TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Mother of 2 Arrested for Raping a Man at Gunpoint, Bail Set at $75,000.

Ciera Ross, a 25-year-old mother of two, was arrested and charged with raping a man in Chicago, according to reports.

Ross and a friend, who were driving on the North Side of Chicago, saw a man walking down the 400 block of North Kingsbury, according to Huffington Post.

Ross offered him a ride, which he accepted, before pulling out a revolver and ordering him to move to the back seat of the car. She then forced him to have sex with her companion in the back seat.

The man pleaded for the women to stop after they made him fondle the woman’s breasts and buttocks. The women, however, paid no heed and asked him to take off his clothes and the man complied before Ross’ friend began sexually assaulting him.

The women also took $200, credit cards and phone from the man, before he managed to escape in a taxi cab that passed by slowly, Assistant Cook County State’s Attorney Amanda Pillsbury revealed.

The victim apparently ran out of the car wearing only his shirt and the cab driver allowed him to use his cell phone to take a picture of Ross’ license plate and email it to himself.

The victim later identified Ross in a lineup, Pillsbury said.

$75,000 bond? For rape using a firearm? In Chicago?

MY USA TODAY COLUMN FOR TOMORROW: For Next Attorney General, Obama Should Reach Across The Aisle. Gay-marriage advocate and former Solicitor General Ted Olson, say.

Key bit:

Perhaps President Obama — and, for that matter, future presidents — should take a lesson from the way we handle the Department of Defense, and apply it to the Department of Justice: Consider naming someone outside his own party as attorney general.

This frequently happens with secretaries of Defense, and it has been of benefit to the administrations that have done it. FDR picked a Republican, Henry Stimson, to be secretary of War in 1940, and that meant that the war — and the war’s casualties — became a bipartisan matter instead of fodder for partisan attacks. President Obama retained George W. Bush’s Defense secretary, Robert Gates, for most of his first term. He replaced Gates with another Republican, Chuck Hagel, in that position.

Having a Defense secretary from the other party makes war bipartisan, and reassures members of the opposition that the powers of the sword aren’t being abused. Likewise, naming an attorney general from the opposite party would tend to make the administration of justice bipartisan, and would provide considerable reassurance, as Holder’s tenure in office emphatically did not, that the powers of law enforcement were not being abused in service of partisan ends. In an age of all-encompassing criminal laws, and pervasive government spying, that’s a big deal.

Odds that Obama will take my advice? About the same as the odds that he has nothing to cover up.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Bill Maher And Me. “Guys like Bill Maher are essentially bullies. They interact with conservatives for one purpose only: to make them look bad, and serve as foils for their leftism. The last thing they want is a real debate on a level playing field. The mere threat of being kept honest by not being the only possessor and editor of the video is enough to send them scurrying in a ‘different direction.'” Yep.

HMM: Hong Kong Government Says It Has Withdrawn Riot Police. “The protesters are seeking fully democratic elections for the city’s leader in 2017. But under China’s plan, only candidates vetted by a Beijing-friendly committee would be allowed to run. Earlier Monday, the government said that it had pulled back the riot police from the areas where roads were being blocked. The government urged the demonstrators to end their sit-ins so that life in this busy commercial city could return to normal.”

AT AMAZON, Fall Deals on Men’s Shoes. Also, Women’s Shoes.

Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season. Winter is coming.

DANA LOESCH: Anti-Gun Hysteria Results In Two Deaths.

IN THE CAMPUS WAR ON MEN, MEN ARE FIGHTING BACK: From Prof. John Banzhaf:

Date-Rape-Accused Hacking, Outing, Videotaping

Ethically Dubious Remedies Alongside Court Wins

WASHINGTON, D.C. (September 29, 2014): College men accused of date rape are fighting back with ethically dubious techniques including hacking, outing their attackers, and videotaping their sexual encounters, in addition to bringing an increasing number of successful law suits to vindicate themselves, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf.

Last week, at the University of Chicago, individuals allegedly trying to keep “the Hyde Park community safe from people who publicly accuse other people of committing varying levels of gender-based violence without any proof whatsoever…” hacked into a website of the school’s student organization and posted the name and photo of an alleged rape survivor as well as this threat: “Hopefully the class of 2018 is paying attention because otherwise the UChicago Electronic Army is going to have to rape harder.”

The incident was apparently in retaliation for a post on Tumblr called the “Hyde Park List.”

That list claimed to identify male students “known to commit varying levels of gender-based violence.” It listed male students as either “code red’ or “code orange” – apparently a reference to the seriousness of their alleged sexual crimes.

“Creating so-called ‘rape lists’ of students who may or may not be guilty of sex-based offenses – ostensibly to warn female students, but also to shame the males – is both ethically dubious and may well open the perpetrators to legal action,” says Professor Banzhaf, who has written widely on the topic of campus date rape. On the other hand, hacking into computer systems and outing women is at least as wrongful, and two wrongs never make a right, especially concerning such a serious matter, suggests Banzhaf.

As colleges are pressured to be more aggressive in finding students guilty of date rape, it appears that a few male students are beginning to follow the advise on various web sites to surreptitiously videotape their sexual encounters to be able to prove afterwards, if necessary, that the act was consensual.

For example, four students at Hofstra University were accused of gang raping a fellow student, but were freed when a cell phone video indicated that the sexual encounter was consensual.

Likewise, a San Francisco lawyer, charged with raping three women, had the charges regarding two women dismissed because he had videotaped those encounters, and another man was found not guilty of an alleged gang rape after a Cook County, Illinois, jury was shown a videotape arguably showing some signs of consent as pointed out by an expert witness.

Although such videotaping – without sound – may not be illegal in many states, it’s likewise ethically dubious, and hardly a good solution to the problem of date rapes, and of students who may be wrongful accused of such actions and/or denied basic procedural protections in the campus proceedings determining guilt or innocence.

An alternative, albeit a very expensive one, is for males found guilty to bring law suits against their universities – about a dozen of which have already been successful, and at least twice that number are still in the courts, says Banzhaf.

When the system fails to provide justice, people will seek it on their own. What’s that old saying? Oh, right: No Justice, No Peace!

IN LIGHT OF MY EARLIER POST ON KNIVES, SayUncle emails that he likes this Spyderco Endura. Sure, it’s not a Claymore, but as he notes, it’s as fast-opening as a switchblade (those are legal in Tennessee) but it’s legal in more other states.

He also sends this video, which demonstrates — see at about 1:00 — that it can indeed be opened very quickly.

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: Politico illustrates story about race and the modern GOP with a picture of Democrat George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. Even more amusingly, it’s labeled “History Dept.”

Honestly, Politico’s performance has been poor enough lately that I wonder if they’re hiring from the same pool as the Secret Service.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll: Dispatches From the Reality-Based Community.

Tom Wolfe once wrote that “the greatest hoax of modern history” occurred when “Russia’s ruling ‘socialist workers party,’ the Communists established themselves as the polar opposites of their two socialist clones, the National Socialist German Workers Party (quicknamed ‘The Nazis’) and Italy’s Marxist-inspired Fascisiti, by branding both as “the fascists,” which quickly led to those two socialist clones as being described, per Stalin’s orders, as “right wing” for the rest of the 20th century with very little pushback from limited-government conservatives and libertarians until recent years. The Democrats’ ongoing efforts to offload their shameful racist past onto the GOP has to run a close second. Don’t let them get away with it.

Nope. The Democrats were the party of Jim Crow. Bull Connor was a member of the Democratic National Committee. He set dogs and firehoses on civil rights protesters.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Speaking of Democrats: “On October 10, 1963, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy committed what is widely viewed as one of the most ignominious acts in modern American history: he authorized the Federal Bureau of Investigation to begin wiretapping the telephones of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.”

DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Small dog chases bear from Gatlinburg bedroom where children slept.

WELL, THE POPULIST THING IS JUST CAMOUFLAGE FOR A CORPORATE SHILL, AS HER RECORD MAKES CLEAR: Shikha Dalmia: Ex-Im bank stand betrays Warren’s populist roots.

MICHAEL BARONE: Feminists shocked: Men ride bikes outdoors, women indoors.

Robb doesn’t make the obvious follow-up point. Women, psychologists agree, tend to be more risk-averse than men. Evolutionary explanations are obvious. Riding a bicycle in New York, as Grose appreciates, is a lot riskier than riding a bicycle in an indoor cycling facility. “It’s possible,” Robb writes, in a bow (curtsy?) to feminist theory, “that in a totally gender-equal society, every activity — from gardening and crocheting to taxi-driving and construction work — would have an equal number of male and female practitioners.”

No, it’s not. There are salient differences between men and women, on average, as the natural result of the evolutionary process, and those differences are reflected in different behavior and different career choices, again on average. We want a society where people can make the choices they want, but we fool ourselves if we think that in such a society men’s and women’s choices would be statistically indistinguishable.

Feminists who insist that such choices are only the result of societal pressure often conclude otherwise after their attempts to get their little boys to play with dolls or their little girls to play with trucks prove futile. Yes, there are some males and females who do not follow typical gender patterns, and there are a very small number who choose to change gender.

Alice Robb stops short of making this general argument—would the New Republic print it?—but she goes some creditable distance in that direction. Good for her.

Always sad when getting people to come close to admitting long-established truths — boys and girls are different! — counts as a victory, but that’s where we are.

My question is, why are feminists science-deniers? Monkey test shows gender choices.

An experiment seems to back the theory that male monkeys choose traditional boy toys above dolls, which female monkeys choose to play with.

The experiment, which was conducted at the Woburn Safari Park, in Bedfordshire with Barbary macaques, formed part of a Horizon investigation into the differences between male and female brains.

The science is settled. You don’t want to be a science-denier, do you?

I’M SO OLD, I REMEMBER HER AS MARTIN. Futurist, pharma tycoon, satellite entrepreneur, philosopher. Martine Rothblatt, the highest-paid female executive in America, was born male. But that is far from the thing that defines her. Just ask her wife. Then ask the robot version of her wife.

Well, this is the 21st Century, you know. Of course, the Amanda Marcotte take would be that of course the highest-paid female executive in America used to be male. Because the patriarchy takes care of its own! And, no, I really do remember her as Martin Rothblatt, writing about space law back in the early days.

JUST A REMINDER, I WAS CALLING FOR ACTION ON SECRET SERVICE MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS BACK IN 2002: White House Intruder Got Farther Than First Reported, Official Says. “A man who jumped the White House fence this month made it far deeper into the president’s home than previously disclosed, overpowering a female Secret Service agent inside the North Portico entrance and running through the East Room before he was tackled, according to a congressional official familiar with the details of the incident. The man, Omar J. Gonzalez, was finally stopped as he tried to enter the Green Room, the official said. Earlier, Secret Service officials had said Mr. Gonzalez, 42, had only made it steps inside the North Portico after running through the front door.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE FROM THE INSTA-WIFE: How Not To Be Poor.

I REMAIN LEERY OF THE “INTERNET OF THINGS:” When Everything Works Like Your Cell Phone: When a thing connects to the Internet, three things happen: it becomes smart, it becomes hackable, and it’s no longer something you own.

I think people should own their devices.

POINTS AND FIGURES: Can You Teach Courage? First you have to want to.

AT AMAZON, fresh deals on Bestselling Products, updated every hour. There’s always something new!

Also, it’s the Kindle Daily Deal.

ANN ALTHOUSE: Jerry Brown signs a law requiring colleges and universities that get state money to impose a “yes means yes” standard on student sex.

The statute proceeds to speak of “the accused” and “the complainant.” The accused is not permitted to use intoxication as an excuse for misperceiving the existence of affirmative consent and there can be no affirmative consent when the complainant was “incapacitated” by drinking or drugs.

What if both are drunk? The smartass answer to that question is: It depends on who’s the accused and who’s the complainant. It seems as though, beyond the gender-neutrality of the statute, there is an assumption that only women will complain. The statutory scheme would collapse if men complained too. But social conditioning and convention keep men quiet… at least so far. Perhaps in the future, they will complain defensively after a night of ambiguity.

There are plenty of college women acting badly, and usually, because of uneven social conditioning and convention, with far less self-awareness about it than men.

THE UNDIGNIFIED NUDGE. If anyone needs to be nudged toward the path of proper behavior, it’s the bureaucrats and Clerisy who want to nudge us.

Let’s think about the dramatis personae of Sunstein’s account. There are, first of all, people, ordinary individuals with their heuristics, their intuitions, and their rules of thumb, with their laziness, their impulses, and their myopia. They have choices to make for themselves and their loved ones, and they make some of them well and many of them badly.

Then there are those whom Sunstein refers to as “we.” We know this, we know that, and we know better about the way ordinary people make their choices. We are the law professors and the behavioral economists who (a) understand human choosing and its foibles much better than members of the first group and (b) are in a position to design and manipulate the architecture of the choices that face ordinary folk. In other words, the members of this second group are endowed with a happy combination of power and expertise.

Of course regulators are people too. And like the rest of us, they are fallible. In the original Nudge, Sunstein engagingly confessed to many of the decisional foibles that Thaler exposed. Worse, though, is the fact that regulators are apt to make mistakes in their regulatory behavior: “For every bias identified for individuals, there is an accompanying bias in the public sphere.” Sometimes governments blunder because they feel compelled to defer to the irrationalities of ordinary people. But we all know they are perfectly capable of screwing things up on their own, whether it’s the invasion of Iraq or the rollout of Obamacare.

The difference is that when individuals make bad decisions in their own lives, they bear the cost. When members of the “nudging class” make bad decisions, they generally step through the revolving door to an even cushier job.

UPDATE: From the comments: “Sunstein et al. are concerned that the common man is not investing enough in his 401K. They attribute this to inertia, since they are unable to think of another reason why people would not make good investments against future needs. I suggest an alternate explanation: The common man is not investing in his 401K because he lacks confidence that Sunstein et al. can keep the world from blowing up before he retires, or that they can keep their hands off his retirement finds if the world does not blow up.”

AN ONLINE FIREARMS MUSEUM: The Arms Room.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: When To Resurface Your Concrete Sidewalk.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: I Went Undercover To See If A Girl Could Get Happy Ending Massage. “Any ‘rules’ restricting female sexuality are dying as fast as Sex and the City repeats can slay them, and it was only a matter of time before women embraced the notion that ‘quick releases’ aren’t just for men. . . . The bottom line: We like massages and we like orgasms, so why shouldn’t the two sometimes, er, come hand in hand?”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Married female teacher, 32, is jailed for less than two years for having sex with two students and flashing a third teenager; The married English teacher would entice students by saying: ‘All the candy you need is right here.’ There appears to be disparate treatment in these cases, with female teachers receiving much lighter sentences than similarly situated males.

JOURNALISM: Academic Prostitute Blogger Brooke Magnanti Outed as Sockpuppeter Who Smeared Other Female Journalists.