WELL, IT’S A BURDEN BEING A CAREGIVER: Elderly suns rip their closest planets to shreds.
Archive for 2013
June 7, 2013
FRAMEUP: Texas woman arrested in ricin letters to Obama, Bloomberg. “Shannon Rogers Guess Richardson of New Boston, Texas, originally called the Federal Bureau of Investigation claiming that her husband had sent the letters, officials said. The investigators found that she had sent the letters herself, they said.”
LAW SCHOOL: Reconsidering Legal Education And Licensing.
ROGER SIMON: Traveling with Drudge — America’s Indispensable Man.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY WE’D SEE POLITICAL CENSORSHIP IN THE MILITARY. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Soldier Told Not to Read Mark Levin, David Limbaugh or Sean Hannity in Uniform. Franz Fanon would be okay, though, I’m sure.
HE WAS ALMOST AS SHOCKED AS PEOPLE WHO THOUGHT OBAMA WAS A CIVIL LIBERTARIAN: At 66 Years Old, Man Discovers He’s Actually A Woman.
JULIUS GENACHOWSKI AND JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Let’s Test an Emergency Ad Hoc Network in Boston.
I JUST WONDER IF IT “LEAKS” OVER TO THE DATA MINERS AT OFA: Why the NSA Wants All That Verizon Metadata.
ILYA SOMIN ON GEORGE WILL AND CRIMINAL LAW REFORM: “An even better way to rein in federal criminal law by abolishing much of it completely. For many of the federal crimes currently on the books, we need a mandatory maximum of zero.”
DAVID HENDERSON: When Government Cries Wolf.
IN THE MAIL: From Timothy Zahn, Cobra Gamble: Cobra War, Book III.
A DEFENSE OF THE NSA SPY PROGRAM from Stewart Baker. Also, thoughts from Orin Kerr.
HOW OBAMACARE LOOKS ON THE GROUND: “What I’m saying is that for a large minority of people opting out of the ACA probably won’t even be a conscious choice. It will just happen because of the complexity, the upfront sticker cost and the lack of ability to make good financial decisions.”
Nobody’s interested in the un-exotic underclass. “The unexotic underclass, has the misfortune of being insufficiently interesting. These are the huddles of Whites – poor, rural working class – living in the American South, in the Midwest, in Appalachia. In oh-so-progressive Northeast, we refer to them as ‘hicks’ and ‘hillbillies’ and ‘trailer trash,’ because apparently, this is the one demographic that American manners have forgotten.”
JOBLESS RATE RISES TO 7.6 PERCENT. Recovery summer!
UPDATE: Three-Month Average of Job Creation Plummets.
ANOTHER UPDATE: “We were told in 2009 if we passed the stimulus, unemployment now would be 5%. But these scandals might hurt Obama’s credibility.”
NICK GILLESPIE: The Top 4 Apologies For Obama As Stalker-in-Chief.
Well, my favorite is still this one: “Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.”
NOAH BERLATSKY: When Men Experience Sexism.
Even in cases where temporary alimony makes sense—as when a spouse has quit a job to raise the children—it’s hard to understand the need for lifetime alimony payments, given women’s current levels of workforce participation. As one alimony-paying ex-husband says, “The theory behind this was fine back in the ’50s, when everybody was a housewife and stayed home.” But today, it looks like an antiquated perpetuation of retrograde gender roles—a perpetuation which, disproportionately, harms men.
This isn’t the only case in which men can suffer from gender discrimination. David Benatar, in his 2012 monograph The Second Sexism discusses a whole range of other ways in which men as men are disadvantaged. Men, for example, receive custody of children in only about 10 percent of divorce cases in the United States. Men also, as Benatar writes, are subject to “a long history of social and legal pressure…to fight in war” —pressures which women do not generally experience in the same way. Along the same lines, physical violence against men is often minimized or seen as normal. Benatar refers to the history of corporal punishment, which has much more often been inflicted on boys than girls. Society’s scandalous tolerance of rape in prison seems like it is also related to a general indifference to, or even amusement at, sexual violence committed against men.
Perhaps most hideously, men through history have been subject to genocidal, or gendercidal, violence targeted at them specifically because they are men. Writers like Susan Brownmiller have over the last decades helped to show how mass rape and sexual violence against women are often a deliberate part of genocide; similarly, there has been increasing awareness in recent years of the gendercidal results of sex-selective abortion and infanticide in places like India and China. But the way gendercide can be directed against men is much less discussed. One of the worst recent examples of this was in the Balkans war, where, according to genocide researcher Adam Jones, ” All of the largest atrocities… target[ed] males almost exclusively, and for the most part “battle-age” males.
Read the whole thing.
ANN ALTHOUSE ON WHY THE DATA-MINING SCANDAL LEAKED: “I suspect it was someone who wanted to distract us from the IRS scandal (and other scandals) so that the scandal of the moment would be one that’s about Bush.”
How cynical we’ve all become, in this age of Hope And Change. But then: “Here’s where the other Obama scandals come in. How do we know the government is dutifully concentrating on national security — fighting terrorists and not political enemies? That kind of mistrust matters, but it’s not specific to the NSA program. It undermines everything government does. What would you like government to stop doing now that you can’t trust it with anything?”
UPDATE: More thoughts on trust.
THE CONVERGENCE BETWEEN the White House and Big Data. “The general problem is the unholy government and tech alliance, based on a mix of plutocracy, information-sharing, and a joint understanding of the importance of information for future elections. Which current politician wouldn’t want to court the support of tech, and which major tech company can today stand above politics?”
AT AMAZON, Digital Deals.
Also, today only: 63% Off Men’s Stuhrling Original Swiss-Quartz Ascot Watches with Extra Strap, $54.99 (85% off).
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 29.
ANDREW KLAVAN AND BILL WHITTLE: Can An Atheist Be A Conservative?
BOB ZUBRIN debates an anti-humanist.
PRIVACY IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: WSJ: Big Brother also collecting credit-card transactions.