TEACH WOMEN NOT TO BITE.

NARRATIVEFAIL: Raheem Kassam: Was Steve Jobs Syrian? No, But He Might Have Never Existed If Abortion Had Been Legal In The 1950s.

Earlier this morning Michigan Congresswoman Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) took to Fox News (above) to declare that “Steve Jobs was a Syrian”. Obviously, that’s a massive fib. And a “racist” one too, as Ms. Dingell’s assertion relies on forcing the children of immigrants to maintain their parents’ country of origin as a national identifier. It also flies in the face of the ideas of integration and assimilation. . . .

Finally, if conservatives ever hear “Steve Jobs was a Syrian” – they might want to reply with this little nugget of information, based on his family background.

His biological mother, Joanna Schiebe, fell pregnant with Mr. Jandali’s baby out of wedlock. Her father was intent that she not marry a Muslim, and at the time, abortion was illegal. So, the pair gave Steve Jobs up for adoption.

But had abortion been legal at the time, as per Jeffrey S. Young’s “The Journey Is The Reward” early biography of Mr. Jobs

“Adoption in those days was a much more prevalent occurrence than today. The stigma of single parenthood was intense, and abortion was a dangerous and illegal back-alley operation”.

So could it be that had abortion been freely available in the United States in the 1950s, we would have had no Steve Jobs? Well, it’s more credible than calling him a “Syrian”.

Read the whole thing. Of course, you can see how Debbie Dingell, who inherited her political position, might believe in such things.

DEMS SURE SPEND A LOT OF TIME CALLING PEOPLE PHOBIC: Roger Simon: Are Republicans Crazy Xenophobes? Answering Fareed Zakaria. “Trump is a symptom, not the problem. And the problem is the cancer in Islam itself which people like Zakaria (and Obama) refuse to accept or even name, deflecting the issue to Trump’s pronouncements.”

My question: What have the xenos done for us lately? And maybe, with Obama’s election being an example of xenophilia, others are asking the same thing. An excerpt from my earlier post, during the now-prescient Giuliani flap:

Obama’s appeal in 2008 lay in no small part in xenophilia: We’re so open-minded, we’re not just electing a President with a Muslim-sounding name, we’re electing a President with the same name as our most recent wartime foe! It let people feel enlightened, and progressive.

But all those differences that seemed so appealing can quickly flip into grounds for suspicion, especially when the object is behaving suspiciously. After all, if — like me — you believe in evolution, you might think that xenophobia, as such a well-established human trait, must have had beneficial functions: Maybe the xenos couldn’t be trusted, or even expected, to have the polity’s best interests at heart. Maybe, when people start getting worried about the polity’s future, those novel characteristics that once seemed so appealing now seem threatening. So while there’s a general reason the establishment wants to take the patriotism question off the table — patriotism is unsophisticated, and so limiting — there’s also a specific reason, which is that it’s something Obama’s vulnerable on right now, and it’s something the establishment can’t afford to cast Obama loose on, for reasons internal to its coalition.

I think the fact that the Dems are doubling down on their latest phobia charge is related to this. Meanwhile, the one phobia they won’t talk about is oikophobia.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Babysitter, 21, who had sex with 11-year-old boy will NOT go to jail as judges rule against bid to give her a tougher sentence. Female privilege. Apparently, the 11-year-old was “sex mad” and asking for it.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Lawsuit By 12 Graduates Against Thomas Jefferson Law School Over Placement Data Heads To Trial In March. “Thomas Jefferson reported post-graduation employment figures that exceeded 70 percent and topped 90 percent in 2010, but did not disclose that those figures included part-time and non-legal work such as a pool cleaner and a sales clerk at Victoria’s Secret and were based on a small sample of graduates, according to Nguyen’s lawsuit and her attorney, Brian Procel. The lawsuit further alleges that the school routinely reported unemployed students as employed and shredded surveys and other documents that reflected a more accurate employment picture.”

Courts have been suspiciously charitable to law schools in other cases along these lines, but stay tuned.

CHANGE: Highly Educated Women In The US No Longer Have Fewer Children.

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AS LIMBAUGH SAYS, THEY HATE TRUMP, BUT THEY FEAR CRUZ: National Journal: Cruz is More Dangerous Than Trump.

ARE OPEN PLAN OFFICES INHUMANE? At the PJ Lifestyle blog, Kate O’Hare writes:

Modern zoos go to great lengths to make their animals’ enclosures resemble natural habitats. After decades of keeping wildlife in cramped, sterile cages with no privacy, they discovered that the stress and the deprivation made the creatures more susceptible to disease and shortened their lives.

But some of the most progressive companies in America haven’t yet figured out that, however clean, beautiful and stylish a work environment may look, if it doesn’t take human nature into account, the results may be the same.

Ironically, many of these companies — like such tech giants as Google — expect employees to work extremely long hours and dedicate huge chunks of their lives to the mission. The Googles of the world also provide snacks, games, gyms and beanbag chairs, but for a lot of corporate workers, they get the “open plan” office without all the tech-firm perks.

As with any “progressive” notion, the idea of the “open plan” office had lofty goals. Lowering cubicle walls or eliminating personal workspaces entirely, it was meant to foster communication, collaboration and teamwork. As a bonus, it saved floor space, money and allowed bosses — often sequestered in glass-walled offices around the perimeter — to keep a constant eye on employees.

The early modernist architects such as Mies van der Rohe (the last director of Weimar-era Germany’s Bauhaus) were obsessed with open-planning, both in commercial and residential applications. In the 1950s after emigrating to America, Mies even designed a project at the Illinois Institute of Technology (where he was founder and director of the architectural program) which he called, based on its dimensions in feet, the 50X50 house. It was an attempt to merge his steel and glass architecture, paired to down to the absolute minimal of elements, with Levittown-style mass production; its only enclosed rooms were two bathrooms and a utility room.

As architectural historians Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst noted in their exhaustively researched (and quite readable) 2012 biography of Mies:

American families with children would never have accepted the lack of privacy that Mies’s generalized interior implied. Goldsmith [Myron Goldsmith, who did the actual engineering drawings and mockups under Mies’s supervision — Ed] “thought it was a huge step to suggest [it for a family], so I said, incredulously, one day to Mies, ‘Do you mean you can raise this family with children, parents in this open plan and adjust some walls?’ ‘Ja,’ said Mies, ‘There’s distance, and it reminds me of some ski lodges or on a yacht or or sailboat.’ He thought it could be done if you had a venturesome client.”

“The Fifty by Fifty House was an abstract[ ion],” Goldsmith stated in a 1986 interview:

At that time Mies was very interested in architecture just as background for people, to try to reduce the architecture as much as possible to nothing. . . . He said he had visited the United States Plywood Company to pick some plywood for something and loved this big empty warehouse. What a wonderful house it would make, this space where you could just live. How all the problems are solved, one sees the glimmer of this in some of the lofts that are being done now, unified, very high spaces, solving the elements like sleeping and everything at an absolute minimum. Mies had the same idea. This was the idea of the Fifty by Fifty House, of how far you could go in one unified space and how you could live within it.

And Mies and other European modernists and their acolytes were – and are – prepared to go quite far indeed. Nice to finally see this century old “Progressive” concept finally getting some pushback in the office place.

SO LEFTIES WANT TO REMOVE SCALIA FROM THE SUPREME COURT because he said something totally reasonable.

Meh. They just want to get rid of him, or to intimidate him. Same as always. I don’t think he’s very easy to intimidate, but maybe Kennedy is the real target here. He seems susceptible to PR attacks.

BINARY BERNIE: Shorter Bernie Sanders: If you don’t go to college, you’ll end up in jail.

Or Iraq, as John Kerry would add.

ANDREW BOSTOM: Deobandi Butchery in San Bernardino: 1977 Roots of the Jihad Carnage.

THE MEN’S HEALTH GAP: “In most parts of the world, health outcomes among boys and men continue to be substantially worse than among girls and women, yet this gender-based disparity in health has received little national, regional or global acknowledgement or attention from health policy-makers or health-care providers.”

Men are considered expendable. In fact, when men live longer, we hear complaints that it’s bad for women.

THEY DON’T WANT CONVERSATIONS, THEY WANT SUBMISSION: Jeannie Suk: Shutting Down Conversations About Rape at Harvard Law. “To my knowledge, no complaint of sexual harassment has been filed with Harvard’s Title IX office—though I’ve been told by a high-level administrator that several people have inquired about the possibility—and I don’t know if the school would proceed with an investigation. Precedent for such an investigation exists in the case of Laura Kipnis, a feminist film-studies professor at Northwestern University, who earlier this year wrote an article criticizing aspects of Title IX policies and culture and was accused of creating a hostile environment on campus; Northwestern conducted an investigation and ultimately cleared Kipnis of sexual-harassment charges.”

Anyone who files such a complaint should be hit with a civil-rights conspiracy suit in response. These people need to be taught that bullying is risky.

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NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Novel nanoconjugate delivers synergistic combination of microRNAs to treat cancer.

SPYING: The Growth Industry Helping Governments Hack Terrorists, Criminals—and Political Opponents. Since the ruling class is usually safe from terrorists, and in bed with criminals, I’m guessing that “political opponents” will get the most spying.

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CAN NATIONS BE RUN BY ELITES WHO THINK THAT THEIR NATIONS DON’T MATTER? The Tale of the Swedish Prosecutor, the Citizen, and the Human Being.

And how long will citizens be disposed to follow leaders who think that their nations don’t matter?

THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS ONCE AGAIN DISPLAY THEIR IGNORANCE ON FIREARMS, and Tom Maguire is there to mock them cruelly. “The ‘according to research’ link provided by the editors takes us to the Violence Policy Center, which is a step up from their recent editorial linking to a rival of The Onion.” Well, possibly. VPC is laughable, as opposed to humorous.

Plus: “The burst you hear is laughter. Do they even know that semi-automatic weapons fire one shot per trigger pull, or are they having a flashback to the Imperial Storm Troopers in the Star Wars trailer? Their own polling on that issue has gone against them, so it seems as if the Great Unwashed are figuring out just how phony the assault weapons debate is, even if the Times has not.”

HMM: Prostate Cancer Treatment Tied to Alzheimer’s Risk. “Hormone therapy, a common treatment for prostate cancer, is associated with an increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease, a new study has found. The goal of hormone therapy, also known as androgen deprivation therapy, is to lower the level of male sex hormones, or androgens, that stimulate the growth of prostate cancer cells. Over all, those treated with hormone therapy had an 88 percent increased risk of Alzheimer’s compared with other patients. The longer the hormone treatment, the more the risk increased, and patients with at least 12 months of treatment had more than double the risk. . . . Androgens have been shown to affect the accumulation of amyloid plaques, one of the features of Alzheimer’s disease, and this may be one mechanism that could explain the finding.”

I wonder if this means that testosterone supplementation might reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s?

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Terror arrests hit record levels as women and teenagers lured by Islamic State. “Widows and orphans,” as our President says.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 948.

THE ECONOMIST: Playing with fear: In America and Europe, right-wing populist politicians are on the march. The threat is real.

Populists differ, but the bedrock for them all is economic and cultural insecurity. Unemployment in Europe and stagnant wages in America hurt a cohort of older working-class white men, whose jobs are threatened by globalisation and technology. Beneath them, they complain, are immigrants and scroungers who grab benefits, commit crimes and flout local customs. Above them, overseeing the financial crisis and Europe’s stagnation, are the impotent self-serving elites in Washington and Brussels who never seem to pay for their mistakes.

Jihadist terrorism pours petrol on this resentment—and may even extend populism’s appeal. Whenever IS inspires or organises murderous attacks, the fear of immigrants and foreigners grows. When the terrorists get through, as they sometimes inevitably will, it highlights the ruling elite’s inadequacy. When leaders, in response, warn against slandering Islam and focus on gun control, as Barack Obama did in a speech from the Oval Office on December 6th, populists dismiss it as yet more political correctness.

When elites are weak, ineffectual, and dishonest — not to mention staggeringly corrupt — you get populism. If those, like The Economist, who purport to police the elites had done a better job over the past decade, maybe we wouldn’t have come to such a pass.