Incognito bullying story continues

The schools and parenting experts have been focused on bullying for several years. My local newspaper has had about 20 stories over the last several months about the stupid Incognito football bullying story, and it continues:

Offensive lineman Jonathan Martin wants to return to the NFL, he said in an interview aired Wednesday where he claimed that racial, aggressive and sexually charged comments all played a role in his departure from the Miami Dolphins.

Martin, who played in college at Stanford, also said he was not the only victim of hazing in the Dolphins' locker room. ...

Among the allegations Martin made in his interview with Dungy:

That teammates directed comments of racial and aggressive nature toward him, as well as sex-related comments about his mother and sister.

Is he kidding? I thought I saw a movie once where an opposing football lineman makes sex-related comments about a player's mother and sister just to distract him. I always thought that was part of the game.

Incognito is actually someone's name, not some sort of euphemism for anonymous bullying. Supposedly his worst offense was to call Martin a "half-nigger".

So how did the Stanford-educated Martin get the idea that after losing his job to a better player, he could get it back by making a sexual harassment charge? From his labor lawyer mom! Fox News reports:

Richie Incognito is fighting back. ...

Incognito's attorneys argued to Wells that Martin’s mother is a prominent attorney with a background in labor law, and that before he left the team, Martin never said he was uncomfortable with the tone of his discussions with Incognito.

In a statement to Fox News, Incognito's attorney Mark Schamel of the law firm of Womble, Carlyle, Sandridge & Rice, said: "The coarse and unacceptable comments and text messages that were sent to Jonathan Martin were of the same poor taste as those sent by him. All of these communications were provided to Ted Wells and the NFL investigation. What they show is banter between friends, not bullying."

Schamel added: "Jonathan Martin sent text messages to Richie Incognito which included threats to send someone over to Richie Incognito's home with a 'tranquilizer gun and sandpaper condoms' to homosexually rape him. Jonathan Martin sent another that said he would 'kill (Richies’s) whole family.' There was another where Jonathan Martin indicated he would ejaculate in Richie’s face."

Please spare us. I hate to hold anyone accountable for trash talk.

I just want to be able to enjoy the Super Bowl without any of this nonsense. We have two very evenly matched teams from our two leading dope-smoking capitals. The game features a white quarterback against a black one, with the corresponding stereotypes, and studies show such games get the highest ratings:

Race, Football and Television: Explaining the black quarterback effect
Nielsen ratings for ABC’s Monday Night Football are significantly higher when the game involves a black quarterback. In this paper, we consider competing explanations for this surprisingly robust effect. First, quarterback race might proxy for other player or team attributes. Second, black viewership patterns might be sensitive to quarterback race. Third, viewers of all races might be exhibiting a taste for diversity. We use both ratings data and evidence on racial attitudes from the General Social Survey to test these hypotheses empirically. The evidence strongly supports the taste-for-diversity hypothesis, while suggesting some role for black own-race preferences as well.

I wanted to link to the research paper, but found this instead:

The paper "Race, Football and Television: Explaining the Black Quarterback Effect" has been removed from this site. Our contract with Neilsen Media Research requires us to refrain from posting the results of this study online.

Apparently the NFL and ESPN make a lot of money off racial animosity, and no one wants to talk about it.

I am not criticizing. I see nothing wrong with blacks, non-whites, and even white SWPL urban metrosexual liberals rooting for the black quarterback, while rednecks and other unreconstructed Americans root for the white guy.

We have become waaaaaay toooo sensitive. If I had a half-black kid, I would teach him to be emotional strong enough not to crumble just because someone calls him a half-nigger.

Free to post court official pics

The Wash. Post reports:

A D.C. Superior Court judge ruled Tuesday that a convicted sex offender can distribute and post photos of court employees online to protest the city’s sex offender registry

Dennis Sobin, a former pornographer who served more than a decade in prison for a sexual performance using a minor, posted the photos of employees from D.C.’s Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency (CSOSA) on idiotsregistry.info saying that sex-offender registries are unfair. A court employee filed for a civil protection order, accused him of stalking and asked the court to have Sobin to remove her photo.

But Judge Todd E. Edelman said that Sobin’s actions were protected by the First Amendment.

Dan Brewington went to prison for posting gripes about the court officials who had unfairly taken his kids away.

I don't have any opinion about this guy being on the sex offender registry, but I do think that he has a free speech right to make fun of the govt officials who are harassing him.

Meanwhile the federal appeals court for California and other western states ruled against free speech about gays. In Pickup v. Brown and Welch v. Brown upheld a California law requiring psychotherapists to give pro-LGBT messages to minors. The court said:

Dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc, Judge O’Scannlain, joined by Judges Bea and Ikuta stated that by defining disfavored speech as “conduct,” the panel’s opinion entirely exempted California’s regulation from the First Amendment. Judge O’Scannlain stated that in so doing, the panel contravened recent Supreme Court precedent, ignored established free speech doctrine, misread Ninth Circuit cases, and thus insulated from First Amendment scrutiny California’s prohibition — in the guise of a professional regulation — of politically unpopular expression.

So you could naively take your kid to a psychotherapist who might encourage him to become gay out of fear that telling the truth could jeopardize the shrink's license. Our lawmakers and courts have decided that promoting an LGBTQIA agenda is more important than preserving free speech in a professional setting.

The majority opinion cited their 2005 opinion saying:

In sum, we affirm that the Meyer-Pierce right does not extend beyond the threshold of the school door.   The parents' asserted right “to control the upbringing of their children by introducing them to matters of and relating to sex in accordance with their personal and religious values and beliefs,” by which they mean the right to limit what public schools or other state actors may tell their children regarding sexual matters, is not encompassed within the Meyer-Pierce right to control their children's upbringing and education.   Accordingly, Meyer-Pierce provides no basis for finding a substantive due process right that could have been violated by the defendants' authorization and administration of the survey.

After some criticism of such a narrow view of parental constitutional right, the judges amended their opinion in 2006, but I guess they still like the emphatic denial of parental rights in the 2005 opinion.

Update on Glass - not a lawyer

I mentioned this guy wanting to become a California lawyer, and now David Plotz writes in Slate:

Stephen Glass Should Be a Lawyer

The California Supreme Court’s cruel, self-righteous decision to reject the disgraced journalist’s bar application.

Stephen Glass, the disgraced New Republic journalist, and once my friend, lied to me most of the times we spoke. My wife Hanna Rosin was one of his closest confidantes at the New Republic, and he played her for a fool, too, and even tried to get her to defend his lies to the magazine's editor. In The Fabulist, the dreadful, self-justifying novel Glass wrote a couple of years after his disgrace, he depicted the Hanna-like character as conniving, sleazy, and disloyal, and the Hanna-like character’s husband as even worse.

So, needless to say, I don’t like Steve. And I don’t trust Steve.  

Even so, today’s California Supreme Court decision denying him admission to the California bar is misguided and cruel, a verdict that embodies what is wrong with American law. The Supreme Court spends 35 smug, self-righteous pages finding him morally unfit to be a lawyer in California. His “turpitude” required him to show overwhelming evidence of rehabilitation, but the court found his apologies self-interested, his confessions incomplete, and his pro bono work insufficient. Lawyers must be utterly devoted to “honesty,” the justices assert — a claim that only lawyers could make about law with a straight face — and Glass isn’t. ...

The Supreme Court also worries that Glass would fabricate documents and deceive clients, a bizarre and backward conclusion. The very first thing anyone knows about Glass is that he was a liar and a fraud. Any judge he appears before will know: This is that lying journalist. ...

Admitting Stephen Glass to the bar would help the people of California who need lawyers.

I have also mentioned Hanna Rosin for writing that men are obsolete and other anti-man rants.

Glass, Plotz, and Rosin are all Jewish. Rosin was born in Israel. Plotz wrote in 2006:

I picked up the Torah in the pew-back, opened it at random, and started reading (the English translation, that is). ...

The founding fathers of the 12 tribes of Israel lie, breach a contract, encourage pagans to convert to Judaism only in order to incapacitate them for slaughter, murder some innocents and enslave others, pillage and profiteer, and then justify it all with an appeal to their sister's defiled honor.

I hate to say it, but a lot of people like to hire Jewish lawyers precisely because they are sleazy and conniving. They will often do things that Christian lawyers will not do. If you want to hire a hit man, then you do not want someone who is queasy about pulling the trigger.

I am not saying that all lawyers and Jews are dishonest, immoral, anti-man, conniving, sleazy, and disloyal. But really, what do you expect? If they disbarred all the creeps, then who would do the legal work?

There are 1000s of terrible child custody decisions in California every year, and the California supreme court never does anything about them. Those justices hurt many more people than Glass did. The pot is calling the kettle black.

Praising kids can be good or bad

Slate reports on parenting research:

So far, the research has treated praise as a fixed influence—a kind of powdered sugar (or crack) that tastes the same to everyone. But a new study in Psychological Science clarifies that praise’s effects depend on the characteristics of the kid receiving it. Kids with high self-esteem often respond to glowing kudos by taking the types of risks that might win them more approbation. Meanwhile, kids with low self-esteem tend to “avoid crucial learning experiences” in the wake of compliments, says Utrecht University psychologist Eddie Brummelman, because they fear “revealing [their] deficiencies.”

I have had people tell me that gushing praise is always best for a child, and that anything else might permanently damage his self-esteem. Such advice is lousy. Over-the-top praise might sometimes be appreciated, but it is not good to always give such praise.

Ten Jewish stereotypes

My most controversial posting was on Five Jewish stereotypes in 2011.

There are many Stereotypes of Jews. Many of these are in decline according to a 1998 poll. Joel Stein countered:

I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe "the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews," down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood.

How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah.

The person they were yelling at in that ad was SAG President Alan Rosenberg (take a guess). The scathing rebuttal to the ad was written by entertainment super-agent Ari Emanuel (Jew with Israeli parents) on the Huffington Post, which is owned by Arianna Huffington (not Jewish and has never worked in Hollywood.)

The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews. The sixth, AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.

As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood. Without us, you'd be flipping between "The 700 Club" and "Davey and Goliath" on TV all day.

So that explains why Jewish values dominate TV and movies, and why those shows denigrate Christian family values.

The ADL also said:

The charge that "Jews control the Federal Reserve" is a classic example of the hatemonger’s paranoid-style exploitation of legitimate concerns — in this case, the nation’s economy. Moreover, the wide appeal of this anti-Semitic conspiracy theory among all kinds of extremists strikingly demonstrates how the agendas of otherwise opposing hate groups meet on common ground: the scapegoating of Jews.

I don't want to scapegoat Jews, but all of the Federal Reserve chairmen since 1987 have been Jewish. Janet Yellen has just been confirmed as the new chairman until 2018, and she is Jewish. All of the others who were reported as being under consideration for the appointment were also Jewish. A majority of the board of governors has been Jewish for years. Pres. Obama has just appointed an Israeli citizen and former head of the Bank of Israel as vice-chairman. And yet the mainstream press consistently praises the Federal Reserve Bank, no matter how badly it screws up our economy.

You can be called anti-semitic for saying just about anything about Jews, even if it is the truth. Especially if it is the truth. Even if Jews are not mentioned. Criticizing the Obama pajama boy has been called anti-semitic, because the pathetic, liberal, effeminate, parasite Obama supporter matches a Jewish stereotype.

My concern here is more directly with stereotypical characteristics that are a bad influence on family court officials, and not with Jewish conspiracy theories. Besides the five sterotypes already listed, here are another five:

6. Superiority complex. Tiger mom Amy Chua has raised her kids as Jews, and has written a new book about how Jews believe that they are superior, as they are the Chosen People.
   
7. No forgiveness. Christians believe in forgiveness, but many Jewish holidays celebrate persecution by enemies who are not forgiven.
   
8. Obedience to institutional authority.
   
9. Untrustworthiness. Once a year Jews meet to solemnly say a prayer repudiating all vows, pledges, and oaths.
   
10. Jewish leftism. Also socialism, communism, and other anti-individualist causes.

These can have a bearing on family court decisions. An official who believes in forgiveness will be more likely to accept a parent's promise to make amends for a previous mistake. Perhaps you will be surprised by the authority stereotype. Protestants have a long tradition of defying authority, but Catholics accept the authority of the Pope, so you will probably think that Catholics have more of an authority culture. Let me quote the Jewish view from Jewish 101:

A rabbi is not a priest, neither in the Jewish sense of the term nor in the Christian sense of the term. In the Christian sense of the term, a priest is a person with special authority to perform certain sacred rituals. A rabbi, on the other hand, has no more authority to perform rituals than any other adult male member of the Jewish community. In the Jewish sense of the term, a priest (kohein) is a descendant of Aaron, charged with performing various rites in the Temple in connection with religious rituals and sacrifices. Although a kohein can be a rabbi, a rabbi is not required to be a kohein. A rabbi is simply a teacher, a person sufficiently educated in halakhah (Jewish law) and tradition to instruct the community and to answer questions and resolve disputes regarding halakhah. When a person has completed the necessary course of study, he is given a written document known as a semikhah, which confirms his authority to make such decisions. When I speak generally of things that were said or decided by "the rabbis" or "the sages," I am speaking of matters that have been generally agreed upon by authoritative Jewish scholars over the centuries. When I speak of rabbinical literature, I speak of the writings of the great rabbis on a wide variety of subjects.

Jewish communities even have their own Jewish court. Catholic priests have authority to perform sacraments and explain doctrine, but not to cast judgments or decisions. When the Pope said 'Who am I to judge?', he was just following millennia of teachings. The Catholic Church has a long history of staying out of civilian judicial matters. You may have heard about medieval witch burning, but those were done by governments, not the Church. The Church would take stands on what is or is not official doctrine, but would not attempt to run peoples' lives.

Jews are taught to accept a decision, if it was made by someone with the proper institutional authority. In my family court case, I had a Jewish commissioner (Irwin H. Joseph) and a Jewish psychologist (Ken B. Perlmutter) who would accept the decisions of other officials without questioning, even tho they were legally obligated to re-evaluate those decisions. I foolishly attempted to reason with them as if they had Christian values. They do not. I am not sure that they are even capable of independent thinking, without following an authority of some sort. I would have been okay with them following scientific authority on what makes good parents and child-rearing, but they prefer institutional authority.

There are also non-Jews in these jobs who have this same sort of deference to authority. Jews are only about 2% of the USA population.

Normally someone's ethnicity would not be an issue in a court dispute. However family court officials are supposed to make judgments about the BIOTCh (best interest of the child), and allowed to apply their personal prejudices when they do. I have listed 10 Jewish stereotypes that could have all worked toward an adverse decision in my case. These factors should not be influencing child custody decisions. Unfortunately Joseph and Perlmutter have the most horrible influences.

I am not saying that we should purge Jews or those with Jewish values from the family court. A better solution would be to abolish BIOTCh and require child custody decisions to be demonstrably free of such anti-Christian cultural influences.

A US News op-ed by a woman with bipolar disorder says:

Sotomayor's blow brings us to confront an uncomfortable reality. More than WASPS, Methodists, Jews, Quakers or Baptists, Catholics often try to impose their beliefs on you, me, public discourse and institutions. Especially if "you" are female. ... Catholics in high places of power have the most trouble, I've noticed, practicing the separation of church and state.... We can no longer be silent about this.

All Sotomayor did was to allow nuns to argue in court that they should not have to pay for contraceptive care. It appears to me that ObamaCare is imposing beliefs on the nuns, and not the other way around.

I do not see this Catholic imposition of views. Catholics have 6 out of 9 US Supreme Court justices, and yet they rule in favor of abortion, sodomy, and other sins. Catholic priests and other officials do not run for political office. Catholic voters are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans.

If there is a Catholic family court official who is separating kids from good parents based on his or her religious beliefs and prejudices, then please let me know so I can denounce it on this blog.

On the other hand, Jews vote overwhelmingly Democrat and anti-family. So do all 3 Jews on the US Supreme Court. Jews try to impose their beliefs and prejudices more than any other religious group in the USA. And their cultural and religious prejudices make them particularly dangerous as family court officials.

My complaint is with these prejudices being applied in the family court. No doubt some non-Jews apply these prejudices, and some Jews do not. The court should not operate on these prejudices. Those who do apply these prejudices to mess up the lives of others should be publicly blamed, whether they be Jewish or not.

Is traditional marriage natural law?

Eugene Volokh writes:

“Virginia Attorney General abandons natural marriage,” reads a Liberty Counsel press release. “Marriage was not created by religion or government and is ontologically a union of one man and one woman.”

Really? What is so natural about exclusively one-man-one-woman marriage, as opposed to polygamy, or, more precisely, social acceptance of either monogamy or polygamy?

Polygamy has been common throughout human history, present in a vast range of cultures — according to the Ethnographic Atlas count, many more than practiced solely monogamy (though of course with such counts much depends on how you separate or group together cultures). The Old Testament of course reports this as to the ancient Jews, and on this point I suspect it is historically accurate. Many American Indian tribes have practiced polygamy. The Muslim world of course still allows polygamy, and my sense is that this reflects continuous practice in many areas from the pre-Muslim era.

To be sure, nature also provides roughly equal numbers of male and female babies, and historically nature has made it hard for men to support more than one wife. Still, very many societies throughout human history have allowed polygamy for those men who had the wealth or social status to attract multiple women at once.

He has a point, but it is a weak one. Natural law is not just what tribal people do in uncivilized societies. Just the opposite:

Classically, natural law refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature — both social and personal — and deduce binding rules of moral behavior from it. Natural law is often contrasted with the positive law of a given political community, society, or state.

Marriage has been between one man and one woman in all civilized societies, so maybe there is a rational argument that such marriage law is the best way to go, and hence natural. Marriage law could be viewed as natural in the same sense that some people view laws against murder as being natural.

Alternatively, maybe it was Christianity that drove out polygamy and other forms of marriage like cousin marriage. That is what happened in Europe, many centuries ago. But China and other cultures seemed to have settled on one-man-one-woman-marriage without Christian influence.

Ontology is the philosophical study of being and existence. Saying that Marriage ... is ontologically a union of one man and one woman” is just a way of saying that's what marriage really is. It is not an argument. I presume that the argument is made elsewhere.

With law-makers changing the definition of marriage, I am not sure what term to use for the old definition. Terms like "natural marriage" or "traditional marriage" have the problem that someone like Volokh might argue that it includes polygamy. "Christian marriage" doesn't work either as it is practiced by millions of non-Christians.

Meanwhile, the supremacist judges are marching towards same-sex marriage:

In a decision giving sweeping new legal protections to gays and lesbians, a federal appeals court on Tuesday found it as unconstitutional to exclude jurors based on sexual orientation as it is to keep women and minorities off juries.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that sexual orientation deserves the strongest anti-discrimination protections in civil rights law, siding with gay rights advocates who argued that gays and lesbians are entitled to the same equal treatment in jury trials as they are in the military, voting and marriage.

The groundbreaking decision underscored the growing importance of recent rulings in gay marriage battles, relying heavily on the Supreme Court's decision last year striking down a federal ban on same-sex marriage benefits. The 9th Circuit also cited high-court precedents forbidding bias in jury selection based on gender and race. ...

Vikram Amar, a UC Davis law professor, said the new legal protection could be particularly important in challenges to bans on gay marriage in other states within the 9th Circuit, such as Nevada, which is defending its law in the same court. California's gay marriage ban already has been invalidated.

"Today's ruling will make it exceedingly difficult for states to justify laws that discriminate based on sexual orientation," said David Codell, litigation director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Traditionally lawyers are allowed a small number of peremptory challenges to jurors. These can be based on gut feelings or anything. Only in a 1986 case did the Supreme Court forbid racial discrimination in such challenges.

Mathematicians are excluded from juries just for being mathematicians. I don't see why gays should have more rights than mathematicians.

Follow the logic here? The court refuses to decide in favor of same-sex marriage, but makes comments that are used to support gay jurors. Then the gay juror decision is used to support same-sex marriage. Isn't any judge going to make the obvious comment that none of this is in the Constitution?

The research studies still show that dads and moms do best:

Progressives like Obama and Krugman are clearly right to argue that the American Dream is in trouble. Today, poor children have a limited shot at moving up the economic ladder into the middle or upper class. One study found that the nation leaves 70 percent of poor children below the middle class as adults. Equally telling, poor children growing up in countries like Canada and Denmark have a greater chance of moving up the economic ladder than do poor children from the United States.

Before you get too excited, but moving up the ladder more easily also means that moving down the ladder is easier.

Of all the factors most predictive of economic mobility in America, one factor clearly stands out in their study: family structure. By their reckoning, when it comes to mobility, “the strongest and most robust predictor is the fraction of children with single parents.” They find that children raised in communities with high percentages of single mothers are significantly less likely to experience absolute and relative mobility. Moreover, “[c]hildren of married parents also have higher rates of upward mobility if they live in communities with fewer single parents.” In other words, as the figure below indicates, it looks like a married village is more likely to raise the economic prospects of a poor child.

The single moms are doing more to destroy our society than anyone else.

These studies tend to overlook heritable psychometrics, so marriage will not solve the provlem. The kind of women who become single moms are the ones who should not be breeding anyway.

Kansas sperm donor is legal father

The Topeka newspaper reports:

A Topeka man who donated sperm to a lesbian couple is the presumptive father to a baby one of the woman bore and is subject to paying child support, a Shawnee County District Court judge ruled Wednesday.

In her written decision, District Court Judge Mary Mattivi said that because William Marotta and the same-sex couple failed to secure the services of a physician during the artificial insemination process, he wasn’t entitled to the same protections given other sperm donors under Kansas law.

“Kansas law is clear that a 'donor of semen provided to a licensed physician for use in artificial insemination of a woman other than the donor’s wife is treated in law as if he were not the birth father of a child thereby conceived, unless agreed to in writing by the donor and the woman,' ” Mattivi wrote.

This case is getting a lot of publicity as being unjust and anti-father, but I don't have a problem with it. California has similar rules. Whether these are the best rules, I don't know, but it seems proper for the state to set rules on such matters, and the Kansas man would be in the clear if he had followed them.

The man is appealing:

William Marotta, the Topeka man who answered a Craigslist ad from a lesbian couple seeking sperm to conceive a child, will appeal Wednesday’s court ruling that labeled him a "presumptive father" and not a sperm donor.

"We have every intention to appeal," his attorney, Benoit M.J. Swinnen, said Thursday. Swinnen said the decision finding Marotta the presumptive father was a surprise to him, noting the key decision said his client didn't meet the definition of a sperm donor.

"If there is a definition, I haven't read it," Swinnen said. ...

Swinnen questioned whether the timing of the court decision had a political edge to it, noting there was an anti-abortion rally and discussion in the Legislature dealing with changing how Supreme Court justices are nominated and surrogate mothers.

"It begs the question of whether the decision was political," Swinnen said.

Here is that political story:

The chairwoman of the Kansas Senate's health committee marked the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision Wednesday by introducing a bill that would ban surrogate pregnancies in Kansas and invited two women to undergo sonograms in front of legislators.

Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook, a Shawnee Republican who leads the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee, said her bill would mirror prohibition on surrogate pregnancy imposed in the District of Columbia.

Surrogate pregnancy is legal in some states, and illegal in others. In most states, there is a legal uncertainty.

This blog opposes giving judges the discretion to arbitrarily run peoples' lives. Paternity should be decided by marriage licenses, birth certificates, and DNA tests. I do not want some judge deciding five years later whether the man intended to be a father, or whether the lesbians have a happy home, or whatever else would drive the judge's decision if the rules are not followed.

Here is a stranger court decision:

The common legal principles that have been developed by case law to resolve difficult questions of property law within the context of a divorce action are singularly unhelpful in this case. The petitioner clearly owned, prior to the marriage, the egg from which the fetus developed. On the other hand, the respondent impregnated the petitioner with sperm he acquired after the marriage.

[Footnote:] The general understanding is that the female of the human species possesses at birth all the eggs that will ever be available for reproduction. This a very simplified description of the process as only one mature ovum is produced during each menstrual period from an un-matured egg called an oocyte. The male of the species, on the other hand, produces sperm cells each day which mature over a period of about 90 days and, if then not ejaculated, are reabsorbed into the body.

UCLA professor Volokh criticizes this as bad law, assuming that the science is correct. But the science is not even correct. Recent research showed:

Women may make new eggs throughout their reproductive years—challenging a longstanding tenet that females are born with finite supplies, a new study says. The discovery may also lead to new avenues for improving women’s health and fertility.

A woman has two ovaries, which release eggs during her monthly ovulation.

Previous research had suggested that a woman is born with all the egg cells she will ever have in her lifetime.

But in recent experiments, scientists discovered a new type of stem cell in the ovaries that—when grown in the lab—generates immature egg cells. The same immature cells isolated from adult mouse ovaries can turn into fertile eggs.

It seems pretty crazy to try to decide a legal case based on whether certain human cells had divided recently. I am surprised that this case was not severely criticized.

Expanding spousal rape law

Here is the latest attempt to push kooky radical feminist views throughout the world:

The Maldive legislature tried to criminalize just some narrow categories of spousal rape — “while a case for dissolution of the marriage is in a court, while the divorce filed by either husband or wife is pending a court, sexual intercourse to intentionally transmit a sexually transmitted disease, and during a mutually agreed separation (without divorce).” But even that was too much for the President, who vetoed the bill, as Minivan News reports:

“‘The bill containing some provisions that are contrary to Islamic Shariah and Islamic principles was among the reasons considered for returning the bill,’ the President’s Office stated….

“Following the passage of the bill, Vice President of the Fiqh Academy Dr Mohamed Iyaz Abdul Latheef condemned the conditional recognition of marital rape as a crime and called on MPs who voted in favour to repent.

“‘With the exception of forbidden forms of sexual intercourse, such as during menstrual periods and anal intercourse, it is not permissible under any circumstance for a woman to refrain from it when the husband is in need,’ Dr Iyaz had said on a local Islamic question and answers website.”

I am not sure who is worse, the feminists who say that PIV is always rape, or the Moslems who want Sharia law.

Bogus libel lawsuit progresses

For free speech reasons, I have been following the Michael Mann's libel lawsuit for being called the Jerry Sandusky of climate science and intellectually bogus. I reported before that Mann won the first round, and now he has won the second round.

I still think that Mann is going to lose this lawsuit, but if he wins, then I am going to have to be more careful about saying things like Ken Perlmutter being the Jerry Sandusky of the family court.

Half have mild autism

The Monterey County Herald reports:

The story of Temple Grandin, the woman diagnosed with autism at age 2 who went on to earn her doctorate in animal behavior, is remarkable because it is a rarity.

That is, unless you ask her.

Grandin, who will be speaking at two events on the Monterey Peninsula this week, is challenging the way the world views people with autism by saying her success is far from unique.

"Half of Silicon Valley's got mild autism, they just avoid the labels," Grandin said in a phone interview. ...

"Einstein would be labeled autistic today," she said. "Steve Jobs was probably on the spectrum." ...

Autism spectrum disorders, which include Asperger's syndrome, stem from unusual brain development. ...

"I knew people in college who were probably on the spectrum. They were just called geeks or nerds before," she said.

She is just describing personality characteristics, not a disorder. Einstein and Jobs were famous for being good communicators, among other things.

So many have these characteristics because the Asperger definition is like male brain. Grandin is a woman, but she looks and talks like a man.

Gay rights creep me out

Gay activists in the family court first creeped me out when a gay shrink recommended that I be ordered to see a nutritionist about my vegetable rotation. Some recent news items creep me out more.

The Russian Winter Olympics will soon start, and the LGBTQIA folks are all agitated because of LGBT rights in Russia:

In 2013, Russia received criticism from around the world for enacting a law that bans the distribution of "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations" to minors, ...

International rights groups have described the current situation as the worst human rights climate in the post-Soviet era, while Russian human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva has called passage of the law against gay propaganda "a step toward the Middle Ages."

The Russian are free to do whatever they want, except that they cannot promote homosexuality to minors. For people who lived thru Commie oppression, isn't this a triviality? Do they really want to make homosexual seduction of children their big public issue?

Here is the Obama administration at work:

Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday condemned a new law in Nigeria prohibiting same-sex marriages, calling it a “dangerous” restriction on freedom.

“The United States is deeply concerned by Nigeria’s enactment of the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act,” Kerry said in a statement released by the State Department.

California and about 35 other states enacted same-sex marriage prohibition laws. All civilized countries in world history prohibited same-sex marriage until about ten years ago. Why is this Nigerian law any of our business?

Here is the result of another big gay cause:

After years of campaigning, a royal pardon has been granted to computer pioneer and wartime codebreaker Alan Turing, overturning his conviction over half-a-century ago for ‘gross indecency’ with a 19 year old boy.

For the ‘enlightened classes’, this act of official state forgiveness for a secular homosexual martyr symbolizes the victory of liberal progress over the backward and prejudiced attitudes of the past. In reality, as with same sex marriage and sodomite rights in general, the Alan Turing story is merely a tool that the progressive elite is manipulating in order to disguise the brutal feminist war upon ordinary male heterosexuality.

Turing was a great genius, and this embarrassing episode should have been forgotten. But now he is celebrated for the anal rape of an underage boy.

The biggest recent homosexual child molester story was Jerry Sandusky. The LA Times reports:

Since the Jerry Sandusky scandal blew up several years ago, there have been few figures quieter than Matt Sandusky, the adult son of the convicted sex offender.

The younger Sandusky has stayed entirely out of the public eye, even after he came forward with an offer to testify against his adoptive father at the close of the trial.

That changed on Sunday, when the documentarian Amir Bar-Lev premiered "Happy Valley," his new movie about Joe Paterno, Penn State and the fallout from the Sandusky affair. ...

It's hardly a simple tale. Matt Sandusky initially denied any abuse at the hands of his father. "I had to be loyal to the family. I wasn't going to betray him," he says in the film. But he decided finally to step forward when he heard the of the testimony of one of the victims.

It was a courageous move, not only psychologically but also practically; as the rare named victim in the case, Matt Sandusky has been the subject of bile from conspiracy theorists who believe the trial was a plot to bring down Paterno and Penn State. (He initially declined to participate in the film for fear of exposing himself and his family to further hatred, but agreed in November, prompting Bar-Lev to crash on an interview and re-order the movie just ahead of the Sundance deadline.)

No, it was not courageous. His testimony was that his adoptive father was innocent, until lawyers offered him $2M to change his story. He took the money. They arranged a psychologist to say he had a recovered memory. Jerry was going to prison anyway, as the fix was in. Of course the younger Sandusky is embarrassed and ashamed that he sold out, and is reluctant to talk about it.

Besides Duck Dynasty, another reality TV star (and token white hispanic) has gotten into trouble for not wanting to homosexuality to kids:

Juan Pablo Galavis, the 32-year-old star of The Bachelor ...

The writer asked whether ABC should have a gay or bisexual bachelor on the show. "No," Galavis responded. "Just 'cause I respect them but, honestly, I don't think it's a good example for kids to watch that on TV. It's hard, it's hard, it's a very thin line." ...

ABC, Warner Horizon Television and the Bachelor producers issued a joint statement: "Juan Pablo’s comments were careless, thoughtless and insensitive, and in no way reflect the views of the network, the show’s producers or studio." ...

"Study after study shows that young people raised by gay parents are as happy and healthy as other young people."

No, the studies do not show that. Even if they did, the guy ought to be able to express an opinion.

California voters are now trying to repeal the Co-ed Bathroom Bill. Otherwise California law requires schools to let boys declare themselves transgendered and use the girls restrooms and play on the girls sports teams.

No doubt all the Democrats and major news media will tell us that the initiative is motivated by hate. But we really just want the public schools to ba able to distinguish boys and girls.

I am all in favor of consenting adults having freedom and privacy. But the anti-family LGBTQIA lobby wants much more than that. They want the corruption of schools, children, and foreign countries.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama was on the Jay Leno Tonight Show:

Q You can't grasp that number, no. (Laughter.) Now, I've seen Michelle tease you about your gray hair. You have a bit of silver in your hair. Do you tease back?

THE PRESIDENT: No. (Laughter and applause.) That's why we're celebrating our 21st anniversary. (Laughter.)

Q As I'm married 33 years, I know exactly what you're saying. (Laughter.)

Will someone please check to see if Obama still has two testicles? And tell Michelle to relax.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports:

A documentary that explores the controversial movement of women becoming priests in the patriarchal Roman Catholic Church will play in Santa Cruz on Feb. 2 during a screening at Peace United Church.

"Pink Smoke" tells the stories of several women who have risen up against the long-held Catholic church rule that prohibits female priests and how they've been automatically excommunicated from the church they love for their efforts in achieving gender equality.

After the film, there will be a discussion with Father Roy Bourgeois, a priest of 40 years who was dismissed for his support of ordaining women.

This sounds like a joke. No one is excommunicated for efforts in gender equality. They get kicked out for acting against the Church. They can just join the Peace United Church, whatever that is.

"Pink Smoke" -- named for the colored smoke a group of women released in protest outside the Vatican when Pope Francis was named in March 2013 -- hits home for Santa Cruz resident Christine Fahrenbach. She is set to become ordained in the Roman Catholic Womenpriests on Feb. 8.

There are no Roman Catholic Womenpriests.

All along there was a burning desire to be a priest, something she felt as a child.

"If we ever played church, I was always the priest," Fahrenbach said during an interview in her Santa Cruz office. "I've known it since I was a small child, like knowing you're gay. I learned to live with it, with a lot of stress."

Fahrenbach, a lesbian who works as a psychologist, spent time exploring other religions, such as Buddhism, in her attempt to accept the Catholic church's exclusion of female priests. But she never found one that fit as well as Catholicism, she said.

She regularly attends Episcopal services in Capitola, but still considers herself a devout Catholic.

Oh, she is also a lesbian psycho Buddhist Episcopalian!

In 1986, the NY Times could still say that gay men are grown up sissy boys. But little girls do not know that they will be lesbians, so she is living a weird fantasy.

The women are not recognized by the Vatican and hold mass only within small ministry groups outside the traditional church. Fewer than 150 female priests exist worldwide.

There are ZERO female priests. If not recognized by the Vatican, then they are not Catholic priests.

Again, the lesbians are not happy just messing up their own lives. They need to attack everyone else also.

Homeschooling illegal in Germany

LifeSiteNews reports:

In a shocking verdict regarding a homeschool case in Germany, a family court judge has refused to return legal custody of four children to Christian parents to prevent the family from obtaining visas that would allow them to travel to a country where homeschooling is permitted.

In his December ruling against the Wunderlich family, judge Marcus Malkmus called homeschooling a “concrete endangerment to the well-being of the child,” comparing it to a “straitjacket” that he said binds children to “years of isolation.”

“The request of the parents to reinstate their right to determine the location of the children, the right to make educational decisions for the children, as well as the right to file legal applications for their children is being refused,” the judge stated.

The Wunderlich family made international headlines in August when a team of 20 social workers, police officers, and special agents stormed the homeschooling family’s residence and forcibly removed the children, ages 7–14.

Parents Dirk and Petra were accused of defying a German ban on home education. The children were returned to the parents in September on condition that the parents send their children to public school. Since the court had awarded legal custody of the children to social workers in 2012, the parents had no choice but to comply.

In his decision, the judge ruled that it was necessary to keep the Wunderlich children in public school for their own “well-being,” arguing that if the children were homeschool in Germany or abroad they would “grow up in a parallel society without having learned to be integrated or to have a dialogue with those who think differently and facing them in the sense of practicing tolerance.”

The judge made these comments despite admitting that the children’s “former homeschooling did not noticeably endanger the child[ren’s] well-being.”

Dirk Wunderlich said the ruling is comparable to what happened under the Nazi regime.

Germany used to be a proud nation. I don't want to make Nazi analogies, but it seems that Germany's current brand of socialism requires public school brainwashing.

Control of the public schools is always the top priority of the socialists. If they cannot persuade the adults, they can still win by indoctrinating the next generation.

American homeschooling is one of the big success stories of the last 20 years. It has gone from a fringe kooky practice to one that is widely accepted as legal and legitimate.

I am not recommending homeschooling, but I think that our society is better off for having some students with independent educations and thinking.

Bloggers are part of free press

I occasionally worry that I might be sued for statements on this blog, such as saying that psychologist Ken Perlmutter is the Jerry Sandusky of the family court. I have First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, of the press; and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. There has been some legal ambiguity about whether a blogger has the same free press rights as a newspaper, but the federal appeals just ruled that he does.

California law also makes it difficult to shut down a blog with a frivolous lawsuit, as I have noted in Truth is a defense.

You can still be censored by sites like Facebook:

Kang had a different point of view. Writing on Facebook, she declared, “I was a little peeved because while I feel like it’s ok to love and accept your body, I think that we’re normalizing obesity in our society.”

Ridiculously, after a user complained, Kang was temporarily booted from Facebook and her post was removed as “hate speech.” Kang told Yahoo! Shine Monday, “I felt like I’d been sent to the principal’s office and been expelled. We’ve become so sensitive to this weight issue that people who speak out against it are vilified. It’s so backwards to me.”

Yes, it is backwards.

Integrity means telling therapist, not dad-to-be

I was happy that my local newspaper dropped the advice column, but now it has an advice column that is even worse. Here is the latest Carolyn Hax advice:

Dear Carolyn: I always wanted kids, but fate and life being as it is, I’d managed to get to my early 40s with no husband or children. ... I lied when he asked if I was taking birth control. ... Well, I’m looking at a positive pregnancy test. How do I do this? ...

Dear Just Sick • I’ll let Bernard Malamud get this one. "We have two lives," he wrote in "The Natural." "The life we learn with and the life we live with after that." You thought you wanted a baby above all. You learned, through your terrible lie and surprise fertility, that the "above all" was wrong — you actually didn’t want a baby at the cost of your integrity. So now you live with what you learned: From now on, it’s integrity first. You start by making an appointment with a reputable therapist, since you need to figure out when and why you let emotions push your judgment off a cliff. That’s the surest path toward keeping it from happening again. Next, you tell the nice guy that you are pregnant, and also lied about birth control.

Really? She says "integrity first" means finding and telling a stupid therapist before telling her man.

Any woman who would consult a therapist first is unfit to be either a wife or a mother.

At least Hax favored telling the dad-to-be, at least in my newspaper. In her home newspaper, the Wash. Post, she regretted that advice and changed her column to this:

You sold your soul for a baby, so it seems obvious that fixing the mess requires truth-telling, immediately and in perpetuity. I filed a first-version of this column saying just that — in part because this man deserves to know your frailty.

But your mess is en route to having a life independent of you (health permitting). Does this child deserve one parent who profoundly resents the other? In perpetuity? Does Nice Guy himself deserve to see his child through unclouded eyes?

No, this is not integrity. This is relying on some flaky therapist to make what could be the most important decision in the child's life.

I post this as a general warning to men. About how deceitful a desperate woman can be, and about the terrible advice she will get once she realizes her mistake.

Supreme court hears domestic violence case

The US Supreme Court is hearing another domestic violence. Usually the federal courts do not hear this nonsense, because most ordinary crimes are under state law, but feminists have passed federal law to punish petty misdemeanor domestic violence. In the past, the court has ducked the obvious injustices, but it faces the issue again.

USA Today reports:

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court struggled Wednesday with how to keep guns away from domestic violence offenders without penalizing those who are not truly violent.

While the key to the debate was guns, the justices spent most of their time trying to define violence and differentiating it from actions that merely cause injury, whether intentional or not.

The differences are important, because a federal law aimed at denying guns to those with misdemeanor convictions of domestic violence relies on definitions within state laws. In 28 states and the District of Columbia, for instance, assault and battery statutes include provisions for mere touching.

That got the justices to wondering what type of domestic violence could lead to a federal conviction for possessing a gun.

"If I punch somebody in the nose, is that violence?" Justice Antonin Scalia asked.

"How about pinching or biting, hair-pulling, shoving, grabbing, hitting, slapping?" asked Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

"If the victim is at the top of the stairwell and you go, 'Boo!' and he or she falls down and is injured, is that physical force?" Chief Justice John Roberts chimed in.

And Justice Anthony Kennedy raised the specter of a photographer who says, "'Back up two steps,' so that the other person falls over the cliff. That's physical force?"

Faced with the barrage of hypothetical questions, assistant solicitor general Melissa Arbus Sherry said the law passed by Congress was intended to go after wife-beaters, not "someone tickling their wife with a feather."

That's the problem, Justice Elena Kagan said, because state laws in 14 of the 28 states don't differentiate between physical force and mere touching.

"Are you going to have a terrible difficulty prosecuting real, you know, punch-in-the-nose kinds of incidents of physical violence, because there are indivisible statutes that apply to both?" she asked.

The obvious solution is for Congress to repeal the law, and only take guns away from convicted felons.

Arizona abolishes CPS as we know it

CPS is the biggest scandal in Arizona:

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer used her annual State of the State address Monday to announce decisive action to overhaul the state's child welfare agency, pulling Child Protective Services from its current department and placing it under the oversight of a new Cabinet-level post reporting directly to the governor.

Brewer called the executive order that "abolished CPS as we know it" a critical step to protect children in the state, a move made more pressing by the discovery in November of more than 6,500 uninvestigated child abuse and neglect reports.

She named the head of the state's juvenile corrections department to head the new unit and asked the Legislature to help her do more to overhaul the agency.

"We need to go even further. The time has come to statutorily establish a separate agency that focuses exclusively on the safety and well-being of children and helping families in distress without jeopardizing child safety," Brewer said. "I call on the Legislature to work with me to codify a new permanent agency. Child safety must be the priority and become embedded in the fabric of this new agency. It is our legal and moral duty."

The action followed this story:

The revelation that about 6,000 cases of suspected child abuse reported to an Arizona hotline were never investigated has cast a disturbing spotlight on a state department in disarray as officials call for investigations and accountability.

Over the past four years, a team at Arizona's Child Protective Services agency improperly designated the cases "N.I." — meaning "Not Investigated" — to help manage their heavy workload and focus on the most severe cases, said Clarence Carter, chief of the state's child welfare system.

Under state law, all reports generated via the statewide hotline must be investigated, Carter said Thursday. He noted plans would be revealed Monday on how the state will catch up on the overlooked backlog.

At least 125 cases already have been identified in which children later were alleged to have been abused.

"I don't know of any fatalities," Gregory McKay, the agency's chief of child welfare investigations, said of the botched cases.

It sounds bad when the CPS defender just says that he does not know about any fatalities, and the governor take drastic action.

I will have to follow this to see if anything improves. I doubt it. Of course CPS cannot investigate every crank call. It means nothing to say that CPS ignored a case that had a later abuse allegation. Maybe those allegations were groundless, and CPS was right to ignore them.

My impression is that "child safety" is just a code word for putting more kids in foster care. The governor's action is just a ploy to get more money for seizing kids. I don't see anything in this plan for respecting parental rights. It is a common fallacy among these do-gooders that safety requires taking kids from parents without proof. In reality, kids are nearly always much safer with their parents than in foster care.

Alabama college limits cohabitation on campus

A black college in the South has to have a black president, and apparently Alabama was worried that a single black woman president would have a parade of unmarried lovers marching thru the president's house on campus. The Wash. Post reports:

Gwendolyn Boyd, the new president of Alabama State University, signed a contract with the school’s trustees that forbids her from allowing a lover to “cohabitate” with her in the presidential home being provided to her by the historically black university in Montgomery.

The contract, signed Jan. 2, 2014, was obtained by The Birmingham News and posted here. It provides Boyd with an annual salary of $300,000, starting Feb. 1, 2014, plus a number of standard fringe benefits such as insurance.

This sounds ridiculous, but a few years ago no one would have raised an eyebrow. After all, the university is the landlord, and the landlord is always allowed to limit how many people live in the house. Furthermore, the president is living on campus as an important role model for students, and her contract could certainly have a morals clause. In an earlier day, she would have been expected to refrain from any sexual relations outside of marriage.

But now, female sexual freedom is more important than other considerations. Marriage is dead, as a moral example for our youth.

If blacks are doing poorly in school, it must be discrimination. The NY Times editorializes:

Over the last several years, civil rights officials in the Obama administration have begun to focus on this problem, increasing civil rights investigations and forcing school districts to revise disciplinary policies that disproportionately affect minorities. ...

The guidance documents included striking data on racial inequities. For example, African-American students represent only 15 percent of public school students, but they make of 35 percent of students suspended once, 44 percent of those suspended more than once and 36 percent of those expelled. Statistical information does not in itself prove discrimination. But research has shown that black students do not engage in more serious or more frequent misbehavior than other students.

Really? Black kids are behaving just as well, but racism is getting them kicked out of school?

Speaking of racism, here is a funny parody of the Tiger Mom:

Studies have consistently shown that women of European descent are the worst mothers. They endlessly coddle their children and are incapable of setting the boundaries kids need to thrive.

You might think you're ready to be a parent. You might fantasize about putting a cute little baby to sleep at night. But if you're white, your cuddly little infant will grow up spoiled, undisciplined and undereducated, and will likely end up on welfare. ...

But when you look at the evidence, it becomes clear that overall white people are inferior and should not be a allowed to procreate. I'm sure if Neil Armstrong had a Tiger Mom he would have gotten all the way to Mars.

If you absolutely must have children, do what I did: marry into one of the successful cultural groups. Like most Chinese women, I didn't marry for love. No, I married for one reason and one reason only: the Jew-genes. My husband is Jewish and my children are perfect little Sino-Judaic hybrids.

Why kids get the dad's name

Here is today's anti-father news.

Father pays outstanding child support, still gets jail time

Dad sues after son in Utah is given up for adoption

Viral video of toddler cursing: Some see racism in police comments - This is some sort of racial dispute between Nebraska police, the ACLU, and the black community. Yes, the toddler is black and CPS has seized him for using bad language. CNN reports:

The African-American toddler knocks down a chair and gives nearly as good as he gets, responding to some of the comments with an upraised middle finger and telling one of the adults at one point, "Shut up, bitch." The adults laugh and prompt him to repeat other crudities.

Just another day on the Internet -- until the police union in Omaha, Nebraska, posted the clip on its website to highlight what it called the "cycle of violence and thuggery" the community faces.

Why shouldn't children have their mother's surname?

To answer the last question, moms have strong obvious and biological ties to their kids. The dad may not be so sure himself. A normal mom wants to unambiguously and publicly declare that the kids belong to the dad, so that he will take responsibility for them.

When a mom gives her surname to a kid, it is almost as if she is announcing to the public, "I am a slut and I do not know who the dad is." Or she has some sort of sick desire to brand the child with her feminist ideology.

Another feminist Kay Steiger just wrote:

I am a woman who is engaged to be married. But unlike lots of your friends who are busy posting photographs of their diamond engagement rings on Facebook, you wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at my left hand.

This is because I told my fiancée many times before we got engaged that I wasn’t interested in getting an engagement ring at all, diamonds or no. There are a lot of reasons I feel this way, including my particular indifference to jewelry. “Honestly, I’d rather have an iPad,” I told him. ...

Very few people ask me why I don’t have one, and if they do, I shrug it off. “Engagement rings aren’t really my thing,” I say.

So is she engaged to a man or a woman? She says "him", but a fiancée is an engaged women, and fiancé is an engaged man.

Most fiancées are proud to wear engagement rings. This one thinks that it is somehow unjust unless the man also wears an engagement ring.

She regretted sending her dad to prison

Here are a couple of bad stories: Nonviolent Parent Spent Year Reuniting Family and this:

“Did Your Father Touch You?”
“No.”
“No.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
She’s regretted the lie that sent him to prison ever since.

Men Are Obsolete

Feminist Hanna Rosin writes Men Are Obsolete in Time magazine:

Five reasons we are definitely witnessing the end of men
ONE: It’s the end of men because men are failing in the workplace.
TWO: It’s the end of men because the traditional household, propped up by the male breadwinner, is vanishing.
THREE: It’s the end of men because we can see it in the working and middle class.
FOUR: It’s the end of men because men have lost their monopoly on violence and aggression.
FIVE: It’s the end of men because men, too, are now obsessed with their body hair.

She has been milking this idea since a 2010 article, expanded into a 2012 book, and again in 2013.

I thought that she was serious until Reason 5. My apologies for wasting your time.

Tiger Mom has new book

I posted about Tiger Mom Amy Chua 3 years ago (also here, here, and here). Now she has another book on why Chinese and Jewish parents like herself and her husband are superior:

It may be taboo to say, but some groups in America do better than others. ...

• Americans are taught that everyone is equal, that no group is superior to another. But remarkably, all of America’s most successful groups believe (even if they don’t say so aloud) that they’re exceptional, chosen, superior in some way.

• Americans are taught that self-esteem—feeling good about yourself—is the key to a successful life. But in all of America’s most successful groups, people tend to feel insecure, inadequate, that they have to prove themselves.

• America today spreads a message of immediate gratification, living for the moment. But all of America’s most successful groups cultivate heightened discipline and impulse control.

Some ethnic groups do better than others. If she is right, then you should be able to teach those values to your kids and have them do better. I doubt it, but I haven't read the book and I don't know.

Update: Chua is getting publicity like this:

"Tiger Mom" Amy Chua is known for claiming that Chinese women make the best mothers, but now she and her husband say that some groups are just plain better than others.

She’s doubling down.

And this:

She gained notoriety in 2011 as the uncompromising 'Tiger Mom' - boastful that Chinese mothers make better parents and ultimately have more successful children.

Now though, Amy Chua, 51, has inspired the fury of the public on Twitter with her new controversial theory that some races and religions are just superior to everyone else.

Dubbed 'simply racist' by one commentor on Twitter, another pulled no punches and called her a 'full blown eugenics pushing racist!'

Maybe she is right that some ethnic groups are better, but I don't know how she separates nature and nurture. My guess is that her book tells a log about what Chinese and Jews believe, but not so much about Mormons and other groups,

Divorce Corp.

Here is the YouTube trailer for a new film, Divorce Corp., narrated by Dr. Drew.

I cannot imagine going to a movie theater to watch the evils of family court. You can read this blog for free. Maybe it will publicize some of the corruption and unfairness.

The Half Sigma blogger argues that Men should not be held responsible for child support for children of unmarried women. He is correct that many of the past arguments are not persuasive anymore.

Paglia says schools neuter boys

In this WSJ article:

'What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia. This self-described "notorious Amazon feminist" isn't telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can't Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation. ...

Ms. Paglia observes this phenomenon up close with her 11-year-old son, Lucien, whom she is raising with her ex-partner, Alison Maddex, an artist and public-school teacher who lives 2 miles away. She sees the tacit elevation of "female values"—such as sensitivity, socialization and cooperation—as the main aim of teachers, rather than fostering creative energy and teaching hard geographical and historical facts.

By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. "This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it's all about neutralization of maleness." The result: Upper-middle-class men who are "intimidated" and "can't say anything. . . . They understand the agenda." In other words: They avoid goring certain sacred cows by "never telling the truth to women" about sex, and by keeping "raunchy" thoughts and sexual fantasies to themselves and their laptops.

So she is sharing custody of her boy with her ex lesbian lover. No dad in sight. I hope she teaches the boy some manly virtues, but I don't know how she is going to do it.

Feds looking at outrageous child custody outcomes

Examiner.com reports:

Concerned parents were elated this week when a much awaited segue for them to speak came forward as an invitation from the federal government, asking for clarifications on identified problems with child human rights in court, family rights in court and the lack of a uniform structure to respond to child sex abuse investigations, child abuse investigations and placement of children with a parent who is not known to them, has committed crimes against the other parent or is convicted of crimes that put the child at risk in their care.

This appears to be a project of the California Protective Parents Association, and they consist mainly of moms who do not want to share child custody with dads, as long as the moms are making accusations against the dads.

We have an anti-father administration in Washington, and I am not recommending sending your story until I find out more. The story does not give a way to send your story to the feds, but only to some private advocacy organization for screening.

I could not find the invitation from the feds, and only found this:

The Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women (OVW), in partnership with the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ), announces the selection of four courts to participate in the Family Court Enhancement Project (FCEP) to improve custody and visitation decision-making for families who have experienced domestic violence. The four courts selected are: Circuit Court of Cook County in Chicago, Ill.; Family Court of the State of Delaware; Hennepin County Family Justice Center in Minneapolis, Minn.; and Multnomah County Family Court in Portland, Ore.

“In order to maintain safety for the entire family, it is crucial that judges weigh the dynamics of domestic violence and its impact on both adults and children when making custody and visitation decisions,” said OVW Acting Director Bea Hanson. “Ensuring the safety of domestic violence victims and their children during and after court proceedings is an essential component of the FCEP. This project will provide guidance to courts around the country in implementing proven procedures and practices that keep victims and children safe.”

Reading between the lines, it appears that they want the mom to be able to make domestic violence accusations that lock the dad out of custody and visitation until he proves that he is not a threat. In other words, the man is guilty until proven innocent.

Colonial adultery laws

Here is what domestic crimes used to be:

Vermont's adultery law, 1779, is like CT's. It reads: "whosoever shall commit adultery with a married woman, or one betrothed to another man, both of them shall be severely punished by whipping on the naked body not exceeding thirty-nine stripes, and stigmatized, or burnt on the forehead with the letter A, on a hot iron; and each of them shall wear shall wear the capital letter A, on the back of their outside garment, of a different colour, in fair view, during their abode in this state. And as often as such convicted person shall be seen without such letter, and be thereof convicted before an assistant or justice of the peace in this state, shall be whipped on the naked body, not exceeding ten stripes." Laws of Vermont, 1777-1780, ed. Allen Soule, vol. 12 of State Papers of Vermont (Montpelier: Secretary of State, 1964), 38.

Note that adultery has been defined by the woman being married. That is how it has always been defined, until recently. Non-marital sexual intercourse by a woman is a much greater offense, because of the possibility of a child with the wrong father.