the Revision Division

ADAM J. MCLEOD: President Obama’s statements on the importance of fatherhood are undercut by his actual policies.

The social experiment of genderless parenting has failed. Extensive studies have affirmed that fathers are essential to the enterprise of parenting. And the costs of encouraging fatherless families have proven to be very high. So, the president’s enthusiasm for preaching the virtues and importance of fatherhood is an encouraging development.

Unfortunately, the president has undercut this message with his own policies. In particular, his expressed interest in fatherhood is difficult to reconcile with his administration’s attack on fatherhood during the last term of the Supreme Court of the United States. Perhaps no one in the administration appreciates that, when it successfully argued that the Court should redefine marriage in United States v. Windsor, the administration helped to eliminate the legal office of fatherhood from federal law. . . .

New York’s marriage statute, which the Obama administration celebrated and relied upon in the Windsor case, reads, “It is the intent of the legislature that the marriages of same-sex and different-sex couples be treated equally in all respects under the law.” This definition of same-sex “marriage” rests upon the definition of marriage as a one-man-one-woman union, the very definition that it eradicates and replaces. The resulting incoherence obscures the plain logic of the new definition of marriage—namely, that fathers and/or mothers are dispensable.

GAVIN MCINNES: Three TV Villains That the Audience Turned Into Heroes. “All in the Family, Family Ties, and Duck Dynasty were all created by liberal snobs to denigrate American values, and they all backfired.”

I GUESS SOME PEOPLE STILL BELIEVE THIS LIE: Columnist Robin Abcarian Falsely Implies IRS Targeted Progressive Groups and Tea Party Groups Equally.

Abcarian strongly implies that the Inspector General didn’t even look at the treatment of progressive groups. That is utterly and completely false, as you are about to see. I’m going to give Ms. Abcarian the benefit of the doubt and assume that she is not deliberately trying to mislead her readers.

But the problem, Ms. Abcarian, is that when you put ideological blinders on, you overlook holes in your analysis. Your passage above seems to equate the concept of “flagging” applications with the concept of those applications actually receiving extra scrutiny. Had you done a little extra research, you would have found out that there is more to it.

ACTON: What the Oregon Medicaid Study Tells Us About Big Government. “The most recent finding of the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment contradicts another Obamacare selling point. Among those who won the Medicaid lottery, investigators found “increases in emergency-department visits across a broad range of types of visits, conditions, and subgroups, including increases in visits for conditions that may be most readily treatable in primary care settings.” In other words, the free health insurance encouraged patients to visit the ER instead of the more-affordable doctor’s office.”

JILLIAN KAY MELCHIOR: The EPA’s Privacy Problem.

The data released included names of owners, addresses, global-positioning-system coordinates, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and, in some instances, notes on medical conditions and inheritances. Though environmental groups had requested information about “concentrated animal feeding operations” — “CAFOs” in the bureaucratic lingo, and “feedlots” in the vernacular — some of the information released clumped in data about crop farms, too.

Farm groups say the EPA violated farmers’ and ranchers’ privacy, increasing their risk of agro-terrorism as well as harassment or litigation from animal-rights and environmental activists. The EPA has admitted to having improperly released farmers’ data on two occasions, and has twice attempted to claw back those records.

TODD ZYWICKI: The Corporatist Legacy of the Auto Bailouts.

If success is measured by a $10 billion loss on a $49.5 billion investment [sic] in one case, and the control of one of the “Big Three” American automakers by Europeans in the other, one is left to wonder what an unsuccessful program would look like. (Oh yeah, right). On top of that, special tax treatment by the Obama Treasury Department saved GM billions of dollars in taxes that typically would be owed.

But despite the massive losses and the shrinking of the “Big Three” to the “Not-Quite-As-Big Two” American automakers, it is true that both General Motors and Chrysler have survived and returned to profitability. Moreover, the automotive industry as a whole has added hundreds of thousands of jobs since the depths of the recession. But is this because the taxpayer bailouts “saved” the American automotive industry? (Notably, the President no longer says that his administration “saved Detroit.”) Or did GM and Chrysler survive despite Washington’s meddling?

Looking at the actual record of the auto bailouts paints a different story from that told by the Administration. In particular, looking at the record, there is little evidence that the most controversial elements of the federal government’s intervention actually helped to reorganize the companies—and in the end had an overall net negative effect.

WALTER OLSON: The ACLU “evolves” on speech rights. “In McCullen v. Coakley, the Supreme Court will reconsider its 2000 decision in Hill v. Colorado, which upheld a law prohibiting (among other things) leafleting and some other forms of peaceful protest within 100 feet of an abortion facility. (Massachusetts in 2007 passed a similar law which is now under challenge.) Noted civil libertarian Floyd Abrams, writing in the WSJ, sees the case as a straightforward one of supporting free speech for a position with which he happens to disagree. But the ACLU, Abrams notes, has changed its position between the earlier case and this one, and in a speech-unfriendly direction.”

RELIGION OF PIECES: Muslim Persecution of Christians: October, 2013.

STUDY: At-Home Test Can Spot Early Alzheimer’s.

GOVERNMENT IS JUST A WORD FOR THE THINGS WE DO TOGETHER: Fast & Furious Was Part of a US-Drug Cartel Alliance? “The US government has had a relationship with Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel since the Clinton administration. That relationship/alliance was used to damage Mexico’s other drug cartels, but at a great price: Sinaloa alone imports about 80% of the illegal drugs that make their way to Chicago.” Turns out you don’t have to be part of a legal corporation to benefit from cronyism.

LABOR FORCE DROPOUTS are responsible for the decreasing official unemployment rate. “Yes, the unemployment rate has fallen significantly from its high of 10 percent in October of 2009. But it turns out the unemployment rate has been falling for a pretty depressing reason: people dropping out of the labor force. Last month, 347,000 workers dropped out, effectively sending the message that it wasn’t even worth looking for work anymore.” Click the link for the graph.

THE NBA IS A JOKE: Dwayne Wade Doesn’t Get Called for 7-Step Travel. How can a competition be legitimate when the rules are enforced so unequally?

WEALTH TRANSFER: 79% of new Obamacare enrollees get subsidies. “Most of the people who bought coverage on the exchanges this fall got subsidies to help them afford the premiums. That’s in contrast to the first month of the program, when less than one-third of buyers were subsidized. People earning up to four times the poverty rate—as much as $96,000 a year for a family of four—can get help buying coverage.”

CARRIE SEVERINO on the oral argument in NLRB v. Noel Canning. “The arguments seemed to be a decided success for those challenging the appointments. The justices across the board seemed to appreciate how ad hoc and self-serving the administration’s defense of its actions are. So I don’t expect this to be a 5–4 decision that gets invoked by liberals as evidence of a conservative bench and by conservatives as evidence of how politicized the liberal justices have become. The result could be unanimous or nearly so, although the reasoning could well be fractured.”

WALTER OLSON: DOJ: school discipline must follow disparate-impact standards.

The letter represents the culmination of a years-long drive toward imposing tighter Washington oversight on school discipline policies that result in “disparate impact” among racial or other groups. Policies that result in the suspension of differentially more minority kids, or special-ed kids, will now be suspect—even if the rate of underlying behavior is not in fact uniform among every group. . . .

In 2012 Senate testimony, Andrew Coulson noted: . . . Zero-tolerance policies were adopted in the first place in part as a way for administrators to try to defend themselves against disparate-impact charges. In other words, the new supposed remedy (disparate-impact scrutiny) helped cause the disease to which it is being promoted as the cure.

EUGENE VOLOKH: Proposed Virginia Criminal Ban on “Bullying”.

While the definition of “bullying” in the statute is drawn from a statute that is targeted at schoolchildren, nothing in the definition itself is limited to such children. And the statute that Del. Keam’s proposal would modify applies to everyone, not just adults. So it may well be that the proposal, if enacted, would also apply to speech about adults. If someone harshly criticizes — on a blog, or on one’s facebook page, or in a newspaper article posted online — a businessperson, a low-level government official, an academic, or anyone else in a way that is seen as “inten[ded] to … harass” and “humiliate,” is “repeated over time,” and “involves a real or perceived power imbalance between the aggressor or aggressors,” that too would be a crime.

This strikes me as unconstitutionally overbroad (even if limited to speech about schoolchildren), and extraordinarily vague.

ROBERT OSCAR LOPEZ: The Latest Attempt to Misconstrue Pope Francis Ends in Embarrassment for Same-Sex Parenting Advocates. “The November 29th statement was obviously a call to solve the ‘problem’ of suffering caused by same-sex parenting. The fact that one month later, the Pope was even more emphatic about preventing gay couples from adopting in Malta, shows that no rational person could take his November 29th statement as an endorsement of same-sex parenting. But the ligbitists [LGBTists] in the media tried their best anyway.”

ALL SHALL SUBMIT: Holder’s Lawless Action on Marriage in Utah.

Attorney General Eric Holder today declared that the federal government will recognize the supposed marriages of same-sex couples that occurred in Utah before the Supreme Court overturned federal district judge Robert J. Shelby’s wildly irresponsible failure to stay his judgment against Utah’s marriage laws. Holder’s statement mischaracterizes the Supreme Court’s order as an “administrative step.”

Worse, Holder wrongly invokes the Court’s anti-DOMA decision in Windsor v. United States to justify his action. But Windsor requires that the federal government treat as marriages those same-sex relationships that a state recognizes as marriages. It doesn’t call for the federal government to treat as marriages those same-sex relationships that the state in which the marriage supposedly took place does not recognize as marriages.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Improve the Sound of Your Voice.

For all of us, our best, strongest, most attractive and most natural voice comes from the diaphragm. A person who uses the diaphragm voice commands attention, “sounds” more attractive socially, and is more likely to be perceived as a promotable leader. The diaphragm voice is the best sounding voice for both women and men.

So, what can you do to access your most optimum voice? Here are a few suggestions.

NATURAL LIVING: Ancient hunter-gatherers had rotten teeth.

Scientists have long thought that tooth decay only became common in humans about 10,000 years ago, when we began farming – and eating starchy crops that fed sugar-loving bacteria on our teeth. But Isabelle De Groote of the Natural History Museum in London, UK, and her colleagues have found widespread tooth decay in hunter-gatherers that lived several thousand years before the origin of agriculture.

Her team analysed the remains of 52 adults who lived between 15,000 and 13,700 years ago, and who were buried together in a cave in Taforalt, Morocco. They found evidence of decay in more than half of the surviving teeth, a prevalence of dental disease comparable to that of modern, industrial societies with diets high in refined sugars. Only three skeletons at the site showed no signs of cavities.

Reminds me of atherosclerosis in ancient Egyptian mummies: “An examination of mummified bodies has revealed that ancient Egyptians suffered from hardening of the arteries in surprising frequency, suggesting that blame for heart disease extends beyond the modern culprits of smoking, fast food and the remote control.”

CAN YOU TRUST THEM? NO. What The Intelligence Community Doesn’t Get: Backdoor For ‘The Good Guys’ Is Always A Backdoor For The ‘Bad Guys’ As Well. “The surveillance apologists always claim that their goal is security. If so, they have a funny way of showing it. The ‘solution’ they’ve drummed up hasn’t made us any more secure… it’s made us less secure.”

SOBERING: How Child Support Enforcement Works.

The story was that some people – ghetto residents in particular – were irresponsibly having lots of children and leaving the rest of us to foot the bill. As usual, the politicians came up with a clever plan that would both protect their welfare recipient constituents and assuage the anger of the middle class. The idea was to not solve the problem, but to find someone to beat down so as to demonstrate their toughness, and grab some cash in the meanwhile.

The result was the Bradley amendment, which effectively resurrected slavery and debtors’ prison in the United States. A number of states immediately interpreted this as a way to seize as much income as possible from noncustodial parents – disproportionately working class and black men to begin with – and turn it over to states and counties for welfare expenditure. . . .

The idea was to increase state revenue by allowing state seizure of funds without traditional safeguards. This is why politicians loved it so much. Not only could they arbitrarily grab cash from men; they could sell it as a good deed! Hell, even the welfare attorneys loved it. They’re getting paid from state funds too, after all. . . .

However, not all funds are so easily taken as state lottery winnings. Sometimes, men keep cash, assets, private accounts and so on, and sometimes their loved ones have money. In this case, you’ve got to really twist their arms, and nothing does that better than threatening to throw them in county lockup. . . .

A recent Supreme Court decision – Turner v. Rogers – called this state of affairs into question. A man named Michael Turner, who had been in and out of jail on child support contempt cases for much of the last decade, argued that if he was going to be jailed, he should have the right to counsel. Ultimately, the court found that because it was a civil rather than criminal contempt case, Turner did not have the right to counsel, but to ensure that his 14th amendment rights weren’t violated states should adopt guidelines that prevent incarceration of men who do not have the ability to pay. . . .

However, this doesn’t mean that noncustodial parents are out of the woods yet. Not even close. Awards remain excessive, extortion by mothers using claims of physical and/or sexual abuse and other forms of slander/perjury is still a common tactic in the courtroom, and coercion is still the rule. Although contempt jailings are in decline, you can still easily end up in jail due to a license suspension.

WARREN MEYER: Inequality Metrics Exclude Effects of Government Actions to Reduce Inequality.

Earlier: It Is Not True That 15% Of Americans Live In Poverty. “The 15% number is not the number living in poverty. It is the number who would be living in poverty if it weren’t for all the money n’stuff we give to the poor. For when we calculate the poverty number we ignore almost all of what is done to alleviate poverty. We leave out all four of the largest anti-poverty programs in fact. . . . We could double the amount of money we spend to alleviate poverty and the number under the poverty line wouldn’t change by one single digit.”

ARE THEY RELIABLE? Let’s talk about those sexual assault surveys that insist one-in-five college women are victimized. “That rape surveys are unreliable can be inferred from the irrefutable fact that when rape claims are actually reported to police or campus authorities and subjected to competing claims of innocence, and where the evidence is actually examined, the majority of claims can’t be classified one way or the other as rape or non-rape, founded or unfounded, true or false. This is true even using the preponderance of the evidence standard, as shown on college campuses across the United States. (The research of Dr. David Lisak, well respected in the feminist community, actually supports this conclusion — when they are examined, most rape claims cannot be definitively classified as rape.) So why, on earth, do we assume that every assertion of rape posited in a survey should be regarded as an actual rape?”

Related: Rape: Why 1 in 4 is Wrong, which relies heavily (and justifiably so) on Christina Hoff Sommers’s article “Researching the ‘Rape Culture’ of America.”

Also: The Campus Rape Myth.

BUYER’S REMORSE: I Thought I’d Get an Elite Education.

One of the reasons why I was excited about college was that I imagined that the professors would be a different league of intellectual who could generate insightful ideas and lively discussion in their classrooms. Unfortunately, after my first quarter at UCLA, I realized that my idealization of college professors came from tidbits in movies and pop culture. It had no basis in reality.

The truth is very few of my professors took their teaching seriously. As a freshman, almost every lecture I went to seemed like a confusing and incoherent regurgitation of the textbook. Because of this, after the third or fourth week of class, many students started to skip class, including myself.

What makes big research universities such as UCLA different from your normal high school is that in UCLA there is absolutely no incentive to be a good teacher. I didn’t know this at the time, but faculty are engaged in both research and teaching, but only get promoted because of the former. It was disappointing for me to see that professors, in general, were not much engaged in their undergraduates, since that does not help their career prospects.

GREG GUTFELD: Greg’s Chart on How to Write a Successful Feature Article for Slate.com.

AGREED: The Ignorance Of Today’s College Students Shouldn’t Surprise Us. “Students cannot advance beyond the teaching they receive. If they are taught in the textbooks that Rockefeller was a ‘robber baron’; if they see movies depicting businessmen unfavorably; and if they see adulation given and monuments erected not to entrepreneurs, but to politicians who spend the money the entrepreneurs earn, then this country is in trouble in future generations. We need to teach and honor those men and women whose ideas and inventions made America prosper. They took the risks that created the jobs that brought millions of immigrants to America, and they provide many of the job offers our students will consider after they graduate. Certainly our politicians and reform leaders deserve recognition, but if they completely crowd out our major entrepreneurs, then we are telling students that the way to success is to spend other people’s money, not make some of your own.”

WHOOPS: Teenagers are jealous of the teen moms in the TV shows they watch. “It doesn’t matter if they cry in every episode. It doesn’t matter if they spend the entire time complaining about how they don’t have a life and people think they’re whores. It doesn’t matter if they’re constantly on drugs; actually, for the kids who have discovered that some drugs are a lot of fun, it would be a bonus. When you aim a camera at them and let them gain sympathy and compassion and relevance through highly-rated media, then you have just elevated them to a position of greater influence over other people’s points of view on the world than 99% of the US population. That, more than the content of the shows, is what the kids in the study were responding to. Of course the teen moms are getting paid and becoming famous.”

WILLIAM M. BRIGGS: National Academy Of Sciences Mistakes Politics For Science. Again. “As you can plainly see, this paper, cheerleading as it was for the liberal view, even though this bias was probably unintentional, has nothing to do with science. How moral it is to reduce CO2 is—need I say this?—a moral and not a scientific question. And anyway, the opinions of some people off the street after they were harangued with some left-leaning lecture aren’t even valuable as sociology.”

SUSPICIOUS: Senator Leahy Tries To Sneak Through Plans To Make Merely Talking About Computer Hacking A Serious Crime.

DAMNED IF YOU DO: Father pays outstanding child support, still gets jail time. Sounds like he has a bad attorney. Even she admits it: “‘I’m like he couldn’t have gotten a worse result,’ [Hall’s attorney Tyesha] Elam says. ‘He could have gone in there with a monkey and gotten a better result.'”

IT GETS BETTER: ‘Bullied’ transgender [sic] boy charged with assault for hitting girl at school.

A transgender [sic] high school student, who became a social media hero as an alleged victim of “bullying,” has been charged with misdemeanor battery for attacking a girl. Jewelyes Gutierrez, a sophomore, slapped a teenage girl in the face at Hercules High School in the Bay-area city of Hercules last November 15. . . .

Hercules police documents show that Gutierrez admitted starting the fight.

WESLEY J. SMITH: Drop PC to Fight STDs.

We’ve been hearing this rationalization for decades. People get STDs because of stigma, not because they are irresponsible in their sexual relations.

Now, the stigma card is being played to explain recent increases in syphilis and gonorrhea. . . .

But STDs are also rising in San Francisco–hardly Stigma Central about matters sexual. From the 4/30/13 SF Examiner story:

Infection rates of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis among San Francisco residents have been steadily rising since 2007, according to the Department of Public Health…New cases of syphilis have more than doubled during that time frame, from 40 cases per 100,000 people to over 105 in 2012, according to statistics presented by the health department.

Oops.

GIRL SCOUTS UPDATE: Yep, still leftist.

Last month, Breitbart News reported that Ackley—the main media spokesman for the Scouts—was also the lead singer of a “homopunk” band, The Dead Betties, who made several controversial videos, including one where a woman is strangled and another where a young man writhes naked on the ground and appears to touch his genitals. . . .

Within a few days of the story breaking, the Girl Scouts scrubbed Ackley from their media page, though the Scouts tweeted on December 19 that he was still around: “We’re happy to clear this up for you. Not only is Josh Ackley still employed, no one has been demoted.” . . .

The real story of the rolling Girl Scout scandal is their attachment to feminist politics, particularly their connection to Planned Parenthood, which is the largest single abortion provider in the United States. Breitbart’s Susan Berry has reported on these connections extensively.

So, it came as no surprise that the new Girl Scout media spokesman came from the Ms. Foundation, one of the preeminent abortion advocacy groups in the country. Until this past spring, Kelly Parisi was Vice President of Marketing and Communications at the foundation founded in 1973 by Gloria Steinham and now connected to the Feminist Majority Foundation that calls abortion “a matter of survival.”

PAUL MORENO: The Truth About Social Security.

The fundamental problem with Social Security is that it is a “defined benefit” pension system masquerading as a “defined contribution” program. Senator Warren says, correctly, that seniors have contributed to the system. But what have they contributed, and what relationship does their contribution have to their benefits? Politicians have understandably been more reluctant to raise taxes (euphemistically called “contributions”) than to raise benefits. The inevitable result has been promises that far exceed resources. . . .

Every year, the Social Security Administration sends me a statement detailing how much I have paid into the system, and projecting how much I (or my wife and dependents) will collect if I continue to contribute at the current rate. But the administration does not include such details as the fact that there will be no funds left for anyone by 2033 — unless the government goes above and beyond the “contributions” to the program and makes payouts from general revenues — and that it is almost certain that future retirees will get less back than they paid in. . . .

Social Security was conceived in dishonesty. FDR understood that the payroll-tax system of funding Social Security was untenable. “I suppose you’re right on the economics,” he told Luther Gulick. But payroll taxes “are politics all the way through. We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program.”

D.G. MYERS: Academe quits me.

My experience is a prelude to what will be happening, sooner rather than later, to many of my colleagues. Humanities course enrollments are down to seven percent of full-time student hours, but humanities professors make up forty-five percent of the faculty. The imbalance cannot last. . . .

More than two decades ago Alvin Kernan complained that English study “fail[s] to meet the academic requirement that true knowledge define the object it studies and systematize its analytic method to at least some modest degree,” but by then the failure itself was already two decades old. About the only thing English professors have agreed upon since the early ’seventies is that they agree on nothing, and besides, agreement is beside the question. Teaching the disagreement: that’s about as close as anyone has come to restoring a sense of order to English. . . .

In 1952, at the height of his fame, F. R. Leavis entitled a collection of essays The Common Pursuit. It was his name for the academic study of literature. No one takes the idea seriously any more, but nor does anyone ask the obvious followup. If English literature is not a common pursuit—not a “great tradition,” to use Leavis’s other famous title—then what is it doing in the curriculum? What is the rationale for studying it?

My own career (so called) suggests the answer. Namely: where there is no common body of knowledge, no common disciplinary conceptions, there is nothing that is indispensable. . . . I fill no gap in the department, because there is no shimmering and comprehensive surface of knowledge in which any gaps might appear. Like everyone else in English, I am an extra, and the offloading of an extra is never reported or experienced as a loss.

PLANNED PARENTHOOD BOARD MEMBER: Abortion “is a gift, a grace, a mercy, a cause for gratitude, a new lease on life. Being able to choose when and whether to bring a child into the world enables us and our children to flourish.”

UK: Street preacher arrested and held in custody for mentioning sexual sin.

Mr. Miano finished his preaching in a few minutes and as the street preachers packed up two police officers arrived.  At this point Pastor Williamson says the women shouted that they would get the preachers arrested.

“The female officer saw we had a camera and lunged for it and then the male policeman grabbed it and threw it in the police van,” says Pastor Williamson. He says the male officer interviewed the women and then immediately arrested Mr. Miano, but did not question him or explain why he was being arrested. “After Tony was put in the police van I asked why he was being arrested and was told it was for a breach of the peace and for using homophobic language” . . .

Tony Miano was arrested in July last year, in London, for alleged ‘homophobic’ comments. The case was dropped.

Earlier: Tony Miano arrested for ‘hate’ speech.

EFF: Three Hearings, Nine Hours, and One Accurate Statement: Why Congress Must Begin a Full Investigation into NSA Spying. “It shouldn’t take three hearings over several months for a member of Congress to obtain accurate and understandable information from the Director of the NSA.”

THE CLOSING OF THE SCIENTIFIC MIND:

Science needs reasoned argument and constant skepticism and open-mindedness. But our leading universities have dedicated themselves to stamping them out—at least in all political areas. We routinely provide superb technical educations in science, mathematics, and technology to brilliant undergraduates and doctoral students. But if those same students have been taught since kindergarten that you are not permitted to question the doctrine of man-made global warming, or the line that men and women are interchangeable, or the multiculturalist idea that all cultures and nations are equally good (except for Western nations and cultures, which are worse), how will they ever become reasonable, skeptical scientists? They’ve been reared on the idea that questioning official doctrine is wrong, gauche, just unacceptable in polite society. (And if you are president of Harvard, it can get you fired.)

Beset by all this mold and fungus and corruption, science has continued to produce deep and brilliant work. Most scientists are skeptical about their own fields and hold their colleagues to rigorous standards. Recent years have seen remarkable advances in experimental and applied physics, planetary exploration and astronomy, genetics, physiology, synthetic materials, computing, and all sorts of other areas.

But we do have problems, and the struggle of subjective humanism against roboticism is one of the most important.

JILLIAN KAY MELCHIOR: The unemployment rules discouraged me from working.

But unemployment makes freelancing complicated. According to the rules, “each day or part of a day of work will result in a payment of [only] a partial benefit.” If I worked one day, my unemployment payment would be only $303; two days meant only $202.50. If I earned more than $405 in a week, I got nothing.

That made freelancing costly for me, regardless of how much I wanted to spend my time productively. Say I earned $75 in one day of freelance work. I would then receive $303 in unemployment that week, and my total weekly haul would be $378 — less than the $405 in standard unemployment. In other words, if I couldn’t earn more than $100 in a day, I’d actually be losing money by working.

The unemployment rules also subjected me to a bizarre work schedule, because they stipulate that “you are considered employed on any day when you perform any services — even an hour or less — in self-employment, on a freelance basis, or for someone else.” In other words, taking two days instead of one to do an assignment meant I’d lose an extra hundred bucks. As a result, I tried to pack all my freelance writing and pitching into a single weekday, pulling the sort of late nights I’d once hoped I had left behind in college.

SUNSHINE MARY: Do feminists accept that women are physically inferior to men?

I saw a tweet the other day in which a man wondered how it is that the NFL has yet to be able to produce even one competent female punter, yet women are supposedly tough enough and strong enough to be Marines. And even though it was a humorous comment, his point is actually a good one.

If feminists don’t accept that women are physically inferior to men, then how do they account for this? How do they explain away that women are 30% smaller then men? How do they explain stories like the one published in the Marine Corps Gazette in 2012 by Capt. Katie Petronio, Get Over It! We Are Not All Created Equal, in which she argued against integrating women into infantry positions? She describes how her own experience as a deployed Marine severely damaged her body, leaving her infertile, because she was physically unable to endure, and writes this:

I am confident that should the Marine Corps attempt to fully integrate women into the infantry, we as an institution are going to experience a colossal increase in crippling and career-ending medical conditions for females.

The short answer is that feminists don’t account for it. They go completely silent and change the topic.

NO RESPECT for the accused.

The New York Daily News reports that the boyfriend of Bethenny Frankel, Michael Cerussi III, was accused of rape as a student at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., but the alleged victim never filed a police report and no charges were ever filed outside of the victim’s complaint to the school. Union College expelled him in 2000, and Cerussi sued the school and the alleged victim. The case settled and was voluntarily dismissed. . . .

The Daily News resurrected this long dead non-story for no reason other than as gossip column entertainment. It has no concern about the needless scar it has inflicted on Mr. Cerussi’s reputation. But — just wait — the Daily News said it “is withholding the name of the alleged victim out of respect for her privacy.”

Presumably any concern expressed for Mr. Cerussi’s privacy will be met with charges that we are “rape apologists.”

AUSTRALIA: Men die earlier but women’s health gets four times more funding. “Since 2003 women’s health research received more than $833 million from the National Health and Medical Research Council compared to less than $200 million for men. Breast cancer received $60 million more than prostate cancer and ovarian cancer $64 million more than testicular cancer. The smaller funding for men’s health research is a paradox given their average life expectancy is just 79.7 compared to 84.2 for women. And the fact that one in two Australian men will be diagnosed with cancer by the age of 85 compared to only 1 in 3 Australian women.”

PROBIOTICS: Good for maintaining testosterone in old age? “The decline of circulating testosterone levels in aging men is associated with adverse health effects. During studies of probiotic bacteria and obesity, we discovered that male mice routinely consuming purified lactic acid bacteria originally isolated from human milk had larger testicles and increased serum testosterone levels compared to their age-matched controls.”

JANET BLOOMFIELD: Hanna Rosin says we are witnessing the end of men! Oh yeah? How about we look at the facts?

The traditional household is failing?

Gee, I wonder why?  Women are out in the workforce doing their housewife gig, neglecting their children and partners and are deeply, deeply unhappy as a result.

They file most divorce proceedings, have more mental health problems and express greater dissatisfaction with their lives.

But let’s blame men for that, shall we, Hanna?  What women need is to be more dominant.  To rule with an iron fist.  Oh, except that women in traditional marriages are much happier.

SARAH HOYT on feel-good Christianity and slut-shaming shaming:

There seems to be a sub-sect of what I – not being evangelical – will call Candy-*ss Evangelical Christians who think that their duty is to go through life being kissy kissy about everything and saying everyone is so wonderful and lovely.

How they reconcile this with the scene in the temple, or with the many cutting remarks of the Nazarene in the Gospels, or with the fact that that he instructed his apostles to shake the dust from their sandals and invoke the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah on any place that rejected them is beyond me.  How they square serious religious commitment with their saccharine inability to say boo to a mouse is even more puzzling.  And how they manage to square their attitude of approving of everything and blessing everyone with coming down like a ton of bricks on anyone who doesn’t candycoat everything the way they do is most puzzling of all.  I’m going to assume Quaaludes are involved. . . .

I don’t have a dog in this fight – much – but since when did slut-shaming become a worse crime than being a slut, even for self-appointed Christian moralists?

And who in heck thinks this is a good thing?

WARREN MEYER lists headlines to look out for in 2014 with regard to Obamacare, including “Emergency rooms overflow with new Medicaid patients that no private doctor will take on” and “Small to mid-size companies are shocked as Obama Administration finally reveals new record-keeping requirements.”

Reminder: Meyer in 2012 claimed that “the biggest economic story of 2013” would be “the complete shift in the US labor model, at least in the service sector, due to Obamacare” — that is, a shift away from full-time work. And I think that he was right. See his follow-up here.

JOHN C. WRIGHT on political correctness, with regard to responses to his series “Saving Science Fiction from Strong Female Characters”:

Much of the surprise was that no one saw fit to argue the point with an actual argument. We seem to have fallen into a stage of society where disagreement with Political Correctness is regarded as an unforgivable moral depravity rather than a error in reasoning open to correction by reason.

This is a symptom not of the strength but of the senility of Political Correctness: it has lost its confidence to win in the marketplace of ideas, so it  rules the marketplace to be out of bounds. There seems, however, to be no provision to enforce the ruling, nor any reason to regard the ruling as legitimate.

He elaborates in the comments:

I recall a time in the late 80′s and early 90′s when partisans of Political Correctness would give their reasoning, such as it was, to support their claims, such as, for example, one would say that using ‘he’ rather than ‘he or she’ excluded women and hurt the delicate female feelings of the poor helpless dears.

This was because, or so it was explained to me, women are equal to men in every imaginable way, and needed no special favors from men to protect them: and ergo we needed to change our language as a special favor to them to protect them.

Now they merely assume that this is the standard, and call you a bigot if you question the alleged standard or refuse to obey it.

His mention of “he or she” reminds me of an earlier post of his, “On Political Correctness, or, How To Speak Nonspeak.”

LIES: When Is an Abortion Not an Abortion? When the Media Say So.

So how do Media Matters, the Times, and others justify their claim about the mandate’s abortion requirements?  They say life begins at implantation, not fertilization, and thus drugs and devices like Plan B, ella, and IUDs do not cause abortions. . . .

Regarding Plan B and ella, there is intense debate about whether these drugs, and others like them, interfere with implantation.  However, Plan B’s own packaging warns that the drug may destroy a newly conceived human being (referred to as “a fertilized egg” on the box), and the scientific evidence strongly indicates that ella kills “a fertilized egg.”

One might think the media was blissfully unaware of these facts.  However, last week, NBC let the mask slip when its editors changed an originally correct article from noting that the mandate requires abortion coverage to the following (italics in original):

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story stated the Affordable Care Act requires companies to offer health-care coverage that provides abortion-inducing drugs to their employees. It does not.