What's wrong with American child support

Philip Greenspun writes:

I am part of a team of five authors that has researched divorce laws and customs in the 51 jurisdictions nationwide. For our forthcoming book we have interviewed roughly 100 divorce litigations nationwide as well as in nearly 10 foreign jurisdictions. We have also interviewed research psychologists, retired judges, and legislators.

We found that the U.S. was unique worldwide. We seem to be the only country where simultaneously (1) obtaining custody of a child can produce more cash than going to college and working at the average college graduate wage and (2) custody of a child is up for grabs and therefore open to litigation. In other countries either the maximum child support obtainable will cover only basic expenses, e.g., $2,000 to $8,000 per year in Scandinavia, or there are strong presumptions regarding how a custody dispute will be resolved, e.g., “mom always wins” or “children’s time split 50/50.” The result is that, as a society, we expose our children to far more custody litigation than any other country in the world. In addition to the psychic toll, this costs us close to $50 billion in cash every year and consumes additional public resources for investigating litigation-motivated claims that a custody defendant is a molester, prosecuting and imprisoning parents who don’t pay child support ordered, etc. ...

The incentives are simplest to understand in a state such as Wisconsin, where custody of one child entitles the winner to 17 percent of the loser parent’s pre-tax income (about 33 percent of after-tax income). This means that the person who has a one-night sexual encounter with a surgeon will have one third of a surgeon’s spending power. If that person has a second child with a different surgeon, as predicted by the Danish study above, he or she will now have two thirds of a surgeon’s spending power. If the child support recipient then has a third child with a third surgeon, he or she will have the same spending power as a surgeon. Politicians tell Americans to study STEM subjects and work hard in college, but a thoughtful child support plaintiff can enjoy a comparable spending power without ever attending college, working, or paying income tax. ...

The incentives are simplest to understand in a state such as Wisconsin, where custody of one child entitles the winner to 17 percent of the loser parent’s pre-tax income (about 33 percent of after-tax income). This means that the person who has a one-night sexual encounter with a surgeon will have one third of a surgeon’s spending power. If that person has a second child with a different surgeon, as predicted by the Danish study above, he or she will now have two thirds of a surgeon’s spending power. If the child support recipient then has a third child with a third surgeon, he or she will have the same spending power as a surgeon. Politicians tell Americans to study STEM subjects and work hard in college, but a thoughtful child support plaintiff can enjoy a comparable spending power without ever attending college, working, or paying income tax.

I don't know if anyone is listening to him, but he clearly explains some of the problems with the current system.

Dalrock writes:

Child support, far more than no fault divorce, abortion, and contraception, is the legal force which underpins modern feminism. Child support is the solution to shotgun weddings, unhappy marriages, and strong husbands & fathers. No fault divorce is designed not just to destroy families, but to weaken husbands in all marriages. However child support is the economic arm which makes divorce an attractive option for wives, and therefore makes divorce a credible threat when there are children involved. Child support is also the incentive which makes it more attractive for single mothers to remain single than to marry the father.

He blames conservatives for not recognizing this.

Greenspun is a private pilot and has some sensible comments about the recent German pilot crashing plane, but in the middle of it he says:

Thus my layperson’s perspective is that pilots tend to be reliable, patient, and sober/drug-free. There is one big exception, however: divorce, custody, and child support. Pilots are away from home 10-22 days/month. Suppose the stay-at-home spouse decides he or she is bored and needs to have a lover. If the stay-at-home spouse progresses to the plaintiff stage, most U.S. states will reward that spouse with the house, the children, and at least half of the pilot’s income going forward. The cash and the house go with the kids. The pilot is the slam-dunk loser for any custody lawsuit because he or she was away much of the month and therefore cannot meet the “historical primary caregiver” standard that is used when courts allocate children and the child support profits that accompany them. “Suing a pilot is almost as easy as suing someone deployed overseas in the military,” is how one litigator put it. ...

Thus my layperson’s perspective is that pilots tend to be reliable, patient, and sober/drug-free. There is one big exception, however: divorce, custody, and child support. Pilots are away from home 10-22 days/month. Suppose the stay-at-home spouse decides he or she is bored and needs to have a lover. If the stay-at-home spouse progresses to the plaintiff stage, most U.S. states will reward that spouse with the house, the children, and at least half of the pilot’s income going forward. The cash and the house go with the kids. The pilot is the slam-dunk loser for any custody lawsuit because he or she was away much of the month and therefore cannot meet the “historical primary caregiver” standard that is used when courts allocate children and the child support profits that accompany them. “Suing a pilot is almost as easy as suing someone deployed overseas in the military,” is how one litigator put it.

I would rather fix the family court, of course, but it is increasingly obvious that the family court is not going to get fixed.

Dog or Jewish Boyfriend

Fox News reports:

Lena Dunham is not one to hold her tongue. The “Girls” star has become known for her controversial comments about sensitive subjects including rape and molestation. Now the actress has offended even more people with an article she wrote titled “Dog or Jewish Boyfriend? A Quiz.”

The piece, which ran in the New Yorker, asks “Do the following statements refer to (a) my dog or (b) my Jewish boyfriend?”

The article includes tidbits like “He doesn’t tip. And he never brings his wallet anywhere.” Another portion of the article adds “…he comes from a culture in which mothers focus every ounce of their attention on their offspring and don’t acknowledge their own need for independence as women. They are sucked dry by their children, who ultimately leave them as soon as they find suitable mates.”

Fans and critics of Dunham alike have reacted strongly and swiftly to the article, which is part of the March 30 edition of the magazine. Dunham’s mother is Jewish and her father is Protestant.

I have occasionally been criticized for mentioning Jewish stereotypes, but this is a bizarre attack on her Jewish live-in boyfriend, Jack Antonoff.

I realize that she is a comedienne and I do not want to censor offensive jokes. But this relationship is doomed.

The stereotypes here are that of the spoiled, whiny, ungrateful, high maintenance, and nagging Jewish American Princess and the foolish mensch who puts up with her. But my objection here has nothing to do with Jewish values.

When a woman publicly badmouths or belittles her man, then she is unfit to be a wife. It is as simple as that.

This is one of the things I have never liked about Hillary Clinton. She acts as if Bill is not good enuf for her. That makes her a loathesome character.

If you do not know who Lena Dunham is, she is the creator of a successful HBO show. Otherwise, she is every parent's nightmare. She is exactly what you do not want your twenty-something daughter to be.

Update: A Jewish woman writes:

Most striking about the enraged responses was what they did not include: The impunity with which women are allowed to express contempt for members of the male sex, while cloaking their own neediness and hunger for love in outdated feminist lingo.

Indeed, nobody calls them out on things that men could never get away with saying, certainly not in print. ...

Her true problem with her boyfriend is not that he is typically Jewish. Nor is it due to his apathy in relation to her "many accomplishments." It all boils down to her insecurity, love-starvation and fear of abandonment. Nothing feminist about it. Merely female.

This slightly more honest version of the war between the sexes is precisely what comes across in "Girls," which partly explains the show's popularity.

More puzzling is Antonoff. Why would he stick around with Dunham after she whipped him so publicly?

The answer is going to sound just as anti-Semitic as Dunham's dog analogy. It is precisely the "enlightened" -- emasculated -- Jewish male, conditioned to accept the bullying of women waving their "minority status" in society like a machete, who dares not unleash the beast.

In Antonoff's case, it didn't help. But that's what he gets for shacking up with one.

Pao jury gives hope for our society

I rarely post good news on this blog, but the Ellen Pao verdict shows that there is some hope for humanity. This went to a jury, and was presumably a mixture of men, women, whites, and Asians. Pao's situation is strange:

Ellen Pao is married to a man whom I’ve written about in depth. His name is Buddy Fletcher, and and he has a history of filing dubious lawsuits inspired by perceived slights and financial desperation. In my opinion he is, at the very least, a scoundrel; the forces of law may yet prove him a criminal.

I wrote about Fletcher in Boston magazine; he’s a Harvard graduate, an African-American man, who went to Wall Street and tried to make a lot of money. He left his first job at the brokerage firm Kidder Peabody and promptly filed a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination. Like Ellen Pao, Fletcher charged that he was treated differently from the great majority of employees whose identity did not match his. In my article, I found that the grounds for that lawsuit were thin at best. Fletcher didn’t win it ...

He is broke now, because he is not a financial genius, and there is ample suggestion that he is broke even though he siphoned money from his hedge fund — including retirement money from Louisiana firefighters — to support a lavish lifestyle that included the ownership of three apartments at the Dakota, John Lennon’s old apartment building in New York. ...

One other fact about Fletcher that’s worth knowing: Until he fled New York, married Ellen Pao and had a baby, he had lived his entire adult life as a gay man. Not bisexual—gay.

The judge in Pao’s case has ruled that none of this is admissible, and I think that’s the right decision; in court, Pao’s allegations should stand or fall on their own merits. The mainstream media seems to have decided that it’s sexist or something to write about her marriage, and so I haven’t seen a single smart article that really explores her relationship with Fletcher and whether it’s had any impact on her decision to sue Kleiner Perkins.

Pao was intelligent, successful, and on the fast track at a high-status high-paying job. Then she has an affair with a married Indian partner at the firm, and tries to give him an ultimatum to leave his wife. Later she marries and has a kid with a gay black financial con man (assuming that the accusations are correct). And she sue her employer over some relatively minor slights. Weird.

The liberal feminists hate to ever admit that someone might be innocent, as the NY Times reports:

Even with her loss in the case, Ms. Pao’s suit succeeded in prompting debate about women in technology and venture capital, said Deborah Rhode, a law professor at Stanford University.

“This case sends a powerful signal to Silicon Valley in general and the venture capital industry in particular,” Ms. Rhode said. “Defendants who win in court sometimes lose in the world outside it.” ...

“Kleiner Perkins has been significantly tainted by the facts that have come out in this proceedings,” Ms. Rhode of Stanford said.

Too bad there are no jury trials in family court or juvenile dependency court. I think that Texas is the only state where a parent can demand a jury trial before his kids are taken away.

Meanwhile a somewhat different verdict came out of Oklahoma:

Members of a University of Oklahoma fraternity apparently learned a racist chant that recently got their chapter disbanded during a national leadership cruise four years ago that was sponsored by the fraternity’s national administration, the university’s president said Friday.

President David Boren said the school interviewed more than 160 people during its investigation into members of its now-defunct Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter who were captured on video taking part in the chant, which included references to lynching, a racial slur and the promise that the fraternity would never accept a black member. ...

Boren said about 25 members of the school’s SAE chapter will face punishment ranging from two expulsions the school announced previously to mandatory community service and cultural sensitivity training. The video, which surfaced earlier this month, showed fraternity members yelling the chant on a chartered bus while headed to a formal event at an Oklahoma City country club with their dates, Boren said. ...

Beginning in the fall, Boren said all current and future OU students will be required to take diversity training. ...

SAE’s national leadership disbanded the OU chapter in the wake of the incident and announced it was taking steps to become more inclusive, including requiring all of its members, nationwide, to go through diversity training and by setting up a confidential hotline for people to report inappropriate behavior.

SAE began collecting racial and ethnic data in 2013. Approximately 3 percent of SAE’s reporting members identified as African-American and 20 percent identified as non-white, according to Ayers.

We don't know whether the students have any racist opinions or not. They were just reciting some dopey chant just as they might sing a school song without necessarily believing every word.

I thought that it was just the commies who sent people to re-education camps for their opinions, and who set up confidential hot-lines for reporting any politically incorrect thinking.

I wonder if Boren has ever listened to rap music. If he were consistent, he would punish all the students who listen to rap music.

Somehow I suspect that Boren and the other white liberals promoting these policies would never live with black people themselves. Some of the most liberal areas in the USA are also areas where they have somehow figured out how to keep the blacks out.

Feminist reporters exhilarated by lawsuit

The feminists are all excited about the Ellen Pao lawsuit against the Si Valley venture capitalists. Look at how NPR Radio reports it:

CORNISH: You've been writing that equal rights advocates have been waiting for a lawsuit to kind of bring out into the open the gender bias in Silicon Valley. But you questioned whether this case was the one to do it.

TIKU: I mean, I think that it's exhilarating that she filed this lawsuit and that we are able to get so much information. But I think a lot of it is just how you interpret these things. I mean, it's about the subtle sexism in the workplace, you know, maybe even unconscious bias. So that's where I think that people who are looking for a big win, for a definitive statement about sexism in Silicon Valley, aren't going to get it with this trial just because it's so particular to her situation. But that doesn't mean that this isn't progress and this isn't, you know, a potentially different era.

So they are exhilarated by the discrimination lawsuit, but disappointed that no one found any explicit discrimination.

We should have a jury verdict soon. The venture capitalists have famous for being extreme rich from investments, and for being jerks to lots of people. So I am expecting a verdict of $2M or so from the possibility of some harm. But this woman should have been fired for being a homewrecker, and does not deserve a dime.

Update: The jury has ruled against Pao on her first 3 claims, and voted 8-4 against her on the 4th. It is likely that she will get nothing out of this lawsuit.

Update: The jury finished, and Pao has lost on all counts. This is a total win for the VC firm, as it probably offered a settlement of $2M or so.

A female executive writes:

I think that regardless of the outcome, Ellen Pao's lawsuit is frivolous and moreover, a setback for professional women. ...

A job is an exchange of services on one side for compensation on the other. If that exchange is not working for either side, then move on. ...

If Pao wins her lawsuit — and frankly, even just from her bringing such a lawsuit to bear — she actually creates an additional handicap for women to overcome. It will give those in Silicon Valley and elsewhere pause and concern when hiring women because of an unfair potential liability. Why hire someone who you are concerned could sue you by playing the gender card if things didn't work out?

I expect the feminists to say that this lawsuit only proves how bad the discrimination is -- that women cannot get remedies in court, and that the discrimination is so subtle and unconscious that it cannot be proved.

Huff Post says better to be a single mom

Kerri Zane advertises herself as a "Single Mom Lifestyle Expert" and explains in the Huff Post:

Although the gold standard in child rearing has traditionally been a dual family unit, being a single parent has a myriad of benefits. Rather than navigating the treacherous territory of constant parental compromise, you can independently make choices for your children that you feel is best. Eleven years ago, when my former husband and I split, I saw my divorce as a glorious opportunity to parent solo. ...

In fact, based on the latest Census Bureau statistics, there are over 14 million single parent households with children under the age of 18. That is a lot of people and a good reason to celebrate. Which is why, March 21 has been designated as National Single Parent's Day. ...

I would like to honor the day and offer you five solid reasons why it's better to be a single mom or dad then half of a parenting pair.

Return of Kings http://www.returnofkings.com/59694/5-reasons-its-better-to-be-a-divorced-parent-according-to-the-huffington-post:

Here are Zane’s five excuses she uses to justify her terrible life choices and convince you to do the same:

1. You always get your way
2. You Can Encourage Your Daughters To Pursue An Inflated Ego
3. Teach Your Children To Die Alone
4. You Get To Be A Slut!
5. It Motivates You To Lose 30 Pounds

Apparently Zane is so self-focused that attracting new dick is more motivating than pleasing the man she promised forever and ever. Maybe she’s losing so much weight because now she has to work an actual job instead of watching Lifetime tv movies all day.

The best way to handle the inevitable life shifts is to stay positive, reach out for support from your friends and family, relish the time you spend with your children and most importantly, create a daily space for some much deserved me-time.

If this doesn’t summarize the narcissistic entitlement of the author, I don’t know what does.

Her advice would have been considered nutty a few years ago. Now it reflects the breakdown in our society.

Stanford bans billionaire for psychological kidnapping

A fellow angry dad sends this NY Times story:

After sightseeing in Rome, Lonsdale and Clougherty were together in the hotel room they were sharing when she started dressing for evening Mass. Lonsdale came up behind her and kissed her, touching her neck and hair and telling her she was beautiful. She had told him she was a virgin. Both agree they had sex. But what actually went on between them that night, and throughout their yearlong relationship, would become highly contested. After the relationship ended, Clougherty accused Lonsdale of sexual assault. ...

In the course of the therapy, Clougherty came to reject the term “relationship,” or even “abusive relationship,” to characterize her year with Lonsdale. She now calls it a “psychological kidnapping,” a term she came up with after watching a video about domestic abuse on the Internet, and she says she was raped every time she and Lonsdale had sex. ...

Meanwhile on campuses throughout the country, a movement was taking shape. A growing number of students were coming forward to criticize their universities for the handling of sexual-assault cases. ...

The government also instructed schools to adopt a new standard for determining the outcome of a sexual-harassment or violence case. At the time, many schools used the standard of “clear and convincing” evidence, meaning that the adjudicators (usually a panel of administrators or faculty) believed that it was substantially more likely than not, or roughly 75 percent likely, that the accused had committed the offense. The letter from the civil rights office demanded that schools switch to a lower standard of proof, a “preponderance” of evidence, meaning that it was more likely than not — above 50.01 percent — that the offense was committed. The office noted that preponderance is the standard that courts use to decide civil suits for sexual harassment. A few schools, including Princeton and Harvard, initially refused the new standard and then found themselves under investigation for suspected Title IX violations.

So because the 21yo woman was 50.01% believable and the Obama administration was putting pressure, Stanford banned the 29yo man from the campus.

Princeton and Harvard was not just investigated; the Obama administration found them both guilty of not acting swiftly and harshly enuf, and imposed embarrassing and punitive sanctions. The Obama policies are anti-male and contrary to basic ideas of due process.

I remember the only other time I heard of a man being declared persona non grata on the Stanford campus, because it really rattled some of the faculty where I was studying. Here is the Wikipedia story for Theodore Streleski:

Theodore Landon "Ted" Streleski (born 1936) is an American former graduate student in mathematics at Stanford University who murdered his former faculty advisor, Professor Karel de Leeuw, with a small sledge hammer on August 18, 1978. Shortly after the murder, Streleski turned himself in to the authorities, claiming he felt the murder was justifiable homicide because de Leeuw had withheld departmental awards from him, demeaned Streleski in front of his peers, and refused his requests for financial support. Streleski was in his 19th year pursuing his doctorate in the mathematics department, alternating with low-paying jobs to support himself.

During his trial Streleski told the court he felt the murder was "logically and morally correct" and "a political statement" about the department's treatment of its graduate students, and he forced his court-appointed lawyer to enter a plea of "not guilty" rather than "not guilty by reason of insanity" as the lawyer had urged. Streleski was convicted of second degree murder and he served seven years in prison for his actions.

Streleski was eligible for parole on three occasions, but turned it down as the conditions of his parole required him to not set foot on the Stanford campus. Upon his release in 1985, he said, "I have no intention of killing again. On the other hand, I cannot predict the future."

There is more info on Murderpedia. The LA TImes reported:

In a rambling and sometimes confusing discourse Sunday, Streleski repeated that he felt no remorse because remorse would undo the statement he was trying to make by killing DeLeeuw.

"I have murdered a professor at Stanford," he said. "I have submitted it to a judge and a jury. I say Stanford treats students criminally.

"If I express remorse, I cut the ground out from under that argument. OK? I would not only be a murderer but a dirty, lying dog. I am a murderer. I am not a dirty, lying dog."

That is what it used to take to get banned from the campus. Now it just takes an ex-girlfriend to realize that she blew a chance to marry a high-status man, and to watch a YouTube video about domestic abuse.

When colleges are not banning people from campus, they are otherwise trying to shelter their precious little snowflakes from upsetting ideas. Here is what one Ivy League college did when activists could not censor a debate on "rape culture":

The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” Ms. Hall said. ...

But why are students so eager to self-infantilize? Their parents should probably share the blame. Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, wrote on Slate last month that although universities cosset students more than they used to, that’s what they have to do, because today’s undergraduates are more puerile than their predecessors. “Perhaps overprogrammed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity,” he wrote. But “if college students are children, then they should be protected like children.”

Another reason students resort to the quasi-medicalized terminology of trauma is that it forces administrators to respond. Universities are in a double bind. They’re required by two civil-rights statutes, Title VII and Title IX, to ensure that their campuses don’t create a “hostile environment” for women and other groups subject to harassment.

A couple of Oklahoma students were kicked out of college for a 9-second video of a silly chant in a non-college acitivity, without any hearing to get their side of the story. The college president encourages all students to turn in their fellow students who might have privately expressed some offensive opinions.

The biggest college scandal of the last year was the UVa fraternity gang rape, and now the Wash. Post reports that a 5-month police investigation shows the story entirely false. Apparently it was part of a string of lies that Jackie told to impress some boy who was not returning her affections. And the Ferguson police shooting was 100% justified, even tho the NY Times published 106 stories in the first 3 weeks making outrageous racist claims. The Obama administration still claims that the cops are racist, but the last allegedly-racist email from a Ferguson cop was in 2011. The NY Times is still not telling the straight story about UVa.

Wisdom of Rush

I occasionally listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio defending right-wing views. He has many views on Republican politics, most of which are off-topic for this blog. But he has a coherent ideological basis.

To him, the Right wing believes in individual and family autonomy, while the Left wing believes in dependency. The Right focuses on facts and results, and the Left on feelings and intents. He sides with the Right.

If you think this is unfair, just listen to him. He elaborates on this with examples nearly everyday.

People who praise Pres. Obama, for his handling of health care, or Ferguson cops, or Syria, or almost anything else, do so primarily for his intent, not his results. Rush demands to look at results.

This is also a difference between male and female thinking. Men look at facts and results, while women look at feelings and intents. Yesterday Rush was illustrating this with political campaign statements by Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton.

Your typical leftist Obama supporter can listen to Rush and not understand a word he is saying. They simply do not understand his worldview. I have seen it myself in people I know. Leftists rarely think for themselves; they just get connected to like-minded allies, and parrot what they say.

Likewise, I doubt that this blog persuades any of the supporters of the family court or CPS systems. They do not understand male thinking. Yes, I know some of them are men, but they are probably Obama supporters with low testosterone and low critical thinking skills.

A consistent theme of this blog is that the family court should not have the authority to micro-manage peoples' personal lives. You can be prosecuted for crimes that written in the statutes, if properly noticed and proved, but no judge or psychologist should be able to tell you to do something based on his own personal prejudices about the Best Interest Of The Child (BIOTCh). I guess that is a right-wing or libertarian view. Several years ago I would have said that it was an American view that is broadly held. Apparently not.

Update: I just heard Rush calling BS on this:

While the case involving a student the magazine identified as "Jackie" has been suspended for lack of evidence, "that doesn’t mean that something terrible did not happen" to her that night in September 2012, Timothy J. Longo, chief of police in Charlottesville, Va., said during a news conference.

"We are just not able to gather sufficient facts to conclude what that something may have been."

Rush is correct that the Jackie UVa story waa conclusively proved false, and the Left's preoccupation with this story shows that they disregard the facts.

Save Europe by destroying the family

This UK Guardian article argues that destroying the traditional family is essential to the survival of Europe, because of falling fertility rates:

Most countries in southern Europe are based on something akin to the Japanese package, with fairly rigid family norms in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Malta and Greece. There is social pressure on women not to work while their children are still young, just as it is ill-thought of to live with someone or have a baby outside wedlock. In all these countries the proportion of births outside marriage is below 30%, whereas in France, Sweden and Norway it exceeds 50%. In Japan the traditional family package clearly has a dramatic impact on fertility, with fewer than 1.4 births per woman.

The picture is very different in Scandinavia and France. “In these countries the family norm is much more flexible, with late marriages, reconstituted families, single parents, much more frequent births outside marriage and divorces than further south,” Toulemon adds. “People are far less concerned about the outlook for the family [as an institution].” The positive impact of this open-ended approach to families on fertility is borne out by the statistics, at more than 1.8 children per woman in Sweden, Norway, Finland and France.

This seems ridiculous to me, but it is out of my expertise.

I think that Japan is overpopulated, and their low birth rate is a good thing. France has boosted its population by bringing in millions of Moslem immigrants, with disastrous results. Same with Sweden and other Euro countries.

We are in the midst of a vast demographic experiment. I am predicting that in 50 years, Japan will be a civilized country that will be very happy it resisted the immigrant repopulation plans being undertaken by France, Sweden, and Korea.

The Atlantic magazine asks Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe? While they are always complaining about whites, Christians, and nationalists, the real problem is Moslem immigration.

Whatever problems Europe has, I don't think that they are going to be solved by immigrants having illegitimate babies on welfare.

If I am wrong, then the future does not belong to the free and autonomous white families that have marked American history. It will look more like black ghettos, where welfare queens do all the breeding while being visited by a series of men who are in between jail and jobs to pay child support debt.

Initiative to shoot the gays

The San Francisco newspaper reports:

Southern California attorney’s “shoot the gays” initiative is not destined to become law — for one thing, it’s clearly unconstitutional. But Attorney General Kamala Harris is scheduled to clear it for circulation in May, and she may not have any choice.

Matt McLaughlin, a lawyer from Huntington Beach in Orange County, paid his $200 filing fee Feb. 26 to submit the “Sodomite Suppression Act” to the voters. Declaring it is “better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God’s just wrath,” it would require that anyone who touches a person of the same gender for sexual gratification be put to death by “bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.”

The measure would also make it a crime, punishable by 10 years in prison and permanent expulsion from the state, to advocate gay rights to an audience that includes minors. It specifies that its constitutionality can be judged only by a state Supreme Court that has been purged of LGBT justices and their advocates. And it authorizes private citizens to step in as executioners if the state fails to act within a year. Another provision would require that the text of the initiative be posted prominently in every public school classroom.

It seems inconceivable that such a proposal would collect the 365,000 valid signatures it would need to make the 2016 state ballot. Or, if it did, that the voters would approve it. Or that any court this side of Uganda or Saudi Arabia would uphold it. ...

“The statute is clear: that the office has to prepare a summary provided the proponents have paid $200 and followed the right procedures,” said attorney Robert Stern, author of the state’s 1974 Political Reform Act. He said he’s never heard of a case in which the attorney general refused to issue a title and summary.

This is a state where judges cannot even be Boy Scouts, because of some LGBTQIA objection.

This initiative could be some sort of sick joke, I don't know. But I am wondering why other groups do not use this tactic. There are Libertarian and Green Party members who are happy to just get their message on the ballot, even if they only get 1% of the vote. Maybe a fathers rights group could put a radical rights initiative on the ballot to generate attention to the issues, even if losing. Same-sex marriage lost many times before winning.

Update: The text of the proposition can be downloaded here.

The Case for Free-Range Parenting

A German-American parent writes a NY Times op-ed in defense of Free-Range parenting:

A study by the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that American kids spend 90 percent of their leisure time at home, often in front of the TV or playing video games. Even when kids are physically active, they are watched closely by adults, either in school, at home, at afternoon activities or in the car, shuttling them from place to place.

Such narrowing of the child’s world has happened across the developed world. But Germany is generally much more accepting of letting children take some risks. To this German parent, it seems that America’s middle class has taken overprotective parenting to a new level, with the government acting as a super nanny.

Just take the case of 10-year-old Rafi and 6-year-old Dvora Meitiv, siblings in Silver Spring, Md., who were picked up in December by the police because their parents had dared to allow them to walk home from the park alone. For trying to make them more independent, their parents were found guilty by the state’s Child Protective Services of “unsubstantiated child neglect.”

I mentioned that Meitiv case here and here.

What had been the norm a generation ago, that kids would enjoy a measure of autonomy after school, is now seen as almost a crime.

Today’s parents enjoyed a completely different American childhood. Recently, researchers at the University of Virginia conducted interviews with 100 parents. “Nearly all respondents remember childhoods of nearly unlimited freedom, when they could ride bicycles and wander through woods, streets, parks, unmonitored by their parents,” writes Jeffrey Dill, one of the researchers.

But when it comes to their own children, the same respondents were terrified by the idea of giving them only a fraction of the freedom they once enjoyed. Many cited fear of abduction, even though crime rates have declined significantly. The most recent in-depth study found that, in 1999, only 115 children nationwide were victims of a “stereotypical kidnapping” by a stranger; the overwhelming majority were abducted by a family member. That same year, 2,931 children under 15 died as passengers in car accidents. Driving children around is statistically more dangerous than letting them roam freely.

Motor development suffers when most of a child’s leisure time is spent sitting at home instead of running outside. Emotional development suffers, too.

“We are depriving them of opportunities to learn how to take control of their own lives,” writes Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College. He argues that this increases “the chance that they will suffer from anxiety, depression, and various other mental disorders,” which have gone up dramatically in recent decades. He sees risky, outside play of children among themselves without adult supervision as a way of learning to control strong emotions like anger and fear.

I am no psychologist like Professor Gray, but I know I won’t be around forever to protect my girls from the challenges life holds in store for them, so the earlier they develop the intellectual maturity to navigate the world, the better. And by giving kids more control over their lives, they learn to have more confidence in their own capabilities.

Philip Greenspun points out some of modern risk distortions:

At the same time I have been poking around to find a new car seat for our son (will be 16 months old when the seat arrives). I’m discovering that the goal of safety advocates is to keep children rear-facing until they are age 4 or 5. All of the articles talk about how this makes children 50 or 75 percent “safer” but there is no mention of the actual statistical risk. Is the risk of injury in an accident being reduced from 10%/year or from 0.0001%/year? None of the articles include this information. Nor do any say “You could cut your child’s risk to zero by leaving him or her at home, buying a house that is walking distance to school (and where no streets need to be crossed), not signing up for Russian Math or Kumon unless those are offered within walking distance from your house, etc. You could also cut the risk in half by getting a minivan instead of a compact sedan. You could cut the risk by at least another fact[or] of two avoiding driving at night, in the rain, or when you’re tired.”

I agree with the comment saying, "We have gone totally bonkers with parenting."

Man tricked ex with abortion pill smoothie

A mom can kill an unborn fetus at any time for any reason. Why not the dad? Here is a guy who did:

A NORWEGIAN man who slipped abortion pills into his ex-girlfriend’s smoothie and caused her to have a miscarriage, claims it was “the only way out”.

The 26-year-old pleaded guilty on Monday to inflicting serious bodily harm and also to terminating a pregnancy without the mother’s consent. The prosecution wants a seven-year sentence.

The 20-year-old woman lost the baby in her 12th week of pregnancy, following the man’s second attempt to sneak her abortion pills. The first time he tried passing off the pills, which he bought online, as painkillers.

“He tried several times to convince me to have an abortion but it was not an option for me,” the woman told a court in Trondheim, reports the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK.

After drinking the smoothie, the woman experienced severe abdominal pain and later miscarried that evening.

I am not condoning this, but I do think that men should have the right to opt out of a pregnancy, if women can.

News Jobs movie trashes him for lacking empathy

I posted a rant against a movie about a modern genius, and here is another such move. Here is a London Guardian review:

Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine first look review – Apple founder's sour side
4 / 5 stars

Alex Gibney portrays Steve Jobs as a modern-day Citizen Kane, a man with dazzling talent and monomaniacal focus, but utterly lacking in empathy

Having tackled the Scientologists in his most recent film Going Clear, documentary maker Alex Gibney takes on a cult that is even more ardent, and with considerably more members – that of Apple. His unsparing portrait of Steve Jobs will prove extremely displeasing to devotees, but it’s a riveting and important corrective to the myths Jobs helped to propagate, ...

The film points out that Jobs’s genius was in personalising computers – Lisa being the first – but it also reveals that this impulse came from a pretty messed-up place. As well as being deeply ambivalent about being a father, Jobs also felt at once rejected and anointed by the fact that he was adopted. Jobs has somehow transmitted that mess to us too. Our iPhones connect us to faraway friends and family, yet we spend increasing amounts of time alone with them, seduced by machines that can never really fulfil us.

Gibney’s film concludes that Jobs had the monomaniacal focus of a monk but none of the empathy of one, and it makes a powerful case. Jobs’s was an astonishing life of such significance that it will probably be studied for centuries, and Gibney does not downplay his genius. Yet the kernel of the film is probably the ex-girlfriend who says that Job “blew it”. How so? Jobs achieved things that the vast majority of us would never dream of. Yet Gibney’s film forensically anatomises the contradictions, the ruthlessness, and the pointlessly crappy behaviour that reveal Apple’s ideals to be a sham, even while the products themselves continue to prove almost irresistible.

Maybe I will have to watch the movie. The man did have his flaws, but does this movie really concentrate on an ex-girlfriend badmouthing him for lacking empathy?

I have previously noted that powerful people lack empathy, and even Pres. Obama is mocked for lacking empathy.

What family court judges do

A legal blog drew this comment:

This means that while our legislatures pass one set of rules and regulations for citizens, family court judges are free to just make up their own rules that have nothing to do with law or reason.

That's what family court judges do. It doesn't have anything to do with guns per se. Could be religion or schooling or health care or parental dating or anything else you can think of. These are decisions in equity, and the judges frequently apply no particular set of principles beyond their own whims.

That's right, and it is completely opposite what 3 millennia of legal theory says judges are supposed to do.

The case involved a dad who won sole custody of a child, but then was ordered to get rid of his guns until the kid is 18yo. The appeals knocked out the gun condition:

In its letter opinion, the trial court noted that extensive testimony was given regarding Kurt’s collection of guns. It acknowledged that Kurt, Andrea, and both of Andrea’s parents testified that the guns were kept in a locked safe in a closet located behind a locked door to Kurt’s bedroom. ... Nevertheless, the court went on to find that it was not in the child’s best interests to have multiple guns and ammunition in a home.

Based upon the evidence presented at trial, as well as the trial court’s own specific findings, it was not reasonable for the court to place such a restriction on Kurt’s lawful possession of ammunition or guns without any evidence of danger to the child. Accordingly, we reverse the trial court’s ruling on this issue …

Of course the family court judge could still retaliate by taking away his custody.

Why men vanished from grade schools

You don't see many men working for elementary schools anymore. All men are suspected child abusers. The schools don't want to hire men, and the men don't like being suspects all the time.

Here is a case of an elementary school counselor and child behavioral specialist whose career was ruined by a false accusation. He tried to take precautions; he never had a child in his office with the door closed. He would only see a kid with the door open and everyone in plain view of a secretary and other passersby.

Nevertheless some 7yo kid accused him of repeated anal sodomy. Based on that, CPS made a finding of substantiated abuse. And the police arrested him after a 3-month investigation. This was despite the fact that the kid told inconsistent stories, the medical exam was negative, and there was no corroborating evidence of any kind. They believed the kid and were over-eager to prevent abuse.

Does anyone seriously think that this ever happens? If it did, the kid could walk out the door, scream, get a medial exam, and the man would spend the rest of his life in prison. At it would be a short life, because he would get killed in prison.

You might say, "Why would a kid ever invent a story like that if it were not true?" He did not, originally. He had a minor complaint about being touched with his clothes on. It was only after CPS interrogation and manipulation that the story escalated.

He somehow got it the case to a federal appeals court, where he finally found a judge with some common sense:

Indeed, it appears that no federal court of appeals has ever found probable cause based on a child’s allegations absent some other evidence to corroborate the child’s story…. Indeed, some cases have expressed heightened concerns about the reliability of child-witnesses’ allegations when, as here, there are other indicia of unreliability.
We are, of course, all too aware of the difficulties facing police investigations into child sexual abuse. We recognize that a child-victim’s testimony often plays an important role in prosecuting the perpetrators of this serious and disturbing crime. Nevertheless, we conclude that J.S.’s young age is a factor bearing on the reliability of his accusations and that Rigney (and the district court) should have given it appropriate weight.
Second, we note that the implausibility of a witness’s accusations is also germane to determining the existence of probable cause…. Without question, J.S.’s allegations against Wesley were facially implausible.

Indeed, it appears that no federal court of appeals has ever found probable cause based on a child’s allegations absent some other evidence to corroborate the child’s story…. Indeed, some cases have expressed heightened concerns about the reliability of child-witnesses’ allegations when, as here, there are other indicia of unreliability.
We are, of course, all too aware of the difficulties facing police investigations into child sexual abuse. We recognize that a child-victim’s testimony often plays an important role in prosecuting the perpetrators of this serious and disturbing crime. Nevertheless, we conclude that J.S.’s young age is a factor bearing on the reliability of his accusations and that Rigney (and the district court) should have given it appropriate weight.
Second, we note that the implausibility of a witness’s accusations is also germane to determining the existence of probable cause…. Without question, J.S.’s allegations against Wesley were facially implausible.

I conclude that there are horrible systemic problems with the authorities on child abuse. It has been well known for decades how easily kids can be manipulated into saying bogus things like this. I must have watched 5 TV documentaries on the subject. If CPS were at all fair or honest, they would have training programs in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

But I am afraid that is not the conclusion that most people will draw. This case will not even make the news. People will just assume that an isolated agent used bad judgment, or that more money needs to be spent on CPS and police, or that such agressive prosecution is necessary to root out the real abusers, or even that the man probably really was an abuser who just hasn't been caught in the act yet. They may even say that only the rights of the kids should be considered, or that there must be something wrong with a man who wants to work in an elementary school anyway.

I have posted many of these stories, and it is useless. If these don't convince you that the system is broken, and that there is a CPS war on the innocent, then nothing will.

A judge can have religious biases

I often quote the NY Times here, because it is a great source of news. But it does have a Jewish leftoid bias. It recently had a big front page story alleging anti-semitism, making a big deal out of a trivial little college student vote. It started:

It seemed like routine business for the student council at the University of California, Los Angeles: confirming the nomination of Rachel Beyda, a second-year economics major who wants to be a lawyer someday, to the council’s Judicial Board.

Until it came time for questions.

“Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community,” Fabienne Roth, a member of the Undergraduate Students Association Council, began, looking at Ms. Beyda at the other end of the room, “how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?”

It is just a question. It was prompted by the fact that she is very active in Jewish religious campus groups. If she is campaigning for office, she ought to be able to explain that she will be fair.

There is no big wave of anti-semitism, except from Moslems. What the article did not explain is that all the opposition to her was from Moslems.

The leftoid bias of the NY Times is to exaggerate anti-semitism allegations, but also to promote anti-Christian diversity with Moslem immigration, so it does not want to blame the Moslems for the anti-semitism. Others piled on.

We have 9 justices on our US Supreme Court, and they are all either Catholics or Jews. The Jews are all appointed by Democrats. Is this coincidence? Of course not. We do not allow open interrogation of religious beliefs in the US Senates, but these beliefs are a factor anyway.

A judge has enormous discretion to impose his or her beliefs and values on others. In big cases pending before the Supreme Court on Obamacare and same-sex marriage, all observers are in agreement on how the Jewish justices will vote.

While no one admits to religious discrimination, the reasons are obvious. If you know someone's religion, you have a clue to his foundational values. You also get clues from his personality type, his mental disorders, and his family. Generalizations about such matters have exceptions, of course. For example, Jews vote Democrat about 70-80% of the time, and have done so for decades. They are not all liberal Democrats, but it is a good working assumption.

Here is a 2013 example of a complaint about a religious question:

It’s got plenty of competition but this may just be the single most cringe-worthy, embarrassing interview on Fox News. At least in recent memory. Fox News anchor Lauren Green had religious scholar Reza Aslan on her FoxNews.com show Friday to talk about Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, his book that has been stirring up some online controversy recently. And right off the bat, Green gets to what is important: “You’re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”

I have listened to 100s of book author interviews, and most of ask a question of the sort "Why did you write this book?" It is a softball question that allows most authors to promote their books. But Reza Aslan launched into a series of lies about his credentials.

Here is a left-wing blogger who is embarrassed to admit that she is a Christian.

My most controversial postings were where I questioned the religious biases of family court judges and psychologists. My preference, of course, is that these creeps should not have the discretion to apply their personal religious values to micro-manage the lives of law-abiding citizens.

Suing for alimony 20 years after their divorce

London Telegraph reports:

The ex-wife of a former new-age traveller who later became multi-millionaire wind farm entrepreneur has been told she can bring a claim for financial support from his fortune more than 30 years after their marriage broke down.

Dale Vince, owner of the green energy provider Ecotricity, described the Supreme Court ruling as “mad” and said it would leave people “looking over our shoulders” for decades in case a former partner came after them for a share of money they made later in life.

Divorce lawyers described the ruling in favour of Kathleen Wyatt as “unprecedented” and said it meant spouses could keep their options open “indefinitely” before staking a claim.

The foolishness of this is explained here, if it is necessary.

When Liberals Blew It

Liberal NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes:

Fifty years ago this month, Democrats made a historic mistake.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at the time a federal official, wrote a famous report in March 1965 on family breakdown among African-Americans. He argued presciently and powerfully that the rise of single-parent households would make poverty more intractable.

“The fundamental problem,” Moynihan wrote, is family breakdown. In a follow-up, he explained: “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families ... never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.”

Liberals brutally denounced Moynihan as a racist.

Yes, such name-calling is standard fare for liberals. Say anything pro-family, and they will call you racist, sexist, and various other names.

The taboo on careful research on family structure and poverty was broken by William Julius Wilson, an eminent black sociologist. He has praised Moynihan’s report as “a prophetic document,” for evidence is now overwhelming that family structure matters a great deal for low-income children of any color.

In 2013, 71 percent of black children in America were born to an unwed mother, as were 53 percent of Hispanic children and 36 percent of white children.

Indeed, a single parent is the new norm. At some point before they turn 18, a majority of all American children will likely live with a single mom and no dad.

On that last point, he means all American kids, not just blacks.

Causation is difficult to tease from correlation. But efforts to do that suggest that growing up with just one biological parent reduces the chance that a child will graduate from high school by 40 percent, according to an essay by Sara McLanahan of Princeton and Christopher Jencks of Harvard. They point to the likely mechanism: “A father’s absence increases antisocial behavior, such as aggression, rule-breaking, delinquency and illegal drug use.” These effects are greater on boys than on girls.

Yes, everyone agrees that single moms are ruining society, but they differ on what to do about it. Kristof is a mindless knee-jerk liberal, so his only suggestion is to expand welfare programs:

What can be done?

In line with Moynihan’s thinking, we can support programs to boost the economic prospects for poorer families. We can help girls and young women avoid pregnancy (30 percent of American girls become pregnant by age 19). If they delay childbearing, they’ll be more likely to marry and form stable families, notes Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution.

So let’s learn from 50 years of mistakes. A starting point is to acknowledge the role of families in fighting poverty. That’s not about being a moralistic scold, but about helping American kids.

I did not know that so many 19yo girls were already pregnant.

These liberals refuse to address the bad incentives that women have today. Increasing welfare for single moms will make the problem worse, not better.

More detailed analysis here:

I don’t often laud Nicholas Kristof. His op-eds for the New York Times are routinely smug and ill-informed. If there’s a single false assumption typically held by liberal chatterers to which Kristof doesn’t subscribe, I certainly haven’t found it. But when a person veers in the right direction, I’m honor-bound to say so, and this is one such time (New York Times, 3/11/15).

Ellen Pao trial continues

I mentioned the Ellen Pao lawsuit, and here is a report:

I’ve been attending the Kleiner Perkins gender discrimination trial for the past week looking for irrefutable examples of gender discrimination, but so far I haven’t seen the bombshell disclosures that would lead me to think Kleiner is sunk. ...

After talking to experts on the issue of gender and bias, the lack of a smoking gun is not surprising. Instead, these cases are tough to prove because they are often filled with small, everyday examples from the workplace. There is the dismissive tone in emails, the bawdy chitchat in breakrooms, the office layout with the power corridor, and seating charts at conferences.

In other words, there is no overt discrimination, and you have micro-analyze trivial behavior to allege them.

A typical complaint is that the men were once discussing a porn show. Or maybe it was just an HBO show for mature audiences.

“Standing alone, the examples don’t seem that significant,” said Jason Knott, a litigator with Zuckerman Spaeder in Washington who focuses on business and employment disputes. “But when you stand back, it can look discriminatory.”

I thought testimony about the review process produced some of the most interesting detail about the small, subtle stuff of gender bias. Pao was told she was too timid and not commanding enough. But she also had her knuckles rapped for being seen by co-workers as shrill, abrasive and not nurturing of others. Male co-workers were praised for traits that did not sound all that different.

It is possible for a woman to be both timid and shrill. And less likely for a man to be.

If men are more likely to be team players, as research has shown, is it discrimination to promote the team players?

One unusual thing about this case is that the jury is allowed to ask questions of Pao and the other witnesses. 9 of the 12 have to agree.

I don't see how they can side with Pao. She was paid $400k a year, and seducing one of the married partners. No other female employees are suing. Just this homewrecker.

On another matter, I have discovered that there are limits to the feminism at Jezebel. A post last year said:

Looking for practical advice about your relationship? You may want to avoid the Wendy Williams Show, because the talk show host just told an audience member it's okay to trick your husband into getting you pregnant if he promised you a second child. "Men have never been in control of our bodies," Williams tells the star-struck fan before telling her that she'd never suggest anyone trick a spouse in this way.

The audience agrees that the woman should trick her husband into another child.

And the war on free speech continues, with the NY Times reporting today:

The University of Maryland in College Park revealed on Thursday night that its officials had learned of email sent last year, apparently connected to a different fraternity, containing racist and sexist slurs, and that the university was investigating.

The university says that it has been investigating this email for 15 months! Apparently we have gotten to the point where a college kid cannot express an opinion in an email. Unless he is black and reciting rap music lyrics, of course.

The article also says the guy in the picture "said he was once turned away from a fraternity party because of his race." If the fraternity was so racist, why did he want to party with a bunch of racists? Maybe because the hot white college girls do not attend the black parties. Just guessing.

More comments on child support article

Yesterday's WSJ child support essay drew some comments on another blog:

I have to agree with Obama on this one. The idea of child support is archaic. It hearkens back to a time when it was assumed that people didn’t have sex until after they were married, and if it happened before marriage it was assumed that the man scammed the woman into doing something she didn’t want to do. Child support, perhaps, was seen as punishment for doing something immoral and then not getting married.

The blogger is a very class-conscious Jewish Republican.

Other comments:

If the parents have joint custody, which should be the norm unless one parent is unfit, there should not be child support. Each parent supports the children when they are living with him/her. If one parent has sole custody, the other one should pay child support. People do have a moral obligation to take care of their children.

Why does a man have a moral obligation to “support a child” the other ripped away from his care with a unilateral divorce?

Do men have a moral obligation to take care of a child they never wanted? Women don’t.

I agree with most of that.

I have to thoroughly disagree with any policy that makes the United States more like a Black ghetto hellhole. I don’t want to live in a world where non-Blacks have the incentive to live like Blacks. In fact, if such legislation were passed in all majority-White countries, I would have to seriously consider living among different race peoples. ...

This article genuinely made me angry.

We are reaching end-game of alpha-fucks, beta-bucks, and even the government is in on it.

Due to the ever diminishing integrity of our country and rule-of-law, the government is giving up on trying to extract money from alphas to pay for their children, so instead they double down on the low hanging fruit – beta bucks. ...

A woman needs child support like a fish needs a bicycle.

Live by your own standards, bitches. ...

Philp Greenspun’s blog (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/) is mostly about the U.S child support system, and he has me convinced that the system is both insane and evil (and he has collected alot of data on the subject). Essentially its evolved to yet another way to reward system gamers.

Its probably impossible to enforce child support in a way to ensure the money is actually spent on the child (there is now no requirement to do this at all, and the money is often not spent on the child), but it should be a flat rate per child calculated off of the poverty rate. If the custodial parent effectively denies visitation rights to the paying parent (such as by moving out of the area), then the obligation should be suspended. I’m actually fine with just automatically awarding custody to the women and support obligations to the man, unless the woman is in jail, crazy, otherwise incapacitated, or waives, mainly to avoid the nasty custody battles, though capping child support at a fixed amount would accomplish alot of this anyway.

Women are no longer disadvantaged in the labor market, at worst it is harder for women to get really high level jobs (but the studies show it is easier for them to get entry level jobs), so alimony should no longer exist.

There are many things wrong with the current system. They are just scratching the surface.

Update: Just to be clear, I am quoting the comments of others. I regard them as only partial understandings of what is wrong with child support. I will post on Greenspun separately.

NASCAR reverses itself

I blasted NASCAR for treating a man as guilty-until-proven-innocent, so I should credit them with reversing themselves after the man is proven innocent. AP reports:

Kurt Busch was cleared Wednesday to get back in his race car and attempt to rebuild a career that was halted two days before the Daytona 500 when NASCAR suspended him for allegedly assaulting his ex-girlfriend.

''It's been torture sitting out of the car,'' Busch said in a conference call. He called the allegations against him ''a complete fabrication.''

''I never did anything of the things I was accused of,'' he added. ''I never wavered in this whole process because of the confidence in the truth.'' ...

He said he will replace his longtime nickname ''The Outlaw'' with his signature above the door of his car.

Busch remains on indefinite probation. ...

Last week, the Delaware attorney general declined to charge Busch for the incident with Driscoll - a move O'Donnell said ''removed a significant impediment'' to reinstatement. ...

Busch has also complied with NASCAR's reinstatement requirements, the terms of which have not been disclosed. O'Donnell said a health care expert recommended Busch's immediate return.

A comment says:

That's all well and good NASCAR BUT you still owe Kurt an apology for suspending him for nothing! Now make it right and let's move on

Another says:

He was evaluated by a health care expert (who advised his immediate return) why? Is his health a question? And she obtained a restraining order against him, when SHE came to his trailer and he has and wants nothing to do with her? I have followed this story since its inception and can see no reason why Busch was suspended in the first place. Yes he's a hot-head and has prior anger problems we all know about, but this thing with Driscoll is nothing more than "he said, she said" bullshite

Obama getting soft on dead-beat dads

I have been criticizing Pres. Obama for many things, but here is something where he is not as bad as the Republicans, as there is bipartisan agreement to screw dead-beat dads as much as possible.

The Wall Street Journal has left-wing reporters and right-wing editorial, and here is an op-ed opinion. I am quoting it in full, as it is behind a paywall:

Making It Easier to Skip Paying Child Support
The Obama administration seems more focused on absent parents’ interests than on their children’s welfare.
By Robert Doar
March 9, 2015 7:20 p.m. ET

With little public attention, the Obama administration has been changing America’s child-support enforcement. The most recent Census Bureau report found that in 2011 fewer than 50% of single mothers had child-support orders — down from almost 60% in 2003. At least part of this decline reflects the administration’s shifting the focus from helping single parents with children toward helping absent parents who say they can’t afford payments. This is good news for delinquents, but bad news for children already coping with not having two parents at home.

Making absent parents (usually fathers) provide financial help for their children used to have bipartisan support and plenty of media attention. Begun in 1975 and strengthened by the 1996 welfare reform, child-support enforcement is one of the few antipoverty programs that stresses personal responsibility over government dependency. State child-support enforcement agencies — with federal funding — use wage garnishments and other techniques to hold absent parents responsible for contributing financially to the care of their children.

Reimbursing the government for welfare payments to poor single mothers used to be a primary goal. But increasingly the program has shifted from “cost recovery” to distributing the vast majority of collections to families. In 2013, 95% of the $28 billion collected was distributed to custodial parents to help pay for the daily needs of their children and to reduce their need for government assistance. For such families living below the poverty line who receive child support, the income from collections averages 45% of their family income. These numbers make child-support enforcement arguably the most cost-effective antipoverty program, collecting more than $5 for every $1 of administrative cost.

Despite its success, the program has always had critics. In the past especially, orders for monthly child support were often out of line with what some low-income parents could be reasonably expected to pay. Arrearage balances could grow so high that they condemned parents to a lifetime of debt.

Over the years, however, much progress has been made in addressing these problems. Child-support programs have found ways to reduce arrears and to “right size” payment amounts for noncustodial parents who were willing to accept responsibility but had no way of paying excessive arrears or payments. This evolution has not been fast enough for the Obama administration, which is why it has diluted the focus on personal responsibility by emphasizing “arrears forgiveness,” and “discretionary enforcement,” for absent parents.

This also may be why the administration has proposed a major update of federal regulations governing the program—without seeking congressional approval. The administration is expected to announce the final rule this summer, when states will need to comply or face possible sanctions from the Department of Health and Human Services.

Some of the proposed changes are positive. One provision would let state child-support programs use federal child-support funding to implement job-training programs for some of the unemployed parents from whom they are trying to collect. Washington used to tell states not to use child-support funding for jobs programs. The Obama administration has decided to change that.

Other changes are problematic and reflect the administration’s ambivalence about a program that once operated on the principle that paying child support should be like death and taxes—something that cannot be escaped. Federal regulations discouraged child-support programs from categorizing cases as “uncollectable.” The administration’s changes will make it easier to give up on such cases. Since states can earn additional federal funds if their collection rate increases, one way to collect more on a per-case basis is to close the hardest cases. Now states would have an incentive to do so.

Other new provisions would limit the agency’s ability to determine the income of delinquent parents. Some people will go to great lengths to hide, or avoid earning, income that could be used to pay child support. The ability to ask a court to consider what the absent parent could be making, or appears to be making based on his standard of living, gives the authorities a stronger hand with evaders.

Authorities used to have help in this effort under a provision of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which requires single applicants for cash welfare payments to participate in court and administrative proceedings to establish child-support orders. Since the late 1990s, however, the number of TANF recipients has declined dramatically as poor single mothers went to work and sought assistance from other government programs (food stamps, Medicaid, housing help). While some advocates have suggested imposing the child-support requirement on recipients of these other, non-TANF forms of assistance, the administration has shown no interest.

In the past, President Obama has emphasized parental responsibility and the important roles that fathers play in their children’s lives. As White House officials conduct their final review of the proposed new child-support regulations, they would be wise to make the final product match the president’s rhetoric.

Mr. Doar is the Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He served as the New York state Child Support Enforcement director from 1995 to 2000.

The proposed changes are here. Comments were accepted through Jan. 16, 2015.

No, I do not agree with taking away a man's drivers license in order to extract welfare reimbursements. I guess the Democrats like it because it expands the welfare systems, and breeds losers who vote Democrat, and the Republicans like it because it punishes deadbeats and is not considered a tax.

I question whether any man should ever have to pay for a child that he has no say in rearing. I think that the whole system is immoral, because all the incentives are wrong.

Zero tolerance for racist chant

CNN reports on our latest national scandal:

Even with the national chapter shutting the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house at the University of Oklahoma, the school president said the university's affiliation with the fraternity is permanently done as a campus group called for the expulsion of fraternity members.

The members have until midnight Tuesday to get their things out of the house, university President David Boren said in a Monday afternoon news conference.

"The house will be closed, and as far as I'm concerned, they won't be back," he said, adding that the university is exploring what actions it can take against individual fraternity members.

A Saturday video showing party-bound fraternity members on a bus chanting a racial epithet found its way anonymously to the school newspaper and a campus organization, which both promptly publicized the nine-second clip.

The students on the bus clap and pump their fists as they boisterously chant, "There will never be a ni**** SAE. You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me."

By Sunday night, SAE's national chapter had suspended the University of Oklahoma members and threatened lifelong suspensions for anyone responsible for the chant, but Boren took it a step further.

Wait a minute. This was a 9-second video clip! I would have said that it is impossible to get the whole country mad at you from a 9-second video.

The punishment is against the whole fraternity, including members who were not involved. And punished for life.

I may get into trouble for saying this, but I do not believe that anyone should be punished for privately expressing their personal opinions about who they want to associate with, regardless of how offensive those opinions might be.

The former LA Clippers owner was forced out of the NBA for private opinions of who his paid mistress should associate with. That was bad enuf, but these are just partying college students who could have been joking, for all we know.

Even if they favor segregation, or slavery, or deporting blacks to Africa, or any other racist opinion, that should be their right. Certain types of discrimination in employment, housing, and a few other areas are illegal, but this action is purely against expressing an opinion.

And maybe not even an opinion. No one has  bothered to ask these boys whether it was really their opinion, or they were just reciting a chant.

I think that if a bunch of white racists in Oklahoma want to have their own little all-white private club, then the blacks and liberals should be happy that those people have separated themselves from the community so that their presence will not bother anyone.

One trouble with this is that I do not what most white people think of blacks. Many express anti-racist views, but are they just saying that to avoid the thought police?

The country Jordan does not truly have free speech:

Earlier this month, Jordan's Information Minister Mohammad Al-Momani told a conference that freedom of expression can contribute to stopping radicalization.

On the very same day, a military court in the capital Amman sentenced a man to 18 months in prison for a Facebook post that was seen as insulting a friendly country, the United Arab Emirates.

Okay, that is Jordan, but I thought that Oklahoma was better than that.

Here is another story of someone being punished before the facts are in:

In a stunning move just two days before the season-opening Daytona 500, NASCAR suspended Kurt Busch indefinitely on Friday after a judge said the former champion almost surely strangled and beat an ex-girlfriend last fall and there was a "substantial likelihood" of more domestic violence from him in the future.

NASCAR said Busch would not be allowed to race or participate in any NASCAR activities until further notice given the "serious nature of the findings and conclusions" made by the Delaware judge. ...

In a 25-page opinion explaining why he issued the no-contact order this week, Family Court Commissioner David Jones concluded that it was more likely than not that Busch abused Patricia Driscoll ...

So his race-car career is over because of some stupid family court commissioner has an opinion about what is "more likely than not", and that there is a "substantial likelihood" that he do something bad in the future?!

As I keep complaining, no one believes in innocence until proven guilty, and people are guilty in family court for what they might do in the future.

Busch has denied the alleged assault, which is the subject of a separate criminal investigation, ...

[Commissioner] Jones noted that [girlfriend] Driscoll presented false testimony that conflicted with that of a chaplain who saw her immediately after the alleged assault and said he didn't see any marks or bruises on her. Jones nevertheless said he didn't believe Driscoll's false testimony amounted to perjury or intentional falsehood. ...

Busch's attorneys filed a motion late Thursday asking Jones to re-open the Family Court hearing so that they can present testimony from three acquaintances of Driscoll who they say were previously reluctant to get involved but have now come forward to contradict statements Driscoll has made about her relationship with Busch.

So he denies the charges, the girlfriend was proved to be a liar, and he has not been criminally charged or convicted of anything.

The judge [ie, the commissioner] concluded that Busch did not appear to be a prototypical batterer who uses violence to subjugate or control, but that the incident instead was most likely a "situational" event in which Busch was unable to cope and to control his tendency to act out violently in response to stress and frustration, causing him to "snap."

At the same time, however, Jones said he believes there's real possibility that Busch will lash out again.

"Given respondent's passion for his racing career and his intemperate and frequently violent reactions to seemingly minor racing setbacks, the court finds that there exists a likelihood of future acts of domestic violence against petitioner in the event that respondent's racing career is damaged or destroyed as the result of his having been found to have committed an act of domestic violence in this case or any subsequent criminal prosecution," Jones wrote.

Jones added that because Busch has a propensity to lose control in response to disappointing or frustrating situations involving racing and that those who love him are likely to be around him at those times "there is a substantial likelihood of acts of domestic violence by respondent against future intimate partners.

So this family court commissioner is psychoanalyzing him based on him being a race-car driver. This speculation is that he might lose a future race, become irritable, and take it out of a future intimate partner!

So not only does this commissioner pre-judge Busch in a way to destroy his racing career, he punishes Busch for how he might react to his racing career being unfairly destroyed!

Family court judges rarely spell out such crazy reasoning, but I wonder how often they do it. That is, a judge takes a dad's kids away, and then is reluctant to give the kids back because the dad is probably angry about his kids being unfairly taken away.

If NASCAR thinks that he lacks the temperament or safe practices to the point where he is a hazard to other drivers or fans, then I could understand suspending him for bad behavior. But a family court commissioner trying to protect some future girlfriend who might be trying to comfort him after a loss? This is crazy. It is like that movie about pre-crime. Or wrecking his racing career based on false testimony from his girlfriend, and then justifying wrecking his career because of how upset he might be at having his career wrecked by false testimony? The world has gone mad. I wonder if anyone in the NASCAR world is defending Busch.

Update: A free speech law professor says that it would be unconstitutional to expel the students, and sticks to that after OU does expel them.

My guess is that Boren has already made a deal with some prosecutor to charge these kids with a hate crime. If they can be coerced to pleading guilty to some misdemeanor, then the university will be vindicated.

Female politicians have been bad for Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley sex discrimination is in the news, with the Ellen Pao lawsuit. But this is an area that has tried the experiment of female politicians, and it has been a disaster:

San Jose was once the female capital of the world for political power. Janet Gray Hayes was the first woman mayor of a major city. She had a council consisting mostly of women. The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors also had a majority of women. Gender parity was coming into vogue.

But times have changed and fewer women are now in local public office. The Board of Supervisors has just one woman, Cindy Chavez, and previous to her special election victory the board was all male. ...

Only in Congress, where Mike Honda joins Zoe Lofgren, Anna Eshoo and Jackie Speier, is there an actual majority of women representing Silicon Valley. ...

We also have Boxer and Feinstein in the US Senate. All elected many years ago, and we are sick of them.

The feminist press complains of double standards:

Nobody cares when Bill Clinton changes his hairstyle, unless he holds up airport traffic getting it cut. Nobody comments on Dick Blum’s fashion choices when he stands next to his wife, Sen. Dianne Feinstein. They don’t refer to him as Mr. Feinstein. Nobody questions Mitt Romney’s commitment to his numerous grandchildren when he ran for president, but for some reason it is a story for Hillary.

To many in the good old boy establishment, much of this is dismissed as political correctness or women being overly sensitive to criticism — an insulting charge. The simple truth is that there is a new generation of women who will not play by the outdated codes and double standards that continue to persist. They see rules that need rewriting and want to change perceptions.

What women wear, whom they date, what they look like and what name they choose to be called is not relevant to the content of their character. It is not news and it will be challenged.

Are you kidding me? Hillary Clinton has decided herself to play up the grandmother role for her presidential run. She also is the one to emphasize her maiden name, as if she was never happy to take Bill's name.

One of my readers points out an incisive comment:

Like the child allowed to grow-up undisciplined and unruly by an inept single mom, San Jose has never found the maturity necessary to pay as it goes, address its responsibilities, or plan for the future... Take a walk along San Jose’s borders and you will find, in almost every direction, that to step across the line is to step into higher home valuation, better schools, smoother pavement, faster fire service, cleaner parks, better police coverage, and enhanced residential services.

The Dilbert site got taken down with a DDOS attack apparently because of this comment:

Locally, one hears stories all the time about some guy who did something special with a start-up, or he’s a superstar coder, or a product genius, or whatever. How many times have I heard similar stories about superstar female entrepreneurs with technology skills? Maybe…never? At least none in the past year. ...

Here’s the part that ends my career: On average, men and women are equally capable for academic and technical pursuits. But men tend to have the most freaks on the high end and low end of the IQ spectrum. One study says there are about twice as many men as women in the top 2%.

The Germans have joined other European countries in passing laws requiring women to be on corporate boards of directors.

Silicon Valley is a meritocracy, so they should have wised up about women politicians by now. They have been stupid enuf to elect women in the past, and to decide we needed a black President. Will they think we need a woman President? I hope they look at the track records of Democrat candidates a little better.

Update: Silicon Valley startups have always been against regulation, especially of the internet, but not that Obama has enacted regulations to protect Google and Facebook, the local papers are telling a different story. From today's paper:

The FCC's vote essentially puts the Internet under the same regulatory umbrella as telephones. The aim is to keep Internet service providers from slowing or blocking certain web activity -- or creating paid "fast lanes."

Silicon Valley's House Democrats -- Mike Honda, Zoe Lofgren, Anna Eshoo and Jackie Speier -- all lauded the FCC's action. But among Republicans, the only split now seems to be between those who want to use their new majority in both houses of Congress to ram through a resolution decrying the FCC in the hopes of overriding the decision, and those who would prefer to enlist some Democrats to impose different, weaker rules.

Even House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, a frequent visitor to Silicon Valley and arguably the GOP's point man for the region, blasted the FCC vote.

"The FCC has just taken the Internet -- arguably the most dynamic contributor to a growing economy and higher quality of life in the world -- back in time to the era of landlines," he said in a statement after the vote. "The Internet is too important to the everyday lives of Americans for such government overreach."

If G.W. Bush had done this, we would be hearing a lot more complaints. What a lot of people don't realize is that big companies like regulation, because their lobbying can control it, and it keeps small competitors out.

Update: Hillary Clinton's email account, while Sec. of State, was hdr22@clintonemail.com. Those are the initials of her maiden name. She just wants to use the Clinton name when it advances her political agenda.