NOT THE ONION: Man who gave birth faces court battle to be father. “The father claims the baby has no mother as, although he gave birth to the child, he is a man so cannot be a mother.” Can’t argue with that logic.
NO FREE SPEECH if you’re talking to God on public property.
Urena began praying out loud on school property in February, but was told in July by Principal Gene Connolly that she would no longer be allowed to do so this school year. Throughout the end of summer, national pro- and anti-religious organizations weighed in on the issue, and Urena sought legal representation to maintain her right to pray. Last week, Urena returned to campus but has been praying silently, and she said Connolly has been very friendly since she has been back.
Superintendent Chris Rath said Monday that the district hasn’t made a definitive decision about whether or not Urena can continue praying on campus, but that administrators will evaluate her actions on a daily basis.
Maybe it’ll be okay if she prays to Michael Jackson.
LET’S NOT GIVE THEM ANY IDEAS: Unregulated Secret Dinner Parties.
I don’t think the people concerned about unregulated dinner parties are going far enough. You know what else is unregulated? The kitchen at my house.
Think about what the means for a second. It means that my children–children, mind you–are being fed food that’s prepared in unregulated, uninspected, and possibly less-than-sanitary conditions. The burgeoning field of Helen Lovejoy Political Economy demands that something must be done. For the children, of course.
There’s another issue here, as well: jobs. I would also be remiss if I didn’t point out that local restaurants are suffering, too, from the crippling competition my wife and I provide when we prepare meals for our kids. Yes, we have to pay for inputs, but my wife and I are willing to provide this service without expecting payment. We don’t even accept tips (not that they’ve been offered, but still).
Related: Licensed to grill.
GOVERNMENT IS JUST A WORD FOR THE THINGS WE DO TOGETHER: State Takes Baby for First 75 Days of the Baby’s Life, Because of Mother’s Use of Poppy Seed Dressing.
TRY THIS DEFENSE WHEN CHARGED WITH INFANTICIDE: Isn’t abortion OK since babies go to Heaven?
YouTube user entropyofmind (Melissa) recently asked a question directed to pro-life Christians: If we believe that abortion is the tragic taking of a human life and yet believe that children are innocent and go directly to heaven when they die, how can abortion be bad? Doesn’t it spare those aborted children pain?
Note to self: Kill people who are exiting the confessional.
MOBILE ULTRASOUND SERVICE encourages women not to kill their unborn children to do what’s best for themselves.
When an abortion-minded woman enters the van she is presented with the three possible choices before her: parenting, adoption, or abortion. Counselors go through each option, telling the woman how each decision could impact her.
“All of the counseling on the bus is really about the impact to ‘her’, how it’s going to be so much more beneficial to ‘her’ if she chooses one of the first two options,” said Baker.
Save the Storks has found that such a woman-centered approach is more effective in saving lives than a baby-centered approach.
Baker said that the abortion-minded woman intercepted by a Stork van tend to be “self-centered.” “It’s not at all un-normal for a girl to say something like: ‘Oh, I could never adopt out my baby’, and we’re sitting there at the abortion clinic!”
“If your mission isn’t to just love her and convince her that [parenting or adoption] is the best decision for her, you really could lose her,” he said.
I won’t argue against what works, but isn’t it shameful that such a tactic is necessary in the first place?
FOR THE LADIES: Piece of Advice #109: Don’t deliberately sabotage your looks.
ZERO HEDGE: This Is What Happens When The Bureau Of Labor Statistics Is Caught In A Lie.
It appears, after ignoring our advice for months, the BLS finally scrambled and crammed all the revisions to the reconcile the two non-matching data series in one month.
Sadly, in the process it merely confirmed that both data sets are very much suspect and likely completely made up.
NICHOLAS JOHNSON on his new book, Negroes and the Gun. “This black tradition of arms takes root early and ranges fully into the modern era. It is demonstrated in Fredrick Douglass’ advice of a good revolver as the best response to slave catchers. It is evident in mature form in 1963, when Hartman Turnbow of Mississippi fought off a Klan attack with rifle fire. Turnbow considered this fully consistent with the principles of the freedom movement, explaining, ‘I wasn’t being non-nonviolent, I was just protectin’ my family’.”
“NOBODY IS LISTENING TO YOUR TELEPHONE CALLS:” Obama Lied to Public About Whether Government Was Listening to Our Calls.
UPDATE YOUR TOR BROWSER: Majority of Tor crypto keys could be broken by NSA, researcher says. “He went on to cite official Tor statistics to observe that only 10 percent of Tor servers are using version 2.4 of the software. That’s the only Tor release that implements elliptical curve Diffie-Hellman crypto, which cryptographers believe is much harder to break. The remaining versions use keys that are presumed to be weaker.”
SPAIN BECOMES SLIGHTLY LESS WELCOMING TO WEIRD CREEPS by raising the minimum age of consent for sex from 13 to 16. “The draft measure however provides for an exception so as not to criminalize sexual intercourse ‘between equals’, in particular is case of consensual sex between a minor under 16 and ‘a person close to the victim in age and degree of development and maturity’, as determined by a judge.”
CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: Criminal who burned woman’s face can stay in Britain because of his human rights.
Valentine Harverye, a Zimbabwean national, was jailed for five and a half years for grievous bodily harm after he “mutilated” and “humiliated” his 34 year-old victim, whom he scarred for life.
The Home Office tried to deport him under rules which say that any foreigner jailed for more than 12 months should be subject to automatic deportation but the 22 year-old brought a human rights appeal, and won.
WILLIAM M. BRIGGS: Global Warming To Cause New Crisis. What Will It Be? “‘Global warming has paused since 1997.’ Paused, which means global warming is still out there lurking, ready to strike. It has only put on hold its nefarious activities. It has not ceased, but is held in abeyance. Global warming, the sneaky creature, is in hiding, perhaps in the oceanic abyss. In short, the theory is still true and the world is wrong.”
DEMOCRATS LAUGH AT WOMAN CONCEIVED IN RAPE, Want Resolution Supporting Her Abortion.
I introduced myself and shared my story of having been conceived in rape and nearly aborted at two back-alley abortions, but spared because I was legally protected in Michigan at the time.
Unlike prior experiences I’ve had in testifying before legislatures — where hearts and minds were changed on the issue, in response, the pro-abort Democrats introduced a new amendment: “BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Oakland County Board of Commissioners believe that women who are raped or victims of incest should not be forced by their government to carry out a pregnancy.” Laughing amongst each other, this was an in-your-face resolution to issue the death penalty to me, and to those who are similarly-situated, but they were gloating that they introduced it in front of me.
I think they misunderstood Marx when they read about his “classless society.”
ADVENTURES IN EUPHEMISM: It’s not plagiarism; it’s just “language from already published sources without using proper citation methods.”
IN THE UK, no free speech. “I confess I used to view with a degree of discouragement and dismay those Bible-bashing Christians with their ‘end-of-the-world’-type placards, preaching fire and brimstone and hell and damnation. I find myself now feeling not much less than contempt for those gays who persecute and prosecute elderly hotel owners and B&B proprietors, or call in the police when they receive ‘Good News for Gays’ in their inbox.”
LOYOLA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL SCHOOL to accept illegal immigrants.
TREASON: US Soldier Admits Smuggling Illegal Aliens for ‘Mexican Transnational Criminal Organization.’ “The soldier, Carlos Vives Feliciano, is described in the court documents as being ‘an active member of the United States Army, stationed at Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas.’ He was caught by U.S. Border Patrol in a vehicle with another man carrying what authorities have described as as ‘alien smuggling load.'”
CATO: Cracking the Books: How Well Do State Education Departments Report Public School Spending? “Public schools are usually the most costly item in state and local budgets. Yet despite tremendous and persistent spending growth in the last half-century, the public vastly underestimates the true cost of public education.”
RELIGION OF PIECES: Afghan National Charged With Explosives Possession.
Thirty-eight year-old Atal Bashar of Burke is a native of Afghanistan and a naturalized U.S. citizen. He made an initial appearance Monday in federal court in Alexandria. . . .
According to the affidavit, Bashar admitted to investigators last week that he built the device for self-defense by placing fireworks in the duffel bag and surrounding it with shrapnel like nails and screws.
“Self-defense.” Of course.
“CRACKER”: Bus rider’s face smashed in during ‘hate attack.’ “An attacker pummeled a bus passenger so hard he smashed the bones in his face after calling the victim a ‘cracker’ in Manhattan.”
ONLY THE NARRATIVE MATTERS: What If Matthew Shepard’s Murder Wasn’t an Anti-Gay Hate Crime? “But McKinney and Shepard were not strangers. They had many friends in common, and had socialized with each other. And they had an even deeper history. Both were dealing (and using) methamphetamine, and as such were business rivals. McKinney was also bisexual, and had had sexual relations with Shepard.”
THE JOBS AMERICANS WILL DO: The STEM Crisis Is a Myth. “Every year U.S. schools grant more STEM degrees than there are available jobs. When you factor in H-1B visa holders, existing STEM degree holders, and the like, it’s hard to make a case that there’s a STEM labor shortage.”
Related: If There’s A STEM Shortage, Why Are Computer Science Graduates’ Wages DOWN?
LOOK! China is “racist” too! “China’s Education Ministry says that about 400 million people — or 30% of the population — cannot speak the country’s national language.”
NEARLY 20 MILLION ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS IN U.S., former Border Patrol agents say. “They also argue that the lesson from the 1986 amnesty is that more people end up getting benefits than the government initially projects.” You’d almost think it was intentional.
ZERO HEDGE: Poland Confiscates Half Of Private Pension Funds To “Cut” Sovereign Debt Load. “In the aftermath of Cyprus, we now know what the two most recent European blueprints for preserving the myth of solvency are: bail-ins, which confiscate deposits, and pension fund ‘overhauls’, which confiscate, well, pension funds.”
WOMEN DEFEND CONVICTED PEDERAST who admitted to molesting a student for years, beginning in middle school. “Neal made a mistake. . . . He allowed a mutual friendship to develop into much more.” “I am asking that Neal be given the absolute minimum sentence.” “This was an isolated incident.”
In all, 10 people, including seven WB-RC teachers, submitted letters of support for Erickson, most pleading for a reduced sentence. They included [Sally] Campbell, Amy Eagan, [Harriett] Coe, Toni Erickson, Carol Rau, Marilyn Glover, Sandi Lee, Kathryn Weber, Kathleen Sheel and Kathleen Palmer, the Herald reports.
Judge Michael Bumgartner told Erickson he was “appalled and ashamed that the community could rally around, in this case, you,” according to the Herald. . . .
Some of the teachers who supported Erickson have heckled Lori Janczewski at work, according to her husband.
The letters can be found here.
Related: Boy Rape Apparently Normalized in Schools Across America.
ALMOST HALF OF U.S. BIRTHS covered by Medicaid.
CULTURAL ENRICHMENT incoming: “‘All Syrian asylum seekers who apply for asylum in Sweden will get it,’ Annie Hoernblad, the spokeswoman for Sweden’s migration agency, told AFP.” I think that I prefer Baron Bodissey’s headline, “A Nation Commits Suicide.”
BRING IT ON: Fliers threaten to name Portland residents on public aid. “‘There are sixteen people in this neighborhood who vote and receive cash disability payments,’ said fliers posted to doors across several neighborhoods in August. ‘The names of these people are being posted where they can be seen by taxpayers and the neighborhood can decide who is truly disabled.'”
AN INFORMAL HARVARD SURVEY confirms some stereotypes.
They scored well on the SATs, but it appears Harvard freshmen aren’t quite as good at scoring in bed.
Only 35 percent of the Class of 2017 had sex before coming to Harvard, according to a survey of incoming freshmen conducted by The Crimson last month. . . .
Respondents who identify as homosexual or bisexual are more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to report that they have lost their virginity. Forty-five percent of homosexuals and 56 percent of bisexuals reported having sex versus 35 percent of heterosexuals. Of those freshmen who say that they are questioning their sexuality, only 20 percent said they have had sex.
Well, we see where the priorities of The Harvard Crimson lie.
NAOMI KLEIN reminds us why many people remain “climate change deniers:” “Climate change could be an opportunity for a global Green Marshall Plan with the North paying climate debts in the form of huge green development project.” But then she offers some hope:
I think if we look at the track record of Kyoto, of the UN Clean Development Mechanism, the European Union’s emissions trading scheme – we now have close to a decade that we can measure these schemes against, and it’s disastrous. Not only are emissions up, but you have no end of scams to point to, which gives fodder to the right. The right took on cap-and-trade by saying it’s going to bankrupt us, it’s handouts to corporations, and, by the way, it’s not going to work. And they were right on all counts. Not in the bankrupting part, but they were right that this was a massive corporate giveaway, and they were right that it wasn’t going to bring us anywhere near what scientists were saying we needed to do lower emissions.
MARK PERRY: The College Textbook Bubble. “Adjusted for inflation, the price of college textbooks has increased almost 100%, while the price of recreational books has fallen by more than 40%.”
PAUL KRUGMAN uses a ridiculous standard to measure the expertise of his conservative opponents. “Political conservatism and serious policy analysis can coexist, and there was a time when they did. Back in the 1980s, after all, health experts at Heritage made a good-faith effort to devise a plan for universal health coverage — and what they came up with was the system now known as Obamacare.”
Yes, Krugman thinks conservatives can be serious — when they come up with ideas he likes.
THE FUTURE LOOKS PROMISING: Oyster offers unlimited e-books for less than 10 dollars a month.
OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION SYSTEM rests on these “foundations”: “The school district in Little Rock, Ark. has announced plans for a dress code that will require teachers to wear underwear. Every single day. Female teachers will have to wear bras, too.”
FRESH OFF THEIR strong stand for traditional marriage . . .
Williams clarified what he saw as DC’s position on the marriage issue. “We fought to get them engaged, but were told emphatically no marriage can result,” he wrote, adding that it “was never put to us as being anti-gay marriage.” Fellow DC Comics creator Gail Simone suggested that “it’s more of an anti-marriage thing in general,” to which Williams agreed. (It’s worth noting that not only was Superman’s marriage to Lois Lane undone when the publisher relaunched the character in 2011, but a plotline featuring an engaged Bruce Wayne was rumored to have been killed at the last minute last year.)
. . . DC Comics sinks further with this disturbing contest:
Harley Quinn is no stranger to a little breaking and entering for a good time and now, she’s going to help one talented artist break into comics with DC Entertainment’s Open Talent Search. That’s right, we’re looking for someone to draw one page of HARLEY QUINN #0 alongside some of comic’s most amazing talents, including Amanda Conner, Paul Pope, Bruce Timm, and a few other surprises, maybe even you!! . . .
Read the following script page and give us your original artistic interpretation of what those four panels should look like on a single page: . . .
PANEL 4
Harley sitting naked in a bathtub with toasters, blow dryers, blenders, appliances all dangling above the bathtub and she has a cord that will release them all. We are watching the moment before the inevitable death. Her expression is one of “oh well, guess that’s it for me” and she has resigned herself to the moment that is going to happen.
RON adds: I don’t think that this is as bad as it at first seems. The scene is in line with the character and is supposed to be rendered humorously. And suicide isn’t exactly breaking new ground, either.
DIANA WEST rebuts the FrontPage “take-down” of her book, American Betrayal. “The Radosh review, then, is a defense of a conventional, tightly blinkered historiography – ‘the court histories that continue to obscure key facts about our backstage war with Moscow,’ as M. Stanton Evans wrote in his endorsement of American Betrayal. But Radosh’s is in no way not a fair defense. It is not a fair debate. Instead, the Radosh review misrepresents my work by continually attacking my credibility.”
Related: Did the Gatestone Institute drop Clare Lopez for her favorable treatment of West’s book?
BURYING THE LEDE: Study “proves” impartiality of experts is a myth.
MARK PERRY: ‘Equal pay day’ this year fell on April 9; the next ‘equal occupational fatality day’ will occur on December 20, 2023. “The chart above shows the significant gender disparity in workplace fatalities in 2012: 4,045 men died on the job (92.3% of the total) compared to only 338 women (7.7% of the total). The ‘gender occupational fatality gap’ in 2012 was considerable — almost 12 men died on the job for every woman who died while working.”
LINDSEY GRAHAM JUMPS THE SHARK, implies that failure to strike Syria may result in U.S. getting nuked.
SUNNY SIDE UP: Alimony for Your Eggs. “Mr. Lieberman’s argument is that since fertility treatments were part of the marriage, they should be considered part of the marital lifestyle, which should be maintained as much as possible post-divorce. The only difference is, in the future, she’ll use another man’s sperm.”
Yes, because this is clearly less insane than not divorcing each other and trying to work it out.
ROBERT SPENCER: Fort Hood jihad mass murderer dishonorably discharged, gets to keep $300,000 he’s gotten in salary since his jihad attack. “A military panel also ordered that Hasan be stripped of his military pay. However that order will not take effect until place 14 days following his sentencing. Hasan will continue to receive his full military salary until Sept. 10.”
KEN WHITE: Bad Writing, Bad Editing, Bad Grasp of Law: An Example of Awful Legal Coverage. “Perhaps you’ll say that the bad reporting here was just in the lede, not in the heart of the story. But the lede is all that many people read. The lede gets picked up as the hook for the story. The lede gets repeated and cited and argued by people talking about the news. An ignorant lede promotes ignorance. This is an ignorant lede.”
White writes, “One of my most constant gripes is that the media does a terrible job of covering legal issues.” They do a terrible job in many areas. This just happens sticks out to White because he’s a lawyer.
AUSTRALIAN COLUMNIST SUFFERS INCOHERENT MELTDOWN after the recent election. “The cold waters of the Inuit code run headlong into the hot waters of amor fati and create chaos like a perfect storm. It’s little wonder that sometimes I feel I’m drowning. During amor fati, when I was a practising drug and alcohol addict, I believed it was my destiny to follow my mother’s path. I exceeded all expectations, and I exceeded all limitations. Hedonism is the only sport I was very good at.”
“I HATE WHITE PEOPLE”: Rampage in New York Leaves One Man Brain Dead.
The New York City Police Department’s (NYPD) Hate Crimes Task Force is investigating a savage attack that took place Wednesday afternoon in Union Square, after witnesses say a man vowed to attack white people before assaulting multiple individuals and leaving one man brain dead.
The black suspect, Lashawn Marten, 31, was playing chess before randomly jumping up and declaring “I hate white people,” according to one witness.
Another eye-witness told WLNY-TV that Marten said “the next white person who walks by I’m going to f**k.”
DEMOCRATIC POLITICS: Reported List of Churches and Christian Institutions Attacked in Egypt Since Wednesday. “Though there may be some changes made to the list, what has been assembled so far is staggering.”