Future time orientation is racist

Seattle schools define:

Cultural Racism:
Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as "other", different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

There is more nonsense on the Seattle school page.

VAWA funding

On VAWA:

The ABA report states flatly: "Domestic violence does not necessarily involve physical violence." The feminists' mantra is, "You don't have to be beaten to be abused."

Advocates of the Violence Against Women Act assert that domestic violence is a crime, yet family courts often adjudicate domestic violence as a civil (not a criminal) matter. This enables courts to deny the accused all Bill of Rights and due process protections that are granted to even the most heinous of criminals.

Specifically, the accused is not innocent until proven guilty but is presumed guilty, and he doesn't have to be convicted "beyond a reasonable doubt." Due process rights, such as trial by jury and the right of free counsel to poor defendants, are regularly denied, and false accusations are not covered by perjury law. The act provides funding for legal representation for accusers but not for defendants.

Snitching on offensive speech

A Denver Post column says:

Tuesday, the Boulder City Council will take up the matter of allocating public funding for a "hate hotline," which would give residents an opportunity to report incidents in which Boulderites use tactless language.

"Our concern - and there are many - is that there is no confidentiality, no legal confidentiality," explains Judd Golden, chairman of the Boulder American Civil Liberties Union, which has not yet taken an official position on the hate-line. "So it's potentially chilling if people think they are providing this information in confidence and then that information were provided to the government or the government sought access to it. That would chill free speech."

The ACLU's concern is that it is not anonymous?! The city wants a snitch line to report anyone who attacks "personal beliefs and values", and the ACLU just wants the snitching to be anonymous.

No. I say that the govt should not take anonymous complaints about someone else's free speech rights. It shouldn't have the hotline at all, but I am surprised that the ACLU wants it anonymous.

Housewives get fat

UK news:

Mums who go out to work are healthier AND slimmer than stay-at-home housewives, say researchers.

Women who shun careers to remain as "homemakers" have a much higher risk of obesity, doctors discovered.

By the age of 54 women who have been housewives for all or most of their lives are most likely to say their health is poor.

But women who have been wives, mothers and employees are much less likely to suffer ill health or be fatties.

The research showed that almost 40 per cent of long-term housewives are obese ? compared to just over 20 per cent of married mums who work.

This is consistent with what I have seen in California.

Low German fertility

LA Times op-ed:

THE GERMAN PUBLIC was recently shocked to learn that 30% of "their" women are childless -- the highest proportion of any country in the world. And this is not a result of infertility; it's intentional childlessness.

Demographers are intrigued. German nationalists, aghast. Religious fundamentalists, distressed at the indication that large numbers of women are using birth control.

And evolutionary biologists (including me) are asked, "How can this be?" If reproduction is perhaps the fundamental imperative of natural selection, of our genetic heritage, isn't it curious -- indeed, counterintuitive -- that people choose, and in such large numbers, to refrain from participating in life's most pressing event?

The rate is 40% for female German college graduates.

No feminazis in politics

Seattle Times reports:

WASHINGTON -- Patty Murray has become one of the Senate's foremost advocates for women's issues -- health, safety from domestic violence, equal treatment in the workplace and education, and access to birth control.

But there are two words that you won't hear Murray -- or almost anyone else -- say in Congress: women's rights.

It's not because women's rights don't matter. Or that they are old hat.

It's because the phrase "women's rights" can be political death in D.C. Utter it at your peril. ...

Thus, the corridors of Congress are awash in women who preface their support for job equality, contraceptive choice and other such issues important to women with, "I'm not a feminist, but ... "

People don't want to be represented by feminists.

Freudian pseudoscience

NY Times letter:

Freud and His Legacy (1 Letter)
Published: May 14, 2006
To the Editor:

In "The Inside Man" (Op-Ed, May 7), William H. Gass commemorates Sigmund Freud's 150th birthday and very properly marks the enormous impact that the psychoanalysis innovated by Freud has had on the intellectual and cultural life of our world for more than a century.

I take issue, however, with his unsupported statement that the world has scarcely noticed that "this therapy -- which took so long and cost so much -- wasn't curing anybody."

What would Mr. Gass assert to be the basis for this view? Certainly the perspective of the more than 10,000 members of the International Psychoanalytical Association, plus the thousands more other psychoanalytically based mental health practitioners, would give ample evidence to the contrary, as would so many of their patients.

For the more questioning, I can readily cite very substantial and ever growing documented formal research to support this statement.

Robert S. Wallerstein, M.D.
Belvedere, Calif., May 7, 2006
The writer is a former president of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Wallerstein's defense of Freud is so lame that it is comical. It is true that Freudian therapy does not cure anyone. Wallerstein's gripe is that the statement is "unsupported", but he fails to give any support to his contrary view. He merely says that he could cite research. So why doesn't he?

His letter doesn't have much space for argument, but he could certainly cite a published article or a web site. It means very little to just cite the existance of people trying to exploit deluded mental patients. It is about like citing Scientologists.

I did find where Wallerstein wrote an article surveying the history of empirical research on the effectiveness of Freudian therapy. You can read it yourself, but it sounds to me like he found that nothing works better than anything else. Here is one of the stronger findings:

The most striking finding of the Columbia studies was that across every patient category, measured therapeutic benefit always substantially exceeded measured evolved analytic process. However, as with the Boston study, the outcomes, in terms of both therapeutic benefit and analyzability, were only marginally predictable from initial evaluation.

This is just gibberish. If he really had good evidence, then he would spell it out.

Rolling Stone magazine says:

Scientology holds that the entire field of neurological and mental-health research -- from Freud to the study of brain chemistry -- is pseudoscience. In Scientology's overview text, What Is Scientology?, psychiatry is described as a "hodgepodge of unproven theories that have never produced any result -- except an ability to make the unmanageable and mutinous more docile and quiet, and turn the troubled into apathetic souls beyond the point of caring."

But Scientology has its own kooky Freudian beliefs:

Published in 1950, Dianetics maintained that the source of mental and physical illness could be traced back to psychic scars called "engrams" that were rooted in early, even prenatal, experiences, and remained locked in a person's subconscious, or "reactive mind." To rid oneself of the reactive mind, a process known as going "Clear," Dianetics, and later Scientology, preached a regressive-therapy technique called auditing, which involves re-experiencing incidents in one's past life in order to erase their engrams.

This is more pseudoscience. There is no scientific evidence that psychic scars are locked in a person's subconscious.

(BTW, this Robert Wallerstein is unrelated to the Judith Wallerstein whom I criticized on this blog previously, as far as I know. They just happen to be pseudoscientific quacks with the same last name.)

Youthful indiscretions

Marcel Proust wrote:

There is no man," he began, "however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man--so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise--unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. ..."

I ran across this quote in a discussion of whether a social scientist should be discredited because of some lifestyle decisions that he made 30 years earlier. Yes, wisdom comes from experience.

200 years for child porn

Arizona news:

PHOENIX -- A 200-year prison term for a man convicted of possessing 20 separate items of child pornography is not constitutionally excessive, the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

All he did was to download some images from the internet. This is excessive.

Tom Cruise declines

CNN reports:

Days after his latest movie, "Mission: Impossible III," opened to lower-than-expected domestic ticket sales, a USA Today/Gallup poll showed Cruise's star power has dimmed considerably during the past year in the eyes of the public. ...

"Tom Cruise is one of the most important stars ever in the motion picture business," Universal Studios President Ron Meyer, a close friend and former agent, told Reuters. "I don't know anybody who has had the consistent success rate that Tom has. And nobody should be counting him out." ...

USA Today said that many of its survey's respondents cited Cruise's behavior during the past year, including his blunt criticism of psychiatry and actress Brooke Shield's treatment for postpartum depression, for their waning impression of him.

Cruise also became the butt of countless jokes for his manic, couch-hopping appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" last May to declare his love for Holmes.

The problem is real simple. Tom Cruise hasn't starred in a great movie in a very long time. War Of The Worlds was just a stupid remake. It is remarkable that Cruise has done as well as he has.

Photo ban

In Troy NY, you cannot photograph your kids at the public ice skating rink anymore. People are too paranoid.

Impotent young men

The Wash. Post reports that sexually aggressive girls is causing impotence on college campuses:

It seems that for a sizable number of young men, the fact that they can get sex whenever they want may have created a situation where, in fact, they're unable to have sex. According to surveys, young women are now as likely as young men to have sex and by countless reports are also as likely to initiate sex, taking away from males the age-old, erotic power of the chase.

"I know lots of girls for whom nothing is off limits," says Helen Czapary, a junior at the University of Maryland. "The pressure on the guys is a huge deal."

Combine performance anxiety with binge drinking and the abuse of drugs on campus and it's no wonder that problems are showing up at college clinics in numbers that give the lie to the adage that impotence is reserved for the old (Bob Dole) or crazy (Jack Nicholson in "Carnal Knowledge"). The younger models who now appear in commercials for Viagra and its pharmaceutical clones reveal that the drug makers know (hope?) what the rest of us don't: Some members of the Game Boy generation are losing their game.

Weird. I am suspicious that this story was planted by Viagra sellers.

George writes:

Why do you doubt this? Girls are just discovering what everyone thought was obvious 50 years ago -- that girls cannot chase boys in the same way that boys chase girls.

The article says that "ED" is the politically correct term.

Duke lacrosse report

Duke has a site just for dealing with the lacrosse stripper incident. The latest is a report from former Princeton president Bill Bowen It says that Duke got a police report showing wild inconsistencies in Crystal Gail Mangum's story. She first claimed that she was raped by 20 players, and later said 3 players.

The report also says that Duke underestimated the coming political tidal wave over the incident. Of course. No one could have predicted that the DA, the press, and the public would have gone so berserk over such an apparently phony accusation.

Anyway, I seriously doubt that Bowen would have handled it any better. I was a Princeton student when he was university president, and he did not exercise any control over off-campus parties. He acts like the coach should have monitored off-campus drinking and parties, but Princeton served beer to all students over 18 at the old library on campus. There was no adult supervision for parties whether on campus or off campus. Bowen's list of recommendations is just self-serving doubletalk.

Expensive housing

Housing news:

In 2005, the least-affordable place in the country to live, measured by the percentage of income devoted to mortgage payments, was Salinas, Calif.

The second was the Santa Cruz-Watsonville area of California.

The third? Santa Rosa-Petaluma, Calif.

In fact, California has the distinction of having the 11 least-affordable metropolitan areas in the country.

California is growing, mainly from immigrants and foreigners. I wonder how people afford to own homes here.

Visiting the father in jail

Feminist bloggers are complaining this story and child visitation law.

Indiana law requires that a noncustodial parent is entitled to reasonable parenting time rights unless a court finds that time will endanger the child's health or well-being or impairs the child's development.

Kim Linetty wanted a divorce, so she had sex with her husband and accused him of rape. She got custody of the kids, and he went to jail for rape. Now she is refusing a court order to let the father see his kids!

I think that she is the one who belongs in jail. She had betrayed her husband twice, psychologically poisoned their kids, deprived them of a father and refused a reasonable and lawful order.

DNA tests foster changes in paternity laws

USA Today reports:

Florida legislators are scheduled to vote today on whether to allow men to escape child-support payments and other legal responsibilities if DNA tests show they are not the fathers of children born to their wives or partners.

Florida would become the 17th state since 2001 to alter a centuries-old legal principle that holds men responsible for children born of a marriage regardless of whether the men are the biological fathers, says the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) in Washington, D.C. The principle, which comes from English common law, is designed to keep children from being left without support.

No, I don't think that was the purpose of the English law. The father and the child have a right to have a relationship with each other, and the law was a way of legally establishing that relationship when technology could not.

Now we have reliable DNA tests. The law should be fixed to respect provable facts.

I wouldn't describe the change as "allow[ing] men to escape child-support payments". I say that it is allowing men to terminate the fraudulent mother support orders. It doesn't even offer a refund of past fraud, or prosecute the perpetrator of the paternity fraud.

Another goofy Wallerstein argument

Glenn Sacks answers Trish Wilson, a feminist opponent of shared parenting:

"Dr. Judith Wallerstein found that in cases where judges ordered joint custody/shared parenting to force warring parents to get along, that 'three and one-half years after separation, these couples were experiencing considerably more conflict and less co-operative parenting than were couples for whom joint custody was the first choice of each parent.'"

This sounds impressive at first reading, but in reality it is almost meaningless. She doesn't say there's too much conflict in court ordered joint custody arrangements--she says there's more than with "couples for whom joint custody was the first choice of each parent." It is to be expected that joint custody will be smoother in couples who both originally opted for it, as opposed to couples where one parent tried to push the other parent to the margins of the children's lives but later had to "settle" for joint custody.

We don't need Judith Wallerstein or Trish Wilson to tell us that warring parents are less cooperative than other parents. It is still quite likely that ordering joint custody for warring parents is the best way to make them cooperate.

Accurately portraying diversity

California news:

A bill requiring students to learn about the contributions homosexuals have made to society and that would remove sex-specific terms such as "mom" and "dad" from textbooks has passed another hurdle on the way to becoming the law of the land in California.

Having already been approved by the state's Senate Judiciary Committee, SB 1437, which would mandate grades 1-12 buy books "accurately" portraying "the sexual diversity of our society," got the nod yesterday of the Senate Education Committee.

The bill also requires students hear history lessons on "the contributions of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender to the economic, political, and social development of California and the United States of America."

"This bill is the most extreme effort thus far to transform our public schools into institutions of indoctrination that disregard all notions of the traditional family unit," said Karen England, executive director of Capitol Resource Institute. "SB 1437 seeks to eliminate all 'stereotypes' of the traditional family so that young children are brainwashed into believing that families with moms and dads are irrelevant."

I wouldn't mind so much if the schools really did portray diversity accurately. They don't.

Top 10 cultural faux pas

If you are going overseas, here are some tips for showing that you are an American. Look people in the eye. Eat with your left hand. Use hand gestures for Yes and OK. Put your feet on the coffee table. Blow your nose. From the military protocol experts.

Five Reasons To Skip College

Forbes magazine says:

New York - College is expensive. Four years at an elite university like Princeton or Harvard will set you back around $160,000. ...

Although there is clearly a correlation between earnings and a four-year degree, a correlation isn't the same thing as a cause. Economists like Robert Reischauer ruffled feathers several years ago by pointing out that talented, driven kids are more likely to go to college in the first place--that they succeed, in other words, because of their innate abilities, not because of their formal education. ...

1. You'll be losing four working years.
2. You won't necessarily earn less money.
3. In fact, you could probably make more money if you invested your tuition.
4. You don't need to be in a classroom in order to learn something.
5. Plenty of other people did fine (without college).

I went to Princeton, but it only cost about $16,000 then for my whole bachelor's degree.

Coffee makes us say 'yes'

ABC Science reports:

If you want to bring someone around to your way of thinking you should make sure they've got a cup of coffee in their hand, according to research showing that caffeine makes us more open to persuasion.

The Australian researchers say a caffeine hit improves our ability to process information and increases the extent to which we listen to and take on board a persuasive message.

They tested this by quizzing people about their attitudes to voluntary euthanasia and abortion before and after either the equivalent of about two cups of coffee or a placebo.

They were also given a persuasive argument to read after having the caffeine.

The experiments showed that "caffeine increases persuasion through instigating systematic processing of the message".

So if you want to brainwash someone, then give him a cup of coffee first.

Wallerstein has caused harm

A reader agrees that Judith Wallerstein's research is unscientific, but thinks that I have been unfairly harsh by comparing her to an astrologer.

Wallerstein's father died when she was young, and she has spent most of her live collecting stories that supposedly prove that fathers are extraneous to child-rearing. Her typical approach is to find some example of a divorced father who was forced out of his child's life, and then complain that the father did not pay for the child's college education.

She has done a lot of harm, especially here in California. She testifies as an expert witness in child custody disputes, and argues that divorced mothers should just move the child away from the father so that the mother and the child won't have to be bothered with visitation schedules. She even has the nerve to argue that such move-aways are in the best interest of the child.

Somehow the California courts have accepted her as one of the nation's leading authorities on divorce. Comparing her to an astrologer is too kind. She is a kook, and she has caused a lot of harm.

Dirt pills may help to ease kids' asthma

Australia news:

Children are to be given a "dirt pill" to provide the germs they missed out on as toddlers as part of a revolutionary treatment for asthma.

Researcher Susan Prescott said asthmatic children would receive daily medication that would include a mixture of different strains of probiotic bacteria and antioxidants.

The bacteria will replicate the germs to which, it is thought, the children did not receive enough exposure at an early age.

As a result, they failed to develop immunity and went on to suffer allergic reactions, including asthma.

Some people think that babies today are raised in an environment that is too clean. Some dirty pets might help.

Unscientific divorce studies

John responds to my last post:

It is not true that "Wallerstein's research has been widely discredited as unscientific." Roger only damages his own position by making such a statement.

After all, Roger himself relies on Wallerstein's research to support his own position, namely that "this Wallerstein research actually tends to favor shared custody laws." That conclusion would be worthless if you really believed that her research was "discredited."

Wallerstein's research was never meant to test the issue of shared vs. sole custody, and her opinion about that subject is merely a distracting side issue.

The purpose of her research was to test the effect of divorce on children, not to compare different custody arrangements. Her research does support the conclusion that "divorce is more harmful that most people think" and that conclusion has not been discredited.

Specifically, her research was designed to test the conventional wisdom that if divorce is desirable for the parents, it is therefore also desirable (or at worst neutral) for the children, because it saves the children from the harm of being exposed to parental conflict.

Her studies showed that children of divorce suffer lifelong damage, even in the best of cases where divorce was strongly indicated for the parents' benefit. IOW, fulfillment for the parents does not translate into fulfillment for the children.

It's true that her subjects were not a random sample; she never claimed they were. That does not mean her research was "unscientific." Far from being "widely discredited," her work is widely accepted as having exposed the myth of the "good divorce."

I say that Wallerstein's research is unscientific because there is nothing scientific about it. It is not just that there is no random sample, but also that there is no control group, no objective measures, no accounting for demographics, and no way to tell whether her conclusions are valid or not. All she has are some anecdotal accounts of some personal interviews which she says reinforce her prejudices back in 1970.

Even if you agree with some of her conclusions, her work is still unreliable and unscientific. An astrologer who predicts the weather is sometimes correct, but the predictions are still meaningless.

Yes, I think that Wallerstein's conclusions are worthless. That is why I said that "I wouldn't rely on her opinion for anything." I am not relying on her research to support shared custody laws. I am only showing that the Focus On The Family arguments are fallacious.

If Wallerstein really had scientific studies showing "that children of divorce suffer lifelong damage", then she would have quantified that damage in a way that could be replicated by other studies. She has not.

John responds:

Roger, you still miss the point. Wallerstein's research was meant to debunk and discredit the conventional wisdom, then widely held among many professionals as well as the general public, and still echoed by the popular media and Hollywood, that children are often not hurt and may even benefit when their parents separate.

Of course, there was never anything remotely scientific about that assumption; yet it was widely believed anyway. After Wallerstein, no one can legitimately believe that anymore. Although her research does not meet laboratory standards for random sample and control group (which are nearly impossible to obtain for this kind of subject anyway), it nevertheless was more than sufficient to accomplish the limited purpose she set out to do.

I interpret your statement that "Wallerstein's research has been widely discredited as unscientific" as saying that her research was completely worthless and her conclusions are wrong. IOW, you are implying that truly scientific research indicates that children are usually not damaged in the "normal" amicable divorce (if there is such a thing).

That is wrong; there is no such scientific research that contradicts Wallerstein. You are shooting yourself in the foot to make such a blanket, broadside attack on Wallerstein, because you thereby eliminate any possibility of sympathy or support for your position from pro-family groups.

No, John, you miss the point. If I say that an astrologer is unscientific, it doesn't necessarily mean that all of the astrologer's predictions will be wrong. I am not expressing any opinion on what scientific research might say about the damage in an amicable divorce.

Judith Wallerstein is just someone with a bunch of anecdotal evidence and opinions about divorce. You may or may not agree with some of her opinions. My objection is to Focus On The Family citing her as an authority on the subject as if she has done scientific studies. She has not, and her opinions have no more worth than anyone else's.

I don't expect this posting to get support from Focus On The Family. That group calls itself pro-family, but it is supporting laws that promote divorce, promote family court litigation, promote conflict between parents, and promote alienating fathers from their children.

Regardless of what you think about the conclusions, Judith Wallerstein's work is unscientific. Here is a typical discussion of the limitations of her approach.

Dobson and shared parenting

James Dobson's Focus On The Family has a position paper against shared parenting. It is very strange because it is undated, unsigned, not on the web site, and contrary to what one would expect from a pro-family conservative organization. I ran across a recent letter affirming that the paper is indeed current policy, and an addendum that responds to some criticisms of it. I previously criticized the position paper.

The Addendum and letter continue to exhibit four logical flaws as they argue against shared custody laws. Here they are, as I see them:

1. Wallerstein's research shows that divorce is more harmful that most people think, and she opposes shared custody laws.

If divorce is more harmful than people expect, as Wallerstein says, then a shared custody law might be harmful if it increases the divorce rate. However nobody believes that such a law would increase the divorce rate, and it is very unlikely to be true. Most divorce is initiated by women who intend to take the kids with them. If they knew that they would have to share the kids equally, then they'd be less likely to file for divorce. So this Wallerstein research actually tends to favor shared custody laws.

Wallerstein's research has been widely discredited as unscientific, and some of it is contrary to the findings of others. I wouldn't rely on her opinion for anything.

2. Shared custody requires the kids to move back and forth frequently, and frequent switching is harmful in a high-conflict family.

The common child custody alternatives are:
(A) Mom has sole custody;
(B) Mom has primary custody, and dad gets 2 weekends a month visitation, and maybe some Wednesday dinners;
(C) Mom and dad split joint custody.

Nobody advocates sole custody if there are two fit parents available. If custody is contested in court, the court will usually choose between options (B) and (C). It turns out that these options have about the same amount of switching. Some parents with shared custody switch on school days and don't even have to see each other. So whatever one thinks about frequent switching, it does not help distinguish between the common court alternatives.

3. Shared custody requires parental cooperation, and should never be ordered by the court. If the parents could cooperate, they might still be married.

The problem with this reasoning is that it gives the custodial parent (usually the mom) some very strong incentives to be uncooperative. It gives her veto power over shared custody.
Any mom who is not a criminal or a drug addict is not likely to lose primary custody to the dad. If the law says that shared custody will not be ordered, then she can create conflict and get primary custody. Such a law just exacerbates conflict and courtroom custody fights.

The reasoning is backwards. It is like saying that a bank can make car loans, but cannot use the courts or repossession to enforce payment, because car loans require cooperation. If cooperation is the goal, then the law should have incentives to cooperate, not incentives to fight.

4. A custody fight is hard on the kids, and court orders should only be used as a last resort.

The Addendum says:

We feel, though, that legal intervention should be attempted only after other avenues of maintaining contact have been pursued and careful consideration given to how such proceedings may affect the children involved. And we do not believe that a court forcing a child to split their time between two homes is the answer.

Yes, custody fights are harmful. Disagreeing parents will take their cases to court, and the court will have to order something. The way to reduce the chance of a custody fight in court is to increase the predictability of the outcome. A statutory presumption of shared custody does exactly that. So would presumptions of mother custody or father custody, but no one is advocating either of those possibilities. Giving family courts maximum discretion for making custody orders is a recipe for promoting court fights, not for making amicable agreements.

None of these Focus On The Family arguments really address what is better for the kids, parents, or society. They just make meaningless conclusory statements like, "legislation supportive of shared parenting could place children in emotionally damaging situations and, as such, is often not a beneficial option."

Sure, any policy has the possibility of not being beneficial in some cases. The existing laws are certainly not beneficial in a great many cases. I suspect that Dr. Dobson does not have the position paper on his web site because he knows that the arguments are embarrassingly lame, and because he has some other political or ideological reason for being against divorced fathers.

If these are the strongest arguments against shared parenting laws, then I predict that we will see more and more states considering a statutory presumption of shared custody. The evidence is overwhelming that it is best for the kids, more equitable for the parents, reduces conflict and litigation, and is even better according to the criteria used by its critics.

What is feminism

I am trying to get a definition for feminism. Usually it is defined as some sort of doctrine or movement advocating social equality between men and women. But this cannot be correct because there are fathers who advocate equally shared child custody among divorced parents, and no one calls them feminists.

There are also feminists who promote privileges for women because of natural inequalities. Equality is not what they want. They want to advance women's rights and interests regardless of any comparison to men. These feminists often contradict the feminists who claim to want equality.

It is also hard to pin down the scope of feminism. It doesn't seem to be limited to economics, politics, literature, or moral philosophy. It could related to almost anything.

The only common thread that I see among feminists is that they all seem to have belief that society is somehow disadvantageous to women. Therefore, here is my definition:

Feminism -- An incoherent collection of ideas characterized by women griping about how the world works.

New DSM written by drug pushers

Wash. Post reports:

very psychiatric expert involved in writing the standard diagnostic criteria for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia has had financial ties to drug companies that sell medications for those illnesses, a new analysis has found.

Of the 170 experts in all who contributed to the manual that defines disorders from personality problems to drug addiction, more than half had such ties, including 100 percent of the experts who served on work groups on mood disorders and psychotic disorders. The analysis did not reveal the extent of their relationships with industry or whether those ties preceded or followed their work on the manual.

"I don't think the public is aware of how egregious the financial ties are in the field of psychiatry," said Lisa Cosgrove, a clinical psychologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, who is publishing her analysis today in the peer-reviewed journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.

The analysis comes at a time of growing debate over the rising use of medication as the primary or sole treatment for many psychiatric disorders, a trend driven in part by definitions of mental disorders in the psychiatric manual.

Cosgrove said she began her research after discovering that five of six panel members studying whether certain premenstrual problems are a psychiatric disorder had ties to Eli Lilly & Co., which was seeking to market its drug Prozac to treat those symptoms. The process of defining such disorders is far from scientific, Cosgrove added: "You would be dismayed at how political the process can be."

The American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the guidelines in its bible of disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), said it is planning to require disclosure of the financial ties of experts who write the next edition of the manual -- due around 2011. The manual carries vast influence over the practice of psychiatry in the United States and around the world.

You should just assume that DSM-IV diagnoses are based on what drug companies want to sell drugs to treat.

Apple v Bloggers

Apple Computer is at war with bloggers:

A California court in San Jose on Thursday is scheduled to hear a case brought by Apple Computer that eventually could answer an unsettled legal question: Should online journalists receive the same rights as traditional reporters?

Apple claims they should not. Its lawyers say in court documents that Web scribes are not "legitimate members of the press" when they reveal details about forthcoming products that the company would prefer to keep confidential. ...

"Unlike the whistleblower who discloses a health, safety or welfare hazard affecting all, or the government employee who reveals mismanagement or worse by our public officials, (the Macintosh news sites) are doing nothing more than feeding the public's insatiable desire for information," Kleinberg wrote at the time.

Apple's case is lame. This case is not even about any real trade secrets, but just some minor marketing plans.

Stone Age Values

The Si Valley paper editorializes:

An apology would help get Los Altos out of the Stone Age ...

The council majority of Kurt Colehower, David Casas and Mayor Ron Packard embarrassed the community in February with its rejection of the students. The three didn't just refuse the kids' request to proclaim a Gay Pride Day. They went further and passed a rule banning any future consideration of proclamations having to do with sexual orientation -- a topic Packard described as divisive and inappropriate. ... These kids weren't just told no, they were told to go away and shut up.

But the rule is even more insidious: It's an affirmation that gays remain far from full acceptance even in the Bay Area. The council majority paradoxically has proved the need for the type of public education that the gay and straight high school students hoped to promote.

No, what this proves is that the San Jose paper wants to brainwash schoolkids and politicians into thinking that they have to apologize for not endorsing pro-homosexual propaganda efforts.

Guilty even if proven innocent

Monika Johnson-Hostler, a sexual assault advocate, just said this on Fox News O'Reilly Factor:

We are very clear in this country that just because someone is acquitted in court has never, in the history of this country, meant that they were actually innocent.

She was arguing that rape accusers never lie, and that the Duke lacrosse boys should be considered guilty of rape even if the court acquits them.

She is wrong. This country has always said that people are innocent until proven guilty. And I think that the accuser is lying in this case.

This blog claims to have a picture of the accuser.

Why Title IX means quotas

Andy writes:

It has remained a continuing mystery why the quota part of the three-part test has become so important under Title IX. Why can't colleges just satisfy one of the other prongs of the test?

The three parts of the test are:

(1) The quota test: proportionality in sports must substantially equal the proportionality enrolled.
(2) The school shows a history of continually upgrading the women's programs.
(3) The school shows that it meets the interests and abilities of female students.

In debates, feminists will frequently say that schools are free to meet prongs (2) or (3) without satisfying the quota.

The answer to this mystery was just provided in the case of Missouri State University this week. Like most colleges, it is losing money and needs to cut back programs to survive. It has no choice: it must cut some sports teams.

But by cutting just one women's sports team, the college has arguably disqualified itself from satisfying prongs (2) and (3) above. The college cut the women's sports team, leaving 7 women who wanted to play tennis without a team. (2) and (3) above are not in compliance.

So the college has to try to meet (1). The college therefore cut FOUR men's teams (tennis, indoor track, outdoor track and cross country), stranding 65 male athletes! That brought its percentage of female-to-male athletes to 51:49.

Too bad anyway. It's female:male enrollment percentage is 55:45. The feminists just sued under Title IX, and will probably force the struggling college to pay its astronomical attorneys fees. Full Post-Dispatch article below.

The bottom line is this: the quota part of the Title IX test is the only one available to schools that need to cut programs for financial reasons, which is a huge percentage of schools.

Here is the story.

What to call illegal aliens

Geoffrey Nunberg writes:

Back in 1920, the New Republic reported on an exercise in which students at a New England college were asked to provide definitions of the word "alien". Their answers were uniformly negative: "a person who is hostile to this country", "a person on the opposite side", "an enemy from a foreign land". ...

But "alien" still suggests strangeness and difference and people who are "not of our sort", a connotation that was strengthened when science-fiction writers picked the word up in the 1930s to refer to extraterrestrial beings. ...

And those who take a hard line on immigration almost never use "aliens" to describe foreigners who are in the country legally -- on news broadcasts, "illegal aliens" outnumbers "legal aliens" by about 100 to 1. Legally speaking, "alien" refers to any non-citizen, but in political debates it often suggests "brown people who snuck in", a way of denying undocumented arrivals the label "immigrant" that most Americans associate with their forebears.

This is a bit like complaining that the term "drug dealer" has negative connotations. A news broadcast would not ordinarily say that someone is "legal" because people are ordinarily assumed to be legal. A news story about "immigrants" would imply legal immigrants.

As the article mentions, the term "undocumented" is incorrect for those who overstay a visa. The term "immigrant" is also incorrect for guest workers and others who do not intend to move to the USA permanently. The term "resident alien" is fairly common for foreigners with (legal) green card. I have yet to hear a better term than "illegal alien" for foreigners who come to the USA temporarily and contrary to law.

Simply Google

People rave about Google's uncluttered home page, as if Google had invented the perfect portal interface. But I think that Google's page is maddeningly difficult because it obscures many of its useful feature. For a more complete list of Google interfaces, see Simply Google. Even that omits Google Blogger and Google Mobile. The Google Guide has an alternate interface, and actually explains some of Google's search syntax.

Teddy Roosevelt on being an American

Theodore Roosevelt's ideas on Immigrants and being an AMERICAN in 1907:

In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American ... There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag ... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language ... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.

He also promoted the idea that our school should only teach in English.

Banning bukkake

Connecticut news:

Outraged by an incident in a University of Connecticut dormitory, the state Senate voted unanimously Tuesday to change the definition of sexual assault to include cases without direct physical contact. ...

The new law would help restore "the pride, self-worth, and safety of myself and other women victimized by thoughtless individuals such as the three men who sexually violated me and will only be convicted of a misdemeanor at best," she said.

Weird. Apparently they want to ban bukkake. I had never heard of it. The next time you hear of someone accused of sexual assault, remember that he might not have touched anyone.

Top ten worst words

The BBC lists the top ten worst words:

1. Retard
2. Spastic
3. Window-licker
4. Mong
5. Special
6. Brave
7. Cripple
8. Psycho
9. Handicapped
10. Wheelchair-bound

The article says that, "Golfer Tiger Woods has been criticised for saying he played like 'a spaz'."

Domestic violence and men's rights

Harry Crouch writes, in the San Diego paper:

Phyllis Schlafly's "Weak women and the Bill of Rights" (Opinion, March 30) is right on the money. I was in court again watching the daily herding of men charged with domestic violence. The judge, public defenders and prosecutors all taught the "anti-male and anti-marriage notions" Schlafly describes.

You can find her other columns on this subject here.

Duke Lacrosse story

The Duke Lacrosse story is blowing up. All 46 DNA tests came back negative.

There were holes in the stripper-accuser's story from the start. Since she was only accusing 3 players, she should have had to pick them out of a police lineup.

The main piece of evidence is now her broken fake fingernails that were found at the scene. That is not enough for a rape conviction.

I think that the press should have waited for the DNA tests, since the police said that they would be dispositive. Now they have branded all the boys as being guilty, and the accuser hasn't even been named. At this point, either the charges should be dropped or the accuser should be named. I'll post her name here if I find out.

NH revising payment guidelines

AP reports:

CONCORD, N.H. (New Hampshire) Attorney General Kelly Ayotte says the state should seek new bids for a child support contract that nearly went to an economist who was jailed in Georgia for failing to make payments to his children.

R-Mark Rogers of Peachtree City, Georgia, had been the low bidder for a contract to retool New Hampshire's child support guidelines. At the time, the governor, health commissioner and a panel examining the bids didn't know Rogers served time in the 1990s over more than 72-hundred dollars in owed child support.

Ayotte says this time around, bidders should be asked to disclose any pertinent legal history so officials can fully evaluate whether potential conflicts or biases exist.

This story is fishy, because no one is ever order to make payments to his children. But more to the point, no one should ever trust a closed-door process of developing guidelines anyway. They should be verifily based on demonstrable data using an accepted methodology.

PC children's books

Foxnews reports:

The globalization of the market for children's books has brought Australian authors face-to-face with American standards of political correctness, according to a report in The Age, and the authors are none to happy about it.

Among the things deemed verbotten in illustrations for the books, the authors say, are udders on cows, large lips on dark-skinned children and so-called "Asian-looking" eyes.

"It's not only gone mad, I think it's completely irrational ... to start to think that portraying a race in a true and honest way is somehow derogatory or demeaning," says illustrator Roland Harvey.

Among the other guidelines handed down by U.S. publishers:

--Avoid stereotypes such as females as peripheral/helpers to active/leading males, or senior citizens as infirm, with canes, doddering.

--Elderly people should be shown as active members of society; unless relevant to text they should not be shown in wheelchairs.

--Show mothers involved in outside employment (not in aprons in kitchens).

--Show African-Americans in positions of power, not just in service industries.

--Show African-Americans and other people of colour with a range of skin tones. Hair texture should vary from straight to curly.

--Do not stereotype Asian people with glasses, bowl-shaped haircuts, or as intellectuals.

--No large groups of people without an appropriate ethnic mix and male/female ratio.

--No "help the disabled" pictures ? show disabled people doing for themselves and others.

--Show many types of family grouping. Take care not to imply that one-parent homes are broken.

Why vegetarians are wrong

This British guy has theories for why men can't read female minds and why vegetarians should be force fed with lard. Some of his evolutionary psychology theories are testable.

Sunshine helps prevent cancer

Health news:

WOMEN with high exposure to the sun as teenagers may be protected against breast cancer in later life, doctors have found.

Boosting levels of vitamin D could be beneficial at a time when breast cells are developing. New evidence of the ability of the "sunshine vitamin" to reduce the risk of cancer comes from two studies presented in the US. ...

"But they don't need to expose their breasts to gain protection, just put on a swimsuit or bikini, because vitamin D is made in the skin."

Millions of Americans avoid sunlight and use excessive amounts of sunscreen because they think that they are reducing their cancer risk.

Forced gay ed

California news:

Sacramento, Calif. - The California state Senate will consider a bill that would require schools to teach students about the contributions gays and lesbians have made to society - an effort that supporters say is an attempt to battle discrimination and opponents say is designed to use the classroom to get children to embrace homosexuality.

The bill, which was passed by a Senate committee Tuesday, would require schools to buy textbooks "accurately" portraying "the sexual diversity of our society." More controversially, it could require students hear history lessons on "the contributions of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender to the economic, political, and social development of California and the United States of America."

If they were really interested in accuracy and diversity, then they would also teach the precise reasons that some people find homosexuality unacceptable.

Sex differences in the brain

Brain news:

Larry Cahill, an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, and Lisa Kilpatrick, a former postdoctoral fellow in his laboratory, have found that the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure found on both sides of the brain, behaves very differently in males and females while the subjects are at rest. In men, the right amygdala is more active and shows more connections with other regions of the brain, even when there is no outside stimulus. Conversely, in women, the left amygdala is more connected with other regions of the brain. In addition, the regions of the brain with which the amygdala communicates while a subject is at rest are different in men and women.

The finding could be key to determining why gender-related differences exist in certain psychiatric disorders and how to treat a variety of illnesses.

The study appears in this week's issue of NeuroImage. ...

Cahill believes this study could be the basis for a fuller understanding and treatment of a number of disorders that affect one gender or the other. For example, in the study, one of the brain areas communicating with the amygdala in women is implicated in disorders such as depression and irritable bowel syndrome, which predominantly affect women.

This might explain more than irritable bowels.

Penn and Teller

I happened to see a couple of Penn and Teller TV shows titled "On Bulls***". They seem to be a profanity-laden rants against people or organizations that they don't like. This time, Penn was unhappy about the lessons he learned as a Boy Scout, and now he doesn't like the fact that the Boy Scouts have a policy against homosexuals and atheists. As proof of the foolishness of the Boy Scout policy, he did an experiment to show that gay kids can fold an American flag as well as straights.

Usually the profanity doesn't bother me, but I thought that Penn said the word "a**hole" a few times too many when ranting about homosexuals.

George writes:

Penn wasn't calling the gays a**holes. He was using the epithet for straight guys who didn't want to associate with gays. They were boy scouts who even defended having the phrase "morally straight" in their traditional Scout Oath.

Whatever. I can see why the Boy Scouts might not want Penn to be a Scoutmaster.

Donkeys better than wives

India news:

A textbook used at schools in the Indian state of Rajasthan compares housewives to donkeys, and suggests the animals make better companions as they complain less and are more loyal to their "masters", The Times of India reported today.

"A donkey is like a housewife ... In fact, the donkey is a shade better, for while the housewife may sometimes complain and walk off to her parents' home, you'll never catch the donkey being disloyal to his master," the newspaper reported, quoting a Hindi-language primer meant for 14-year-olds. ...

"The comparison was made in good humour," state education official AR Khan was quoted as saying.

Political correctness will require removing the reference, not correcting it.

Clarity in the law

Someone recommended this PBS news show for the full story on FCC indecency fines. It had this exchange:

JEFFREY BROWN: Mr. Peters, what do you think? Do you -- do you see a clear line, a clear definition, from what the FCC did, that will help broadcasters and -- and the audience understand what constitutes indecency?

ROBERT PETERS: Well, I will tell you, I -- I think, admittedly, the line is not crystal clear.

And I suspect, if this were a criminal case, the -- the FCC would have a much harder time justifying what it has done, because, in criminal cases, the standards for clarity have to be higher.

Peters was supposed to be defending the FCC,

I don't think that the standards for clarity in a criminal case are any higher. Just ask Quattrone, M. Jackson, DeLay, etc. Look at this recent article in the Si Valley paper:

But leaving kids home alone is not necessarily against the law -- no matter how young they are or how long their parents are gone.

As a very general rule, children are ready for the latch-key life for short periods when they are 12 or 13, child-care experts say. The law, however, is deliberately vague to give prosecutors the flexibility to decide when a home-alone case becomes a crime.

A lot of criminal laws are deliberately vague. I think that it was the PBS news show that was deliberately vague about why the FCC issued indecency fines.

Fat patients

This CNN story details hospitals struggling with fat patients:

Last year, patient care director Colleen Becker decided to check the numbers. She looked at a daily hospital census -- about one-third of the 900 patients weighed 350 pounds or more.

Startled, Becker checked another date, then another. The numbers were consistent. On some days, half the patients were obese. Some weighed 500 pounds or more. ...

The hospital is replacing many of its beds -- built to handle people weighing up to 350 pounds -- with beds for 500-pound patients.

"Three-hundred-fifty pounds is nowhere near what we need for beds now," said Art Kidrow, a nurse manager at Barnes-Jewish. "We've had
some 650-pounders up here."

Wow. I had no idea that so many fat people were clogging up hospitals. (This story is not on the Wikipedia list of April Fools hoaxes, so I guess it is serious.)

How to cheat on the SAT test

Want an extra edge in the SAT test? More and more students are demanding extra time by claiming some dubious disability. There are psychologists, such as this one, who will give a mail-order diagnosis of some sort of learning disability. The the College Board folks have to give you extra time, or they'd be discriminating against the handicapped. As many as 10% of the test-takers take advantage of these procedures.

ABC News reports:

March 30, 2006 ? - When Ali Hellberg, 19, was in prep school, she said several of her classmates obtained notes from psychologists diagnosing them with learning disabilities, even though they didn't have any learning problems.

They faked learning disabilities to get extra time to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, in the hopes of getting a higher score, she said.

"I had a friend who is a good math student but is no math brain, and she got extended time and got a perfect score on her math SAT," Hellberg said.

That friend now attends an Ivy League school. ...

Approximately 300,000 students will take the three-hour-and-forty-five-minute SAT this Saturday; about 30,000 taking the test this year will be given special accommodations, including extra time.

3 claim boob doc D-formed them

NY Post reports:

Three angry women claim an Upper East Side plastic-surgeon-to-the-stars turned them into freaks by stuffing massive, Pamela Anderson-sized breast implants into their chests when they wanted only modest boob jobs. ...

"I wanted to leave with a 34B - but the day after my surgery, I was huge," said Felice Rosenbaum, of Manhattan, who claims her B-cup breasts were inflated to a whopping double-D.

"I was horrified," she said. "I went into my closet and I couldn't button anything.

They did manage to button their shirts in order to pose for a newspaper picture.

Basic Instinct advice

Sharon Stone is not embarrassed to give sex advice to teenagers. She ought to be.

The day we won the Cold War

Richard Reeves wrote:

At the end of 1987, Reagan's seventh year in office, Gorbachev came to Washington. There was a state dinner on Dec. 8, which ended with Gorbachev and his wife standing and belting out the lively "Moscow Nights" as Van Cliburn played the piano. Two days later, the best of the conservative columnists, Reagan's best friend in the press, George Will, wrote, "Dec. 8, 1987, will be remembered as the day the Cold War was lost."

In fact, it was the day we won the Cold War.

Attacks on Barry Bonds

The attacks on Barry Bonds continue. Mike Lupica wrote:

Barry Bonds is Bud Selig's Pete Rose. Selig has to go after Bonds, officially make him a suspect in the eyes of his sport, before another season begins, the way the late A.Bartlett Giamatti went after Rose, who denied and denied and denied his gambling the way Bonds has denied his use of steroids.

Now Selig has made Bonds an official suspect, and the media circus continues. Lupica continues:

Here is Bonds on May 21, 2001, ... On the same day, the same newspaper asked him about the possibility of breaking Henry Aaron's record of 755 career home runs someday.

"Hell, no," Bonds said in the Chronicle. "I promise you from the bottom of my heart I won't be in the game that long."

You believe nothing he says now.

Why is it hard to believe that 5 years ago, Bonds didn't think that he would be in the game long enough to break Aaron's record? In that 5 years, Bonds has played far better than anyone expected, and yet it is still doubtful that he will break the record. Some people think that he will retire at the end of the year, and he is unlikely to break the record this year.

The comparison to Pete Rose is also instructive. Rose and Bonds are two of the greatest players in baseball history. Both were savagely attacked by sportswriters for unproven allegations. I think that both players should be celebrated.

Low-context cultures

I talked to someone who took a grad psychology course in communicating with strangers. Apparently the textbooks say that America and Europe are low-context cultures, where people mean what they say and say what they mean. Other parts of the world are high-context cultures, where people try to communicate things that may be contrary to the plain meaning of their words.

We have a word for when someone says one thing and means another. It is called "irony". But it occurs so rarely in American speech that most people think that the word "irony" means something else.

Americans and Europeans also have different modes of communication. Americans deal in facts, and emphasize empirical realities to justify what they say. Europeans have their minds made up about various ideas, and ignore any facts that might get in the way.

Part of the difference is explained by American individualism.

This communication theory is supposed to explain why American have difficulty understanding the speech and behavior of foreigners -- we don't have the context to make sense of it. I am not sure whether the theory predicts that foreigners can understand Americans or not. I would think that it would be much easier to understand a low-context statement because the words have their plain meaning. But apparently many people in other countries have a lot of trouble with facts and plain language statements, and they just automatically translate everything that they hear into relativized meanings which are subject to their own personal prejudices.

Don't burn the food

Freakonomics blog says:

In a sample of 13 African countries between 1999 and 2004, 52% of women surveyed say they think that wife beating is justified if she neglects the children; around 45% think it's justified if she goes out without telling the husband or argues with him; 36% if she refuses sex, and 30% if she burns the food.

And this is what the women think.

American women should count their blessings.

Recanted child abuse testimony

Nashville news:

Sentenced six years ago to 55 years in prison for rape and sexual abuse, Ben Kiper's conviction rested solely on the testimony of his accuser, his 10-year-old stepdaughter.

There was no physical evidence, no medical exam and no testimony from any corroborating witnesses at his trial in 2000 in Butler Circuit Court.

So when the girl, now 16, recanted her allegations last October -- swearing under oath that her stepmother forced her to falsely accuse Kiper during a custody dispute -- you might have expected the 35-year-old inmate to go free, or at least win a new trial.

"It is simply intolerable if a state allows an innocent person to remain incarcerated on the basis of lies," one of his attorneys wrote a month later.

But five months after the recantation, Kiper remains at the Green River Correctional Complex in Central City. And he may well stay there, because courts have traditionally viewed such testimony with great suspicion. Some have said no form of evidence is more unreliable.

The thinking is that witnesses can be too easily coerced into changing their testimony. Plus, when witnesses change their story, it inherently calls their credibility into question.

Bill O'Reilly of Fox News is on a big campaign to pass Jessica's Law to mandate very long prison sentences in cases like this. He argues that anyone who disagrees must not care about children. He should have a guest on his program to tell the stories of men serving long sentences based on the flimsiest evidence.

Fuzzy thinking in dope-heads

The journal Neurology reports:

Neuropsychological deficits in long-term frequent cannabis users

The authors examined neuropsychological functioning in 20 long-term (LT), 20 shorter term (ST) heavy frequent cannabis users, and 24 controls after abstinence for ?24 hours prior to testing. LT users performed significantly worse on verbal memory and psychomotor speed. LT and ST users had a higher proportion of deficits on verbal fluency, verbal memory, attention, and psychomotor speed. Specific cognitive domains appear to deteriorate with increasing years of heavy frequent cannabis use.

The sample is small, but this just confirms that marijuana stays in the system for over 24 hours.

Using 911 tapes

Did you know that you can call 911, make a criminal accusation against someone, and send the man to jail? He can be prosecuted based on those 911 tapes without you ever having to testify at his trial.

The 6th Amendment to the US Constitution says that a criminal defendant has a right to confront the witnesses against him at trial, and the US Supreme Court is currently considering letting defendants Davis and Hammon exercise that right.

A couple of lawyers in the domestic violence industry argue:

Domestic violence accounts for up to 34 percent of all reported violent crimes, but it is notoriously difficult to prosecute, ... In the 1980's and 1990's, the refusal of victims to cooperate in the prosecution of their batterers may have resulted in the dismissal of as many as 70 percent of all domestic violence cases.

In recent years, however, prosecutors, police officers and advocates for domestic violence victims have developed techniques, together known as "evidence-based prosecution," that focus on the use of reliable evidence, like 911 tapes, to build cases that do not depend on the cooperation of the victim.

In other words, the US Constitution's ban on the use of hearsay evidence
is limiting the ability of feminist do-gooders to bust up marriages.
Sometimes a couple has a fight and then reconciles, but prosecutors
want to jail the husband anyway.

To convict Davis, the court had to justify the use of 911 tapes:

The Washington Supreme Court first determined that the purpose of an emergency 911 call "is generally not to 'bear witness'" but rather to obtain "help to be rescued from peril." ... The court rejected the ar gument that McCottry reasonably knew that her call would later be used to prosecute petitioner, finding "no evidence that McCottry had such knowledge or that it influenced her decision to call 911."

I think that most people know that 911 tapes can be used on court. If not, you'd better learn now.

Decline of patriarchy and birthrates

Phillip Longman writes:

Patriarchy does not simply mean that men rule. Indeed, it is a particular value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of proper station. It competes with many other male visions of the good life, and for that reason alone is prone to come in cycles. Yet before it degenerates, it is a cultural regime that serves to keep birthrates high among the affluent, while also maximizing parents' investments in their children. No advanced civilization has yet learned how to endure without it.

Through a process of cultural evolution, societies that adopted this particular social system -- which involves far more than simple male domination -- maximized their population and therefore their power, whereas those that didn't were either overrun or absorbed. This cycle in human history may be obnoxious to the enlightened, but it is set to make a comeback.

More here.

Another article describes women who have given up dating, and just look for sperm donors. Some of these women have dated 100s of men looking for Mr. Right, but decided that none of them were good enough to marry. My hunch is that most of them are feminists with bad attitudes.

Paternity registries

NY Times:

Under Florida law, and that of other states, an unmarried father has no right to withhold consent for adoption unless he has registered with the state putative father registry before an adoption petition is filed. ...

Although one in every three American babies has unwed parents, birth fathers' rights remain an unsettled area, ...

While women have the right to get an abortion, or to have and raise a child, without informing the father, courts have increasingly found that when birth mothers choose adoption, fathers who have shown a desire for involvement have rights, too.

But to claim those rights most states require a father to put his name on a registry. While about 30 states now have registries, they vary widely.

I never heard about those registries, the article explains that they are ineffective.

Choice For Men

Cathy Young writes about the Roe v Wade for men lawsuit:

I do think that the case illustrates rather strongly the unfairness to men of the current legal regime. With legal abortion, a woman who gets pregnant can get out of this situation with minimal consequences (unless you believe that an abortion is a profound trauma, which it does not seem to be for most women). For a man in his mid-20s to be ordered to pay $500 a month for the next 18 years -- and presumably more if his income increases -- is no trivial burden. It means a radically altered lifestyle, including seriously reduced opportunities to have a real family if he wants one.

She makes a number of sensible points. There are also some contrary comments. We need a public debate on this issue.

Anorexia is not a choice

Medical news:

Researchers studying anorexia in twins conclude that more than half a person's risk for developing the sometimes fatal eating disorder is determined by genes.

Most experts already believe there is a strong genetic component to the disorder, which mostly affects girls and women. The new study "hammers home the fact that these are biologically based disorders," said Cynthia Bulik, lead author of the study, who is a psychiatrist at the School of Medicine at UNC Chapel Hill.

"We need to stop viewing them as a choice. ... The patients feel guilty, the providers tell them things like they should just eat, parents are blamed, the insurance companies won't fund treatment because they think it's a choice. It's held us back."

If that is true, then I guess that I can quit trying to teach good eating habits to my daughter, and go back to making snide remarks about fat kids.

Bonds deserves to break Aaron's record

The MSM attacks on Barry Bonds are unrelenting. Among the silly suggestions, some sportswriters are arguing that Bonds should retire before breaking Hank Aaron's home run record. They always praise Aaron for breaking Babe Ruth's record in the face of criticism.

Aaron never got 1% of the media criticism that Bonds has received. The press hates Bonds, and has always hated him. I hope Bonds breaks Aaron's record.

Bonds has been a much better baseball player than Aaron was. Barry Bonds won seven MVP awards and finished second in the voting twice; Hank Aaron only narrowly won one MVP.

George writes:

Bonds has admitted to getting the "cream" and the "clear"
from Balco. He got his records by cheating. Are you condoning that?

There was a criminal investigation of Balco. If Bonds committed some crime, then he can be charged and prosecuted. If he violated some MLB rule, then MLB can suspend him or apply whatever other punishment is applicable. None of that has happened.

While Bonds is suspected of using steroids, so are a lot of other hitters and pitchers. Somehow Bonds has done better than all those other suspected hitters. Maybe his records are all the more impressive if he got his home runs off of pitchers who were using steroids. If Bonds tests positive, then he should just get the same penalties as other players who test positive. Otherwise, he is innocent until proven guilty, and should get credit for what he has accomplished.

Genetic imprinting

Harvard evolutionary biologist David Haig has a theory about genomic imprinting:

Dr. Haig also made some predictions about the sorts of maternal defenses that have evolved. One of the most intriguing strategies he proposed was for mothers to shut down some of the genes in their own children.

This strategy takes advantage of the fact that most of the genes we carry come in pairs. We inherit one copy from our mother and one from our father. In most cases, these pairs of genes behave identically. But in the past 15 years, scientists have identified more than 70 pairs of genes in which the copy from one parent never makes a protein. In some cases, a parent's gene is silenced only in one organ.

Scientists do not fully understand this process, known as genomic imprinting. ...

In many mammal species, females tend to stay in the groups where they are born and males leave. As a result, females tend to share more genes with other members of their group than males. A conflict may emerge between maternal and paternal genes over how the members of the group should act. Maternal genes may favor behavior that benefits the group. Paternal genes may favor behavior that benefits the individual. ...

Dr. Haig has enjoyed watching his theory mature and inspire other scientists. But he has also had to cope with a fair amount of hate mail. It comes from across the political spectrum, from abortion opponents to feminists who accuse him of trying to force patriarchy into biology.

"People seem to think, 'He must have a political agenda,'" Dr. Haig said. "But I'm not talking at all about conscious behaviors. I'm just interested in these mechanisms and why they evolved."

Funny how feminists can hate the idea that a father's genes might influence his children.

IQ in different academic fields

Someone has compiled a ranking of the IQ of grad students in different departments at elite universities, based on GRE scores. Here is Motl's version:

• 130.0 Physics


• 129.0 Mathematics


• 128.5 Computer Science


• 128.0 Economics


• 127.5 Chemical engineering


• 127.0 Material science


• 126.0 Electrical engineering


• 125.5 Mechanical engineering


• 125.0 Philosophy


• 124.0 Chemistry


• 123.0 Earth sciences


• 122.0 Industrial engineering


• 122.0 Civil engineering


• 121.5 Biology


• 120.1 English/literature


• 120.0 Religion/theology


• 119.8 Political science


• 119.7 History


• 118.0 Art history


• 117.7 Anthropology/archeology


• 116.5 Architecture


• 116.0 Business


• 115.0 Sociology


• 114.0 Psychology


• 114.0 Medicine


• 112.0 Communication


• 109.0 Education


• 106.0 Public administration

The precise numbers shouldn't be taken too seriously, but they do indicate the relative intelligence of people going into different fields.

Slobodan Milosevic dies

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has died mysteriously in prison, and people are saying that he killed 200k people in the last great evil slaughter of the 20th century.

I don't know whether he was guilty or not. But I do know that Pres. Clinton was unable to convince either Congress or the UN to goto war against him, and went to war anyway.

After NATO captured Milosevic, it put him on a show trial to justify the NATO invasion. After a four-year trial, the three judges were still unable to make a decision. If NATO really had convincing proof of his guilt, then it should have only taken a couple of weeks to present in court.

Fearmonger alert

NY Times reports:

Some leading climate scientists warn that we might be as few as 20 years away from a "tipping point," after which it will be too late to reverse catastrophic change.

There is a sign of hope. In 20 years, we shouldn't have to listen to these kooks anymore.

List of 20 Islamic inventions

UK paper:

From coffee to cheques and the three-course meal, the Muslim world has given us many innovations that we take for granted in daily life. As a new exhibition opens, Paul Vallely nominates 20 of the most influential- and identifies the men of genius behind them.

It is an impressive list. The last invention was 300 years ago.

David Brooks not conservative

David Brooks cites some dubious observations from Annette Lareau like this:

Working-class child-rearing is different, Lareau writes. In these homes, there tends to be a much starker boundary between the adult world and the children's world. Parents think that the cares of adulthood will come soon enough and that children should be left alone to organize their own playtime. When a girl asks her mother to help her build a dollhouse out of boxes, the mother says no, "casually and without guilt," because playtime is deemed to be inconsequential ? a child's sphere, not an adult's. ...

To help the worse-off parents, we should raise the earned-income tax credit to lessen their economic stress.

It is debatable whether moms should be helping their daughters build dollhouses, but some govt handouts are not likely to change the moms' attitudes towards dollhouses. This is just leftist fuzzy thinking that ill-defined social problems can somehow be solved by throwing govt money at them.

Fringe hate groups

A reader complains that if I am going to blame all Mohammedans for the actions of a radical few, then Christians should be blamed for not disavowing the Westboro Baptist Church.

The site appears to be some sort of joke. I couldn't make much sense of it. Whatever they are, I don't think that anyone will confuse them for mainstream Christians.

Arab-American on the Clash of Civilizations

Wafa Sultan Al-Jazeera TV:

It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete. ...

The Prophet of Islam said: "I was ordered to fight the people until they believe in Allah and His Messenger." When the Muslims divided the people into Muslims and non-Muslims, and called to fight the others until they believe in what they themselves believe, they started this clash, and began this war. In order to start this war, they must reexamine their Islamic books and curricula, which are full of calls for takfir and fighting the infidels. ...

We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.

This blog says that a jew planted a bomb once.

Update: Now she is getting death threats from Mohammedans for telling the truth.

Teacher monopoly

John Stossel says that the teachers unions are mad at him for saying things like this:

American fourth graders do well on international tests, but by high school, Americans have fallen behind kids in most other countries.

The constant refrain that "public schools need more money" is nonsense. Many countries that spend significantly less on education do better than we do. School spending in America (adjusted for inflation) has more than tripled over the past 30 years, but national test scores are flat. The average per-pupil cost today is an astonishing $10,000 per student -- $200,000 per classroom! Think about how many teachers you could hire, and how much better you could do with that amount of money.

The teachers unions always want more money, but money does not address the problems. Less money would be better.

The feminist-judicial machine

Stephen Baskerville writes:

Phyllis Schlafly stands almost alone today among eminent public figures in warning against the feminist-judicial machine. She is calling for a re-evaluation of "no-fault" divorce, for the role and rights of fathers to be respected equally with those of mothers, and for shared parenting laws to discourage the use of children as weapons. "It's time to stop spending any more taxpayers' money to promote family dissolution and fatherless children."

Study Warns Women About Spring Break

AP Medical news:

CHICAGO - The American Medical Association is warning girls not to go wild during spring break. All but confirming what goes on in those "Girls Gone Wild" videos, 83 percent of college women and graduates surveyed by the AMA said spring break involves heavier-than-usual drinking, and 74 percent said the break results in increased sexual activity. ...

"I think a lot of students wouldn't really pay that much attention to it," Fitzgerald said. "They would just be like, `Duh, that's why we do it.'"

About 30 percent of women surveyed said spring break trips with sun and alcohol are an essential part of college life.

I think that the AMA should stick to medicine.

Barry Bonds is innocent

The Frisco sportswriters are trashing Barry Bonds again, with gossip and hearsay from an ex-girlfriend and others. For some reason, the local sportswriters have always hated Barry Bonds, and they have been saying similar things for many years.

Bonds may very well have told the truth to the grand jury. If there were really good evidence that he lied, then he could be prosecuted. He has never tested positive or found guilty of anything, AFAIK, and he should get the benefit of the doubt.

I also think that Lance Armstrong has been unfairly maligned in the press, over unfounded drug accusations.

Phil Angelides

Phil Angelides is running for California governor, and is advertising that he will "double the number of high school counselors so kids are prepared for college."

The teachers union endorses him, saying that he has a vision for school funding that is not limited by resources.

No, I won't be voting for him. We need a governor who can stick to a budget, not brag about spending money we don't have on school counselors we don't need.

Feminist ideals make wives morose

Meghan O'Rourke writes in Slate:

...the most interesting data may be that the women who strongly identify as progressive -- the 15 percent who agree most with feminist ideals -- have a harder time being happy than their peers, according to an analysis that has been provided exclusively to Slate. Feminist ideals, not domestic duties, seem to be what make wives morose. Progressive married women -- who should be enjoying some or all of the fruits that Freidan lobbied for -- are less happy, it would appear, than women who live as if Friedan never existed. ...

Across the board, progressive women are less likely to feel content, whether they are working or at home, and no matter how much they are making. ...

The study's authors, W. Bradford Wilcox and Steven Nock, speculate that fault-finding on the part of wives makes it hard for men to do the emotional work that stabilizes marriages. Meanwhile, traditionalist women -- a significant portion of whom are Christian -- expect less emotional work from their husbands, Wilcox and Nock speculate, which makes it easier for them to shake off frustrations, and less likely to nag.

O'Rourke's theories are dubious, but this really shouldn't be too hard to understand. Feminists are often unhappy about human nature, and frustrated that they cannot change it.

Unpopular movies win

Oscar news:

One only has to look at the box office reciepts for 2005. Brokeback Mountain is 26th, Crash is 49th, Munich is 63rd, Good Night and Good Luck is 90th, Capote is 97th. Capote provided the Best Actor, Syriana, which was 58th, provided the best supporting actor, Constant Gardener, which was 79th, provided the best supporting actress. Only the best actress award, of the major awards, came from a movie that was moderately well recieved by the public, Walk the Line, which was 16th.

Crash was a mediocre movie. I have not seen the others, and I do not plan to. The highest grossing movie of the year did not win any awards.

Book about pair of penguins

Chicago Tribune reports:

Savannah, Missouri -- A children's book about two male penguins that raise a baby penguin has been moved to the non-fiction section of two library branches after two parents complained it had homosexual undertones.

The illustrated book, "And Tango Makes Three," is based on a true story of two male penguins, named Roy and Silo, who adopted an abandoned egg at New York City's Central Park Zoo in the late 1990s.

Penguins exhibit instinctual pair-bonding, but that is a lot different from what is commonly called human homosexuality. There were no available females when Roy bonded with Silo. Roy later mated with a female.

The feminist anti-kid crusade

Carey Roberts writes:

Call it one of those simple yet profound truths: only a father can help a boy become a man. And only a daddie can teach a girl about healthy male-female relationships.

Both dads and moms are unique and special. Maybe that's why dads love to mix it up with rough-and-tumble play. Perhaps it's why fathers teach kids a thing or two about risk-taking. And no doubt it has something to do with that tough love thing. ...

Not only is joint custody firmly rooted in the notion of gender equality, it's also ideal for kids. As Dr. Joan Kelly, former president of the Academy of Family Mediators concluded, shared parenting "is a desirable outcome which clearly is in the best interests of children and families." By 1991, over 40 states had shared parenting laws in place.

But the M.O.M.s -- Mothers Opposed to Men -- were not going to remain silent.

No Two Alike: Human Nature

William Saletan writes:

Judith Rich Harris calls "No Two Alike" a "scientific detective story." The mystery is why people -- even identical twins who grow up in the same home with the same genes -- end up with different personalities. ...

Eight years ago, Harris's book "The Nurture Assumption" set academic psychology on fire by attacking the notion that parenting styles shape children. ...

Harris shreds popular theories of personality formation. Does home environment -- parenting style, marital harmony, the use or rejection of day care -- shape a child's personality, making her more agreeable, less aggressive or more extroverted? Nope. Research shows that twins don't turn out more alike if they're raised together than if they're raised apart. Nor do adoptive siblings. And when you compare apples to apples -- making sure that each parent-child unit in a study is as genetically related as any other -- being raised in one home rather than another, on average, makes no difference.

This is one of those subjects where people cling to their beliefs, regardless of the evidence.

Smart people in science

Philip Greenspun writes:

Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.

Most people go to work primarily in order to earn a paycheck. Workers prefer a higher salary to a lower salary. Jobs in science pay far less than jobs in the professions and business held by women of similar ability. A lot of men are irrational, romantic, stubborn, and unwilling to admit that they've made a big mistake. With Occam's Razor, we should not need to bring in the FBI to solve the mystery of why there are more men than women who have chosen to stick with the choice that they made at age 18 to be a scientist or mathematician.

Shared parenting fan

A father writes:

With regard to the shuttling kids argument ... anyone who has ever dealt the the 5-8pm visitation, realizes that THIS setup causes a great deal of shuttling. Not to mention, it gives the over all feel of the evening a "visitation" feel, rather than a "home" feel.

It is so amazing to me that we even need to discuss Shared Parenting. It should be a given!

If you want to follow a custody case, just to see how alive and well discrimination is in our family courts, visit my site www.5050parents.com.

He's right.

Fan mail

Gabe writes:

Dude, I have no idea who you are, but I can't believe how much I agree with, like, every single post on your blog!

Truly amazing.

I feel like I need to pay my bill now or something.

Props to you. Spectacular blog.

Hmmm. I thought that I was writing a provocative blog. No one could agree with me that much.

Veteran benefits

Sally Satel writes:

According to a report from its inspector general, the Department of Veterans Affairs is now paying compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder to nearly twice as many veterans as it did just six years ago, at an annual cost of $4.3 billion. What's more surprising is that the flood of recent applicants does not, for the most part, consist of young soldiers just returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Rather they are Vietnam veterans in their 50's and 60's who claim to be psychologically crippled now by their service of decades ago.

There are a lot of myths about Vietnam vets. Very few of them are psychologically crippled, if any.