CHATEAU HEARTISTE: The Project To Feminize Western Men And Masculinize Western Women.
What else do our present and future masculine women offer? Shrieking feminist agit-prop. Wall to wall lies to deny sex differences. “Art” made from menstrual blood. Pussy riots. Delayed childbirth. Women breaking their bodies competing in high-impact sports traditionally dominated by men. And, in a final middle finger to the god of biomechanics, a simultaneous war to feminize men so that women’s descent to maleness can proceed unhindered.
That last part is happening too, in case you were wondering. I could show you a pic of John Scalzi as proof and call it a day, but as demonstrated by the CH links above there is similar data-rich evidence piling up that something weird and disconcerting is happening to Western men to turn them into mewling manboobs, overweight male feminists, slope-shouldered hipsters, and huge beta sycophants. Although it isn’t (yet) making the nightly news, far-flung quarters are beginning to pick up on the CH-identified disturbing inversion of men to a physical and psychological female form.
NOTHING’S GONNA EVER KEEP YOU DOWN: Boy genius placed in special ed classes by school, now on course to graduate college at 14-years-old.
Jacob was not thriving in special ed classes. He kept turning deeper into himself and was uncommunicative with other people. His doctors prescribed medical treatment for the boy. When he wasn’t in therapy though, his mother noticed him doing amazing things. “He would create maps all over our floor using Q-tips. They would be maps of places we’ve visited and he would memorize every street.”
Jake dropped out of elementary school in the 5th grade. His incredible memory allowed him to attend university classes after he learned all of high school math in two weeks. Now he’s on track to graduate from college at age 14 and working on theories to build on Einstein’s theory of relativity.
REAL BEAUTY.
MATT BRIGGS: Researchers Claim Gays Who Face Prejudice Live Shorter Lives.
Next came the magic—I mean the trick. The “anti-gay” measure was averaged across people who lived in the GSS’s “primary sampling units” (PSUs), which are cities or—God help us—”‘life space[s]‘ where individuals live, work, and play.” Then that average was assigned to each “sexual minority” who lived in the PSU.
Now a critic might say averaging these questions across “life spaces” has nothing to do with the health of men who want to have sex with other men (and likewise for women), especially as (it will turn out) Hatz admits that HIV/AIDS might account for the results. That critic would be right. But that critic would not find a job in a university as a “researcher”.
AUSTRALIA: Mum’s boyfriend – the worst sexual risk to children. But the official statistics down under hide this.
We are regularly exposed to sad news stories of children battered by men passing through the lives of sole mothers. What we rarely hear about is the increased risk of sexual abuse by men who lack the constraints that protect most children from incest. That risk is spelt out in great detail in a new research report by the Centre for Independent Studies. Research fellow Jeremy Sammut cites reviews of more than 70 research reports providing overwhelming evidence that girls living in non-traditional families are sexually abused by ”stepfathers” – partners of their single, remarried or repartnered mothers – at many times the rate of abuse by biological fathers.
One such study, the 2010 US Fourth National Incidence Study of Abuse and Neglect, found that children whose single parent had a partner in the home were 20 times more likely to be sexually abused than those in a two-biological-parent family.
Step and single-parent families accounted for only one-third of all children in the US, but more than two-thirds of all children who experienced child sexual abuse. There is research from Britain and many other countries showing similar results. Sammut is rightly critical of the fact that in Australia we are denied the statistics likely to show comparable patterns.
Data on child abuse published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare fail to distinguish between fathers and ”stepfathers”.
Sammut argues this reluctance to publish relevant statistics is because of politically correct attitudes towards family diversity – ”namely the fiction that the traditional family is just one amongst many equally worthy family forms”.
HINT: THEY’RE “ANTI-SCIENCE.” The 6 political groups least likely to believe that astrology is scientific.
Earlier: Did people confuse ‘astronomy’ with ‘astrology’ in the NSF study?
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Training For Gains: High Intensity, Low Volume Strength Gains Stick. Low Intensity, High Volume Gains Don’t, But They Come With Significant Improvements in Body Comp. “The actual intention of the researchers was not to compare the muscle and strength gains during the six-week training program, but their persistence. Accordingly, the all-important question was what would happen, when the subjects resumed their normal active, but not necessarily resistance trained lifestyle after a 2-week lay-off of any type of systematic (training stoppage).”
W.F. PRICE: Time to end Domestic Dispute Pretext for Police Assault, Murder.
Three policemen have been suspended pending investigation after Luis Rodriguez, a husband and father, was beaten to death in Moor, Oklahoma for trying to defuse a fight between his wife and daughter.
Nair Rodriguez told KWTV that incident started after she slapped her daughter Lunahi Rodriguez at the Warren Theater in Moore, Okla. early Saturday morning and then stormed away. Her husband, Luis Rodriguez, then chased after her into the theater’s parking lot, where he was confronted by police asking to see his information, the family said.
Nair and Lunahi said Luis tried to bypass the officers and stop his wife before she drove away in anger. That’s when the officers took him down and started beating him, according to the family. . . .
The policeman’s job is to apply force where directed to do so. If cops are told to shoot people for, say, public drunkenness, they will do so. If they are told, over and over again, to apply force to men who are “abusers” that’s what will happen.
VAWA ushered in not only a presumption that men are batterers until proven not to be in court, but a requirement that police apply force (make an arrest) in all cases where any suspicion exists at all — in other crimes an accusation or a simple suspicion would typically warrant further investigation prior to arrest. The police who killed Mr. Rodriguez were doing exactly what feminists have been demanding they do for over 20 years.
Procedures in the US in regards to domestic disputes are the most draconian on earth, and I’m not sure people who are presumably from Latin America would know about them. What would be seen as a simple family argument in all of the rest of the world often can and will become a police killing in America. Poor Luis Rodriguez had no idea that trying to smooth things out with his wife and daughter could get him beaten to death.
ROBERT OSCAR LOPEZ: Radical lesbian feminists are standing up to surrogacy and taking hard hits. “I knew that lesbian feminists would eventually not be able to stomach the misogyny of the surrogacy industry. Granted, not only gay males hire surrogate mothers, but they are the largest growth market for it, and their aggressive rationalization of surrogacy is particularly offensive since they define themselves as men who want children but don’t want women in their lives. (To them that’s immutable nature; but from a distance, it looks rather like masculine privilege.)”
DAVID HENDERSON: Why We Can’t Conclude that Obamacare Plus Subsidies are Good for Low-income People.
Assume that the federal government forces someone to buy a health insurance policy that is priced at $10,000 a year. Assume that the person’s income qualifies him and his family for a subsidy of $6,000 to buy that policy. The cost to him, therefore, is $4,000. If he values that policy at more than $4,000, he is better off. But if he values it at less than $4,000, he is worse off. . . .
Many factors contribute to making our hypothetical $10,000 policy worth much less. There are three main ones: (1) the ban on pricing for pre-existing conditions, (2) the ban on pricing a policy for a younger family at less than one third the price of a policy for an older family, and (3) required coverages that people must pay for in their insurance premium but that many people would value very little, if at all. . . .
All three factors can combine to make the value of the insurance policy well below its price. Let’s say that the family values the insurance at $3,500. That family is worse off because it is paying $4,000 net of the subsidy. The family can do a little better if one family member works less in order to increase the subsidy. But we cannot, like Krugman and Blinder, naively conclude from the fact that a family member chooses to work less that the family is definitely better off. All we know is that the government dealt the family a hand that could be very bad. The family has no choice but to play the hand it was dealt. By working less, the family makes the hand less bad. But we can’t say for sure that the hand is good.
DIVERSITY AS CONFORMITY: The War on Truth.
The diversity kingpins aim for group representation in all academic fields based on a group’s numbers in the student population, and in America (eventually the world) at large. But why would anyone suspect that both sexes and all races and nationalities have approximately the same skills at everything? And the same interests in everything? And the same physical qualifications for everything? Doesn’t diversity imply (for lack of a better term) diversity?
No!—and that’s the best thing about the diversity crusade. It is actually an anti-diversity crusade, waged by people who detest diversity. Its goal is to suppress diversity of every sort. Yale women must behave just like Yale men: must major in the same things at the same rates, go out for sports in the same numbers, get the same jobs, make the same money, care to the same extent in the same way about children, family, money, power, sex, and everything else. So why are there “Women’s Studies” departments? Because (dammit!) women and men are totally different! So why is there a diversity campaign? Because women and men are exactly the same!
FAKE AND INACCURATE: ‘The Noble Lie’ strikes again.
I must have turned off my hoax-dar (aka TweetDeck) because I missed this story about two gay dads who supposedly received an RSVP to their kid’s party from a parent who didn’t want her daughter exposed to the “gay lifestyle”. . . .
And completely unsurprisingly, the whole thing was faked by the two radio DJs who said that they merely wanted to have discourse on the topic of homophobia.
Mike Gannon offers a good treatment at Pocket Full of Liberty of the history of this lefty tactic which has been well-documented over the past couple of years.
ANSWER: PROBABLY NOT. Did people confuse ‘astronomy’ with ‘astrology’ in the NSF study? “I followed up Landers’ small study with one of my own, trying to correct for some of the deficiencies in his study. In my sample of 108 respondents, the evidence suggests that probably only one of the 108 respondents was confusing astronomy for astrology. Given that, I would say that there is no reason to believe that the results of the NSF/GSS study reflect a substantial conflation of astrology with astronomy.”
Earlier: The 7 political groups most likely to believe in astrology.
JOHN KERRY’S remarks on climate change. “The science of climate change is leaping out at us like a scene from a 3D movie. It’s warning us; it’s compelling us to act. And let there be no doubt in anybody’s mind that the science is absolutely certain.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Is it physically possible for a man to sire over 800 children? “Scientists created a computer simulation to determine how many times a day the 17th-century Moroccan Emperor Moulay Ismael would have had to have sex to have his reported brood of 888 kids. Accounting for factors ranging from sperm aging and ovulation to Moulay falling in love and having favorites, they found that the Emperor needed to get frisky 1-2 times a day and have a harem of at least 65 women to achieve his plentiful progeny.” Nerds.
INTERESTING: The “Law of the Land” Clause of Magna Carta, the Supremacy Clause, and Judicial Review.
Most of the scholarship on the original understanding of the Supremacy Clause focuses on the word “Supreme” or “in pursuance of.”
However, the debates around the constitutional convention with respect to the Supremacy Clause were grounded in terms of judicial review. This provision of the Constitution was seen as a means to give the judiciary a negative on state laws that violated the national laws.
Alison LaCroix, in a fascinating article on the Supremacy Clause, traces its history in 1787. The Supremacy Clause was born out of the rejection of a proposal that would give the Congress a negative on state laws passed in violation of the Constitution. Instead, they turned to the Supremacy Clause to give this power to the judiciary.
NO RIGHTS FOR THE ACCUSED: Why Have a Hearing? Just Expel Him.
“Why could we not expel a student based on an allegation?” That astonishing question was posed at a conference on how colleges respond to sexual assault issues by Amanda Childress, Sexual Assault Awareness Program coordinator at Dartmouth. According to Inside Higher Ed, Childress continued: “It seems to me that we value fair and equitable processes more than we value the safety of our students. And higher education is not a right. Safety is a right. Higher education is a privilege.”
Give Childress credit for candor–even the campus spokespersons for increasing the number of guilty findings in campus tribunals usually aren’t so bald in their disdain for basic principles of due process.
Childress’ jarring remarks coincided with news that Dartmouth had promoted her, and given her additional power over the college’s sexual assault policies.
Institutions should be free to determine who can enter and who can stay, and under what circumstances. But men should take notice that they aren’t welcome, and then act accordingly. And they should reconsider whether they want such institutions to receive public money.
DAVID KOPEL: Growth chart of right to carry.
THE LONG ARM OF BAD POLICY: 1920 maritime law holding up crucial salt supply for New Jersey highways. “But getting the shipment to Port Newark has been frustratingly slow because of the state’s inability so far to obtain a federal waiver of the 1920 Maritime Act, which requires that the shipment arrive on a vessel flying a U.S. flag.”
PUSHBACK: EU responds to Switzerland’s new immigration limit. “The European Union has indefinitely suspended negotiations with the Swiss about their participation in two research programs in the first indication of souring relations following a Swiss referendum seeking to cap immigration.”
WOULDN’T YOU? Germany Considers Counterespionage Against US.
YOU REALLY DO GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR: White House report says $763 billion stimulus was free.
WHEN FASHION TRUMPS DIVINE LAW: Christians embracing premarital sex, despite increased risk of divorce. “Now despite studies supporting the Biblical prohibition on premarital sex, Christians are actually embracing it. Why is that? Well, church pastors are very, very set in the idea that the Bible is assumed to be inerrant in church, and they feel that supporting what the Bible says with actual evidence is ‘putting evidence at the same level as the Bible’. That’s their approach – don’t confirm the Bible with evidence, just tell people to assume that the Bible is true, and tell them to believe it, in the face of mounting culture pressure, secular policies and a resurgence of atheism.”
JAMES SCHNEIDER: Rent Control Devalues the Whole Neighborhood. “A home’s value is not just determined by its own condition, but also by the attributes of the entire community. If your neighbor’s landlord lets his building fall into disrepair, it might negatively effect you. Over time, rent control can gradually make the neighborhood a less appealing place to live. This impact will be magnified to the extent that higher income neighbors are themselves an amenity. A forthcoming JPE piece quantifies how rent control reduces the property values of not just controlled properties but surrounding properties as well. It does this by studying what happened in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after the state legislature suddenly eliminated rent control in 1995.”
IT’S ENCOURAGING TO SEE THIS IN A CATHOLIC PUBLICATION: When Policy Choices Become Moral Mandates.
Policies cannot be made synonymous with a moral principle itself, or held to be essential to achieving it.
This confusion was made manifest right in the title of the Catholic press article, which was from the Catholic News Service and appeared in my diocesan newspaper: “Calls to Hike Minimum Wage Echo Long-Standing Catholic Social Teaching.” A Fordham University professor was quoted as suggesting that Catholics have to support a minimum wage increase. In truth, nowhere in the papal social encyclicals does it say that laws mandating a minimum wage are morally required. . . .
One of the problems of Catholic activists and even spokesmen for the Church in the U.S. who promote something like minimum wage laws is that they seem to grab for it just because “that’s what’s out there.” They also have bought into the standard American mentality—especially pronounced on the left, of course—that there’s always a legislative solution to a problem. The issue is compounded here because they haven’t even defined sufficiently the problem they are trying to solve (as the article’s statements about poverty make clear). Indeed, if addressing poverty is what’s important, why did the article say nothing about the problems of single parenthood, illegitimacy, and family breakdown (that is, issues involving personal conduct)—which are major contributing factors to poverty? Before being so ready to embrace a legislative solution, did they reflect about the greatest example of a programmatic failure to solve the poverty problem, LBJ’s “War on Poverty” whose fiftieth anniversary we’re now celebrating? Do they devote any effort to other ways to build up what might be called a “just-wage culture,” such as by actively promoting sound business ethics?
NOT OVER YET? VW workers reject the UAW: Here’s what it means … and what’s next.
UAW officials suggested on Friday evening that the union is considering a legal challenge to the election. UAW President Bob King said he was “outraged” by statements made by Tennessee Republican politicians in the days before the election. . . . King implied that such comments amounted to unlawful threats under federal labor law.
The UAW’s indication that it may challenge the election raises novel issues under federal labor law. VW promptly management repudiated Corker’s statement and had earlier signed an agreement with the UAW to remain neutral during the election campaign. Federal labor law provides that unlawful threats and promises made by third parties during an election campaign can be attributed to either an employer or a union under traditional principles of agency law. In addition to convincing the NLRB that the statement should be considered an unlawful threat (not a sure thing), the UAW would have to prove that Sen. Corker was acting on behalf of the company. This seems implausible, given VW’s publicly-stated positions. Moreover, Corker’s statements may well be immune from legal challenge under the US Constitution’s “Speech or Debate” clause, which shields lawmakers from litigation or even having to defend themselves, so long as they were engaged in “legislative activity.”
STEVE SAILER: Chua defends Noticing. Chua says, “Now we do state facts, and I think that’s what makes people uncomfortable. . . . Honestly, I think if we can’t just state a statistic without being accused of racism, then we are not going to be able to learn and make any improvement.”
If you defend noticing, prepare for trouble, because political correctness is a war on noticing.
JIM LINDGREN: The 7 political groups most likely to believe in astrology. “At the Demography of Diversity Project at Northwestern University, we took the same astrology data from the General Social Survey that NSF used and broke it down further by political party and liberal-conservative orientation. The results can be found in a brief report that I put up at the Social Science Research Network: ‘Who Believes That Astrology is Scientific?’“
VOX DAY: The truth about women in the military. Getting pregnant is incentivized.
The comment to which he refers is here.
NOT TO “REFORM” HIM, EVIDENTLY: Prison boss ‘had a two-year affair with Britain’s biggest gangster – in his own jail cell.
She claims it lasted two years and only ended when he was convicted of drugs smuggling and transferred to a prison on the mainland.
‘We had sex in his little cell most days,’ says Lisbon-born Ms Rodrigues. ‘Yes, it was insane but I was in love like never before, and I still am.
There were butterflies, feelings of intense excitement. I know what Curtis is, who he is, but love overrode everything.’ . . .
What was it that attracted this ‘middle-class girl from a respectable Lisbon family’ to a man who, among a litany of criminal acts, once kicked a fellow prisoner to death?
‘His charisma and charm,’ she says without hesitation. ‘He’s an old fashioned gentleman.’
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
SAY HELLO to Breitbart London and Breitbart Texas. “James Delingpole, formerly of the Daily Telegraph, and Raheem Kassam, from TrendingCentral.com, will lead Breitbart London, which will have a staff of 10 with 100 contributors already lined up to grow the site. Breitbart’s Brandon Darby will lead Breitbart Texas with a team of contributors that will cover immigration, crony capitalism, education, business, and the the impact the Tea Party is having in Texas politics.”
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The Hillary Papers and the Death of the Mainstream Media. I wouldn’t say “death.” They’re unreliable, incompetent, and gullible, but still very much alive.
That a conservative online newspaper could have understood the significance of the archive, and actually examined its public contents, seemed too much an embarrassment for the staffs of the major newspapers and networks and magazines to bear. By being the first to report on the papers, the Free Beacon exposed the inanity and irrelevance of the mainstream media. We beat them. And they are sore losers.
The very fact that the story appeared on the Free Beacon prompted journalists to append elaborate, silly, and inaccurate qualifiers to their reporting on our findings. In various outlets the WFB was called “relatively obscure,” “conservative,” “ultra-conservative,” and an “anti-Clinton website,” in order to make it easier for liberals to dismiss the story altogether. The case of CNN is demonstrative. The network wrote that a “conservative website”—guilty as charged—was “claiming” to have found documents shedding new light on Hillary Clinton’s years as first lady. “Claim” was an unusual choice of words, since the documents in the story were all on FreeBeacon.com. . . .
Even as some of the most prominent correspondents in America publicly stated that the story was beneath contempt and unworthy of notice, reporters and producers were booking flights to Fayetteville to see what else they could find inside the Diane Blair archive. Suddenly CNN, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, ABC, and others were devoting manpower and work hours and financial resources to cover a story they had neglected for years, all in the hopes that the supposed partisanship of the Free Beacon had led us to overlook some crucial element of the narrative, some nugget that would reveal Hillary Clinton as the saintly and courageous Tiger Mother of liberal dreams. And what have these crack reporters found that wasn’t covered in Goodman’s original report? “The former first lady coped with severe back pain from wearing heels,” says CNN. Stop. The. Presses.
The Girlguiding movement has released a statement maintaining its commitment to having “one Promise for all”, but said that new Girl Guides with a faith would be able to say the new secular promise with the addition of the phrase “In the presence of God I make my Guide promise”.
Last year, Girlguiding UK decided to replace the pledge “to do my best and to love God”, which had been in the promise since the organisation was set up over a hundred years ago with an entirely secular promise. . . .
However, Girlguiding added: “To be clear, this is not an alternative Promise or additional line within the Promise. Rather it is a distinct personal statement, separate to our Promise. This approach maintains one Promise for all within Girlguiding.”
In other words, the organization wholly disavows God.
Earlier: Girl Guides Organization Threatens Expulsion After Chapter Refuses to Omit ‘God’ From Oath.
THE NEW TOLERANCE: Mexico conference on overcoming same-sex attractions finds new venue after harassment from homosexual activists.
It was cancelled because, according to Cohen, “the parents and students of the Labastida School were repeatedly harassed by gay and lesbian activists when coming in and out of the school.”
“The school was traumatized by the constant harassment so they had to cancel my conference,” he said to a local newspaper.
YOU LIE: Obamacare Recruiting Illegals in California.
Covered California–the flagship of state Obamacare exchanges–is recruiting illegal (“undocumented”) immigrants to sign up for the program, regardless of their eligibility.
The Covered California website includes a special page entitled: “No temas si eres indocumentado/a y quieres inscribir a tu familia en un seguro médico” (“Fear not if you are undocumented and want to enroll your family in health insurance”). The website goes on to explain that information shared with Obamacare cannot be shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It does not explicitly warn that illegal aliens are ineligible.
HOMOSEXUAL ACTIVISTS LIKE BIG GOVERNMENT, EVIDENTLY: Gay D.C. Libertarian Mayoral Candidate Slammed by GLAA [Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance] for Supporting Limited Government.
Majors responded to the GLAA Questionnaire for D.C. Candidates. GLAA assigns ratings to candidates based on how supportive they are of government funding of their special interests agenda. A score of +10 is considered the highest possible rating.
Majors received the lowest rating of all the mayoral candidates, a +2, and the explanation for his rating is as follows:
Libertarian candidate Bruce Majors (+2) has an unusual response to many of questions. His and his party’s ideological distrust of government is at odds with policies and reforms favored by GLAA. Consequently, many of his responses were interpreted as non-responsive or negative.
Earlier: Walter Block: Feminists are not libertarians, neither are gays. “Nowadays, the gays do not limit themselves to upholding their (and by extension, everyone else’s) rights. Now, of late, they have been insisting that other people, who do not appreciate their lifestyle, and who wish to have nothing to do with them, be forced, against their will, to engage in commercial activities with them.”
MATT BRIGGS: On Intelligence & Religiosity.
Write down the most intelligent people who have ever lived. Most brilliant in any field of endeavor, now. Who were the best of us? Make it at least twenty entries. . . .
Count how many in your tally have died in the last, say, fifty to one-hundred years. Anything more than about ten-percent proves you are a product of a stunted educational system and that your opinions about what follows aren’t worth diddly. You folks, wounded as you are, just sit back and listen. . . .
Now that that’s settled, time for the test. How many of your luminaries believed in God? That’s right: most, probably all. . . .
Far from being humbled by these observations, modern skeptics might claim, “Culture! These fellows existed in times where it was considered acceptable and normal to be believers. Thus they believed; why, they even used their intelligence to justify their believing.”
That so? Well, today many of the bright claim to be non-believers, and if the skeptic is right about people being at least partly a reflection of their culture, then non-believers are so because of culture. It’s cool to be a non-believer . . .
Enter the peer-reviewed paper “The Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity: A Meta-Analysis and Some Proposed Explanations” by Miron Zuckerman, Jordan Silberman, and Judith A. Hall in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review.
This was a “meta-analysis”, i.e. a disreputable conglomeration of other studies which hopes to prove what the individual studies could not. This meta-analysis “showed a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity.” They mean “significant” in the wee p-value sense and not in any real consequence. And by “association” they mean linear correlation, the weakest and least generalizable of all statistical measures.
The individual studies cobbled into one were extremely heterogeneous, too, using a wide range of “intelligence” measures: GPA, syllogism tests, “Immediate free recall” exams, Peabody picture tests, and on and on. How did the authors compensate for these differences? Answer: they did not.
THIS WILL GO WELL: NY State Lawmaker Wants Mandatory Parenting Workshops.
The bill has provoked a bit of a public outcry in recent weeks. Among the comments at the official state site: “How about letting us raise our own children?” “An insult and serves no purpose”; “Please keep your noses out of my home”; “The only people that will benefit from this are the ones who will charge for the classes.”
Who’d sponsor such a mind-bending assault on individual rights and the integrity of the family? The bill’s main sponsor is Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr. (D-South Bronx), with co-sponsorship from Sens. Adraino Espaillat (D-Washington Heights) and John Sampson (D-Brooklyn).
ANSWER: AT LEAST 3 PER DAY, PROBABLY MORE. Eggs and Cholesterol – How Many Eggs Can You Safely Eat? “A single medium sized egg contains 186 mg of cholesterol, which is 62% of the recommended daily intake. People believed that if you ate cholesterol, that it would raise cholesterol in the blood and contribute to heart disease. But it turns out that it isn’t that simple. The more you eat of cholesterol, the less your body produces instead.”
PAR FOR THE COURSE: Cosmetic tweaks to AR-15 thwart New York’s ‘ban’ on assault rifles.
“Believe it or not, if I had a hundred of [these] things to sell, they’d already be gone. I’m hoping to have them in my shop in the next two weeks,” Justin Reickart, who runs H&H Guns in southwestern New York, told FoxNews.com.
“We’ve already showed it to about a dozen people, just a picture of what it’s going to be, and the younger generation – they already love it. They’re like, it’s same gun, just with a sci-fi looking stock. The suggested retail price is going to be $1,050. Prior to the ban, you would have been able to buy the gun for $949 – so it adds $100, to make it New York compliant.”
FOLLOW THE MONEY: How Special-Interest Groups Benefit from Minimum Wage Laws.
If the price of ice cream was pushed up, earnings of ice cream producers might go up or down, depending on how much less was bought as a result. But producers of frozen yogurt, a substitute for ice cream, will definitely benefit, because a higher price of ice cream will increase demand for frozen yogurt, clearly benefiting its producers.
Similarly, increasing the minimum wage will raise the cost of hiring low-wage workers. And while it might actually hurt low-wage workers, it will help each substitute for low-wage labor by increasing its demand. Thus, the narrow self-interest of those offering substitutes for low-skill labor, rather than compassion for the working poor, may best explain support for higher minimum wages.
Unions top that list. . . .
Even Wal-Mart benefits from this effect. Because Wal-Mart already pays more than the federal minimum, in low-wage areas a federal minimum-wage increase raises competitors’ costs, but not theirs. In high-wage areas, supporting a higher federal minimum wage is a costless way for Wal-Mart to demonstrate compassion for workers.
FRANCIS BECKWITH: Why Privatizing Marriage Can’t Work.
Imagine, for example, as one of my former doctoral students once suggested in a dissertation that defended this idea of privatization, that marriage becomes exclusively the domain of “the church.” Suppose Bob and Mary, both devout Catholics, marry in the Church under the authority of canon law. Over the next decade, they have three children. Mary decides to leave the Church, however, to become a Unitarian and seeks to dissolve the marriage. Because the Church maintains that marriage is indissoluble, and Mary has no grounds for an annulment, the Church refuses her request.
Mary then seeks the counsel of her pastor at the Unitarian Church. She tells Mary that the Unitarian Church recognizes her marriage with Bob, but maintains that divorcing him is perfectly justified, since the Unitarian Church holds that incompatibility is a legitimate ground for divorce. So, Mary now requests a divorce from the Unitarian Church, and it is granted. The Church also grants her full custody of her children, since, according to Unitarian moral theology, what Bob teaches their children about contraception, abortion, and same-sex relations are “hate sins,” and thus is a form of child abuse.
So, who wins in this case? Suppose you say that because it was originally a Catholic marriage, it should remain so, even if Mary changes her religion. But who has the authority to enforce such a rule? The Catholic Church? The Unitarians? What if the Catholic Church agrees to it, but not the Unitarians? . . .
The only way to resolve these disputes is for the state to intervene. What to do with children, property, state residency, freedom of movement, etc. when marital relationships break down are public issues. They are not private ones. Consequently, in such a privatization of marriage scenario, the state would actually become more intrusive into ecclesial matters than it is at present.
NETFLIX Quietly Admits Verizon Isn’t Throttling Netflix Streams. “Granted no ‘evidence or belief’ doesn’t mean Verizon isn’t up to no good; the company has made an art form out of using bogus technical jargon to justify anti-competitive and closed behavior, especially on their wireless network. But the admission from Netflix (which sees a lot of the obfuscated peering data consumers don’t) at least suggests Netflix can’t prove it. It’s not like Netflix has any vested interest in lying for Verizon’s sake either; the company just got done threatening ISPs in an investor letter (pdf) that if ISPs were caught manipulating traffic anti-competitively, Netflix would ‘vigorously protest and encourage our members to demand the open Internet they are paying their ISP to deliver.'”
FATHERS MATTER for religious transmission.
Professor Bengtson also found that one parent matters more than the other — and it’s Dad. “But what is really interesting,” he writes, “is that, for religious transmission, having a close bond with one’s father matters even more than a close relationship with one’s mother.”
There are some interesting exceptions. Transmission of Judaism, for example, depends more on a close bond with one’s mother than with one’s father — perhaps because Judaism has traditionally held that the faith is inherited from the mother. Among Jews with a close maternal bond, 90 percent considered themselves Jewish, versus only 60 percent of those who weren’t close to their mothers.
In general, however, “fervent faith cannot compensate for a distant dad.” Over and over in interviews, Professor Bengtson said, he found that “a father who is an exemplar, a pillar of the church, but doesn’t provide warmth and affirmation to his kid does not have kids who follow him in his faith.”
Christians, if they actually care about handing on their faith, should take no-fault divorce seriously.
TEXAS: Abortionist temporarily loses license for performing 268 abortions without admitting privileges. “Dr. Theodore M. Herring Jr. of Houston continued to perform abortions despite not having the ability to admit patients to a hospital within 30 miles of his office, the Texas Department of State Health Services declared during an undercover inspection last December.”