of being racists and Fascists. Why don’t we – all of us common people – turn our backs on political parties, politicians, intellectual icons, journalists and priests who endeavor to destroy our country? . . .
People think they can tame the beast by speaking nicely to it. They think they can save their skin by bowing their heads, singing the praise of multiculturalism, showing obeisance to barbarians – and delivering their countrymen to persecution. That may succeed for a time – until the day we realize that the Danish lion has been shot and its skin sold and that we shall never get our country or our freedom back. Look at what has happened wherever the prophet’s ideology has gained the upper hand. And ask the obvious question: What makes us believe that it will be different here?
MAYBE: Did the Vikings Travel to Madeira? “Dates for a sample of fossilized bone from a house mouse suggest that the rodents were carried to the island of Madeira by European colonists before 1036, or 400 earlier than previously thought. (The Portuguese took possession of Madeira in 1419.)”
THE WRONG STUFF: The Ed Dwight Story: John F. Kennedy’s Crusade to Find and Promote a “Negro Astronaut”.
The Kennedy Administration found their magic flying negro: the only problem was Dwight couldn’t pass the requirements to be an astronaut. From Phelps’s book, we learn Colonel Chuck Yeager was the one man who dared judge Ed Dwight by the content of his character instead of giving him an immediate, Kennedy Administration approved pass because of the advantageous color of his skin:
Meanwhile, Colonel Yeager’s dim view of Dwight’s abilities grew. Yeager later maintained that Dwight’s abilities were so lacking “we set up a special tutoring program to get him through the academics, as I recall, he lacked the engineering [background] that the other students had.”
Yeager further observes that Dwight worked hard, as did his tutors, but adds that “Dwight just couldn’t hack it… didn’t keep up in flying.” Yeager claims to have worked with Dwight on his flying, but he noted that “our students were flying at levels really beyond his experience. The only prejudice against Dwight,” Yeager recalls, wagging a literary finger,” was the conviction that he was not qualified to be in the school” in the first place. (p. 20)
For his trouble in not placing Dwight high enough in the training program, Yeager was called before multiple Civil Rights inquiries, who hounded him with a tenacity not seen until Eric “My People” Holder’s Department of Justice got a hold of George Zimmerman.
This isn’t a joke.
This happened.
One of the commenters has a good idea for the movie version.
USEFUL: JayMan’s Race, Inheritance, and IQ F.A.Q.
3. There can’t be races or racial differences because everyone knows serious human evolution stopped 50,000 years ago.
Not true. In reality, human evolution has accelerated during that time, especially during the last 10,000 years since the advent of agriculture. A simple look at the distribution of lactose intolerance is enough to disprove the idea that significant human evolution stopped in the distant past . . .
Physicist Gregory Cochran’s and anthropologist Henry Harpending’s 2009 book The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution details this. The advent of agriculture and the rise of states both greatly enhanced the rate of human evolution.
IF DNA IS JUST A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT, ANYTHING GOES: Millions of Americans changed their racial or ethnic identity from one census to the next. “‘Do Americans change their race? Yes, millions do,’ said study co-author Carolyn A. Liebler, a University of Minnesota sociologist who worked with Census Bureau researchers.”
Earlier: If We Can Pick Our Gender [sic], Can We Pick Our Age? Our Race?
ME, ME, ME: Female businessman gets emotional, leaves town, stops paying workers, and sinks two-thirds of a million dollars of investor capital. But it’s okay because she found herself, and that’s what truly matters. Here’s a selection of passages from her letter to her investors:
One day, a few weeks ago, an event happened (I’ll save the details of that for some other time.) Suddenly a torrent of emotions poured in. I was overwhelmed. I stayed home from work one day–my best friend Erica sent me some poetry, and I just cried. I wept. It felt like my soul was pouring out of me, one tear at a time.
I reeled from the onslaught of emotions for days . . .
That was Friday, April 25. Saturday morning, I woke up and bought a plane ticket to Boulder, CO for six days. It was there that I would kill my company. But at that point, I didn’t know that. All I knew was that I had to leave. I had to get away. Something was so profoundly broken in my life–something I knew I couldn’t see without the perspective that leaving my home in Austin, TX would show me. . . .
Today is my fourth day in Boulder, and I have not stopped crying. Yesterday, our largest customer, representing 22% of our revenue for Whoosh Traffic, cancelled. Because of their cancellation, we could no longer make payroll next week. . . .
Today I write this, still in Boulder, still reeling emotionally from the large volume of changes in my life in the past week. I write this humbly, with a complete lack of ego. My business failed and it took my savings, and $640,000 of investor capital on top of that, with it.
But at least she learned her lesson, right? Wrong:
Am I upset that I lost my investors’ money? Only in the sense that many of our investors were my friends and I didn’t want to disappoint them. But the me coming out from this hurricane of chaos is a much stronger me, able to acknowledge the mistakes I’ve made, able to open up and be emotionally raw with my friends and my team–qualities that every great leader must possess.
This is what puts one on the path to success–true, authentic success with deep happiness and fulfillment.
And the punchline:
As more women enter our workforce, and we as female leaders struggle to find our voices and our innate leadership qualities, we must not forget that the feminine side of ourselves is not a weakness. It is, in fact, our greatest strength as the leaders of this world. We are vulnerable, and we are beautiful, and that’s not just okay–it’s needed in our society.
UPDATE: Perhaps this was to be expected.
WHAT A TOOL: My Wife Has Tattoos: Marriage, New Birth, and the Gospel.
I never dreamed that I would sit on a couch with my future wife in pre-marital counseling listening to her cry and tell stories of drunken nights, listing the drugs she used, confessing mistakes made in past relationships. . . .
I do not deserve the precious gift she is to me. . . .
I don’t deserve to marry someone like her.
It’s one thing for someone to be forgiven, and quite another for someone to be marriage material. Statistically, this is a divorce waiting to happen: “The divorce rate is nearly 50% for women who had only one pre‐marital partner and if that partner did not develop into her husband.”
MANDATORY PILGRIMAGE: New FBI agents to visit MLK Memorial. “Director James Comey said Monday that all new agents will now be required to visit the Martin Luther King Memorial as a ‘reminder … of the need for fidelity to the rule of law.'” But no visit to Ruby Ridge?
HARVARD: Kennedy School Students Call for Training To Combat Privilege in Classroom. If they really want to combat privilege, maybe they should all drop out and apply to community college.
For Michelle A. Millar, a first year student at the Kennedy School, the status quo limits the amount of unique voices in the classroom.
“We just can’t learn when we are only hearing from one side,” Millar said. “It’s hard to get that perspective if our professors aren’t trained to…make [classrooms] a safe place.”
Charles Murray remarks, “Harvard should call them Reeducation Camps and be done with it. The spinelessness of it all.”
SO HE IS A RACIST: Redick: Donald Sterling ‘Didn’t Want To Pay Me Because I Was White’.
NOT WELCOME: Sailors leaving Navy over stress on social issues, Top Gun instructor says.
“Sailors continue to cite the over-focus on social issues by senior leadership, above and beyond discussions on war fighting — a fact that demoralizes junior and mid-grade officers alike,” Cmdr. Snodgrass wrote this month on the U.S. Naval Institute website, an independent forum for active and retired sailors and Marines. . . .
“The U.S. Navy has a looming officer retention problem,” Cmdr. Snodgrass writes, adding there is an “erosion of trust in senior leadership.”
He says retention racked up its “worst year in history” for the special warfare community, including Navy SEALs, with a record number of lieutenants declining to stay.
Is it so hard for an article to link to the actual paper? (It’s also available as a PDF on Google Docs and Scribd.)
There is now a survey with which the author hopes to gather more information about officer retention.
LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE: The benefits of well educated baristas. “Let’s face it, modern college graduates have just left the greatest brainwashing system since the Communists invented the ‘re-education centers’ to set their enemies right. Do you really want those budding neo-Marxists to get on the first rung of the ladder of success?” Good point.
To both, the women of our modern feminist era are desperate to commit for life and honor traditional marriage vows, if only there were men fit to marry. . . .
As similar as the two sides are in assuring us that the horde of mothers who reject marriage aren’t really rejecting marriage, there are subtle differences in their arguments. . . .
While feminists celebrate the radical way we have reordered marriage and our society to make the explosion in unwed motherhood happen, family values leaders simply deny such a change occurred in the first place. . . .
What neither the feminists nor the family values proponents are willing to address is that the decision to move from a marriage based family structure was made in the US several decades ago. Prior to the 1960s unwed mothers could not count on child support or welfare. Most states had a patchwork of bastardy laws in place, but even here the laws varied and there was a clear stigma on illegitimacy.
THE FUTURE IS FULL OF REGRET: “Among women under 35, 47 percent have been tattooed, compared with 25 percent of men in that age group. “
STAY CLASSY: Maine Progressive Group Says Wheelchair-Bound Republican Has ‘No Spine’.
A progressive group in Maine has enraged supporters and opponents alike after it accused Republican lawmaker Dale Crafts of having “No Spine” and failing to “stand up” to the state’s governor.
Crafts has been bound to a wheelchair for 26 years as the result of a motorcycle accident.
NOT VIBRANT ENOUGH? US teachers nowhere as diverse as their students. Oh no, can’t have that.
Almost half the students attending public schools are minorities, yet fewer than 1 in 5 of their teachers is nonwhite.
New studies from the Center for American Progress and the National Education Association are calling attention to this “diversity gap” at elementary and secondary schools in the United States. The groups want more to be done to help teachers more accurately mirror the students in their classrooms.
So I’m sure that these groups are practically tripping over themselves to reduce the percentage of teachers that are female to more accurately reflect the sex ratio of students, then. After all, the ratio of female primary school teachers to male is over six to one.
It becomes easier for students to believe “when they can look and see someone who looks just like them, that they can relate to,” said Gilbert, a member of the NEA’s executive committee.
Sounds like an argument for homeschooling.
“Nothing can help motivate our students more than to see success standing right in front of them.”
Success for minorities = working a government job.
But really, doesn’t all of this just mean that white students should have white teachers and vibrant students should have vibrant teachers? Not quite:
More than minority students would benefit from a more diverse teacher corps, said Ulrich Boser, the author of the center’s report.
“Even in a place like North Dakota, where the students aren’t particularly diverse relative to the rest of the country, it’s important for our social fabric, for our sense as a nation, that students are engaging with people who think, talk and act differently than them but can also be just as effective at raising student achievement in the classroom,” he said.
So, white teachers for vibrant students is bad, but vibrant teachers for white students is good.
Note the identification of race with how people “think, talk, and act.” This is usually called racism. Now it’s called encouraging diversity. Race is only a difference in physical features, except when it isn’t.
As for having teachers who think differently, I’m sure that the Center for American Progress and the National Education Association will make known their opposition to the suspension of a teacher suspected of being a neo-Nazi. Isn’t it “important for our social fabric, for our sense as a nation, that students are engaging with” him?
IF I HAD A SON: Yet Another Brutal School Bus Beating – Yet Another School Bus Driver Who Does Nothing. “You guess the races.” They were just checking his privilege.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to win at rock-paper-scissors.
LET’S PUT LOIS LERNER IN CHARGE OF IT: Obama Administration Launches Plan To Make An “Internet ID” A Reality. “The following plan to implement an ‘Internet ID’ will initially only be rolled out as a pilot program in two states (Michigan and Pennsylvania), and will only deal with government services. That said, we can see where all of this is ultimately headed, and the program, called the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, should be monitored closely going forward.”
GOOD QUESTION: How did the SPLC get donor information at Stormfront? “How does SPLC know how much money Stormfront collects and from whom? Given what we know about how IRS employees leaked information on donors who supported California’s Prop 8, shouldn’t we be suspicious about this kind of scrutiny of donors? Such a suspicion is not about the content of one neo-Nazi site, but rather about the means by which this kind of investigation is carried out.”
VOX DAY on surviving a witchhunt. “Don’t think that you can reason your way out of it. Most people have the causality backwards. They think the purge is taking place due to whatever it is that they did or said. That’s not the case. It is taking place because of who you are and what you represent to them. The truth is that the faction behind your prospective purge already wanted you out and they are simply using the nominal reason given as an excuse to get rid of you.”
STUDY: The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge Old Assumptions. “We assessed 12-month prevalence and incidence data on sexual victimization in 5 federal surveys that the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted independently in 2010 through 2012. We used these data to examine the prevailing assumption that men rarely experience sexual victimization. We concluded that federal surveys detect a high prevalence of sexual victimization among men—in many circumstances similar to the prevalence found among women. We identified factors that perpetuate misperceptions about men’s sexual victimization: reliance on traditional gender stereotypes, outdated and inconsistent definitions, and methodological sampling biases that exclude inmates.”
Commentary: Women Rape Men A Lot More Than You Think.
An example Stemple provides for showing that women rape men a lot more often than you think is in a study of male juvenile offenders, who are often not included in studies regarding sexual assault.
Of the juveniles reporting staff sexual misconduct, 89 percent were boys reporting abuse by a female staff member. “In total, inmates reported an astronomical 900,000 incidents of sexual abuse,” the study adds.
Earlier: Claim: Female guards are prone to seduction, can’t be trusted.
Last year, the Department of Justice completed its study of sexual abuse in adult prisons and juvenile facilities. It wasn’t a happy time for feminists. The studies showed that most of the sexual abuse of inmates is committed by guards and most of that is committed by female guards. . . .
So, what to do? Well, if you’re Adèle Mercier, you simply drop all pretense of intellectual integrity and claim that, in the case of boys abused in juvenile facilities, “they were asking for it.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Beauty and brains go together.
One of the main reasons men go for hourglass-figured women is that they produce smart children. They do this because the configuration of fat that goes into the hourglass figure contains different kinds of fat; notably there’s more DHA, an omega-3 fat that is also important in brain function, in the fat of the outer thigh. And this checks out: Human subcutaneous adipose tissue shows site-specific differences in fatty acid composition. [PDF]
And are these women smarter and do they produce smarter children? Waist-hip ratio and cognitive ability: is gluteofemoral fat a privileged store of neurodevelopmental resources? . . .
And it also appears that hourglass-figured women have more feminine minds, and this may be due to those special stores of body fat: Mental State Attribution and Body Configuration in Women.
CHARLES MURRAY: Book Review: ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’ by Nicholas Wade.
The reigning intellectual orthodoxy is that race is a “social construct,” a cultural artifact without biological merit. . . .
The orthodoxy’s equivalent of the Nicene Creed has two scientific tenets. The first, promulgated by geneticist Richard Lewontin in “The Apportionment of Human Diversity” (1972), is that the races are so close to genetically identical that “racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.” The second, popularized by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, is that human evolution in everything but cosmetic differences stopped before humans left Africa, meaning that “human equality is a contingent fact of history,” as he put it in an essay of that title in 1984. . . .
Mr. Lewontin turns out to have been mistaken on several counts, but the most obvious is this: If he had been right, then genetic variations among humans would not naturally sort people into races and ethnicities. But, as Mr. Wade reports, that’s exactly what happens.. . .
Stephen Jay Gould’s assurance that significant evolution had stopped before humans left Africa has also proved to be wrong—not surprisingly, since it was so counterintuitive to begin with. Humans who left Africa moved into environments that introduced radically new selection pressures, such as lethally cold temperatures. Surely, one would think, important evolutionary adaptations followed. Modern genetic methods for tracking adaptations have established that they did. . . .
The genetic findings that Mr. Wade reports should, in a reasonable world, affect the way social scientists approach the most important topics about human societies. . . .
How long will it take them? In 1998, the biologist E.O. Wilson wrote a book, “Consilience,” predicting that the 21st century would see the integration of the social and biological sciences. He is surely right about the long run, but the signs for early progress are not good. “The Bell Curve,” which the late Richard J. Herrnstein and I published 20 years ago, should have made it easy for social scientists to acknowledge the role of cognitive ability in shaping class structure. It hasn’t. David Geary’s “Male/Female,” published 16 years ago, should have made it easy for them to acknowledge the different psychological and cognitive profiles of males and females. It hasn’t. Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate,” published 12 years ago, should have made it easy for them to acknowledge the role of human nature in explaining behavior. It hasn’t. Social scientists who associate themselves with any of those viewpoints must still expect professional isolation and stigma.
AND NOW, a word from the chronically offended.
According to Jenny Davis, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at James Madison University, use of the word “seminal” is “blatantly sexist” and “perpetuate[s] inequalities or marginalization.” . . .
The learned professor can’t resist telling us that, for her, the word conjures up a crude act of male masturbation: “It evokes (at least for me) the image of some dude splooging his ideas all over everything.”
PROBABLY SUICIDE: Fanfare about her Life, Silence about her Death. “Isn’t this the way it is with the celebration of women soldiers? We are told of the power and glory, but denied the tales of personal ruin, of which there will be many more. In other words, we are fed lies.”
Related: Portrait of a pioneer. “So, here is a thought: what if young women were encouraged to get married, bear children, and raise them instead of being encouraged to go to college, join the army, and commit suicide? Isn’t it at least possible that this might be a more functional basis for society?”
Earlier: Leader of failed all-female unit commits suicide; reason unknown.
HIV AND AIDS in the United States.
Teens and young adults continue to be at risk, with those under 35 accounting for 56% of new HIV infections in 2010 (those ages 13-24 accounted for 26% and those ages 25-34 accounted for 31%).4 Most young people are infected sexually.17 . . .
Younger MSM [“men who have sex with men”] (ages 13-24) [wait, 13-year-olds are “men”?] are at particular risk. In 2010, this group accounted for 1 in 5 (19%) of all new HIV infections and 30% of new infections among all MSM. Among Black MSM, this age group accounted for 45% of new infections.4
So of all new infections for people aged 13 to 24, over two-thirds are males infected by other males. I didn’t find, in my quick glance through a couple of cited sources, an age breakdown that identifies numbers for underage (not yet 18) males, though I did come across this: For males aged 13 to 19, 92.8% transmitted via “male-to-male sexual contact,” and another 2.1% via that and injection drug use. (See page 7 of CDC Slide Set: HIV Surveillance in Adolescents and Young Adults [PDF].) So, either the under-18 infection rate for males is extremely small and consists entirely of shared needles, or a considerable number of boys are being preyed upon by a very small percentage of the population as a whole, namely, homosexual males.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Earlier: Apple approves homosexual meetup app for users as young as 12.
MICHIGAN: SEIU Membership Drops 80 Percent After Dues Skim Ends.
More than 44,000 home-based caregivers no longer are part of the SEIU Healthcare Michigan, according to federal reports filed by the union.
The workers previously were forced to pay dues or fees to the SEIU after the union orchestrated a scheme that took money from the Medicaid checks of the people the workers were caring for in homes across the state. The “dues skim” ended in 2013, but not before the SEIU took more than $34 million from the elderly and disabled across the state. . . .
The dues skim scheme was created in 2005 when Jennifer Granholm was governor and incorporated the use of a dummy employer, the by-mail election, and assistance by some Republicans in the Legislature who did not act to end the scheme with legislation. The dues skim lasted from 2006 to early 2013. . . .
In addition, the SEIU, the international union behind the SEIU Healthcare Michigan, was fined almost $200,000 for concealing that it bankrolled Proposal 4 of 2012 — the failed ballot effort to lock the forced unionization of home-based caregivers into the state constitution. According to state officials, the penalty the SEIU was assessed for the campaign finance violations was the second largest in Michigan history.
Is “dues skim” a euphemism for “theft”?
DARRELL ISSA, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Lusitania carried munitions.
The German high command always maintained the steam liner, traveling between New York and Liverpool, was carrying explosives destined for the Western Front concealed as cheese or casks of beef. But ministers at the time rejected the claim and used the attack to whip up public anger against the Germans. ‘Take up the sword of justice – avenge the Lusitania’ read one famous poster. . . .
However, secret government documents released under the 30-year-rule this week reveal that the German claims may have been right all along. After salvage companies applied to raise the 790ft Cunard liner in 1982, the Government fired off warnings about danger to life, according to the National Archives documents. Officials feared attempts to survey the wreck would reveal an illegal stash of ammunition – discrediting one of the key reasons why the the Americans were dragged into the war. Files show that the Ministry of Defence even went as far as warning divers that the wreck could contain explosives. Foreign and Commonwealth Office files show that officials feared the controversy would ‘literally blow up on us’ denting Britain’s special relationship with the US.
WSJ: How the ‘Jesus’ Wife’ Hoax Fell Apart. “It is perhaps understandable that Ms. King would have been taken in when an anonymous owner presented her with some papyrus fragments for research. What is harder to understand was the rush by the media and others to embrace the idea that Jesus had a wife and that Christian beliefs have been mistaken for centuries.” Why is that hard to understand? It’s not as if the media are friends to traditional Christianity.
NBC seeks dismissal of Zimmerman suit over 911 tape edits. “For the broadcasts in which he’s depicted as volunteering racial information, the NBC filing argues that he is ‘unable to make the requisite showing that omission of the question resulted in a material change in the meaning of what he actually said.'”
DANIEL HANNAN: Britain has just witnessed a political arrest. Where is the liberal outrage?
Paul Weston, standing for election to the European Parliament (against me, as it happens, in the South East) was arrested in the middle of a speech on the steps of the Winchester Guildhall.
When such a thing happens in Burma or Belarus or Bahrain, we report it in suitably shocked tones. Yet here it is happening in Britain, without any discussions on the Today Programme, any Amnesty vigils, any complaints from Liberty. To repeat, a candidate was arrested for making a hustings speech. . . .Why should it fall to me to defend him? Where are the lion-hearted liberals who are so quick to denounce political arrests in distant dictatorships? I realise that “political arrest” is a strong phrase, but it’s hard to think of any other way to describe a candidate for public office being taken into police custody because of objections to the content of his pitch.
JONAH GOLDBERG: Nature Today Is Anything but ‘Natural’.
Native Americans . . . cultivated plants, cleared forests with extensive burning to boost the population of desired animals, and otherwise altered the landscape in ways that may have seemed natural to newcomers but were nonetheless profound. As biologist Charles Kay observes, “Native Americans were the ultimate keystone species, and their removal has completely altered ecosystems . . . throughout North America.”
Kay goes on to note that when we set aside a “wilderness” and then let “nature take its course,” we aren’t preserving “some remnant of the past.” We are instead creating “conditions that have not existed for the last 10,000 years.”
And even then, these supposedly wild places aren’t truly wild. That’s because to the extent they are preserved in their seemingly natural state, it is by humanity’s will. . . .
The wild environment isn’t just about trees and bears and other forms of charismatic mega flora and fauna. I heard Bill Gates on NPR the other day talking about the great strides his foundation has made against malaria and how we may be on the brink of actually eradicating polio forever. Diseases play a huge part of any natural ecosystem, and we’ve been trying to drive them to extinction for centuries.
In other words, we pick and choose all the time what should be “wild” and what shouldn’t.
LOSER DOESN’T PAY, UNFORTUNATELY: Jamaat ul-Fuqra Lawfare: Case Dismissed. “As reported here last month, the Muslims of America (a.k.a. Jamaat ul-Fuqra) sued Marty Mawyer and the Christian Action Network over Marty’s book Twilight in America. Marty had the temerity to investigate MOA and expose some of the details of their history and current activities in the United States, so the group unleashed its lawyers in an attempt to bankrupt CAN and put it out of business.”
Earlier: Muslims of America Wages Legal Jihad Against the Christian Action Network.
MARK PERRY: More on the White House claim that 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted while in college. “There are 22,329 female students at UM-Madison, and if 1 in 5 was sexually assaulted over four years, there would have to be 4,465 sexual assaults during that time period. Since there were only 137 sexual assaults reported at UW from 2009 to 2012, that would mean there would have to have been 4,328 unreported sexual assaults (3 every day) to get to the ‘1 in five’ claim over four years.”
If there really is that much rape at colleges, why do such institutions get so much taxpayer money? Stop subsidizing rape!
Earlier: Let’s talk about those sexual assault surveys that insist one-in-five college women are victimized.
YOU DON’T SAY: The battle over what constitutes sexual assault on college campuses is reaching new levels of absurdity. “Another colleague overheard our conversation and joined us. She, too, said what happened to the woman didn’t sound like rape—’Or if it is,’ she added, ‘I’ve been raped in every relationship I’ve ever been in.'”
That’s the idea.