WESLEY J. SMITH: UK Refusing to Punish Sex-Selection Abortion. “These days bioethical laws–that is statutes and regulations intended to create ‘protective’ guidelines, limitations, and parameters around life-taking, life-denying, or life-creating enterprises–are there mostly for show. They aren’t really intended to be enforced, but to placate a wary public worried about the collapse of moral standards.”
THE AMERICAN: Sorting Out the High-Tech Patent Mess.
ITC administrative law judges, who have no specialized knowledge of patent law, nevertheless are called upon to judge infringement cases. In recent years, this venue has become widely popular with the business community — according to ITC analysis, the number of Section 337 cases increased by more than 500 percent from 2001-2011.
The reasons are twofold: the agency process is much quicker than court proceedings, including appeals; and the ITC can exercise only one (draconian) remedy in these cases: import bans on products deemed to have infringed an existing patent.
TEACH A MAN TO FISH: Afghan police arrested for killing 6 kids while trying to catch fish. “The incident took place last Friday in the Doshi district of the province when policemen fired a rocket propelled grenade into the water to catch fish, but ended up hitting a crowd of children.”
CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: 15-Year-Old Danish Girl Blinded in Attack by Arabs. “This article in DiarioSur adds the detail that all six of the attackers were of North African origin and that they hit the girl in the face with a bottle of vodka. The video below shows some mobile phone footage of the incident. It also features the girl’s father speaking. He says the attackers were Moroccans.”
WARREN MEYER: How Can People Say This Stuff With A Straight Face? “Any 5-year-old can figure out here that this has nothing to do with victim privacy — this is all about shielding her organization from accountability from future screw-ups. Somehow we have ended up in a completely backwards world where surveillance is aimed at private citizens doing private things but is banned for public officials doing public things.”
WHOM DO WE BOMB NOW? Rebels Admit Responsibility for Chemical Weapons Attack. “Syrian rebels in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta have admitted to Associated Press correspondent Dale Gavlak that they were responsible for last week’s chemical weapons incident which western powers have blamed on Bashar Al-Assad’s forces, revealing that the casualties were the result of an accident caused by rebels mishandling chemical weapons provided to them by Saudi Arabia.”
ADVENTURES IN EUPHEMISM: Normalizing Pedophilia. “Cross-generational lifestyle.” “Age orientation.”
I HOPE HIS DAUGHTER HAS DVR: MSNBC confirms October launch of nightly Alec Baldwin show.
BJØRN LOMBORG: Trashing rice, killing children. “Using an ever-changing but incorrect array of allegations against Golden Rice, opponents have managed to delay the deployment of this product for more than a decade. During this time, about 8 million kids have died from vitamin A deficiency.”
ADVENTURES IN EUPHEMISM: Abortion Clinic Closes in Michigan, Woman Was Forced to Have Abortion There. “When she said stop, it was too late… I told her I would stop, but when I take my instrument there was blood and tissue on it from pregnancy, so I couldn’t stop.” Yes, “tissue on it from pregnancy.”
MICHAEL D. TANNER: When Welfare Pays Better than Work.
To be clear: There is no evidence that people on welfare are lazy. Indeed, surveys of them consistently show their desire for a job. But they’re also not stupid. If you pay them more not to work than they can earn by working, many will choose not to work.
While this makes sense for them in the short term, it may actually hurt them over the long term. One of the most important steps toward avoiding or getting out of poverty is a job.Only 2.6 percent of full-time workers are poor, vs. 23.9 percent of adults who don’t work. And, while many anti-poverty activists decry low-wage jobs, even starting at a minimum-wage job can be a springboard out of poverty.
Thus, by providing such generous welfare payments, we may actually not be helping recipients.
A SOLAR PANEL AWARENESS CAMPAIGN I can get behind. “I liked the idea, but when I looked into it, it was clear that the only way it made sense was with these inordinate government subsidies. And after pondering that for awhile, I decided I would install the solar panels to educate people about what the cost of the subsidies is to them as taxpayers. I’d say at least one person a week I discuss it with as they stop by, so I think I’ve reached quite a few people.”
ILYA SOMIN: Private Schools Increase Political Knowledge and Reduce the Danger of Political Indoctrination. “The evidence suggests that political knowledge is higher among students who attend private schools, even after controlling for various demographic variables such as race and family income. I’m not suggesting that private schools necessarily do a great job of teaching history and civics. But they are, on average, doing a better one than government-run schools. Sending all students to public school would further exacerbate the already severe problem of political ignorance.” Maybe that’s the point of government schools in the first place.
THINKING ABOUT FREE MARKETS: Russ Roberts shows why EconTalk is the best podcast around.
MELTING THE PLASTIC CEILING: Feminism “wins” another battle in the war against misogyny in children’s toys.
BOOKS ON COMMUNISM recommended by philosopher Bill Vallicella.
WALTER WILLIAMS on discrimination:
Ideas such as equity and equal opportunity, while having high emotional value, are vacuous analytical concepts. For example, I’ve asked students whether they plan to give every employer an equal opportunity to hire them when they graduate. To a person, they always answer no. If they aren’t going to give every employer an equal opportunity to hire them, what’s fair about forcing employers to give them an equal opportunity to be hired?
I’m guilty of gross violation of equality of opportunity, racism and possibly sexism. Back in 1960, when interviewing people to establish a marital contract, every woman wasn’t given an equal opportunity. I discriminated against not only white, Indian, Asian, Mexican and handicapped women but men of any race. My choices were confined to good-looking black women. You say, “Williams, that kind of discrimination doesn’t harm anyone!” Nonsense! When I married Mrs. Williams, other women were harmed by having a reduced opportunity set.
WATCH YOUR MOUTH: Babies Learn to Recognize Words in the Womb.
IF YOU “LOVE OUR FLAG,” why put it on the floor and ask students to stand on it?
HOW TO GET an easy A. “Fifteen universities worldwide — including Yale University, Brown University, and Pennsylvania State University — will offer college credit to students who ‘write feminist thinking’ into Wikipedia.”
BUT IT’S NEVER ENOUGH: Average Public School Teacher Paid More in School Year Than Median Household Earned in Full Year.
In the 2011-2012 school year, according to a newly released report by the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, the average base salary for a full-time public school teacher in the United States was $53,100 for the regular school year—not counting any earnings made for summer work.
In 2011, the latest year estimated by the Census Bureau, median household income in the United States was $50,054.
WE CANNOT THINK because we cannot speak.
As with the invention of “personhood” in the abortion debate, we have created a metaphysical category — “identity” — in order to avoid talking about physical reality. In the case of sex-reassignment surgery, it is gender identity; in the case of those who want their left legs removed, it is body-integrity identity. The latter may seem shocking and exotic, but the former is no more defensible. But the question of sex reassignment is linked rhetorically and politically to the question of gay rights, though homosexuality is an entirely distinct and separate phenomenon under the emotional shadow of civil rights. It is a measure of the intellectual degradation of our times that the physical reality of these cases is considered, if it is considered at all, a distant second to the subjective impressions of people who are, not to put too fine a point on it, mentally ill and in need of treatment.
CRANMER: Christians may be bombed, for that is convention. Muslims may not be gassed, for that is taboo. “The more we ‘intervene’, the more Christians are marginalised. In Syria, they are happier living under the the Shia Alawite dictatorship of President Bashar al-Assad than under those we call the ‘rebels’ or ‘opposition forces’, who are, in fact, disparate groups of Al Qaeda-affiliated, Wahhabi-Islamist jihadists.”
A TALE OF TWO HEADLINES: Blacks Asked to Leave Wild Wing Cafe because White Customer Felt Threatened.
A group of 25 Black people waited two hours to get in a Wild Wing Cafe restaurant in North Charleston, South Carolina, only to be asked to leave almost immediately after entering the restaurant because a white customer felt “threatened” by their presence. One member of the group, Michael Brown, took his complaint to Facebook when the corporate office of the restaurant did not call him back after placing several calls.
Woman from Wild Wings Contacts Radio Facts, States Black Patrons Asked to Leave for Several Reasons.
You’re only getting one side of story here. I work at the restaurant and your representation of the events is way off base. The group was being loud and obnoxious to both customers and staffers. They kept complaining about their long wait and were talking about how “whitey” was able to get seated, but they were not. The problem was that they had a large group and insisted on sitting next to each other. We only had one area that could accommodate their large group and the patrons in that area were not done.
Funny how one claim is presented as a statement of fact, and another is presented as a mere statement made by a woman.
A DEVIOUS PLAN: If I Hated Women I Would… “If I hated women, I would have them hate and fear their own biology. I would tell them that to be truly a woman, they must daily pump themselves full of dangerous chemicals and hormones to subdue their greatest gifts. I would teach them to reject their natural impulses and treat their fecundity as the enemy.” Read the whole thing.
DALROCK: Solipsism as a religious experience.
The UK equivalent of the Girl Scouts recently decided to change their vow, replacing “love my God” with “be true to myself and develop my beliefs”. As the BBC explains this is not the first change for girls to that portion of the oath. In 1910 that portion of the oath was “do my duty to God”. This was changed in 1994 to the “love my God” wording, which has now been replaced with a promise to be true to themselves.
The Telegraph interviewed Gill Slocombe, the woman who heads the Girl Guides. When asked what being true to themselves really meant, Slocombe explained:
It’s a moral compass
What good is a moral compass if you design it to think you’re the north pole?
MEGHAN COX GURDON: The Case for Good Taste in Children’s Books. “The book industry, broadly speaking, says: Kids have a right to read whatever they want. And if you follow the argument through it becomes: Adults should not discriminate between good and bad books or stand as gatekeepers, deciding what young people should read. In other words, the faculty of judgment and taste that we apply in every other area of life involving children should somehow vaporize when it comes in contact with the printed word.”
UPDATE: The link is now dead. Here is a new one.
HAVE READ MORE! “Yagoda’s book is the answer to a question I have long pondered: why do so many of my talented students write such crappy papers? The problem, he explains, is that too many students are trying to write ‘well’ when they simply aren’t ready for it.”
BUT IT WAS SUCH A GREAT TALKING POINT: Marriage licenses were not introduced to prevent miscegenation.