TURNING SOCIALISM AGAINST ITSELF: The Secret, Dangerous World of Venezuelan Bitcoin Mining.
Archive for 2016
November 29, 2016
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! The Understudied Female Sexual Predator: According to new research, sexual victimization by women is more common than gender stereotypes would suggest.
Today, the fruits of that research were published in another peer-reviewed paper, “Sexual Victimization Perpetrated by Women: Federal Data Reveal Surprising Prevalence.” Co-authored with Andrew Flores and Ilan Meyer, it appears in Aggression and Violent Behavior. Once again, federal survey data challenged conventional wisdom.
“These surveys have reached many tens of thousands of people, and each has shown internally consistent results over time,” the authors note. “We therefore believe that this article provides more definitive estimates about the prevalence of female sexual perpetration than has been provided in the literature to date. Taken as a whole, the reports we examine document surprisingly significant prevalence of female-perpetrated sexual victimization, mostly against men and occasionally against women.”
Those conclusions are grounded in striking numbers. . . .
The authors also note a 2011 survey of 302 male college students. It found that 51.2 percent reported “at least one sexual victimization experience since age 16.”
About half of the victims reported a female perpetrator.
As well, “a 2014 study of 284 men and boys in college and high school found that 43 percent reported being sexually coerced, with the majority of coercive incidents resulting in unwanted sexual intercourse. Of them, 95 percent reported only female perpetrators. The authors defined sexual coercion broadly, including verbal pressure such as nagging and begging, which, the authors acknowledge, increases prevalence dramatically.”
And “a 2012 study using data from the U. S. Census Bureau’s nationally representative National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions found in a sample of 43,000 adults little difference in the sex of self-reported sexual perpetrators. Of those who affirmed that they had ‘ever forced someone to have sex with you against their will,’ 43.6 percent were female and 56.4 percent were male.”
Finally, there is reason to fear that abuse by female perpetrators is under-reported.
The Insta-Wife has long believed this based on her clinical experience.
Meanwhile, if rape is something that people do, rather than something that men do, whole ideologies are in danger of collapse. I had a column on this phenomenon a couple of years ago.
NIALL FERGUSON: Donald Trump’s New World Order.
Donald Trump therefore enters the Oval Office with an underestimated advantage. Obama’s foreign policy has been a failure, most obviously in the Middle East, where the smoldering ruin that is Syria—not to mention Iraq and Libya—attests to the fundamental naivety of his approach, dating all the way back to the 2009 Cairo speech. The President came to believe he had an ingenious strategy to establish geopolitical balance between Sunni and Shi’a. But by treating America’s Arab friends with open disdain, while cutting a nuclear deal with Iran that has left Tehran free to wage proxy wars across the region, Obama has achieved not peace but a fractal geometry of conflict and a frightening, possibly nuclear, arms race. At the same time, he has allowed Russia to become a major player in the Middle East for the first time since Kissinger squeezed the Soviets out of Egypt in the 1972-79 period. The death toll in the Syrian war now approaches half a million; who knows how much higher it will rise between now and Inauguration Day?
Meanwhile, global terrorism has surged under Obama. Of the past 16 years, the worst year for terrorism was 2014, with 93 countries experiencing an attack and 32,765 people killed. 2015 was the second worst, with 29,376 deaths. Last year, four radical Islamic groups were responsible for 74 per cent of all deaths from terrorism: ISIS, Boko Haram, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. In this context, the President’s claims to be succeeding against what he euphemistically calls “violent extremism” are absurd. Much opprobrium has been heaped on Donald Trump in the course of the past year. But there was much that was true in his underreported August 15 foreign policy speech on the subject of Islamic extremism and the failure of the Obama Administration to defeat it.
The “Obama Doctrine” has failed in Europe, too, where English voters opted to leave the EU in defiance of the President’s threats, and where the German leadership he recently praised has delivered, first, an unnecessarily protracted financial crisis in the European periphery and, second, a disastrous influx to the core of migrants, some but not all of them refugees from a region that Europe had intervened in just enough to exacerbate its instability.
Take the time to read the whole thing.
Obama was elected in no small part because he was the “UnBush.” That and his near-personality cult with leftists around the world gave him something approaching carte blanche to pursue a naive (at best) and wildly destructive (almost everywhere) foreign policy. If he backs down from his silly campaign promises to shake down NATO, then as the UnObama, Trump may prove — even to his harshest critics in Europe and elsewhere — to be welcome and stabilizing change agent.
RED LINE: Assad, allies aim to seize all Aleppo before Trump takes power.
Note to Reuters: In this country, we call it “taking the oath of office” not “taking power.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Fidel Castro Bet On The Wrong Horse And Died A Failure.
On the other hand, if Castro’s goal was to live a long life enriching himself at the expense of his brutalized people while setting up his family as a North Korean-style communist royalty, then he succeeded admirably.
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Football fans boo Castro supporters.
ONCE YOU’VE DECIDED THAT MICRO-AGGRESSIONS, “MISGENDERING,” AND “HURTFUL” CHALKING CAN BE PUNISHED, WHAT GROUND DO YOU HAVE TO STAND ON when criticizing Donald Trump for wanting to outlaw flag-burning? Sure it’s a dumb and unconstitutional idea, but Dems have been on board with lots of those where speech is concerned.
I mean, pretty much the entire Democratic party supports overturning Citizens United — a case in which a filmmaker faced punishment for criticizing Hillary Clinton — so what free speech principles are they invoking now?
MY NEPHEW LOST HIS BUSINESS AND HIS HOME LAST NIGHT: Inferno forces evacuations in Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge.
PERSONNEL IS POLICY: Tom Price, Obamacare Critic, Is Said to Be Trump’s Choice for Health Secretary.
If President-elect Donald J. Trump wanted a cabinet secretary who could help him dismantle and replace President Obama’s health care law, he could not have found anyone more prepared than Representative Tom Price, who has been studying how to accomplish that goal for more than six years.
Mr. Price, an orthopedic surgeon who represents many of the northern suburbs of Atlanta, speaks with the self-assurance of a doctor about to perform another joint-replacement procedure. He knows the task and will proceed with brisk efficiency.
Mr. Trump has picked Mr. Price, a six-term Republican congressman, to be secretary of health and human services, Mr. Trump’s transition team announced Tuesday morning.
Give that man a giant scalpel.
THERE’S A LOT OF PROJECTION FROM THE LEFTIES HERE REGARDING OSTRACISM, A FAVORITE TACTIC OF THEIR OWN: Trump win is lesson for media and academia.
As the clock approached midnight on Election Day, our collective bubble began bursting and my iPhone began blowing up.
Myself included, members of my two professions, journalism and academia, were shell-shocked the presidential election didn’t go as expected.
“This is so f—ked up!” a journalist texted me.
“Oh my God!” pinged a professor. “We will be the ones ostracized if he wins.”
When Donald Trump’s victory was official, another academic acquaintance observed, “It’s an indictment on all of us.”
Indeed, it was an epic failure for the media-academia complex. Not just because nearly every poll showing that Trump had little to no chance of winning was a collaborative effort between media outlets and universities.
Journalists are supposed to inform the public about what’s happening in society. Professors are expected to prepare students for the real world. But this election, both were out of touch with reality. While some correctly predicted the outcome, most of us perished the thought. Our hubris may have even suppressed Hillary Clinton’s turnout and mobilized angry Trump supporters.
We need to reckon with our flaws, or risk becoming completely irrelevant in the political process. Here are some ways we can improve.
First, we must stop being insufferable know-it-alls. As scribes and scholars, we have expertise in a particular beat or field, but that doesn’t make us qualified to determine which candidate is best to lead 320 million Americans, each of whom has many and varied needs. Nor is it our job.
Now that kind of talk will get you ostracized in the media and universities.
CHANGE: An Ayn Rand-Loving Banker Huddles With Donald Trump.
While less known than his peers at big banks, Mr. [John A.] Allison ranks as one of the most legendary bank CEOs in recent history, said Christopher Marinac, director of research at FIG Partners LLC. “He’s head of the class,” said Mr. Marinac. “A lot of folks didn’t understand the conservatism of BB&T until the crisis, but they appreciated it after.”
Mr. Allison’s worldview was shaped when he was a college student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and stumbled across a collection of essays by Ms. Rand.
Mr. Allison joined BB&T out of college in 1971 and became CEO in 1989. As CEO, he penned a 30-page handbook, “The BB&T Philosophy,” to give to employees on their first day of work. The first maxim was reality. “The existence of the law of gravity does not mean men cannot create an airplane,” he wrote. “However, an airplane must be created within the context of the law of gravity. At BB&T, we believe in being ‘reality grounded.’”
In 2006, Mr. Allison made headlines when he declined to lend money for commercial projects on private land seized by eminent domain—a government practice that Mr. Allison believed was an affront to individuals’ property rights.
And this:
Mr. Allison instilled a conservative lending culture. BB&T avoided negative-amortizing loans and complicated structured products that Mr. Allison called “esoteric” and “illogical.”
That meant BB&T was often overshadowed by North Carolina rival Wachovia Corp., whose risky mortgage loans fueled huge growth before the crisis—only to then cause its downfall. That bank was purchased during the height of the crisis by Wells Fargo & Co.
Seeking Alpha reports Allison might be under consideration for Treasury, which seems like a great fit for his talents.
More like him, please.
WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Standing Rock: North Dakota access pipeline demonstrators say white people are ‘treating protest like Burning Man.’ “White people are colonizing the camps. I mean that seriously. Plymouth rock seriously. They are coming in, taking food, clothing and occupying space without any desire to participate in camp maintenance and without respect of tribal protocols. These people are treating it like it is Burning Man or The Rainbow Gathering and I even witnessed several wandering in and out of camps comparing it to those festivals.”
NOW I HAVE AN AR-15, HO HO HO: Gun Sales Hit Record High on Black Friday 2016.
AT AMAZON, Che Guevara is a Douche Bag T-Shirt.
THE G.O.P. NEEDS TO MAKE THEM ALL GO ON THE RECORD WITH THIS: Democrats promise to filibuster and kill national reciprocity for concealed carry in the US Senate.
As George Washington University law professor Robert Cottrol has noted, the kinds of laws that national carry would overturn disproportionately affect minorities. “Gun-control laws have a tendency of turning into criminals peaceable citizens whom the state has no reason to have on its radar.”
You’d think that with all the talk about overcriminalization and mass incarceration, Democrats wouldn’t be filibustering against a law that would result in fewer innocent minorities being sent to prison.
CASTRO’S LAST LAUGH: Trudeau’s turn from cool to laughing stock.
Trudeau made himself synonymous with Canada. He made Canada cool again. It was fun while it lasted.
By the early hours of Saturday morning, Havana time, Trudeau was an international laughingstock. Canada’s “brand,” so carefully constructed in Vogue photo essays and Economist magazine cover features, seemed to suddenly implode into a bonspiel of the vanities, with humiliating headlines streaming from the Washington Post to the Guardian, and from Huffington Post to USA Today.
It was Trudeau’s maudlin panegyric on the death of Fidel Castro that kicked it off, and there is a strangely operatic quality to the sequence of events that brings us to this juncture. When Trudeau made his public debut in fashionable society 16 years ago, with his “Je t’aime, papa!” encomium at the gala funeral of his father in Montreal, Fidel Castro himself was there among the celebrities, as an honorary pallbearer, lending a kind of radical frisson to the event. Now it’s all come full circle.
To be fair to Trudeau, he’s only the most recent in a long line of Western leaders who get teh feelz for Castro.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law School Dean Wants al-Qaeda To Go After The U.S. News Rankings.
CATHY YOUNG IN THE HILL: ‘Fake news’ isn’t the problem — mainstream news with an agenda is.
However, most junk journalism does not take the form of outright “fake news” but of tendentious reporting that focuses on some facts while downplaying or omitting others. And here, the mainstream media are indeed often guilty of bias.
Take recent headlines announcing that the incoming Trump administration is planning to establish a “Muslim registry” or a “registry for Muslims,” wording which seems to imply that all Muslims in America, even citizens, would be required to register.
That impression was reinforced by a comment from Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, quoted in The Washington Post: “The day they create a Muslim registry is the day I register as a Muslim.”
Such a registry would certainly be shockingly un-American — not to mention unconstitutional. Yet a closer look at the articles under these headlines shows that this is not what’s being proposed.
Trump may revive a program that was in place from 2001 to 2011; according to The Washington Post, that system “required people from countries deemed ‘higher risk’ to undergo interrogations and fingerprinting upon arrival” and, in some cases, “to follow a parole-like system by periodically checking in with local authorities.”
Most of the countries identified as high-risk were majority-Muslim, and civil rights groups charged that the program targeted Muslims. But to call such a program a “Muslim registry” creates an essentially false impression — which is what many people were undoubtedly left with if they did not read the story carefully, or only saw the buzz about it in the social media.
Beyond this election and the controversial figure of Trump, the media have a very real tendency to fall for narratives that are seen as advancing a “good cause.”
The Rolling Stone article about the fictitious fraternity gang rape, treated as gospel by the rest of the media for ten days until a lone blogger and then a columnist for the libertarian magazine Reason finally pointed out some of its major and obvious problems (such as the fact that the alleged victim claimed to have been raped for hours while lying amidst shattered glass from a tabletop, yet was able to run out of the fraternity house afterward and did not require medical attention).
Indeed, the first New York Times report on the Rolling Stone story being questioned largely defended it.
First they establish the narrative. Then they do their best to squelch anything that might undermine it. But yeah, let’s worry about “fake news.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Texas Legislators Push For New Public Law School In The Rio Grande Valley Because ‘Everybody Has A Law School.’
YEP, THIS IS CNN ALL RIGHT: Christiane Amanpour equates climate ‘deniers’ with proponents of ‘ethnic cleansing and genocide’