Maryland governor panders to gays

Last week, a low-level public official in Maryland, speaking on his own time on a TV talk show about gay rights, and said:

That's fine, that's fine. But that doesn't mean that government should proffer a special place of entitlement within the laws of the United States for persons of sexual deviancy.

Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. was so embarrassed that he fired Robert J. Smith from the transit board, and now he tries to further promote his gay tolerance:

Annapolis, Md. (AP) - Gov. Robert Ehrlich has named an openly gay judge to serve on the Baltimore District Court.

Ehrlich appointed Christopher Panos, 47, a special master in the city Circuit Court family division, to a fill a court vacancy.

Panos and his partner of 17 years, Dennis Cashen, are raising a young daughter, Cate.

There are many things wrong with this story. Most people are against special entitlements for persons of sexual deviancy. Special masters in family court are notorious for all sorts of evil practices, and such a person is not likely to be a good judge. A Republican governor should not be that dependent on the gay vote.

George writes:

I think that the problem was that Smith referred to gays
as persons of sexual deviancy. Being gay is an innate orientation, not a sexual practice. Any reference to gay sexual practices as being outside the norm is therefore bigoted.

When the story said that Panos was "openly gay", I think that it was referring to his lifestyle, not how he was born.

Wrong bra size

Newsweek once told us that 40-year-old women are more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to find a husband. Now Time magazine says that women are similarly alarmed by the statistic that 80% of women are wearing the wrong bra size!

Rape law expands to include alcohol

Wisc. news:

The nation's top party school could get a sobering jolt from a change in state law that puts alcohol on a par with date-rape drugs as an aggravating factor in certain sexual assaults.

The change, long sought by rape-victim advocates in Wisconsin, means that victims who are very drunk during a sexual encounter can be judged incapable of giving consent, triggering a possible second-degree sexual assault charge.

Prior to the change, which took effect in June, a victim who had been drinking typically had to be unconscious to be deemed incapable of consenting to sex. ...

Under state law, having sexual contact with a person incapable of consent because they are under the influence of an intoxicant is defined as second- degree sexual assault. The offense is a Class C felony punishable by a fine up to $100,000 and a prison sentence of up to 25 years.

This is extreme. A lot of men and women like to drink a lot of alcohol before sex. There is a difference between rape and seduction, but feminists keep pushing for laws that deny the difference.

Veganism not healthy

News from India:

VARCA: Extreme vegetarian practices among Indians can lead to hyperhomocysteinemia and high homocysteine levels resulting in diseases including strokes, heart attack, diabetes and other fatal diseases, experts have opined.

At the end of two-day long conference of Indian study group on homocystein at Varca in Goa, medical practitioners said homocysteine levels amongst Indian population was alarming and it is more amongst the "extreme vegetarians".

Don't let anyone tell you that veganism is healthy. Most vegans have to eat vitamin supplements.

Reparative therapy

The psychotherapy profession is filled with quacks promoting goofy ideas, Here is one:

[Christian psychotherapist Richard] Cohen, a former homosexual and the author of the book Coming Out Straight (Oakhill Press, 2005), insists that no one is born with homosexual desires. He claims his reparative therapy group, the International Healing Foundation (IHF), has helped many men and women with unwanted homosexual desires achieve their goal of changing their sexual orientation and becoming heterosexual.

The American Counseling Association has expelled Cohen for not sufficiently respecting the dignity of gays and other alleged ethics violations.

The American Psychological Association says:

Despite the unanimity of the health and mental health professions on the normality of homosexuality, the idea of "reparative therapy" has recently been adopted by conservative organizations and aggressively promoted in the media. Because of this aggressive promotion of "reparative therapy," a number of the health and mental health professional organizations have recently issued public statements about "reparative therapy" as well.

What is aggressively promoted in the media is that homosexuality
is normal, innate, and unchangeable. Anyone who expresses a contrary view is ostracized.

I think that it is very strange that the psychotherapist associations are so intolerant on this subject. They permit all sorts of other wacky therapies that have no scientific studies proving their effectiveness.

The best scientific evidence is that there is no gay gene, and there are bisexuals and others who report changing their sexual preferences. I think that the psychotherapists are being dishonest about this issue in order to promote a certain agenda.

Approving of husband beating

Scotland news:

More than half of women questioned at a Glasgow university said they approved of wives hitting their husbands.

Cops being rude

Florida news:

TAMPA - Two Tampa police officers accused of belching over their radios, watching a pornographic video at work and habitually joking about homosexual sex were fired Friday after an internal investigation into a female officer's sexual harassment complaint. ...
According to the investigation, the officers, members of a plainclothes squad targeting street crime in east and central Tampa, passed gas and belched over the radio system, sometimes preventing other officers from communicating.

Maybe the cops were rude, but it doesn't sound like sexual harassment. I think that the women just want to men to act like women.

Women like porn pics too

Porn research:

Women are turned on by erotic images just as much as men, a study claimed yesterday.

US researchers found more brainwave activity when women were shown pictures of writhing couples than when they saw any other photograph.

Professor Audrey Anokhin, from Washington University, said: ?That surprised us.

?We believed both pleasant and disturbing images would evoke a rapid response, but erotic scenes always elicited the strongest response.?

Experts hope the results will help them better understand some mental illnesses.

Perhaps these experts think that women are mentally ill if they like pornography.

Profiling can work

Bruce Schneier says:

Racial profiling doesn't work against terrorism, because terrorists don't fit any racial profile.

But, as the comments show, his examples are isolated and out-of-date. One of them is even an example of an attempted bombing that was stopped by ethnic profiling.

Leno attacks Coulter

I just watched Ann Coulter on Jay Leno, and he spent most of the time hassling her for using harsh words about four female political activists. He said that he likes to be nice when he makes his points, and he questioned her use of the term "broads".

About once a week, Leno makes fun of Michael Jackson as being a child molester, even though Jackson was acquitted of all charges. Sitting next to Coulter was George Carlin, who is famous for using the Seven Dirty Words in comedy routines. Leno didn't question him about using coarse language.

I can understand some people thinking that Coulter is a bit strident, but Leno was being ridiculous. What Coulter wrote was mild compared to what Leno and Carlin say all the time.

Language without numbers

If you think that all languages are the same, check out this S.American language:

The language is incredibly spare. The Pirahã use only three pronouns. They hardly use any words associated with time and past tense verb conjugations don't exist. Apparently colors aren't very important to the Pirahãs, either -- they don't describe any of them in their language. But of all the curiosities, the one that bugs linguists the most is that Pirahã is likely the only language in the world that doesn't use subordinate clauses. Instead of saying, "When I have finished eating, I would like to speak with you," the Pirahãs say, "I finish eating, I speak with you."

Equally perplexing: In their everyday lives, the Pirahãs appear to have no need for numbers. During the time he spent with them, Everett never once heard words like "all," "every," and "more" from the Pirahãs.

For years, people have debated how language limits how people think.

Feminist shelters cause harm

This Djung Tran letter came to my attention. She is a lawyer for a Connecticut agency called A Women's Place. She was offended by this column about how VAWA money is being used to fund destructive feminist causes. Tran gets paid with your tax money, so her letter proves the point.

Tran makes a comparison between domestic violence restraining orders and ordinary tort cases. It is very rare for a tort case to restrain anyone from otherwise lawful activity. If it were similarly rare in domestic cases, then no one would be complaining.

She objects to the column saying that "name-calling" falls under the definition of domestic violence. But then you refer me to NCADV, which does indeed define domestic violence to include "name calling" on this page.

Her own web site defines domestic violence to include "insults".

Tran keeps referring to the situation in Bucks County, PA, as if it contradicts the above column. I am not familiar with Bucks County. Perhaps it has have more enlightened laws and judges, but I doubt it.

She says that PFA (Protection From Abuse) defendants are not subject to criminal penalties because they are merely kicked out of their homes and subjected to court orders about what they can do and where they can go. They will also be arrested if they are accused of violating those orders. Those sound like serious punishments to me.

Tran's own web site has instructions for how a woman can have her boyfriend sent to jail for six months for violating a PFA.

She suggests the domestic violence only affects custody disputes when harm to the children is proved. Again, I don't know about Bucks County, but Calif. Family Code 3044 says that DV determines custody even when the children are not involved in any way.

I notice that Tran will help women get a PFA, but you won't help undo the damage that you have done. Her site says:

If you wish to withdraw your Order completely, you will need the services of a private attorney and you must appear in Court before the Judge.

Tran's letter is a good reason for VAWA being de-funded. These feminist organizations take tax money, and spend it on political lobbying, anti-male tactics, and legal abuses.

Google censorship

People criticize Google for cooperating with Chinese censorship, but it is not so well known that it has its own censorship in the USA. This blog reports:

Search engine giant Google has cut off its news relationship with a number of online news publications that include frank discussions of radical Islam -- the New Media Journal becoming the latest termination. as its owner just discovered. Frank Salvato, who began the agreement with Google News last September, said he received a reply from the company's help desk Friday indicating there had been complaints of "hate speech" on his site, as first reported by media watchdog Newsbusters.org.

From a quick glance at the sites in question, I am not sure why Google would call it hate speech. There are a couple of articles critical of radical Islam, but I would think that one could criticize suicide bombers without being called a hatemonger.

This blog is hosted by Google, and I haven't been censored yet.

Gun used to teach physics

Calif. school news:

Every year, physics teacher David Lapp brings his Korean War era M-1 carbine to school, fires a shot into a block of wood and instructs his students to calculate the velocity of the bullet.

It is a popular experiment at Mill Valley's Tamalpais High School, where students are exposed to several unique stunts that Lapp performs in his five classes every year to illustrate inertia, velocity and other complex formulae.

Turns out, it also may be illegal.

It is a felony to bring any rifle, loaded or unloaded, onto a school campus without the written permission of the school district superintendent or his designee, according to Marin County District Attorney Ed Berberian.

Actually firing a gun inside a classroom would, in all probability, be considered a "reckless discharge" and could bring about harsher punishment under Penal Code section 626.9, better known as the Gun-Free School Zone Act of 1995. ...

Exciting is not the word, said Ted Feinberg, the assistant executive director for the National Association of School Psychologists.

"It's just absolute madness, from my point of view," said Feinberg, one of the founding members of the National Emergency Assistance Team, which has responded to most of the school shootings in the country. "It is not only crazy in concept, in light of the world we live in it is absolutely irresponsible."

A blogger comments here. I think that the school psychologists are absolutely mad. Feinberg is irrational and paranoid. Science labs commonly have dangerous equipment and chemicals. Safety is an important lesson.

Dobson speaks

Here is a recording of James Dobson, as described below.

Dobson defines marriage

I just watched James Dobson plugging his new book Marriage Under Fire : Why We Must Win This Battle on the FoxNews program Hannity and Colmes. Apparently his main purpose is to keep homosexual activists from redefining marriage. Dobson said:

Most importantly, the next generation depends on strong families. Children do best when there is a mother and a father. ... Boys get something from their fathers that they cannot get from their mothers. Mothers cannot be fathers and fathers can't be mothers.

Colmes tried to trick Dobson into saying that Bush had flip-flopped because he once said that same-sex marriage was up to the states. But all the states have decided against same-sex marriage whenever they've had a chance to vote on it. The federal marriage amendment is an attempt to allow the states to enforce their wishes.

The real problem with Dobson's position is that he opposed shared parenting for divorced parents. I agree with him that children do best when there is a mother and a father, but that is also true about children with divorced parents. I think that it is very strange that he will make such a big issue about the importance of mothers and fathers, and then downplay fathers in family court.

Maggie Gallagher is perhaps the other leading defender of traditional opposite-sex marriage, but I am told that she also promotes mother custody in divorces.

The importance of mothers and fathers has been thought to be obvious for thousands of years, and yet it is hard to find someone who is willing to stand up and defend it.

Canadian judge likes lesbians

Canada news:

An Ontario judge struck down a birth registry provision yesterday that prevents lesbian couples from being registered as parents of babies conceived through artificial insemination, saying that the regulation causes them unjustified "pain and hardship."

Mr. Justice Paul Rivard of the Ontario Superior Court ruled that the province violated the litigants' right to equality by stopping them from adding their names to the Statement of Live Births after their babies are born.

Lesbian mothers live in an atmosphere of homophobia that only is exacerbated when rules and conventions leave an impression that "there is something wrong or unnatural about their families,'' Judge Rivard said. ...

The legal clash stemmed from the fact that the province's Vital Statistics Act specifies the terms "father" and "mother" when it comes to filling out a Statement of Live Birth.

There is something wrong or unnatural about putting two mothers on a birth certificate. That child has a right to real mother and a real father.

California man-haters

Mike McCormick and Glenn Sacks write:

California law defines domestic violence as "the infliction or threat of physical harm against...female intimate partners." AB 2051 refers to domestic violence victims only as "battered women." By defining domestic violence as something only experienced by women, both existing law and AB 2051 exclude male victims and their children from receiving state-funded domestic violence services, including shelter, hotel arrangements, counseling and legal services.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, men comprise over 35% of all domestic violence victims. A meta-analytic review of 552 domestic violence studies published in the Psychological Bulletin found that 38% of the physical injuries in heterosexual domestic assaults are suffered by men.

Domestic violence law is just a way for feminists to complain about men.

Poincare conjecture solved

China news:

Professor Cao Huaidong, of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, and Professor Zhu Xiping, of Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) University in south China's Guangdong Province, co-authored the paper, "A Complete Proof of the Poincare and Geometrization Conjectures - application of the Hamilton-Perelman theory of the Ricci flow", published in the June issue of the journal.

Cao and Zhu put the finishing touches to the complete proof of the Poincare Conjecture, which had puzzled mathematicians around the world, said Professor Shing-Tung Yau, a mathematician at Harvard University and one of the journal's editors-in-chief.

The conjecture was rated as one of the major mathematical puzzles of the 20th Century, said Yau.

"The conjecture is that if in a closed three-dimensional space, any closed curves can shrink to a point continuously, this space can be deformed to a sphere," he explained.

This is big news. The higher dimensional analogues had already been proved. Word of the proof has been around for a couple of years, but this is the first that I have heard that an expert journal editor is vouching for it. Yau is a genius in the field, and he would know. I expect that Grisha Perelman will get most of the credit. You can find his papers here.

Dutch marriage trends

The Dutch have same-sex marriage, and both sides of the issue will be arguing whether the experiment has worked or not, and whether it has effected the straight population. This NRO article and this chart says that the out-of-wedlock births have been skyrocketing.

Here is a response from a hard-core gay activist. He says that correlation does not imply causation. It may well be true that same-sex coupling and out-of-wedlock births are both byproducts of anti-marriage trends.

Advice to a confused man

Today's newspaper advice column:

DEAR ABBY: I recently got a phone call from a woman I hadn't heard from in 30 years. "Vivian" and I once had a short fling. We had a long talk, catching up, and she said she had gotten my number from my sister, who lives out of state.
All of a sudden, I began getting letters from her -- but I never gave her my address. In every letter she would pour her heart out to me, ...
We sat on my front porch, and I had a long talk with her. I explained that a lot has changed in both our lives; ... I said I was feeling depressed and confused, ...
I feel I'm being stalked, and it's giving me nightmares.

DEAR VIOLATED: It should be apparent by now that your old "fling" has mental problems. Her behavior could, indeed, be considered stalking. If you still have the letters and recordings of her messages, give them to your legal counsel ... You should document every incident of harassment, and while you're at it, consult your physician about the nightmares and stress you've been subjected to. Your attorney should have all of this information at his or her disposal.

She has mental problems?! She is just expressing her love. He is the one who suffers mental problems: He is depressed, confused, paranoid, unsure about his sexual orientation, unable to engage in a relationship, unwilling to given Vivian a straight yes or no answer, and having nightmares.

Even worse is Dear Abby -- she wants to make a legal case out of it! It is not a big deal if she somehow got his address in order to send him a letter. Most men have their addresses in the phone book, and do not become psychologically unglued if an old fling contacts them.