False Rape Claim Over Bad Sex

From a police report yesterday:

Two Tennessee women who accused a man of rape have admitted to cops that they had consensually agreed to sex with him in exchange for a pack of cigarettes. One woman told investigators that the duo filed a phony police report because they "didn't enjoy the sex," according to cops. Jessica Kathleen Alexander, 18, and Tammy Nicole Ortega, 29, were arrested today for filing a false police report. ... Police have not identified the accused man, who still could be charged with solicitation in connection with the sex-for-cigarettes arrangement.

The report has pictures. My guess is that they will still charge the man, if they can trick him into admitting the bad sex.

Confusing zero with infinity

You would not think that anyone would confuse zero with infinity, but people do all the time. For example, an astronomer writes:

If there is a finite probability of something happening (ie. a planet forming around a star, or a galaxy forming), then in an infinite universe there will be an infinite number of that thing.

In this sentence, the word "finite" has to be read as "non-zero" to make any sense. Finite means not infinite. He is confusing zero with infinite.

Likewise, the term "finite chance" is always misused. The terms "slim chance" and "fat chance" are also confusing. You would think that these terms would be opposites.

The Simpsons porn lands man on sex offender list

Australia news:

An Ipswich man has only narrowly avoided jail for downloading graphic cartoon porn images featuring child characters from The Simpsons and The Powerpuff Girls television shows.

The 28-year-old former security guard was handed a 12-month suspended prison sentence and is now a registered sex offender after pleading guilty in Ipswich District Court to having the bizarre images on his computer.

Police went to Kurt James Milner’s Leichhardt home on January 24, 2008 after receiving an anonymous tip-off about the disturbing material.

Officers took his home computer, which would no longer turn on, but a year later police forensic experts recovered 64 images of cartoon child exploitation material in the machine’s recycle bin.

This is crazy. First, these were not pictures. No child was exploited. They were just humorous cartoons.

Second, the cops spent a year searching his home computer based on an anonymous tip? Do you really want a society where people are jailed for home viewing of cartoons based on anonymous tips?

Another crippled Apple product

In case you have been sucked in by Apple hype Apple Ipad was announced today. It costs about $800, plus $30 per month, depending on options.

It is crippled as usual. It has no keyboard, no memory slot, no telephone, no removable battery, very limited battery life, no camera, no GPS, and no multi-tasking. There is no ability to run any apps, except those that have been approved by Apple. Web pages that use Flash, Java, ActiveX, or Silverlight will not work.

It is the modern equivalent of a dumb terminal. I think that this product will be a dud. Serious computer users will have no interest in it.

A lot of people think that Apple can do no wrong, after its success with the Apple ipod. But that product only became successful when Apple persuaded the big music labels to put their music exclusively on the Apple itunes store, with digital rights management to prevent you from listening to the music on other devices. But now there are much better music players, and you can buy unencumbered music from Amazon and other places.

Update: Also, it won't work on the T-Mobile wireless network, and it has no USB port. I do not expect to buy any computer without a USB port for the foreseeable future.

Women hate DNA tests

From an advice column today:

Dear Annie: ... However, I am not entirely certain that my second daughter is my biological child. Around the time she was conceived, my wife had an affair with my brother-in-law. ... Is there any way I could secretly obtain a DNA specimen from her to do a test? ...

Dear Tennessee: ... The only valid reason for doing a DNA test is to provide your daughter with an accurate medical history, but if you don't plan to inform her, this doesn't apply.

Yes, the columnists are women. No amount of feminist propaganda will change the basic fact that a man will want to know if his daughter is really his daughter, and the daughter will want to know whether her father is really her father.

Feminists have long said that men have no valid reason to have any say about a woman getting an abortion. Now these columnists say a man has no valid reason to find out who inseminated his wife. This attitude will soon force all men to get DNA tests on every child.

The Trauma Myth

The NY Times reports:

For a graduate research project at Harvard in the mid-1990s, the psychologist Susan A. Clancy arranged to interview adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, expecting to confirm the conventional wisdom that the more traumatic the abuse had been, the more troubled an adult the child had become.

Dr. Clancy figured she knew what she would find: “Everything I knew dictated that the abuse should be a horrible experience, that the child should be traumatized at the time it was happening — overwhelmed with fear, shock, horror.”

But many carefully documented interviews revealed nothing of the sort. Commonly, the abuse had been confusing for the child but not traumatic in the usual sense of the word. ...

First, her data flew in the face of several decades of politically correct trauma theory, feminist theory and sexual politics.

Second, Dr. Clancy found that the world had little appetite for scientific subtlety ...

I guess that means that it is difficult to get scientific data on this subject. People will spread false myths, and the scientists will not have the guts to correct them. I think that there are a bunch of areas where science has been corrupted by political correctness.

Girls may learn math anxiety from female teachers

AP reports:

Little girls may learn to fear math from the women who are their earliest teachers.

Despite gains in recent years, women still trail men in some areas of math achievement, and the question of why has provoked controversy. Now, a study of first- and second-graders suggests what may be part of the answer: Female elementary school teachers who are concerned about their own math skills could be passing that along to the little girls they teach.

Young students tend to model themselves after adults of the same sex, and having a female teacher who is anxious about math may reinforce the stereotype that boys are better at math than girls, explained Sian L. Beilock, an associate professor in psychology at the University of Chicago.

Makes sense to me. My local elementary school only hires female teachers, and only the sort who hate math.

Russian ice dance offensive to aborigines

Yahoo sports reports:

Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin, the favorites for ice-dancing gold in Vancouver, wowed the crowds with their routine at the European Championships. They sit in the lead after their original dance, a tribute to Australian Aborigines.

Except, Aboriginal leaders don't see it as a tribute. They don't really see how it has anything to do with their culture at all.

Ice dancing doesn't have anything to do with anybody's culture. It doesn't have much to do with sport either, as the votes from the judges is always extremely close to what has been decided as the pre-competition favorites. The competitors are not even allowed to do dance moves that are difficult. But their costume looks great!

NY man accused of beheading

AP reports:

The founder of an Islam-oriented television station who is accused of beheading his wife was abused by her for years, according to his lawyer, who said Friday he will pursue a defense combining that justification as well as psychiatric claims.

Defense attorneys' claims that Muzzammil Hassan was victimized by his wife drew a blunt response from District Attorney Frank Sedita after a hearing Friday.

"He chopped her head off," Sedita said. "He chopped her head off. That's all I have to say about Mr. Hassan's apparent defense that he was a battered spouse."

Chopping her head off would be enough evidence for me, but maybe not for a conviction. In California, we have a special law that allows a defense like this. In 2002, a woman who murdered her husband was released under the law.

I'm not sure who is worse, the feminists or the Mohammedans.

Schools stop teaching foreign languages

The NY Times reports:

Thousands of public schools stopped teaching foreign languages in the past decade, according to a government-financed survey — dismal news for a nation that needs more linguists to conduct its global business and diplomacy.

Dismal? This is great news. The USA has too many people speaking foreign languages already. We just don't need very many diplomats. Most diplomacy is in English anyway.

But another contrary trend has educators and policymakers abuzz: a rush by schools in all parts of America to offer instruction in Chinese.

Chinese? That is really a step backwards. Phonetic languages were invented about 5000 years ago, but it is just now getting to China. The Chinese language does not even computerize very well.

Story claims wives make more money

AP reports:

Report: More men get economic boost from marriage

NEW YORK — Historically, marriage was the surest route to financial security for women. Nowadays, it's men who are increasingly getting the biggest economic boost from tying the knot, according to a new analysis of census data.

The changes, summarized in a Pew Research Center report being released today, reflect the proliferation of working wives over the past 40 years — a period in which American women outpaced men in both education and earnings growth. A larger share of today's men, compared with their 1970 counterparts, are married to women whose education and income exceed their own, and a larger share of women are married to men with less education and income.

After you thru all that, it says that only 22% of wives out-earn their husbands. Some of that could be from husbands who are temporarily out of work, and may not reflect income at the time of marriage.

Update: A reader has another criticism below of the study. The NY Times article on the study included this:

Kristen W. Springer, a sociologist at Rutgers, has found that among men in their 50s, having a wife who earns more money is associated with poorer health. Among the highest earning couples in her study, a husband who earns less than his wife is 60 percent less likely to be in good health compared with men who earn more than their wives.

By phrasing it this way, the article makes it sound like the wife's high salary is causing bad health to the husband. But the wife's salary probably has nothing to do with it. People in poor health earn less money, for obvious reasons. So the healthy men in their 50s make more money than the unhealthy men in their 50s, and are therefore more likely to earn more than their wives.

Mom defends soldier accused of having child porn

Chicago news:

An Illinois National Guard soldier in Afghanistan has been charged by the U.S. Army with possessing child pornography over pictures of a young relative his mother says she sent him.

Terri Miller of Galesburg says she sent her son, Specialist Billy Miller, pictures of the little girl to help him get over his homesickness.

The pictures show the child in a swimsuit playing a wading pool and sitting on a truck.

Wow. Do not send pictures to a soldier. It is way too dangerous.

New spanking research

The NY Daily News reports:

Spanking makes kids perform better in school, helps them become more successful: study

A study, which found that young children whose parents spank them perform better at school later on, isn’t winning high marks with child development experts.

Po Bronson writes in Newsweek:

For decades, research on spanking was challenged by the lack of a control group to compare against - almost all kids (90+%) had been spanked at least once, at some time in their early lives. New research shows that now up to 25% of kids are never spanked, so it's a fair question: How are they turning out? Are they turning out better? Surprisingly, they're not.

In NurtureShock, we described some extensive cross-ethnic and international research on spanking by Drs. Jennifer Lansford and Ken Dodge.
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Their data suggested that if a culture views spanking as the normal consequence for bad behavior, kids aren’t damaged by its occasional use.

To explain this shocker, the scholars suggested that in cultures or communities where spanking is common, parents are less agitated when administering spankings. Spanking almost never -- when combined with losing your temper -- can be worse than spanking frequently.

This is not the last word on the subject. I am sure that people will disagree for decades to come. But don't believe anyone who tells you that science has proved spanking to be ineffective or harmful. Spanking is just as good as the other methods in the studies, and maybe better.

Crazy people need certificates to spend money

From another trial day:

SAN FRANCISCO — With the historic trial of a challenge to California's gay marriage ban nearing the end of its first week, two more experts testified Thursday on the negative fallout of denying same-sex couples the right to wed.

The experts cited the mental health toll on gays and lesbians across the state, and they said the ban costs a local government such as San Francisco's millions of dollars a year. ...

Thursday, Ilan Meyer, a Columbia University professor, testified on his research into the mental health damage caused to gays and lesbians by discrimination and the denial of marriage rights. ...

Edmund Egan, the city and county of San Francisco's chief economist, testified it costs the local government's coffers as much as $35 million a year in lost revenue from weddings, hotels and related expenses by denying same-sex couples the right to marry in the city.

I think that Olson and Boies are trying to sabotage the case. These are really bad arguments. If these are really valid arguments that the law is unconstitutional, then I would think that the cell phone driving law and a lot of other laws would also be unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, DC is not allowed to vote:

Thirty-one states have held referendums on whether or not to ban gay marriage, but a Washington, D.C., judge ruled Thursday that such a vote would violate the District’s Human Rights Act.

I just want my rights

I thought that the California same-sex trial was going to present evidence that sexual preference was immutable, but the first day gave us this:

Kristin Perry and Sandra Stier will put their love life on trial today when they take the stand in a federal courtroom in San Francisco. ...

Stier, 47, is a tech-support manager for Alameda County, and the two are raising four boys, ages 15 to 21. Two of the boys are from Perry's previous relationship with a woman and two are from Stier's previous relationship with a man.

So apparently she can have a sexual relationship with a man. It appears that this case is more about cutting fathers off from their sons. She wants same-sex marriage so that it will be respectable for women to ditch their husbands, take the kids, live with another woman, and force the kids to grow up without a father.

They live in Berkeley. I thought lesbianism was already respectable in Berkeley!

It appears that this couple never really wanted to get married. They had a chance to in 2008, but they became domestic partners instead.

The lesbian plaintiff gave this explanation:

"I feel like a tiny person in this huge country, and I just want my rights," testified Sandy Stier, a Berkeley woman and one of the gay plaintiffs seeking the right to marry. "I'm just trying to get the rights the Constitution says I have."

If that is all she wants, then she should read what the Constitution says about lesbianism. The case should be dismissed, unless she can prove that she has been damaged somehow.

German trials may be in English

German news:

Courts in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia have offered to handle business cases in English for a pilot project under keen observation by other courts, which could soon follow their example.

The initiative was launched after it was noted that the most lucrative cases – for both state coffers and lawyers – were being conducted outside of Germany because international businesses did not want to handle legal matters in German.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung paper reported at the weekend that justice ministers of North Rhine-Westphalia and Hamburg, Roswitha Müller-Piepenkötter and Till Steffen respectively, aimed to change the law governing the German courts so that cases could be conducted in English.

This makes sense to me. Hardly anyone speaks German, except for Germans.

Appalled by food

Today's advice column:

DEAR ABBY: Many people in the world appear indifferent to human suffering and the serious problems our planet is facing.

I am appalled when I see TV shows about food contests in which mounds of food are piled in front of each contender, who then wolfs down enough to feed five or six people.

Evidently the audience enjoys the spectacle. They cheer and applaud the winner as if he was a hero. Do they never think about the millions of people who are starving? I would appreciate your comments. -- PRAGMATIST IN N.Y.

DEAR PRAGMATIST: No, I doubt they consider that while they are stuffing themselves, others are literally starving, nor have I heard that the sponsors have donated a portion of the proceeds to feed the hungry.

She seems to have a conceptual misunderstanding about food. Eating more slowly will not solve the planet's problems. Obesity is a bigger problem than starvation.

The fat people are the ones who eat excessive amounts of food, not the competitive eaters. Gurgitators do not necessarily eat more than anyone else. They just eat more quickly.

Trial may make science argument

Ted Olson is suing for same-sex marriage in California, and wrote a Newsweek article on The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage. I did not see any conservative arguments in the article, but he does claim to make a scientific argument:

My answer to this seeming conundrum rests on a lifetime of exposure to persons of different backgrounds, histories, viewpoints, and intrinsic characteristics, ...

Science has taught us, even if history has not, that gays and lesbians do not choose to be homosexual any more than the rest of us choose to be heterosexual. To a very large extent, these characteristics are immutable, like being left-handed.

No, there is no gay gene or any such scientific proof.

His same-sex marriage trial will soon be broadcast on YouTube. Perhaps he will present the scientific evidence and explain its legal significance.

If there really is scientific evidence, then it should tell us what age sexual orientation is determined. It would not say "to a large extent", but give us numbers. And we have all sort of other laws and policies that favor some people based on characteristics that may be largely immutable, so I don't see why that would be unconstitutional.

So there are now three classes of Californians: heterosexual couples who can get married, divorced, and remarried, if they wish; same-sex couples who cannot get married but can live together in domestic partnerships; and same-sex couples who are now married but who, if they divorce, cannot remarry. This is an irrational system, it is discriminatory, and it cannot stand.

It was the Calif. supreme court that created that third category. Maybe Olson should have tried to get the US supreme court to overturn that, if he feels so strongly about it.

However bad that decision may have been, how are Olson's clients harmed by it? He does not explain in his article.

Daughter is embarrassed

From today's advice column:

DEAR ABBY: I'm a 15-year-old girl whose parents treat me like an 8-year-old. They not only refuse to let me see any movie that isn't G-rated, but they still cut my meat for me! Once a week we go to the park, and they still push me on the swings.

I don't want to tell them it's embarrassing because I'm afraid I'll hurt their feelings. Please tell me how to convey to my parents that I'm not a child anymore. -- OLD ENOUGH IN VIRGINIA

She is 15 and she is not yet able to express embarrassment to her parents? No wonder they treat her like an 8-year-old.

Search censorship

PZ Myers reports that Google censors certain searches involving Islam and Mohammedans. Yahoo search does not have this problem.

Update: This story has been picked up by Fox News:

A Google spokesman explained that the weird absence of results is just a software problem: "This is in fact a bug and we're working to fix it as quickly as we can." But the company would not respond to requests for clarification.

An intriguing corollary: Google offers search suggestions for future tense queries as well. Ask "Christianity will" and Google suggests "Christianity will end, it will disappear," and "Christianity will end." Ask the same about Islam and Google notes that "Islam will dominate the world" and "Islam will destroy Europe."

Google likes to trick people into thinking that these things are unforeseeable algorithm quirks. Don't believe it. Results like this are caused by human hand-tuning. Google employs 1000s of engineers to hand-tune searches.

Study on math gender gap

A SciAm podcast says:

Else-Quest notes that there is some association between the status of women in each country and their ability to do mathematics.

“The percentage of women in parliament was moderately associated with the size of the gender gap in math such that in countries where there were fewer women in parliament males tended to do better in math than girls by a larger extent than in countries in which there was better representation by women in parliament.”

That connection would seem to imply that achievement levels are not innate and fixed.

I don't know anything about this research, and it is not online, but the conclusion does not follow. This supposed correlation has nothing to do with whether achievement is innate.

Maybe the girls are innately smarter in some countries, and as a result they do better on tests and get elected to political office more.

Counseling undermines marriage

Today's Dear Abby says:

DEAR ABBY: I just started counseling for postpartum depression. My husband keeps asking me what we talked about. During the counseling sessions I discuss all aspects of my life -- including my husband. How can I let him know that what I discuss with my therapist is none of his business? -- NEW MAMA IN ARIZONA

DEAR NEW MAMA: Your husband's curiosity is natural, particularly if he has never had any counseling.

What does that mean? Do counselor explain, on the first day of counseling, to keep secrets from your spouse? There is something sick about a counselor who tries to convince a wife that she has greater loyalties to the counselor than to her husband.

Why is this woman even writing to Dear Abby if she already has a counselor?

I think that this couple is headed for divorce. If the wife has problems bad enough to need counseling, then she should be willing to tell her husband. The counselor is actively working to undermine the marriage. Yes, the husband has good reason to try to terminate the counseling.

Married women get fatter

The NY Times reports:

It is widely known that women tend to gain weight after giving birth, but now a large study has found evidence that even among childless women, those who live with a mate put on more pounds than those who live without one.

The differences, the scientists found, were stark. ...

“It’s interesting and brings out some important points,” said Maureen A. Murtaugh, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Utah who has published widely on weight gain in women. Perhaps, she suggested, a more active social life may help explain why women with partners gain more weight.

“Think of going to a restaurant,” Dr. Murtaugh said. “They serve a 6-foot man the same amount as they serve me, even though I’m 5 feet 5 inches and 60 pounds lighter.”

She is published widely on the subject, and that is the best theory that she can come up with? Come on, that is ridiculous.

I have a simpler theory. All women get fat unless they are trying to attract a man. A married woman can usually get fat and keep her husband, as long as she cooks his favorite food and gets him fat also. If she manages to stay thin, then she can usually divorce her husband and have that more active social life.

The lost genius tribe

Did you know that there was once a race of humans in Africa, called the Boskops, with an average IQ of 150? The current Discover magazine says so. If you read the online article, you'll find a helpful link to a real anthropologist debunks the whole article.

Are people born criminals?

Today's Si Valley paper reports:

Research: Criminal behavior may be hard-wired

Increasing evidence from neuroscience suggests that many aspects of antisocial behavior can be traced to dysfunctional brains. For instance, brain scans of prisoners suggest the circuitry involved in fear conditioning has gone awry in criminal minds. Deformities of certain parts of the brain that may contribute to antisocial and psychopathic behavior have also been linked to a greater risk of arrests and convictions. ...

In the early 1970s, they traveled to the island nation of Mauritius, off the eastern coast of Africa. ...

The test involved a series of 12 tones. Some of them were pleasant. Others were higher-pitched and were followed by a jarring sound produced by "jangling metal objects," according to a report in The American Journal of Psychiatry.

The children were hooked up to a polygraph to measure their reactions to the noises. The high-pitched tones were supposed to make them sweat in anticipation of the unpleasant sound, while the pleasant tones weren't supposed to elicit much response.

Twenty years later, the researchers scoured court records to see whether any of their subjects had committed crimes involving violence, drugs, property or serious driving offenses. ...

The results suggest that criminal behavior may be hard-wired — to some degree — in children as young as 3 and could be the result of a malfunctioning amygdala, the researchers wrote. If they're not afraid that their criminal behavior will land them in jail, what else will deter them? The result, they wrote, is "a lack of conscience."

The web site dates this story Jan. 1, but also has the same story dated 11/25/2009. The source is a November 17, 2009 LA Times story.

It's okay, I missed this story the first couple of times. I missed it in the 1970s also. The story is a little fishy, tho. Why did they have to goto Mauritius? If this was such great 1970s research, has it been replicated? I don't know anything about Mauritius. Are babies baptized there? Are they taught right from wrong?

The decline of the American novel

NYU prof Katie Roiphe reviews sex scenes in recent novels, and writes:

But our new batch of young or youngish male novelists are not dreaming up Portnoys or Rabbits. The current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex. Prototypical is a scene in Dave Eggers’s road trip novel, “You Shall Know Our Velocity,” where the hero leaves a disco with a woman and she undresses and climbs on top of him, and they just lie there: “Her weight was the ideal weight and I was warm and wanted her to be warm”; or the relationship in Benjamin Kunkel’s “Indecision”: “We were sleeping together brother-sister style and mostly refraining from outright sex.” ...

Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation, there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with a convoluted, postfeminist second-guessing. ...

The younger writers are so self-­conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically un­toward.

I did not know that the men in modern novels had gotten so wimpy. My guess is that real men don't read these books anyway. They are consumed by postfeminists who require their porn to match their politics.

Officer fired for joining the KKK

AP reports from Florida:

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – An Alachua County Sheriff's Office corrections officer who acknowledged being a member of the Ku Klux Klan has been fired for belonging to a subversive or terrorist organization, a violation of the agency's code of ethics.

Wayne Kerschner was fired Tuesday following a 10-month internal investigation.

Is this particular KKK organization subversive or terrorist? I am guessing that they are not terrorists, because the article says that they do criminal background checks on all members. The organization mainly operates a web site and has some secret handshakes.

I am just wondering if they also fire officers who belong to Communist or Mohammedan jihadist organizations.

And if it took 10 months for the investigators to figure out that this was a subversive organization, then how was this officer supposed to know?

In the 1950s, many prominent American leftists argued that they had a free speech right to join Communist and other subversive organizations. Where are they now?

Here are more goofy Florida stories.

Here is another racially inflammatory free speech story:

Letter may be hate crime

If caught, the poster of an anonymous, racist letter on the Mid-Atlantic Christian University campus could be charged with a hate crime.

District Attorney Frank Parrish said this week if the author or authors of the letter violated the state’s ethnic intimidation statute, they’ll face Class 1 misdemeanors.

“If the evidence of the crime is there, and the alleged offenders are there, we will prosecute them,” Parrish said Wednesday.

Although Parrish hadn’t read the letter, he said its contents led him to believe it was written with the intent to intimidate persons on the basis of their race.

“It sounds to me in a general way like threatening language,” Parrish said.

So the DA has not even read the letter, and yet he wants to prosecute someone for some publicly posted opinions.

Misuse of donated money

The NY Times ethicist fields this question:

I am an avid public-radio listener and donate regularly to my local station. It recently became known that its chief executive is the highest-paid in public broadcasting, earning nearly $500,000 a year. Many of my friends see this as a misuse of donated money and now refuse to support the station. I feel that if you listen, you must pay your share. Who’s right?

Huhh? Your tax money already supports public radio. So do commercials, even tho they broadcast on non-commercial frequencies. Their news stories are filled with leftist propaganda. And yet somehow liberal guilt gets people to donate money to support outrageous salaries. Go figure.

TSA harasses bloggers

I am puzzled by this story. The NY Times reports:

Agency Drops Bloggers’ Subpoenas

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Transportation Security Administration on Thursday dropped the subpoenas it had issued to two Internet writers in its effort to learn who leaked an airline security directive.

The agency said the investigation was “nearing a successful conclusion, and the subpoenas are no longer in effect.” ...

One subpoena went to an Internet travel writer, Chris Elliott of Winter Springs, Fla., who did not immediately comply. ...

The other blogger, Steven Frischling of Connecticut, said he had been forced to hand over his computer to agents.

It appears that the TSA got what it wanted. The story says the agency "dropped the subpoenas", as if it backed down in the face of Free Speech challenges. But the rest of the story says the opposite, and suggests that the bloggers were forced to give up the info.