Islamophobia

Cathy Young attacks Islamophobia, and defends moslems:

Spencer argues that Islam, unlike Christianity, has a specific theological mandate to expand by force and to convert, kill or subjugate nonbelievers. To this I can only say that, mandate or no, historically Christianity (until relatively recently) does not seem to have been far behind Islam when it comes to forcible conversion, slaughter or subjugation. Christianity has modernized; Islam, by and large, has not. The theological and cultural causes of this can be debated ad infinitum. Islamic reformation may well be more difficult than Christian reformation. It does not follow that it's impossible.

Perhaps possible, but unlikely. Forcible conversion, slaughter, and subjugation have been central tenets of Islam for over 1000 years. They have never been central tenets of Christianity. Islam is not just a few years behind Christianity; it is a religion with an entirely different purpose and it is not making progress.

Someone is probably going to send me some obscure story about how some overzealous Christian missionaries tortured some poor natives. Such incidents may have happened, but they are usually grossly exaggerated. Usually I find that the missionaries built schools and hospitals, and I cannot verify the torture.

Transgendered research

I complained last week about sex discrimination research by the transgendered Prof. Ben (nee Barbara) Barres, but it is actually worse than I thought. Volokh points out
that Barres wants to forbid any politically incorrect views from even being hypothesized. Volokh also notes that Barres used bad data, and that Nature refused to print a correction. Steven Pinker and Peter Lawrence say that Barres misrepresented their views.

With so many people so eager to prove Larry Summers wrong, you would think that they would be able to come up with better arguments.

Obvious research on dating

Here is a study by some academics who thought that they could end sexual harassment by stopping the socialization to be macho:

"We initially got started on this research thinking if we could identify men who tended to over-sexualize women, we could then interview them [to learn why] and stop sexual harassment on the job and date rape," said lead researcher Maurice J. Levesque, an associate professor of psychology at Elon University, in North Carolina.

"We wanted to see if basically the macho-type guy was the only one who did this," said Levesque, adding the study showed that wasn't the case.

They did an experiment that found that when a college boy meets a college girl and has a conversation, then he often rates her sexual interest as higher than she rates her own. "If he found her to be physically attractive, he would tend to rate her as sexier."

This is silly. The conclusions would be obvious to anyone who has not been brainwashed by academic feminism.

Fraud of the century

Today's Jeopardy (a TV quiz show) had the following item at the end of the Famous Last Words category:

This anti-ERA crusader said, "The claim that American women are downtrodden ... is the fraud of the century."

This source says:

As early as 1972, Phyllis Schlafly posed this question: "The claim that American women are downtrodden and unfairly treated is the fraud of the century?Why should we lower ourselves to ?equal rights? when we already have the status of special privilege?" That editorial launched the movement that eventually defeated the Equal Rights Amendment.

3D manifolds classified

The WSJ reports:

SCIENCE JOURNAL
By SHARON BEGLEY

Major Math Problem Is Believed Solved By Reclusive Russian
July 21, 2006; Page A9

For six years, $7 million in prize money has lay unclaimed at the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass., waiting for someone to solve any of the seven "millennium prize problems," the oldest of which has been kicking around since 1859. Despite periodic claims, it looked like the institute would hold on to the cash until after the sun burned out.

But the math world is abuzz over the very real possibility that one millennium problem, the Poincaré conjecture, has been proved by a mathematician in Russia. After nearly four years of scrutiny by other mathematicians, the work holds up, even though Grigori Perelman's work is decidedly unusual.

In 2002 and 2003, he posted two papers to an online archive. Usually, a posting serves a flag-planting function -- "I solved this first!" -- until the paper is published in a journal, which can take years. But as the math community waited for him to follow up his postings, a realization set in. Dr. Perelman, long affiliated with the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in St. Petersburg, apparently has no intention of saying more. He probably feels he proved the Poincaré conjecture, mathematicians surmise, and has no interest in the $1 million bounty. (He did not respond to emailed requests for comment.)

Dr. Perelman's style is reminiscent of the Sid Harris cartoon of a board filled with equations and, at a key step, the words, "then a miracle occurs." One mathematician tells the other, "I think you should be more explicit here in step two."

The conjecture Henri Poincaré posited in 1904 is the most famous problem in topology, the branch of math that analyzes the shape of objects and space. He claimed, "if a closed 3-dimensional manifold has trivial fundamental group, [it must be] homeomorphic to the 3-sphere," as John Milnor of Stony Brook University puts it.

Translated, that means that if you wrap one rubber band around the surface of an orange and another around a doughnut, and shrink down both, the rubber bands act differently. The one around the orange keeps shrinking without tearing or leaving the surface. The one around the doughnut can't, without breaking itself or the doughnut. This difference says something profound about the structure of space itself.

Many mathematicians have claimed to prove Poincaré, but the claims flamed out immediately, their fatal flaws obvious. Dr. Perelman's proof has survived. The dilemma for the Clay Institute is that, according to its rules, a proof must be published in a refereed math publication. The archives aren't refereed.

Putting his proof online rather than in a journal is only one example of Dr. Perelman's iconoclasm. He admits that he gives only "a sketch of an eclectic proof of" a more general conjecture from which Poincaré's follows; he never mentions Poincaré. The papers are difficult to understand, and sketchy in the extreme. He asserts that one can prove something by a variation on an earlier argument, but it isn't clear what the variation is. "Perelman's papers are written in a style rather different from what would appear in a journal," says mathematician Bruce Kleiner of Yale University.

The sketchiness may reflect how a genius interacts with mortals. Dr. Perelman may believe some things are so obvious he needn't bother to explain them step by step, say mathematicians. If readers are too dumb to fill in the blanks, he doesn't care. Or, he has better things to do than justify every tortuous step, as proofs must.

Others have taken it upon themselves to explicate his work -- and find no major flaws. Like Torah commentaries, they dwarf the original. Dr. Perelman's 2003 paper is 22 pdf pages; the 2002 paper is 39. But "Notes on Perelman's Papers," in which Prof. Kleiner and John Lott of the University of Michigan explain them almost line-by-line, is 192 pages. A book on the papers is expected to top 300 pages. A "complete proof" of Poincaré, based on Dr. Perelman's breakthrough and published last month in the Asian Journal of Mathematics (which Prof. Milnor describes as throwing "a monkey wrench" into the question of who gets credit), is 328 pages long.

Oddly, either the book or the Kleiner-Lott paper might count as the "refereed" work the Clay Institute demands. If so, we would have the weird situation in which authors of the work that satisfies the prize requirement aren't the people who figured out the proof. But their efforts could win Dr. Perelman $1 million.

"It's definitely an unusual situation, but what's important is that the person who made the breakthrough put it out there so the community could scrutinize and analyze it," says institute president, James Carlson.

Dr. Perelman shuns the limelight, but is known through lectures in the U.S. and for getting a perfect score at the 1982 International Mathematical Olympiad, at age 16. He isn't expected at the quadrennial meeting of the International Congress of Mathematicians, in Madrid. There, the Fields Medal, math's Nobel Prize, will be awarded to the "outstanding" mathematician 40 or under. Dr. Perelman is the odds-on favorite.

And the millennium prizes? "I don't think the other six will be solved in my lifetime," says Dr. Carlson. "But then, I didn't think the Poincaré conjecture would be solved either."

Now that the proof has been peer-reviewed, Perelman should get his million-dollar check in a year.

Are Cyclists Destroying the Earth?

NY Times reports:

Karl T. Ulrich, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has put forth a provocative theory. Traveling by bicycle, he argued in a recent paper, may cause more environmental harm than driving around in pollution-spewing, fossil-fuel-swallowing cars and sport utility vehicles.

How can this be? Bicyclists are healthier, he wrote, so they live longer. Over their lifetimes, they consume more energy than they save. ...

"I see it happen here in Berkeley all the time," Mr. [Andrew] Leonard wrote [in his blog How the World Works]. "First you start biking around town, then you put solar panels on your roof and start worm composting your newspapers. Suddenly, you find yourself raising organic free-range chickens in your backyard and hosting weekly meetings of your local Peak Oil Awareness encounter group."

Yes, bicyclists become more enlightened, but the solar panels and recycling aren't necessarily saving the environment either.

Prosecutors fight 'gay panic' defenses

CNN reports:

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Prosecutors said Thursday they want to limit the use of "gay panic" defenses -- where defendants claim their crimes were justified because of fear or anger over their victims' sexual orientation.

"The suggestion that criminal conduct is mitigated by bias or prejudice is inappropriate," said San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, who organized a two-day national conference on the issue. "We can't outlaw it, but we can combat it."

Lawmakers in California and New York are considering bills to deter the common courtroom strategy of making a victim's sexual orientation central to a criminal defense.

Both measures would require judges to remind jurors that bias toward the victim cannot influence their deliberations.

California's bill also would instruct juries that gay panic defenses are inconsistent with state laws protecting gays, lesbians and transgenders from discrimination.

It was prompted by the murder of 17-year-old Gwen Araujo, a transgender teenager who was beaten and strangled in 2002 after two men with whom she'd had anal sex learned she was biologically male.

Lemme get this straight. A boy pretends to be a girl, and tricks and seduces men into having anal sex with him. Two men get upset, kill the boy, and get convicted of murder. The gay lobby is upset that anyone might even consider the trickery to be a mitigating circumstance in a case like this, so it tries to pass law saying that the argument is inconsistent with state nondiscrimination laws.

I guess that they are saying that if a man seduces someone, then he should be equally open to seducing a boy or a girl. If a man prefers a girl, then that is just bigotry and discriminatory behavior. If he gets tricked, then that is just exposing his own bias and prejudice, so he shouldn't be able to complain about it.

This is wacky. Perverted trickery does not justify murder, and the jury agreed to that. But it is really sick to try to tell juries that arguing against such perverted trickery is inconsistent with state nondiscrimination laws.

Labeling Mohammedans

A lot of people are struggling for a good term for the Mohammedan terrorists who are a war with the civilized world. Just calling them terrorists is inadequate because it makes them sound like random criminals, when they are really part of an organized movement. Calling them moslems or muslims sounds like religious intolerance. Some people prefer Islamofascist, Islamonazi, Islamic jihadists, and others. Some people that the label Nazi is appropriate because they their main objectives seem to be killing Jews and taking over the world.

I prefer to just stick with the term Mohammedan. As I understand it, the term Islam was popularized to separate the religious aspects from the political aspects of Mohammedanism. But when I want to emphasize those political aspects, then I need a term that is broader than Islam or moslem.

One objection I sometimes hear is that the good mohammedans might be annoyed at being lumped in with the extremists, jihadists, and terrorists. I hope that they are annoyed, and that they speak up against those who dominate their culture.

Rant favoring illegal aliens

Here is a Huff. Post rant:

Let me get this straight: Phyllis Schlafly is testifying at the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims as an expert witness?

What the hell is going on?

If you don't already know Phyllis, let me give you a brief intro by highlighting some best-ofs:

"Sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women."

"Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions."

"Men should stop treating feminists like ladies, and instead treat them like the men they say they want to be."

Ah, wisdom. Anyways, Phyllis was supposed to go to Washington to speak nicey about the House immigration bill, instead she spent her time, according to the New York Times, blasting the President for supporting the Senate bill because she wrongly believes it provides amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants currently in this country.

The Huff Post sometimes censors non-liberal comments, but it left in comments agreeing with the above quotes. Some feminists responded that they don't want chivalry but they don't want to be treated like men either.

The NY Times article was strange because it identifies Phyllis Schlafly's religion, even tho no one else's religion was identified, and the subject matter did not involve religion. Her testimony did not involve any religious arguments. Perhaps I'll start referring to the Jewish NY Times.

FDR tried to censor Flynn

I didn't know that an American president once tried to censor a mainstream political critic. A history prof writes:

Little did [John T.] Flynn realize, however, that his hostility to Roosevelt and his agenda was destroying his reputation as a liberal journalist. In July 1939, in response to an article in the Yale Review, Roosevelt wrote a confidential letter to the editor in which he called Flynn ?a destructive rather than a constructive force,? and suggested that in the future the journal refuse to print articles by him. It is unknown whether Roosevelt sent such letters to other editors, but in any case it is clear that by late 1940 fewer and fewer of Flynn?s manuscripts were finding their way into print.

Some people think that G.W. Bush is trying to create a dictatorship.

It Wasn't the Court Order She Sought

The LA Times reports:

A substitute judge hearing the case of an illegal immigrant seeking a restraining order against her husband threatened to turn her over to immigration officials if she didn't leave his courtroom.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Pro Tem Bruce R. Fink told Aurora Gonzalez during last week's hearing that he was going to count to 20 and that if she was still in his courtroom when he finished, he would have her arrested and deported to Mexico. ...

In her initial court petition, Gonzalez alleged that Francisco Salgado, 51, her husband of six years, was "verbally and emotionally abusive" to her and their two young boys. Gonzalez, who moved into a domestic violence shelter last month, accused Salgado of referring to her with a derogatory term and threatening to call immigration authorities.

This is really crazy. She is an illegal alien from Mexico. She has a husband who is trying to get her a green card. She goes running to a judge to try to punish her husband for name-calling. The judge is actually helping her to violate the law. There are so many things wrong here, I don't know where to start.

Update: For this, Judge Fink has been fired:

Judge Pro Tem Bruce R. Fink was removed this week from the list of 1,200 lawyers used as voluntary substitute judges by the county, said Allan Parachini, spokesman for the court. The decision was made by a committee that oversees the program, he said.

At the same time, Aurora Gonzalez, the woman at the center of the controversy, resubmitted her request for a temporary restraining order and was granted one, Parachini said.

I guess illegal aliens sometimes have more rights than Americans.

Transgendered neuroscientist

Sharon Begley writes in the WSJ:

Prof. Barres is transgendered, having completed the treatments that made him fully male 10 years ago. ...

Which may account for what Prof. Barres calls the main difference he has noticed since changing sex. "People who do not know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect," he says. "I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man."

Somehow, I doubt that Prof. Barres is really "fully male". If he is not getting respect, it may have more to do with his transgendered status and other factors than ordinary sex discrimination.

Prof. Barres' Nature article is not freely online, but it does have this online editorial intro:

Harvard University president Larry Summers was heavily criticized last year when he claimed that differences in innate aptitude, rather than discrimination, were behind the failure of women to advance in scientific careers. Some other academics agreed with Summers' analysis: "rubbish", to paraphrase the views of female-to-male transgendered scientist Ben A. Barres.

Here is what Summers actually said:

So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them.

So he said that his best guess was "intrinsic aptitude", not "innate aptitude". There is a difference.

Volokh reports an uncorrected error in the Nature article.

Vile meaningless doodles

I just learned that there is a consensus about the best piece of 20th century art. It is Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso. Supposedly it is reproduced in more art books than anything else. The title is an anagram of "vile meaningless doodles".

40% of teen abortions

The Si Valley paper editorializes:

The initiative would require parents to be notified 48 hours before their minor child had an abortion, unless the parents or a judge waived the requirement.

The need for a parental notification law is overstated. Studies show that more than three out of every five teens already tell their parents before deciding whether to have an abortion.

It is bragging about 3 out of 5?! The paper is against a Nov. ballot proposition because it says that the other 40% should be able to get abortions without notifying their parents.

The paper just convinced me to vote for the proposition.

The same paper has a story titled, Fisherman's Wharf shops fume over pot club. My print edition has the story on page 1A with the title, "Plans pit medicine against tourism". No, there is no conflict between medicine and tourists. The complaints is from business who don't want loitering potheads getting in the way.

Poll on lying

Chicago Tribune reports:

In the AP-Ipsos poll, 65 percent said it is sometimes OK to lie to avoid hurting someone's feelings, though 52 percent said lying, overall, is never justified.

Perhaps the poll just shows that people are willing to lie to pollsters.

NY rational beliefs

Leftist Wash. Post columnist Richard Cohen writes:

With same-sex marriage, the issue we are told is children. Even though the court observes that same-sex partners are not likely to have a child by ``accident or impulse,'' it goes on to say something downright mysterious: ``The Legislature could rationally believe that it is better, other things being equal, for children to grow up with both a mother and father.'' Those italics are my own insidious contribution because, really, there is nothing rational about such a belief. It is based solely and exclusively on staying in chambers or, when venturing out, going no farther than the ninth hole.

Nothing rational?! It has been conventional wisdom for 1000s of years, and it is still believed by most of the USA and the world.

The NY Times reported:

Judge Smith found that restricting marriages to heterosexual couples could be justified by arguing that it promotes responsible procreation and that children are best off when they are raised by a mother and a father. He left some room for adoptive and childless heterosexual parents, to avoid "grossly intrusive inquiries" into their private lives.

He said there was little scientific evidence to support one kind of parenting over another, but the idea that a mother and a father were the best parents was supported by "intuition" and "common sense."

The judge is right that there isn't much scientific evidence, but there are certainly some rational beliefs.

Rearing non-fat kids

There is hardly any scientific evidence that any parenting techniques are better than any others. Here is a report on a new study:

Parents have long been admonished to set a good example for their children, especially in establishing eating habits that foster good nutrition and a normal body weight. Now a team of scientists analyzing national data on youth development have found that parental influence on a child?s weight goes beyond the specifics of food. Also at work are overall child-rearing styles.

They found, for example, that authoritarian mothers who dictate how their children are to behave at every turn are most likely to have children who become overweight. And mothers who are overly permissive or neglectful are twice as likely to have overweight children as mothers whose child rearing is described as authoritative but not authoritarian.

Here is the abstract. It says that authoritative moms did better than authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful moms, as measured by first-graders having a high BMI. I haven't see the full paper and I don't know if there is much substance here or not. It may just be that families that score moderately by one measure tend to score moderately by another measure.

At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust

Liza writes:

This is a long, reasonably balanced article on the whole college gender gap question, which I do not believe is the crisis that some right-wingers think it is.

It is not a crisis, but it is yet another example how feminist conventional wisdom is wrong. Feminists are always whining that girls need Title IX and other laws to get opportunities in college. In fact, colleges are already tilted towards girls over boys.

Liza writes:

Here's one solution to the college gender gap. Why didn't they think of that before?

At a time when the image of major college football has been sullied by academic, recruiting and sexual violence scandals ? and as some prominent colleges eliminate football to cope with federal gender equity regulations for athletics ? many smaller institutions have embraced the sport. ...

In the last 10 years, nearly 50 colleges and universities have instituted or re-instituted football, with more than 80 percent in the small college ranks. In the same period, about 25 institutions have dropped football, the majority being scholarship-driven teams from the National Collegiate Athletic Association's top tier, Division I. ...

Dr. James A. Davis, now in his 25th year as Shenandoah's president, said: "I said no to football for 15 years, but I was wrong. Football is the best draw of qualified male applicants that there is anywhere. I am shocked more schools aren't adding football." ...

Sometimes, the allure is more primal.

"Heck, guys who play football just like to hit somebody, and the guys not playing like to watch the guys who are hitting each other," said Trey Kern,

Federal Title IX regulations make it difficult for a college to have a football team, because it creates a presumption of sex discrimination.

Meanwhile, here is some New Jersey news:

Only in America in 2006 would a game of tag be considered dangerous. In the name of safety, a number of schools are prohibiting their students at recess from playing traditional games like tag or soccer, claiming that too many children were getting hurt by aggressive play.

Liza writes:

Only about 18% of U.S. 24-year-olds have a 4-year college degree. For the entire adult population, the figure is about 27%. (A surprising number get the degree past age 24.) You all are accustomed to interacting mostly with college-educated people, but they are and have always been a sliver of society - probably, when you get down to it, mostly the people who score above the 75th or 80th percentile on aptitude tests.

Many more people start out in college but never finish. Close to half the college-age population gives it a shot. They don't finish for many reasons, including lack of aptitude, lack of money, lack of self-discipline, the appeal of immediate wages, etc. There is a wide range of quality in colleges. I dareway some don't impart much of an education anyway.

I agree that Title IX interpretations haven't helped, but that's only a small part of the story. Male high school graduates have other reasonably attractive and manly options like construction and the military. A remarkable percentage of young black males are in jail (something like 20%). The male-female disparity in college enrollment is really skewed by the very wide disparity among blacks.

Schoolteaching has always been a female-dominated occupation. Girls have been reading more than boys for a century and across many countries. (The latter point really comes down to: girls like to read novels. Big deal.) Boys are still doing a lot better on math/science tests, and outnumber girls 4-1 in engineering schools. Male enrollment in college as a percent of male college-age population hasn't declined at all.

At the elite colleges, which are more "competitive" to use John's terminology, there is no significant gender gap. The elite colleges that have engineering and/or business schools tend to be majority male. I know Princeton and Notre Dame are. And the faculties at most universities are male-dominated.

BS postmodern litcrit and women's studies courses understandably don't appeal to men, but it's easy to avoid those courses.

So I'm not seeing some feminist conspiracy here, except for a slight negative impact of Title IX. It's just that many more young women are devoting the time and money to attending college, whereas in previous generations they or their parents didn't think a college education was as important for them as for their others.

Andy writes:

Big media story this week is how women are now huge majorities at college. But, of course, the media won't discuss the real causes and the effects.

Cause? Women, mostly feminists, outnumber men by 4:1 or more as secondary school teachers. Colleges have been trending in the same direction. At quite a few colleges nearly all the key positions are held by feminists. Feminists forced out the president of Harvard over a mere suggestion. Women's studies dominate college campuses today. There are signs that even math, science and engineering programs aren't what they used to be.

Title IX is also a big cause of the imbalance. Eliminate wrestling, men's track and swimming, cut all the male walk-ons on all teams, toss out some big football programs, and pretty soon college is unattractive to a lot of males. Title IX then imposes a vicious cycle that is the opposite of supply meeting demand: Title IX requires cutting more male sports teams the lower the percentage of males at the school drops, causing the percentage to drop further.

How about the effects of this shift: lots of uneducated males and colleges that care more about political correctness than achievement. The result is not good for women either, unless they enjoy working for their unemployed spouse. Not too many women want that.

I do think that feminist policies have made college less appealing for boys.

Fighting siblings

The current Time magazine reports:

(Time.com) -- From the time they are born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and co-conspirators, our role models and cautionary tales.

They are our scolds, protectors, goads, tormenters, playmates, counselors, sources of envy, objects of pride.

They teach us how to resolve conflicts, and how not to; how to conduct friendships and when to walk away from them. Sisters teach brothers about the mysteries of girls; brothers teach sisters about the puzzle of boys. ...

Why childhood fights between siblings can be good

Laurie Kramer, professor of applied family studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has found that on average, sibs between 3 and 7 years old engage in some kind of conflict 3.5 times per hour. Kids in the 2-to-4 age group top out at 6.3 -- or more than one clash every 10 minutes, according to a Canadian study. ...

"Siblings have a socializing effect on one another," says psychologist Daniel Shaw of the University of Pittsburgh. "When you tease out all the other variables, it's the play styles that make the difference. Unlike a relationship with friends, you're stuck with your sibs. You learn to negotiate things day to day." It's that permanence, researchers believe, that makes siblings so valuable a rehearsal tool for later life.

It says that siblings have a huge influence on each other. Both good and bad. Fighting can be good, even tho a lot of parents try to stop the fights.

Maryland governor panders to gays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George writes:

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

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

Wrong bra size

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

Rape law expands to include alcohol

Wisc. news:

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

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

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

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

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

Veganism not healthy

News from India:

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

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

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

Reparative therapy

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

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

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

The American Psychological Association says:

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

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

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

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

Approving of husband beating

Scotland news:

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

Cops being rude

Florida news:

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

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

Women like porn pics too

Porn research:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Profiling can work

Bruce Schneier says:

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

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

Leno attacks Coulter

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

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

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

Language without numbers

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

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

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

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

Feminist shelters cause harm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google censorship

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

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

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

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

Gun used to teach physics

Calif. school news:

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

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

Turns out, it also may be illegal.

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

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

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

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

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

Dobson speaks

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

Dobson defines marriage

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canadian judge likes lesbians

Canada news:

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

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

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

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

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

California man-haters

Mike McCormick and Glenn Sacks write:

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

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

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

Poincare conjecture solved

China news:

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

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

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

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

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

Dutch marriage trends

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

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

Advice to a confused man

Today's newspaper advice column:

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

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

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

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

Wallerstein is no authority

A reader sends this quote from p.192 of What About the Kids? Raising Your Children Before, During, and After Divorce by Judith S. Wallerstein, Sandra Blakeslee, a 2003 book:

While it's not a substitute for a reasonably well-functioning intact family, joint custody does more closely approximate the intact family by providing ongong contact with both parents, although separately. What's more, it captures the new wave of fathers who appreciate how important they are to their children. ...
There is no scientific evidence that the general psychological adjustment of children is related to any particular form of custody.

An Amazon review says:

Be careful of Wallerstein's work, February 26, 2004

Judith Wallerstein has been amicus curiae (a friend of the court) in many custody related cases but she is certainly no friend of children who would like to have both parents in their lives.

Her research, which was presented in a pivotal custody case in California (In re: Marriage of Burgess), was very influential in the court's decision. That decision has been widely criticized and has led to countless children in the state growing up without one of their parents, usually the father. In recent amicus curiae briefs filed by Wallerstein she relies heavily on anecdotal accounts of cases in which she played no part and disregards substantial amounts of literature that highlight the harmful impact of the loss of important relationships to a child and shows that children do much better with two loving, competent parents. She has even contradicted herself on positions that she originally took in the Burgess case.

Her research has been widely criticized in recent years and this book will likely be no exception.

What is weird is that Wallerstein frequently gets cited as some sort of authority for the view that shared child custody is somehow bad. A RI state supreme court opinion cited Wallerstein's Burgess brief for the proposition that "social science research on custody does not support the presumption that frequent and continuing access to both parents is in the child's best interests; therefore a parent with primary physical custody generally should be able to relocate with the child".

The Amazon reviewer is correct. She has caused a lot of harm, and she is no authority against shared parenting. Some of her more recent statements favor shared parenting.

More on domestic violence

RADAR reports:

Rockville, MD -- The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has just released a study that reveals teenage boys are equally at risk of suffering from dating violence. The survey found that 8.9% of boys and 8.8% of girls had suffered from partner aggression during the previous year.

The nationally-representative survey was conducted in 2003 on almost 15,000 students in grades 7-12. The survey defines dating violence as hitting, slapping, or physically hurting the partner on purpose. The study findings were published this past week in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Review.

The CDC study confirms over 100 previous studies that have found females are equally likely as males to engage in domestic violence.

Despite those consistent findings, the media often misreport the issue.

George writes:

Your story about women beating men is implausible. Men are bigger, stronger, and more aggressive. Men don't fear women. Women fear men. Only a politically correct egalitarian would say that domestic violence is sex-neutral.

The vast majority of men aggressively protect their women, not beat them. Women like their men to be big and strong, and do not fear them.

Women do provoke fights, for a lot of reasons. It might seem illogical for someone of inferior size and strength to start a physical fight, but it happens all the time.

You can see something similar in children. Two siblings will commonly fight, and the older kid can be expected to win. And yet it is often the younger child who starts a fight.

Gay agenda laws

California news:

The governor opposes a measure passed by the Senate and pending in the Assembly that would remove "sex-specific" terms such as "mom" and "dad" from textbooks and would require students to learn about the contributions homosexuals have made to society, the Sacramento Bee reported. ...

He urges Schwarzenegger to veto two other "sexual indoctrination" bills, because "parents and grandparents are demanding it."

AB 606, would authorize the California Superintendent of Public Instruction to arbitrarily withhold state funds -- about two-thirds of a school district's budget -- from any district that does not adequately promote transsexuality, bisexuality or homosexuality in its school policies.

A third measure, AB 1056, would spend $250,000 in taxpayer dollars to promote transsexual, bisexual and homosexual lifestyles as part of "tolerance education."

I'll have to tell my kids that there is a gay agenda to brainwash them in school.

Flirting in chat rooms

Obvious research:

A study by the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering found that chat room participants with female usernames received 25 times more threatening and/or sexually explicit private messages than those with male or ambiguous usernames. ...

"Some messages to female usernames were innocuous, while others were sexually explicit ..." ...

The researchers also determined that simulated users or "bots" are not behind most of the malicious messages. "The extra attention the female usernames received and the nature of the messages indicate that male, human users specifically targeted female users," Cukier said.

Yes, of course females get more attention. It is not necessarily malicious to make a suggestive remark to a female name in an internet chat room. It is usually just flirting.

Rant about women

This guy has an amusing rant about women. An excerpt:

MYTH: If I treat a woman well and listen to what she says, she'll stop complaining

TRUTH: Women never stop complaining. For them, it's a sport. ...

MYTH: Men don't listen to women because men don't care about women.

TRUTH: Men ignore women because women normally have nothing worthwhile to say. This is not a condemnation of women, but rather a difference in what talking is for. ...

MYTH: Women understand relationships; men don't.

TRUTH: This myth is perpetuated by women, pussy-whipped men, and psychiatrists. If women truly understood relationships... that is, if they understood relationships with men... then we wouldn't have a 45% divorce rate. ... The other big difference between the sexes is that women are absolutely certain that they know what is going on, whereas men make no such claim. The last man who claimed to have his own radical theories about relationships was Freud, and nobody pays any attention to him any more.

You can also find it here.

Women who beat men

A new study shows that more women than men initiate "intimate partner
violence" and that, when they do, most men do not hit back. The NY Daily News reports:

Women are as violent as their male companions - and sometimes more so, according to a controversial study presented yesterday at a domestic violence conference in Manhattan.

The survey of 13,600 college students came to the surprising conclusion that in the majority of abusive relationships, women are the perpetrators at least as often as they are the victims of violence.

About one-third of students in 32 countries said they assaulted their partner in a survey conducted by the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire.

In 69% of cases, both men and women were violent. But women were the sole perpetrators in 21% of cases, compared with about 10% of relationships in which men were the only batterers.

Author Murray Straus, who presented the study at the Trends in Intimate Violence Intervention conference at NYU, said there was "overwhelming evidence that women assault their partners at about the same rate as men."

"The idea of chivalry is alive. Men genuinely believe 'never hit a woman' - up to a certain point. So when she gets angry at him and slaps him, kicks him, throws something, most men don't retaliate. But if she keeps on doing that, then it moves into the both doing it," Straus said.

"So many women have told me, 'I knew I wouldn't hurt him.' It's for some women a quintessentially feminine thing to do, to slap the cad," he said.

Other studies show similar results.

Female porn preferred

From the London Sunday Times:

[Catharine MacKinnon] has an unexpected vice: an addiction to People magazine, the American celebrity weekly that is obsessed with Britney and Angelina Jolie. "I read it cover to cover", MacKinnon confesses, who also tells me about "this incredible, velvety swing coat thing" that she got years ago at a Farhi sale. ..

In the late 1970s she helped to pioneer laws on sexual harassment and went on to draft legislation with Dworkin in the 1980s designed to make pornography a civil offence on the grounds of sex discrimination and giving women the right to sue for redress. The gambit didn't work: in America porn remains a protected form of free speech, but the debate made her famous.

Amazing. People magazine is just pornography for women. They buy it for the titillating pictures of sexy movie stars.

George writes:

People magazine is not pornography. Wanting to read People magazine is better explained by evolutionary psychology. We evolved from hominids living in clans where everyone knew everything about everyone in the clan. But we don't have enough gossip anymore satisfy our instinctual urges, so we have to read People magazine and watch TV soap operas. It is all about relationships, not sex.

I don't buy it. Your theory doesn't explain why the market for such stuff is predominantly women, or why these urges are only satisfied by pictures of sexy men and women. Women don't just read text messages with gossip about ugly people.

Women do read romance novels with no pictures. But those novels with filled with titillating sexual descriptions, and I regard them as pornographic. The books would not sell otherwise.

Yes, pornography for women focuses more on the relationships than on the sexual acts. That reflects a basic difference between men and women. Women are huge consumers of pornography that is oriented towards their sexual fantasies.

Pres. Bush not anti-science

I just listened to a lecture from Judith Auerbach, a spokesman for the AIDS lobby. She complained about how Pres. Bush was anti-science.

She ranted about suppressions and distortions of science, undermining science, and scientists being overruled by ideological and political considerations.

I am very pro-science, so this would be disturbing to me if true. But there is very little substance to her gripes.

She complained about this CDC article on male latext condoms. It says that condoms are not 100% effective in preventing disease, whereas she thought that it should say that condoms are 95% effective.

She also suggested the following CDC letter is more of an ideological statement than a scientific statement:

The surest way to avoid transmission of sexually transmitted diseases is to abstain from sexual intercourse, or to be in a long-term mutually monogamous relationship with a partner who has been tested and you know is uninfected.

She did not say that the statement is false. Her objection was that it was symptomatic of an erosion of an evidence-based policy for harm reduction.

What she means is that if a panel of distinguished scientists say that the best way to reduce the spread of AIDS in Africa is to hand out condoms and syringes, then that is what the president should do.

The trouble with her and other scientists who sing this tune is that they confuse science with policy. What if the most effective way to reduce the spread of AIDS were to test everyone for HIV and tatoo everyone who tests positive? The panel of scientists would reject the idea for political reasons.

These scientific advisors are not just doing science; they are making political judgments when they recommend a policy. There are people who object to promoting condoms, syringes, and tatoos for various reasons, and it seems reasonable for our govt to choose a less objectionable policy.

I may or may not agree with Bush's condom policy. I don't know enough to have an opinion. But I do think that scientists are being a little dishonest when they argue that scientists should be making policy decisions and pretend that they are scientific decisions.

Bad advice from Dear Abby

More bad advice in today's paper:

DEAR ABBY: ... I dated Mickey a total of four weeks. Since then, he has continuously driven by my house and dropped off presents of books, cards, candy, flowers, etc. I have asked him not to come by uninvited or without calling first, but he just dropped off another book. He appears not to understand that his intrusive behavior is freaking me out. What can I do? Is this considered stalking? ...

DEAR FREAKED OUT: Tell the man plainly that you are not interested in a relationship and you want him to stop dropping by and giving you gifts. If he persists, begin keeping a written record every time it happens and notify the police, because his behavior could be considered stalking.

No, it is not a crime. She is dating the guy. A lot of women like surprise attention and gifts from a boyfriend.

DEAR ABBY: I need to know how to handle my mixed-up marriage. My husband is a preacher, and our marriage is falling apart. He cares more for another woman than he does for me. Every time we talk to each other, he always brings her into the conversation. ... Our sex life is terrible. ... It hurts me because I love him so much. What can I do about this? How can I make him understand?

DEAR HURTING: ... Many wives make their husbands "understand" when communication breaks down through marriage counseling, and that's what I recommend for you.

No communication has not broken down. The husband is communicating all too clearly. Marriage counseling will not make him "understand" anything. Going into marriage counseling with that attitude with surely doom the marriage.

Orwellian nightmare

Letter to Editor, San Diego Union Tribune:

Bravo to Phyllis Schlafly for speaking out against the Orwellian nightmare our domestic violence system has become. Those who are fearful that the USA Patriot Act threatens the ordinary citizen's civil rights should check out the family courts. In the interests of "protecting women" from evil domestic-violence abusers, read: men, the courts routinely trample basic civil rights. Many women who get caught up in the system, by being labeled a "victim" without their consent, are aghast at what is being done to them, and to their husbands or boyfriends.

Popular baby names

NY Times news on baby names:

Chances are you don't have any friends named Nevaeh. Chances are today's toddlers will.

In 1999, there were only eight newborn American girls named Nevaeh. Last year, it was the 70th-most-popular name for baby girls, ahead of Sara, Vanessa and Amanda.

The spectacular rise of Nevaeh (commonly pronounced nah-VAY-uh) has little precedent, name experts say. They watched it break into the top 1,000 of girls' names in 2001 at No. 266, the third-highest debut ever. Four years later it cracked the top 100 with 4,457 newborn Nevaehs, having made the fastest climb among all names in more than a century, the entire period for which the Social Security Administration has such records.

Nevaeh is not in the Bible or any religious text. It is not from a foreign language. It is not the name of a celebrity, real or fictional.

Nevaeh is Heaven spelled backward.

Gosh, I thought that I had picked an unusual name for my daughter Neva when she was born in 1999. I didn't want her to share a name with her classmates. Little did I know, I was just a little ahead of a big fad. Oh well, at least the spelling is different, and those Nevaehs are not old enough to be in her class.

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.