WE LOOKED AT THE DATA: Support for affirmative action by race.
CANADA: House arrest and community service for woman who molested 11-year-old boy.
Ralph admitted to having sexual contact with the student on four or five occasions between 1998 and 2000, when the boy was between 11 and 13 years old. He was not her student at the time.
The sexual contact included kissing, touching, cuddling and oral sex. There was no sexual intercourse. . . .
Justice Selwyn Romilly said he was satisfied that Ralph does not pose a danger to the community — she has no previous criminal record, there is no evidence she has engaged in similar activity since the offence, her risk of reoffending is negligible and she has expressed genuine remorse.
“She is at a very different point in her life after a great deal of introspection and emotional growth,” Romilly said.
During the first 18 months of her sentence, Ralph will be under house arrest. For the remainder of her sentence, Ralph will be subject to a 4 p.m. to 9 a.m. curfew. She must perform 200 hours of community work service.
Lesson for child molesters: act sorry, and be a woman.
300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE “rewrites many of the facts.”
Themistocles, leader of the Greek fleet, . . . is no figurehead, but he fades in comparison with Artemisia. The historical Themistocles resembled a cross between Winston Churchill and Richard Nixon—heroic and cunning, a Machiavellian bulldog, with Lord Nelson’s audacity thrown in. But the film’s Themistocles can’t quite pull off a victory against the Persian fleet. In the big-screen telling of Salamis, another woman comes to the rescue: Gorgo, widow of Leonidas, the fallen king, who brings the Spartan fleet with her to polish off the enemy. Played by English actress Lena Headey, Gorgo is gorgeous but all business, a cold but still-inspiring leader. The real-life Gorgo stayed home; the celluloid version saves Greece.
Imagine a movie about Marie Curie in which the discovery of radium is passed on to a man. How would that go over?
AARON CLAREY: Words That Prove You Have a Worthless (and Likely Leftist) Job.
Initiatives – this is usually used in the public sector, mostly schools. It means to “initiate the creation of another program that is going to cost the taxpayer more money.” The goal of an “initiative” is that it hopefully goes from a program into a full fledged department. For example Michelle Obama would love it if her “initiatives” on obesity evolved into the US Department of Obesity.
Outreach – Usually associated with a program, “outreach” is just a euphemism for “paying unemployable college graduates to go and force something on society that nobody wants.” It belies the true suckiness of the program when you have to “outreach” to clients to get them. For example Obamacare has a lot of “outreach” because nobody wants it.
More at the link.
EUGENE VOLOKH: Belgium bans a wide range of sexist speech.
TYLER COWEN: Is age-adjusted divorce actually way up?
FOR THE LADIES: How Women Can Avoid Hitting The Wall.
Often what turns men off to older women isn’t just their body, but the bitterness causing all the lines in her face. It’s the time and stress that has eroded her femininity. The body is the physical representation of the mind. If you change who you are, you can become younger.
The women I know who’ve avoided hitting the wall have positive thoughts. They don’t complain about men. When you talk with them about the challenges men face, they are generally sympathetic and supportive. They see men as people who need love, rather than oppressive representatives of “the patriarchy.”
The woman I know who is hitting the wall is doing the opposite. As she gets older she complains more about men, and their unwillingness to settle down. She’s more interested in “women’s issues” and narratives that cast her as the victim. And she’s taken a odd interest in artisinal cupcakes (seriously), which isn’t helping her weight.
Patience Perez of Norfolk, Virginia was sentenced to two years in jail with all but seven months suspended. . . .
The judge told her she will have to register as a sex offender and stay away from her victim.
If she completes a counseling course she will not have to go to jail.
Perez still faces child sex charges in Virginia Beach and the victim’s mum said she hopes that court will not be as lenient.
‘I hope that that prosecutor cares more about my family than Norfolk did, ‘ The boy’s mother told News Channel 3.
Imagine how bad it’d be for her if she were ugly.
CHATEAU HEARTISTE: Robert Cialdini And The Triumph Of Game.
Cialdini was tapped [PDF], along with other renowned behavioral scientists, by the 2008 Obama campaign to help propel Obama to the highest office in the land.
Two weeks before Election Day, Barack Obama’s campaign was mobilizing millions of supporters; it was a bit late to start rewriting get-out-the-vote (GOTV) scripts. “BUT, BUT, BUT,” deputy field director Mike Moffo wrote to Obama’s GOTV operatives nationwide, “What if I told you a world-famous team of genius scientists, psychologists and economists wrote down the best techniques for GOTV scripting?!?! Would you be interested in at least taking a look? Of course you would!!”
Related: Can You Teach Charisma?
VOX DAY: Social change has consequences. The post is about British journalists filming children who are told to appear lost in order to see whether passers-by stop to help, and finding that only one out of 616 did.
One comment explains, “THIS is why no man stopped to help these girls.” It links to a few articles about an incident. The first reads,
Barnes & Noble has apologised to a 73-year-old man who was kicked out of one of its stores for browsing the children’s section on his own.
Dr. Omar Amin, from Scottsdale, Arizona, said he was asked to leave after a female shopper told a worker she felt uneasy about his presence.
But the man, who is a world-renowned researcher of infectious diseases, said he was buying books for his two grandchildren.
‘This is an insult to all men not just to me,’ Amin told Azfamily.com.
‘I left the store. I was upset like hell because I’ve been so insulted and humiliated in public for the charge of being a man.’
Imagine how much worse it would have been for him had he been seen talking to a child who looked lost.
STUDY: Coerced Sex Not Uncommon for Young Men, Teenage Boys.
A total of 43 percent of high school boys and young college men reported they had an unwanted sexual experience and of those, 95 percent said a female acquaintance was the aggressor, according to a study published online in the APA journal Psychology of Men and Masculinity. . . .
Of 284 U.S. high school and college students who responded to a survey about unwanted sexual encounters, 18 percent reported sexual coercion by physical force; 31 percent said they were verbally coerced; 26 percent described unwanted seduction by sexual behaviors; and 7 percent said they were compelled after being given alcohol or drugs, according to the study. Half of the students said they ended up having intercourse, 10 percent reported an attempt to have intercourse and 40 percent said the result was kissing or fondling. . . .
The study participants consisted of 54 high school teens and 230 college students, ages 14 to 26. High school students completed the surveys on paper in the classroom. College students completed them electronically or in the classroom. Among the high school students, 42 percent were white, 17 percent black, 15 percent Asian-American, 15 percent Latino and 11 percent multiracial. The college students were 46 percent white, 21 percent black, 18 percent Asian-American, 10 percent Latino and 5 percent multiracial.
Small sample. I wonder where these schools are. Moreover, lying on surveys isn’t unknown to young people. Still, it’s interesting that someone is even looking into this.
LEAN IN, DIE OFF: Burning Seed Corn. “According to Sylvia Ann Hewlett, writing in the Harvard Business Review, 33% of successful career women (business executives, doctors, lawyers, academics, etc) in the 41-55 age bracket are childless. In corporate America, 42%. I figure that the TFR [Total Fertility Rate] of this class is under 1.0.”
For anyone interested in who is reproducing (at least among American Whites), by IQ, by politics, and by education, see my review post here:
TYPICAL: Reuters news reporting unjust to man accused of sexual assault.
In a Reuters news report by Tom Ramstack about the court martial trial of a Midshipman, the story includes this sentence: “Reuters does not report the names of sexual assault victims.”
The story should have stated that “Reuters does not report the names of sexual assault accusers.” While the story elsewhere uses the word “alleged” in connection with the supposed sexual assault, Reuters needs to be consistent. By branding the accuser a “victim,” Reuters suggests — subtly or not so subtly — that the accused is guilty of sexual assault, and that is most unjust.
THE LOTTERY And Big Government’s Gambling Hypocrisy.
And does this money at least go to help schools, as proponents promised? Actually, the support for education is for the most part a total lie. The money is fungible, going toward roads and work projects, and even just back to the state general fund. And for many states, it’s not an insignificant percentage of their revenue. The reality today is that lotteries fund the growth of state budgets with tens of billions of dollars taken from the pockets of poor and working class people who don’t understand math, or who understand it but still throw their money away in pursuit of the gold at the end of the rainbow.
STUDY: Blacks with white friends are ‘less black’ according to other blacks.
When Washington, D.C., councilman and former Mayor Marion Barry this week said that whites need to be “more open-minded” about African-American politicians, claiming “blacks are more open-minded than” whites, he was suggesting that whites can’t do what blacks do — embrace the other race.
But a new study of 212 black college students made available to Secrets found little open-mindedness: Blacks don’t like it when other blacks associate with whites, to the point of refusing help to an African-American experiencing “a run of bad luck” — just because they have white friends.
The study in the April edition of the authoritative journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found the so-called “black code” alive and kicking, prompting blacks far more than whites to frown on one of their own if they associate with the other race.
STEVE SAILER: NYT: “When a Man Loves a Woman … It’s Diversity!”
Diversity doesn’t mean “diversity,” it means who is good and who is bad. The bad people can’t appeal to some technical mumbo-jumbo about what the word actually means. When we use a word, it means just what we choose it to mean — neither more nor less.
The question is, which is to be master — that’s all.
CATHY YOUNG: The ‘Ban Bossy’ campaign misfires. “Sandberg’s new campaign — ‘Ban Bossy’ — is a spectacular misfire that promises empowerment but promotes the worst stereotypes of feminism: victimhood and speech policing.”
JUDITH CURRY: More scientific mavericks needed. “In their drive to develop a consensus around dangerous anthropogenic climate change, establishment climate science has failed to take advantage of knowledge from the broader community of scientists. More seriously, the process of peer review for funding and journal publication torques research in a particular direction. Hence there is unfunded and un-proposed research that could provide serious challenges to the orthodoxy of dangerous anthropogenic climate change. This is not a healthy situation.”
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Word under active attack. “People using Word 2010 with Outlook should take immediate action, company warns.”
BEAR SIMULATOR is “like a mini Skyrim but you’re a bear”.
Related: Goat Simulator. “The gameplay hook is shamelessly pilfered from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater; as Ibrisagic put it, ‘instead of doing [skateboard] tricks, you get points for doing stupid stuff.'”
W.F. PRICE: The Murky World of Sex on Campus.
The LA Times published a correction yesterday to an article published late last year. In the article, which appeared on the front page, the LA Times reported that Occidental College did not disclose a number of sexual assault reports. . . .
So why weren’t these incidents disclosed? Because they were apparently not crimes, but rather accusations of sexual harassment, or they occurred some distance from the school. . . .
It turns out that alleging rape can result in a payout from the school. Media attention in these cases then becomes leverage for complainants in civil suits.
SINKHOLE OF BUREAUCRACY: Deep underground, federal employees process paperwork by hand in a long-outdated, inefficient system.
The employees here pass thousands of case files from cavern to cavern and then key in retirees’ personal data, one line at a time. They work underground not for secrecy but for space. The old mine’s tunnels have room for more than 28,000 file cabinets of paper records.
This odd place is an example of how hard it is to get a time-wasting bug out of a big bureaucratic system.
Held up by all that paper, work in the mine runs as slowly now as it did in 1977.
GROWING DAY BY DAY: List of Teachers Busted for Sex With Students. “How tailor made for sick pedophile women is teaching. Captured audience that churns each year. Authority through title. Teens are just picking up on when a woman is showing off her goods, and they have little control over their equipment and impulses. The teachers take classes on how to spot vulnerable kids going through tough home situations that are intended to help the kids. The school might identify troubled kids with an incoming class for the teacher-predator. A mind can formulate the nationwide or union-wide lawsuit, so we just need a perp count. These are just the women. Let us count them up, and if you know of any that I missed, please add them in the comments. I intend to update this as a database.”
Related: WND’s “big list.”
“THE TRIUMPH OF THEORY OVER REALITY”: NASA-Funded Mathematical Model Of Doom.
But when a result is based on a mathematical model—well! Just look at all those equations! Colorful graphs, too! We look at a paper written by mathematicians and think, “Anybody smart enough to go on and on about “dimensionless parameters” and “optimal depletion factors” must know what they’re talking about.” Right?
No, of course not.
All you need to understand about mathematical modeling is this: equations can be as error-free as Aristotelian syllogisms; nary a decimal out of place, but that does not imply that the use to which the equations are put is valid, or even sensible. Applying math to real life is not a mathematical operation, but a human act of interpretation.
IF I HAD A SON, he would look like JeNorman. “An 18-year-old boy has allegedly confessed to beating his grandmother to death with a baseball bat after she refused to give him a ride to the store.” Wait. If he’s 18, why use the word “boy”?
Or maybe he would look like Kahton.
IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM: Thieves steal section of fresco from Pompeii. “Officials from Pompeii’s archaeology service said the thieves chipped off a 20cm-wide section of fresco depicting the goddess Artemis from a site known as the House of Neptune and Amphitrite, which is not currently open to the public.”
CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: Britain’s female genital mutilation helpline receives an unexpected call. “A suspect contacted an FGM helpline to request the procedure for his two daughters after misunderstanding the purpose of the service for victims.”
FEMALE “EMPOWERMENT” A RAW DEAL? Freakonomics Radio transcript: Women Are Not Men. “What we know is the correlation is that over a time period where women have gained more autonomy, more financial power, more market power, more responsibility and power within their families that they have become less happy and men have become slightly happier. And so one possibility is that somehow this sort of revolution in our lives has actually benefited men more than it’s benefited women. And, you know, the comment that Steve Levitt made to us was, of course women have become less happy, they’re living their lives like men, and now they’re just as happy as men, which is not as happy.”
Related: Benevolent sexists happier.
ROBERT OSCAR LOPEZ: The Pederasty Problem with Gay Hookup Media. “It is important that the gay community acknowledge there is a problem, especially on phone applications . . . which allow gay men to signal their location and availability over their phone GPS systems. Minors get onto these application networks, and the result is that older men engage in pederasty, whether they intend to, or not.”
Earlier: Apple approves homosexual meetup app for users as young as 12.
SUNSHINE MARY: “The Story of My Wife” [or: how to be a sexually-revolting, female-worshiping, neutered Xtian man.] “No woman could watch her man act like this without her libido immediately packing its suitcase, exiting the building, and entering the witness protection relocation program, never to be seen or heard from again.”
UH OH: So Men Do Have a Biological Clock. “We’ve known for a while that fathers in their 40s pose an increased risk of conceiving children with birth defects, or passing down defective recessive genes through their children that are expressed in their grandchildren. Added to this knowledge are recent studies that have been finding problems aren’t just physical, but mental. A Malaysian study in 2011, and a just-released 2014 study from Sweden both found that older dads (i.e., age 40 or greater) conceived children who were several times more likely, even an order of magnitude more likely, to have various psychological disorders and mental illness. Unfortunately, when one considers the steadily rising average age of the Western mother, the burgeoning cohort of women who give birth after age 35 (14% in 2008, undoubtedly higher now), and that fathers are typically a few years older than mothers, it seems like a great many men, yours truly included, are conceiving children at age 40 and beyond, with a substantially higher risk of abnormalities, defects, and illnesses from advanced paternal age, if not maternal as well.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Impact of Weather on Women’s Tendency to Wear Red or Pink when at High Risk for Conception. “Women are particularly motivated to enhance their sexual attractiveness during their most fertile period, and men perceive shades of red, when associated with women, as sexually attractive. Building on this research, we recently found that women are more likely to wear reddish clothing when at peak fertility (Beall & Tracy, 2013), presumably as a way of increasing their attractiveness. . . . Results from re-analyses of our previously collected data and a new experiment support this account, by demonstrating that the link between fertility and red/pink dress emerges robustly in cold, but not warm, weather. Together, these findings suggest that the previously documented red-dress effect is moderated by current climate concerns, and provide further evidence that under certain circumstances red/pink dress is reliably associated with female fertility.”
HOW APPROPRIATE: Nancy Pelosi to Receive Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award.
TIM O’NEILL: Cartoons and Fables – How Cosmos Got the Story of Bruno Wrong. “The objective here was to make a point about free thought and dogmatism in the context of the culture wars in the US about Creationism. That Bruno was a believer in God was an idea that was repeated several times in the cartoon, even though he was actually more of a pantheist than anything. But he is depicted as an open-minded and unconstrained believer who is oppressed and finally killed by the forces of dogmatic literalism. The cartoon Bruno’s cry to the fruit-throwing Oxford scholars – ‘Your God is too small!’ – is actually the point of the whole parable. This entire sequence was aimed at the dogmatic literalists in the American culture war while still trying to appeal to believers, given the majority of the show’s American audience would have been theists. That’s the framework of this fable and the writers chopped up bits of the actual historical Bruno story and then clumsily forced them into this modern message.”
J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: PA Democrats Took Bribes to Oppose Voter ID.
Pennsylvania Democrats were caught on surveillance tape reportedly accepting cash bribes in return for opposing voter ID in the Pennsylvania legislature. Gifts of Tiffany’s jewelry were also given to Democrat legislators from Philadelphia, reportedly in exchange for “NO” votes on a Pennsylvania voter ID bill that passed in 2012.
Despite this evidence, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane has not charged any officials. Kane is a Democrat.
“A LARGE GROUP OF YOUTH”: Shots fired, large fights terrorize Kansas City Zoo goers. “Heckadon, who is a season ticket holder, said she had gone to the zoo with her 9-year-old son, a friend and her friend’s 10-year-old son. They were in the Africa section” — uh oh, dog whistle.
CAROLINE KITCHENS: It’s Time to End ‘Rape Culture’ Hysteria.
Though rape is certainly a serious problem, there’s no evidence that it’s considered a cultural norm. Twenty-first century America does not have a rape culture; what we have is an out-of-control lobby leading the public and our educational and political leaders down the wrong path. Rape culture theory is doing little to help victims, but its power to poison the minds of young women and lead to hostile environments for innocent males is immense.
On college campuses, obsession with eliminating “rape culture” has led to censorship and hysteria. . . . a growing number of young men find themselves charged with rape, named publicly, and brought before campus judicial panels informed by rape culture theory. In such courts, due process is practically non-existent: Guilty because accused.
Earlier, from the same author: Statistics Don’t Back Up Claims About ‘Rape Culture.’
Meanwhile, the actual “rape culture” of American prisons continues on without much public protest.
CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: France: Violent Muslims Claim ‘City Is Ours’ — or Else They Will Burn It Down.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Little-known applications of Vitamin C.
Here are some examples of gender [sic] imbalances favoring men, but in these cases I’m pretty sure we won’t be hearing any concerns from gender [sic] activists about the female under-representation in cases like this (or any concerns about the male over-representation!):
1. Of the inmates currently serving time in America’s federal prisons, 93.4% are male and only 6.6% are female, for a male-female ratio of 14.2-to-1.
2. In 2012, 4,667 people were killed in motorcycle accidents and 4,246 of those fatalities and 91% were men, for a male-female ratio of 10.1-to-1.
3. Of the 4,383 US workers killed on the job in 2012, more than 92% were men (4,045), for a male-female ratio of 12-to-1.