RUBE: “I spent two years defending Obamacare . . . because it would make health care available to everyone at, what I assumed, would be an affordable price. I have now learned that I was wrong. Very wrong.” “Someone please tell me why my premium in January will be $356 more than in December?”
WARREN MEYER: Most Obscene Example of Promoting Government Dependency I Have Ever Seen.
We are going to cancel the health care policies of millions of middle class Americans, then raise their rates, and then give half of them taxpayer subsidies so it seems like they got a rate cut. . . .
Millions of middle class people who were independent and paid for their own health insurance will soon be wards of the state.
JANET BLOOMFIELD: Criminalizing the male gaze: giving female narcissists the upper hand.
Men who cat-call women on the street are playing out the script that women continue to insist upon: women draw attention to their appearances and highlight the features of their bodies that convey youth and fertility, and only object when the wrong man notices. . . .
The idea that women are somehow harmed by attention from men requires two assumptions: that women, and only women, have the right to control the expression of sexuality, and that women are always, always victims. . . .
Indeed, there is a great deal of power in the “gaze”. And despite the protestations to the contrary, organizations like Hollaback! are seeking to criminalize that gaze. But only one side of it. The male gaze. And not just any male. Low status men.
WESLEY J. SMITH: Pro Abortion Subsumes Pro Choice.
BREAKING NEWS FROM 2009: Final Verdict on Cash-for-Clunkers: Fail.
Related: Who’d a-Thunk It? “Here’s about as perfect an example as reality will ever serve up of a government policy built on the absurd premise that prosperity can spring from destruction – a policy, of course, pushed on Keynesian grounds. And yet people will continue, I’m sure, to promote such counter-productive destructive policies as creators of prosperity, and these people will continue to be hailed by legions of intellectuals as being ‘reality-based’ and ‘scientific.'”
COOL: Man claims he dumped gold in dumpster during divorce dispute.
“D*** right I did,” the 52-year-old former defense contractor huffed at a July deposition by the woman’s stunned divorce attorney . . . In his sworn interview, Jones said he consigned the treasure to a Dumpster behind a Colorado Springs motel, according to a transcript obtained by The Gazette.
Bank records supplied by Jones prove that the money was converted to gold through a Phoenix, Ariz. precious metals dealer, lending credence to the hard-to-swallow tale, Lyle said.
“We say that when people are divorcing, they enter a state of temporary insanity,” he said. “But on a scale of 1 to 10, this is my 10.”
DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO: RIAA and BPI Use “Pirated” Code on Their Websites.
Earlier: Obamacare Website Violates Licensing Agreement for Copyrighted Software.
Carl Chatman was drinking his coffee when police handcuffed him, ignoring Theresa’s explanation that her brother’s conviction had been vacated and that she had the paperwork to prove it. They arrested him anyway. So much for believing the victim.
Carl was released later that morning and authorities blamed a clerical error.
Theresa said, “We didn’t think that every time we turned around and opened our door, there were going to be police there. I mean, come on, when is it going to be over?”
RELIGION OF PIECES: Bombs planted in confessional box of Syrian church.
EFF: Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s New NSA Bill Will Codify and Extend Mass Surveillance of Americans. “Don’t be fooled: the bill codifies some of the NSA’s worst practices, would be a huge setback for everyone’s privacy, and it would permanently entrench the NSA’s collection of every phone record held by U.S. telecoms.”
CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: Pensioner Guilty Of Raping Trafficked Girl.
A pensioner who trafficked a deaf and mute girl into the UK, using her to milk the benefits system, has been found guilty of repeatedly raping her.
Ilyas Ashar, 84, sexually abused his vulnerable victim again and again, Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court heard.
Two female jurors wept as guilty verdicts were delivered on 13 counts of rape.
The girl, from Pakistan, who is profoundly deaf and cannot speak, was beaten and slapped and forced to work for Ashar and his family as a domestic servant.
While Ashar used his victim to satisfy his sexual desires, the girl was also used to steal more than £30,000 in benefits.
ART CARDEN: On Sweatshops: They’re Better Than the Alternative. “I think a lot of sweatshop critics misunderstand the economist’s argument. The argument isn’t that sweatshop conditions and wages are good in some cosmic sense. Rather, they are better than the available alternatives. By passing laws to regulate and restrict sweatshops, we take away from people the best of a lot of bad alternatives. If we genuinely care about people, we should work to give them more and better options, not fewer and worse.”
RELIGION OF PIECES: Baghdad cafe bombing kills at least 38.
STOP ENABLING THIS: Toronto actress dates for free meals. “My purpose really isn’t to dupe men. My purpose is to eat in really nice restaurants on dates. It’s just none of the ones I’ve been on have been leading to other dates or there isn’t any chemistry.”
WAIT. THIS IS A THING? Q&A: The Women Who Write Dinosaur Erotica.
Is monster erotica lucrative?
We don’t want to get into actual numbers, but let’s put it this way: Combined, Christie and I make more money than our friend who has been working as an engineer at Boeing for a few years and Christie’s friend who is a five-year accountant in Dallas, Texas.
“TOO WHITE”: Mostly-white Afrobeat band’s appearance at university cancelled due to “concerns about cultural appropriation and the need to respect marginalized cultures.” Another win for open-mindedness and tolerance.
CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: Inmates Bullied Into Converting To Islam.
Sky News has learned that increasing numbers of British inmates are being bullied into converting to Islam while in jail.
The Prison Officers Association says it is symptomatic of the growing power and influence of Muslim gangs in prison.
THE POOR GET POORER: How Washington Really Redistributes Income. “While many seniors believe they are simply drawing out the ‘savings’ they were forced to deposit into Social Security and Medicare, they are actually drawing out much more, especially relative to later generations. That’s because politicians have voted to award the seniors ever more generous benefits. As a result, while today’s 65-year-olds will receive on average net lifetime benefits of $327,400, children born now will suffer net lifetime losses of $420,600 as they struggle to pay the bills of aging Americans.”
HUMAN TRAFFICKING: Girl smuggled into Britain to have her ‘organs harvested’.
The case emerged in a government report which showed that the number of human trafficking victims in the UK has risen by more than 50 per cent last year and reached record levels.
A total of 371 children were exploited, with the majority of them being used as slaves or sexually abused. They included 95 children from Vietnam, 67 from Nigeria and 25 from China. Others hailed from Romania and Bangladesh.
BILL VALLICELLA: Contemporary Liberal Doublethink: Welfare = Self-Reliance.
EMPLOYEE WEARS OBAMA COSTUME, now all 750 employees are required to take “diversity training.”
UK: Young mother jailed for making two false rape claims within hours after getting drunk and sleeping with friend’s partner. There’s an important lesson here: “The friend she had accused was able to prove his innocence because he had filmed the sexual encounter on his mobile phone.“
FEDS TOOK REPORTER’S NOTES During Unrelated Search, After They Spotted Documents She Had Obtained Via FOIA. “DHS officials and Maryland police were sent to do a search of Paul Flanagan’s house to make sure he had no guns — since he’s been legally prohibited from owning a gun due to previous legal issues. But, while in the house, the officials apparently searched Flanagan’s wife’s documents and seized a bunch. That’s a problem because his wife, Audrey Hudson, is a journalist and they took a bunch of her private notes, many of which revealed journalistic sources.”
A FAILING NARRATIVE: Statistics Don’t Back Up Claims About ‘Rape Culture.’
Statistics surrounding sexual assault are notoriously unreliable and inconsistent, primarily because of vague and expansive definitions of what qualifies as sexual assault. Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute explains that the study often cited as the origin of the “one in five” factoid is an online survey conducted under a grant from the Justice Department. Surveyors employed such a broad definition that “‘forced kissing” and even “attempted forced kissing” qualified as sexual assault.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ “Violent Victimization of College Students” report tells a different and more plausible story about campus culture. During the years surveyed, 1995-2002, the DOJ found that there were six rapes or sexual assaults per thousand per year. Across the nation’s four million female college students, that comes to about one victim in forty students. Other DOJ statistics show that the overall rape rate is in sharp decline: since 1995, the estimated rate of female rape or sexual assault victimizations has decreased by about 60 percent.
Meanwhile, the actual “rape culture” of American prisons continues on without much public protest.
FOR THE LADIES: The Buyer’s Market. “One thing that tends to confuse those looking superficially at the matter is that most women, even in their late 30s, are able to find partners. But what tends to escape the attention of those superficial observers is that the men for whom the women are settling in their 30s and 40s tend to be of distinctly lower quality than the men that were pursuing them in their middle and late 20s. If you see a high caliber married man in his 40s or 50s who is married to a woman within a few years of his age, in most cases you will learn that they married when he was in his 20s. One seldom sees a high caliber [un]married man that age who is engaged to a woman who is within five years of his age, as the statistics increasingly demonstrate.”
GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS AREN’T BROKEN; they’re just doing what they’re designed to do.
Government education is designed to be an instrument of propaganda and bureaucratic control. This isn’t a side effect –it’s the whole point. If you don’t want your kid subject to government propaganda and government control, then don’t send him to a government facility 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 13 years of his life. Or go ahead and send him — perhaps you have no choice, I understand that — but confront the reality of the situation.
Many of us screamed from the hilltops when Obama set forth on his plan to seize control of health care. Yet we seem to have taken it for granted that the government ought to control education. We don’t want any bureaucrat telling us what pills to take, but we’ll sure let them tell our kids what thoughts to think. We don’t want them controlling what we put in our body, but we don’t seem too intent on disabling their ability to control what’s put into our child’s mind. This failure to fundamentally question government education, is, itself, a major victory for government education.
JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: 40% of low-income Americans pay 40% marginal tax rates.
MORE MEN ARE RAPED in the US than women, figures on prison assaults reveal.
More men are raped in the U.S. than woman, according to figures that include sexual abuse in prisons.
In 2008, it was estimated 216,000 inmates were sexually assaulted while serving time, according to the Department of Justice figures.
That is compared to 90,479 rape cases outside of prison.
EAT IT: Saturated fat is not the major issue.
The mantra that saturated fat must be removed to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease has dominated dietary advice and guidelines for almost four decades.
Yet scientific evidence shows that this advice has, paradoxically, increased our cardiovascular risks. Furthermore, the government’s obsession with levels of total cholesterol, which has led to the overmedication of millions of people with statins, has diverted our attention from the more egregious risk factor of atherogenic dyslipidaemia.
Related: Time to end the war against saturated fat? Yes. Also, how about we not use the word “war” when we’re not talking about an actual war, and instead use it when we’re talking about an actual war?
MILESTONE: Census Bureau: Means-Tested Gov’t Benefit Recipients Outnumber Full-Time Year-Round Workers. “There were 108,592,000 people in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2011 who were recipients of one or more means-tested government benefit programs, the Census Bureau said in data released this week. Meanwhile, according to the Census Bureau, there were 101,716,000 people who worked full-time year round in 2011. That included both private-sector and government workers.”
I CAN GET BEHIND THIS: A Week Of Praise.
With the recent overwhelmingly large success of Fat Shaming Week, I think it’s time to take a different tack on things. That is to say, I believe it’s time for a Week of Praise. . . .
It is time to let women know that:
- It’s okay to be submissive to a man
- It’s okay to be good at cooking
- It’s okay to be good at cleaning
- It’s okay to want to be a traditional, stay-at-home mom
- It’s okay to be feminine and petite
- It’s okay to be skinny and interested in staying in shape
- It’s okay to get married young and chaste
- It’s okay to take care of your man according to his wants and needs
- It’s okay to not like effeminate men
WARREN MEYER: This is Becoming the All Purpose Headline: Obama Was Unaware of [blank].
Related: #ObamaDidntKnow. Nice roundup.
PRO-LIFERS VIOLENTLY ATTACKED at Australian March for Babies. “‘We all sat in protest and started praying,’ Mr Kemper said. ‘Then the police let them start attacking us.'”
BIAS MUCH? Gal punched by Jets fan charged with assault. The woman identified by law enforcement as the aggressor is described as “perky,” “beautiful,” and “petite.” The man who defended himself is called a “fanatic” who is “exhausted-looking” and “burly.” And apparently it’s important to a report on their altercation that the woman’s online social profile suggests that she “loves short skirts, the beach and partying.”
THE TRUTH CAN HURT: Gavin McInnes: Feminism makes women miserable.
“That study that I cited was all over the news a year ago — Lou Dobbs covered it on CNN — it didn’t seem to generate that much controversy when it came out, and all I did was cite that study and say a lot of women in the workforce would be happier at home. What is wrong with that?” he asked.
McInnes said that the real reason his comments set off such a firestorm is that “deep down” women realize what he said is true.
“I think a lot of women smash through the ‘glass ceiling’ and get to where [men] are and they go, ‘wait a minute, I thought you guys had brandy and went to strip clubs, you’re going over expense reports?’ And they see their friends from their small town with 3 kids going to soccer practice and they think, ‘That looks kind of cool, actually.’”
ANATOMY OF THE HOAX: And how one progressive reporter refused to go along with another fake rape story. “Progressives and liberals — reporters and activists alike — are apt to see each case of evil-doing — rape, racist murder, racial intimidation, or homophobia — as a stand in for events that actually do occur in society. Evil happens regardless, and a moral relativism places no limitations on which actual set of ‘facts’ must be used to prove the point. To them, proxies for truth are close enough.”
CAMPUS REFORM: College hosts lecture exploring connection between misogyny and meat.
The lecture, titled “The Sexual Politics of Meat,” will take place at the University of Redlands on Monday, and is to explore the “relationship between patriarchal values and meat eating by interweaving the insights of feminism, vegetarianism, animal defense, and literary theory,” according to the official website of the speaker, Carol J. Adams. . . .
Harvard University hosted Adams in 2010, and she taught students the “parallels between the consumption of meat and misogyny,” and “referred to male bonding in steakhouses or at barbecues as examples of a culture of male-dominant consumption of meat and women,” according to an article in the Harvard Crimson, the school’s official newspaper.
I feel like grilling now.
AN INTERVIEW with a “former gay porn actor”.
With my book, my intention was not to simply disgust people or gross them out, but to reveal a very significant side of the gay lifestyle that is rarely investigated. The last serious exploration was probably the much maligned film “Cruising” directed by William Friedkin. But that movie got it right. Because, although, gay men may one day settle down and attempt monogamy, the vast majority, beforehand, had to travel through a wasteland of perversity and promiscuity. Because, every young boy, who just enters the lifestyle, is quickly set upon by a troop of eager older men ready to exploit new recruits. It sets you up for a life of bitterness and disappointment. Some survive and move on, many do not. But, they all reemerge damaged and untrusting.
You are very keen and astute to realize that the gay lifestyle has been “sanitized” by the media, and that was precisely what I wanted to fight against [by writing my book]; to show just how ugly, and yes dirty, the gay lifestyle is; but also how ultimately sad and tragic it seems to end for almost everyone involved. I especially wanted to reach modern parents who are so willing to offer their sons up to this horror – to explain what awaits their children, and to also give some dignity to those who fell into the life because of no fault of their own.
I’M GLAD THAT I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO NOTICED THIS: AP Just Can’t Bring Itself to Call Dead Baby Found in Bag at Victoria’s Secret a ‘Baby’. “So, despite the preliminary reports that the baby was ‘born alive and possibly had been asphyxiated,’ the AP four times referred to it as a fetus.”
FOR THE LADIES: Profanity is unladylike.
2070 PARADIGM SHIFT: The Greatest TED Talk Of All Time. The introductory anecdote from 2:52 to 4:04 is marvelous.
SIGNING UP FOR OBAMACARE: Identity Theft Russian Roulette.