BlogWonks

ZombieTime has a slew of pictures from the anti-Marines protest in Berkeley that took place several days ago.

Plug your nose and click here.

Fortunately, the palate is cleansed with the sorbet of a few counter-protesters amid what appears to be a pink unemployment line operating a floating meth lab while waiting for the next check from the folks to arrive in the mail.

(h/t LGF)

Hillary's campaign has put out what appears to have been intended to be an internal memo about strategy following next Tuesday's primaries in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont.

The memo essentially paints Obama's non-blowouts as proof that he's lagging. Huh? Yeah, I thought that to. Here's the memo.

Hillary's people are admitting that Barack is out-campaigning them, out-fundraising them, out-orating them, out-spending them, and getting more big endorsements than them.

With all that, if Obama doesn't win all four states, Hillary's people say, this is evidence of a problem:

Should Senator Obama fail to score decisive victories with all of the resources and effort he is bringing to bear, the message will be clear:

Democrats, the majority of whom have favored Hillary in the primary contests held to date, have their doubts about Senator Obama and are having second thoughts about him as a prospective standard-bearer.

I never thought I'd feel sorry for the Clintons, but now — I still don't. But it's getting really pathetic nonetheless.

Any chance the feminsits will read this and understand that men and women want and love each other and that the feminsts are the abnormal ones who believe everyone is abnormal like them too?

Not likely…

Normal is not what the majority does.
Its not truly defined that way, except by ideologues and normalizers, and anti-absoluters.

All one has to do is ask a psychiatrist and one will get a much more nuanced argument rather than the MSM take, which is what most are doing.

Normalize, is not to make normal, its to make something appear normal.

Study examines how men and women view marital and parental time pressures

Only about one-fifth of employed women and men are completely satisfied with the time they spend with their spouse and their children according to a recent study published in the Journal of Family Issues.

“Typically in past studies, full-time workers and parents tend to be more time pressured than those who work part time or who don’t have children,” says Dr. Susan Roxburgh, associate professor of sociology at Kent State University.

In a study funded by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, Roxburgh examined how employment and parenthood influence time pressures pertaining to marital partners and the parental role.

She found that men are significantly more likely to want more time with their spouses, while women were more likely than men to say they wanted to improve the quality of time they spend with their spouse. Both women and men equally were likely to say that they wanted to slow down the pace of time spent with their spouse.

However when it comes to time spent with children, only women felt that a hectic pace affected the time they spent with their children.

Source: Kent State University

I was reading a piece at the Huffington Post ("It is wise to study the ways of ones adversary") called "Bill Buckley's conservatism."

Much of the column I agreed with, but toward the end I ran across this fallacious gem:

For now, it's enough to note that Buckley deserves laurels not simply for his elegant flair and tolerant temperament, but also his contempt for radical ideologues on the right — the unhinged types who are now whining that John McCain isn't conservative enough because he has the temerity to recognize that global warming is actually taking place and needs to be stopped.

This kind of tripe is oft-trumpeted, mostly by liberals who are thrilled that the GOP is about to nominate the weakest possible candidate and become angered when somebody points that out. But as far as the "McCain recognizes that global warming is taking place" thing, I haven't seen a bigger pile of crap since witnessing a head-on collision between a septic cleaning van and a Port-O-San delivery truck.

John McCain does not believe that man-made climate change is taking place. McCain is constantly saying things like "even if we're wrong, so what, we're creating a cleaner world." Along putting more money in the hands of polticians — which is McCain's specialty.

As evidence that it's really only about the government getting their hands on more private sector money, McCain did an interview not long ago with Frank Beckmann on WJR in Detroit.

Beckmann: "It's (forcing companies to adopt 'green' technologies') going to be costly to Americans, isn't it?"

McCain: "I know of nothing costly to Americans. As I say, General Electric is makin' lots of money…"

Yes, and they'll pass it along to the consumer, Mr. Honorary Democrat. Thanks a lot.

This is the guy who calls himself "conservative." In actuality, McCain is no different than Bill Clinton, who once told a business owner who expressed concern over high taxes to "just raise your price."

Here's a short clip from the WJR radio interview from January. Put on your waders before clicking "play":

Prince Harry (aka "the bullet magnet") had been serving in Afghanistan for ten weeks until the word leaked out, and now that the news is public he may have to head for home.

His deployment there was subject to a news blackout deal struck to preserve his safety, but it broke down after foreign media leaked the story.

The deal included guaranteed access to Harry for interviews if the media wouldn't report on the deployment.

It's good to see that the Brits still have some media who, in the end, realize which side they're on. Can you imagine the larger American media (NYT, CNN, USA Today) being able to keep it zipped for ten weeks about anything to do with the war — especially about something that may actually help the U.S. win the damn thing?

Maybe the NYT did know about this, but if we were to substitute Harry with, say, Jenna Bush, the secret would have been out before Dubya could say "nu-kew-lur."

In the old days, before treason fell under the umbrella of freedom of speech, reporting information beneficial to the enemy in wartime would have meant the firing squad for the likes of the leaker. Nowadays the mainstream media will not discern between friend and enemy — believing it's not their place to do so. If the enemy wins the war, however, the enemy will do the discerning for them, but the media doesn't seem to realize that.

In 1780, British Maj. Andre was found in possession of the plans for West Point given to him by Benedict Arnold. After some American scouts found the documents after a patdown, the major was hanged.

If the same thing happened today, the mainstream media in the United States would have called for George Washington's head for violating the privacy rights of Andre. After all, the major was merely a tourist sharing cultural exchange with a local. Benedict Arnold would have then secured a tenured humanities professorship at Columbia University.

Of course, we're talking about papers like the New York Times, which would have done such a good job at helping to win the Revolutionary War that the cover of the paper would have looked like this:

US military forces, and ground forces in particular, have operated at a high pace since the attacks of September 11, 2001, including the support of ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Between 2001 and July 2007, approximately 931,000 US Army and Marine Corps service members deployed for overseas military operations, including about 312,000 National Guard or Reserve members, according to the Department of Defense.

To support ongoing military operations and related activities, Congress has appropriated billions of dollars since 2001, and through September 2007, the Department of Defense has reported obligating about $492.2 billion to cover these expenses, of which a large portion are related to readiness.

In addition, DOD’s annual appropriation, now totaling about $480 billion for fiscal year 2008, includes funds to cover readiness needs.

While DOD has overcome difficult challenges in maintaining a high pace of operations over the past 6 years and US forces have gained considerable combat experience, reports have shown that extended operations in Iraq and elsewhere have had significant consequences for military readiness, particularly with regard to the Army and Marine Corps. To meet mission requirements specific to Iraq and Afghanistan, the department has taken steps to increase the availability of personnel and equipment for deploying units, and to refocus their training on assigned missions.

For example, to maintain deployed force levels, DOD has increased the length of deployments and frequency of mobilizations, but it is unclear whether these adjustments will affect recruiting and retention. The Army and Marine Corps have also transferred equipment from non-deploying units and pre-positioned stocks to support deploying units, affecting the availability of items for non-deployed units to meet other demands.

In addition, they have refocused training units extensively for counterinsurgency missions, with little time available to train for a fuller range of missions. The DOD has adopted strategies, such as relying more on Navy and Air Force personnel and contractors to perform some tasks formerly handled by Army or Marine Corps personnel.

If current operations continue at the present level of intensity, DOD could face difficulty in balancing these commitments with the need to rebuild and maintain readiness. Over the past several years, the Government Accounting Office has reported on a wide range of issues related to military readiness and made numerous recommendations to enhance DOD’s ability to manage and improve readiness.

Given the change in the security environment since September 11, 2001, and demands on US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, rebuilding readiness will be a long-term and complex effort.

However, the GAO believes the Defense Department can take measures that will advance progress in both the short and long terms. A common theme is the need for DOD to take a more strategic decision-making approach to ensure programs and investments are based on plans with measurable goals, validated requirements, prioritized resource needs, and performance measures to gauge progress.

Overall, the GAO recommended that DOD develop a near-term plan for improving the readiness of ground forces that, among other things, establishes specific goals for improving unit readiness, prioritizes actions needed to achieve those goals, and outlines an investment strategy to clearly link resource needs and funding requests.

The GAO also made recommendations in several specific readiness-related areas, including that DOD develop equipping strategies to target shortages of items required to equip units preparing for deployment, and DOD adjust its training strategies to include a plan to support full-spectrum training. DOD agreed with some recommendations, but has yet to fully implement them.

For others, particularly when GAO recommended that DOD develop more robust plans linked to resources, DOD believed its current efforts were sufficient. GAO continues to believe such plans are needed.

Jim Kouri, CPP is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police and he’s a staff writer for the New Media Alliance (thenma.org). Kouri also serves as political advisor for Emmy and Golden Globe winning actor Michael Moriarty.

He’s former chief at a New York City housing project in Washington Heights nicknamed “Crack City” by reporters covering the drug war in the 1980s. In addition, he served as director of public safety at a New Jersey university and director of security for several major organizations. He’s also served on the National Drug Task Force and trained police and security officers throughout the country. Kouri writes for many police and security magazines including Chief of Police, Police Times, The Narc Officer and others. He’s a news writer for TheConservativeVoice.Com and PHXnews.com. He’s also a columnist for AmericanDaily.Com, MensNewsDaily.Com, MichNews.Com, and he’s syndicated by AXcessNews.Com. He’s appeared as on-air commentator for over 100 TV and radio news and talk shows including Oprah, McLaughlin Report, CNN Headline News, MTV, Fox News, etc. His book Assume The Position is available at Amazon.Com. Kouri’s own website is located at http://jimkouri.us

Patricia Pearson is a writer who possesses a plethora of interests. A great deal of information concerning her can be found at her website, called “Pearson’s Post.” She has won numerous awards and is a regular contributor to The USA Today, and Canada’s National Post. Her work has also appeared in Spy, Chatelaine, the New York Times, the Times of London, New York Observer, Redbook, the Guardian, Nerve, Shift, and Saturday Night. Mrs. Pearson has authored several books such as Believe Me, When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, and Life on a French Poster. At present, she lives with her family in Toronto, Canada. The release of her latest book occasioned my second interview with her.

BC: Congratulations on A Brief History of Anxiety [Yours and Mine]. Auden dubbed his time “The Age of Anxiety,” but can a better claim be made to it being true of our time?

Patricia Pearson: Rates of clinical anxiety are extremely high in North America right now. I think historians will look back and consider us to have been a part of Auden’s Age. We are still in the maelstrom of clashing cultures and shifting values. Modernity has thrown us for a loop. Primarily, it is an age of uncertainty. Humans have always coped with hazard, but their rituals and beliefs were intact, and acted as buffers against personal anxiety. In our Age, we have tossed out faith and ritual and social rules and common cause, and rendered ourselves isolated. In my opinion, this is why our rates of anxiety and depression are soaring.

BC: Would you say that the great size of our governments directly impacts the public’s mood along with the prevalence of anxiety within the general population?

Patricia Pearson: I’m not sure what you mean by this, Bernard. Government can certainly play at fear-mongering, whatever its size or character, just as media does. I am a journalist, a former crime reporter, and I know for a fact that I participated in fanning flames by encouraging readers to pay what psychologists call “selective attention to threat.” We’re all going to be murdered by serial killers! Or terrorists! Media has a huge role to play in enhancing people’s sense of powerlessness and unease. This is why I now write a column devoted solely to good news. (For CBC.ca) It may not be as dramatic or as sexy, but it’s just as real — the constructive and positive efforts being made by good-hearted and ingenius people all over the world to solve critical problems.

BC: Might we regard anxiety as being holdover from our evolutionary past which was once a very good thing but now, like cravings for salt and fat, potentially disabling?

Patricia Pearson: I think so, yes. Neuroscience has shown that the ‘fight or flight response’ our brains trigger in response to menace, such as the prowling leopard our distant ancestors darted away from, can also be triggered by threats that resist interpretation. I’m no expert on this subject, but it has to do with the neurobiological interplay between the amygdala and the cerebral cortex. From an evolutionary perspective, our brains need to interpret the source of menace before the amygdala stops sending out alarm signals. But if we cannot interpret the source of menace, in other words if the culture itself feels threatening or bewildering or too complex, then the alarm continues to sound.

BC: Do you agree that “preparation is the remedy for anxiety?”

Patricia Pearson: No. Fear is the remedy for anxiety. What I mean by that is that dealing with a clear and present danger will displace the more paralyzing and helpless sensation that is anxiety. Since I wrote my book, a family member has grown very ill. No time to be anxious. Time, instead, to be working the phones, finding cutting-edge treatments, battling doctors. This is what Virginia Woolf called ‘extreme reality.’ Anxiety is more about what T.S. Eliot wrote: “What shall we do now, what shall we do? Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.”

BC: Along these lines, do you think that the “hypothetical analytical planning” you mention is just preparation gone mad? I think the word hypothetical tells us much about its usefulness.

Patricia Pearson: People cope with anxiety in a number of ways. In my case, I have often engaged in what psychologists call “hypothetical analytical planning.” Basically, I convince myself that if I can just foresee every conceivable contingency in the future and plan for it, I will somehow have control over my fate. It’s a delusion, a form of anticipatory worry that eventually just makes your head spin.

BC: When you note that “the essence of the condition is an intolerance of uncertainty” are you really referring to symptoms arising from an individual’s lack of realization that life cannot be controlled? That we never will be the masters of our world?

Patricia Pearson: There are two threads to this. Anxiety disorders are characterized by an intolerance of uncertainty because people who are prone to this neurologically and through childhood experience really ARE incapable of coping well with uncertainty. This has been shown with mice in a lab at Columbia University. If you knock out a certain gene, the mice are much less able to navigate ambiguous (changing) lay outs in a maze.
The other thread is cultural. America lives by the myth of the supercompetent individual who can rise above all challenges –American Idol-style—with enough grit and persistence. In reality, we have very little control over fate. Most cultures in the world are completely aware of this lack of control, but Americans are not. So it is that much more anxiety-provoking when life doesn’t proceed in a predictable way, according to plan.
(Mice, Men and Best-Laid Plans…)

BC: Do you think that most writers possess higher than normal levels of anxiety?

Patricia Pearson: Creative people in general, both scientists and artists, have been found to have higher than average levels of mood disorder. Not just anxiety but also depression. The thinking now is that there may be a neurological correlation between mood and creativity.

BC: You cite a statistic claiming that 28.8 percent of the overall population in America suffers from anxiety and it is mentioned in the context of world health problems. This strikes me as being rather absurd. Isn’t measurement error a more likely cause? Or possibly a result of the World Mental Health Survey mislabeling normal behaviors such as occasionally feeling stress as indicators of pathology?

Patricia Pearson: The stat refers to a lifetime prevalence rate. In other words, over the course of their lifetimes nearly one third of Americans will have experienced some form of “clinically significant” anxiety, ranging from phobia to panic attacks to a bout of post-traumatic stress disorder. Let’s say you have ten people in a room. Ask them their stories: one of them might have been in the Armed Forces, a second lost their husband in a fire, a third was once sexually assaulted. All those events could have generated acute anxiety. There’s your 30 per cent. The difference with the rest of the world is that people also have traumatic life events, but they are more buffered by their faith, their extended family, their rituals and beliefs. In tearing down all of our customs and traditional institutions in favour of more freedom, we are actually making ourselves less resilient.

BC: Lastly, the book is an extremely personal account of anxiety and the way it impacted your life. We find Patricia Pearson front and center. What would you say in response to someone who found it too self-indulgent?

Patricia Pearson: I’d tell them not to read memoirs. This book is driven by the narrative arc of my experience. So is William Styron’s self-portrait of depression, Darkness Visible, and Kay Redfield Jamison’s account of her bipolar illness: An Unquiet Mind. I don’t think it’s self-indulgent to offer up one’s own tale as a basis for conversation about an overarching human conundrum. What is self-indulgent is drinking too much Port.

BC: Thank you, Mrs. Pearson.

Bernard Chapin is the author of Women: Theory and Practice and Escape from Gangsta Island and a series of video podcasts called “Chapin’s Inferno.” He can be contacted at veritaseducation@gmail.com.

February 28, 2008

The Bible’s stance on homosexuality “Fundamentalist bile” So Says Andrew Sullivan

The Republican Party’s and Conservatism’s token morally depraved homosexual said today on his Blog, that the Bible’s doctrine, in regards to the practice of homosexuality, is nothing more than “Fundamentalist Bile”.

Here is the quote:

Liebman was indeed a brother in combat, one of the great gay foes of totalitarianism, up there with Whittaker Chambers and Alan Turing. But he was always reminded that his gayness would bar him from full inclusion as an equal in the conservative movement. I wish that times had changed. But the stance remains - absent Buckley’s grace and manners, and compounded now by the dark strains of fundamentalist bile.

He, of course, was speaking of William Buckley Jr. and his nice treatment of Marvin Liebman, who was a Conservative who came out, as a homosexual. While I do believe in being civil to those, who choose to practice this lifestyle, I highly object to my personal religious convictions and my Bible being referred to as “Fundamentalist bile”

As I have written before, The Bible is very clear on the homosexual lifestyle. It is morally and scripturally wrong, period. As the Bible says:

Do you not know that the unrighteous and the wrongdoers will not inherit or have any share in the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived (misled): neither the impure and immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor those who participate in homosexuality, Nor cheats (swindlers and thieves), nor greedy graspers, nor drunkards, nor foulmouthed revilers and slanderers, nor extortioners and robbers will inherit or have any share in the kingdom of God. - (1 Corinthians 6:9-10 AMP)

The Old Testament it says:

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. - (Leviticus 18:22 KJV)

This, Mr. Sullivan is not “Fundamentalist bile”, as you so foolishly called it. It is the Word of God, which is the core document of Christianity, which, by the way, is the blueprint of what the Conservative movement is based upon. Further more, it is one of the documents, of whose principles, the United States of America was founded upon.

Frankly, the only reason you ever accepted or treated fairly among Conservatives and in the Republican Party is the great deal of compromise within those ranks. Not to mention, the only reason you are married to your gay partner is that the Liberal Democrats have fought to change our constitution from what it was originally intended to convey, in the regards to marriage. Which the Bible says is supposed to be between a MAN and a WOMAN:

And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. (Matthew 19:4-6 KJV)

Therefore, Mr. Sullivan, you have exposed yourself, as nothing more than a Liberal Homosexual, posing as a Conservative. How anyone can say, that they are Conservative or a Republican, and be gay, is quite beyond me. As the Conservative movement is about the preservation of moral values, and my friend homosexuality is not moral, at all.

For those not well versed in sleazy Chicago politics (and I unfortunately am having lived in Illinois for 12 years) Rick Moran at Pajamas Media has an excellent primer explaining Barack Hussein  Obama’s relationship with Tony Rezko, and why it’s such a big deal.

Are you confused by the head spinning machinations of Barack Obama that allowed him to purchase a house worth $2.6 million (with a vacant lot next door that can be accessed only through the property where the house sits) for around $1.65 million? (Don’t worry, so is most of the press.)

Do you wonder why this “Agent of Change” and modern day prophet Barack Obama would have gotten himself involved with a man indicted for political corruption and fraud?

Well, allow me to clear things up for you. Following is a little primer on Rezko, Obama, and how Windy City politics can have its way even with new messiahs.
To set the stage, you have to remember that we’re talking about Chicago. This is “The City That Works.” No one disputes that. The question is who it “works” for. If you’re a member of the Democratic Machine, it works wonderfully.

This story is not going to go away no matter how much Obama tries to ignore it. If you want to be an educated voter I would encourage you to read the whole thing.

Conservatism has lost an icon within its hallowed halls.  I am referring to William F. Buckley Jr., who has gone on to his eternal reward.  I will readily admit, I did not know about him.  However, his regal kind of conservative politics gave rise to a Republican leader that greatly admire, and that is Ronald Reagan.

Yes, I am aware of his outright rejection of the John Birch Society.  I can understand this, as there are some elements, to that group, that I also dismiss.  However, I will say that I admire the man.  He was a defender of his principles.  This is more than I can say for many.  I know of people, if pressed would fold like a piece of wet cardboard.  Whether it be Christianity, politics, or what have you.

William Buckley’s Contribution to the Conservative movement is beyond measure, with his Magazine, the National Review.  I read this magazine, in it’s online format, quite a bit.  I do not always agree with that which I read.  However, it is an interesting magazine to read.  It helps me to understand what Conservatives are thinking.  As a writer, I like to know what others are thinking and why.

The stream of Conservatism of which he represented, could well serve those up and coming in those ranks.  It is too bad that some are instead, drawing from the likes of Coulter, Limbaugh, and those of that ilk.

The game is changing, the old players are leaving us, and the new players are being left to pick up the pieces and move on.  I can only hope that those left with that responsibility, have picked up on the good things and repeat them, and will see the failures and learn from them and do things differently.

My most heartfelt and sincere condolences are to be given to his family.  It is my hope Mr. Buckley rests in the eternal peace of God.  He has, earned that right.

Campaigning in Ohio, Hillary Clinton was proudly introduced by one of her major endorsers:

My views on how we currently supply financial aid to Africa, which most often does nothing but create wealthier tyrants, are well documented in columns here, here and here.

But I have to admit that Bob Geldof's article in Time is a good read in that it actually points out some fatal flaws that allows our mistakes to happen over and over again — though I'm sure it wasn't intended that way.

Geldof's rather long piece had me from the opening lines:

I gave the president my book. He raised an eyebrow. "Who wrote this for ya, Geldof?" he said without looking up from the cover. Very dry. "Who will you get to read it for you, Mr. President?" I replied. No response.

It's that kind of mutual "touche'!" with which male friendships are born.

But Geldof helps highlight Bush's involvement in Africa (where he says Bush has done more in Africa than any other president) with these words about how little of it has been brought to the attention of the American people:

It is some story. And I have always wondered why it was never told properly to the American people, who were paying for it.

Uh, that's why it's never told properly to the American people — because we're paying for it, and the money disappears as fast as it's sent.

That it even needs to be told to the American people in the first place could be construed as evidence of an across-the-board lack of demand on our part for accountability as to where the hell our money is going, and more importantly, if it's doing anything but creating richer anti-American thugs in Africa.

And the fact that all this needs to be brought to our attention by the former singer for The Boomtown Rats just adds to the perplexity.

At any rate, it's an interesting essay, and you can read all the pages of it here.

Yesterday I linked to a statement from the Republican Jewish Coalition which claimed that Barack Obama has been consistently anti-Israeli at least as a state legislator from Illinois. Now, certainly this Jewish group is partisan. However, they obviously have statements that were made by Obama to back up what they are saying. And, their main point is that Obama has only recently changed his positions regarding Israel so as not to lose Jewish voters in the general election.

“People should be very skeptical of Barack Obama’s shaky Middle East policies. When a long-time political activist like Ralph Nader, with a well-documented, anti-Israel bias, claims that Senator Obama shares this anti-Israel bias, that is alarming,” said RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks. “If Senator Obama supports Ralph Nader’s policies, which consistently condemn Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism, and if Sen. Obama has only reversed his positions to run for president, it once again raises serious questions about his grasp of the geo-political realities of the Middle East and puts into doubt his commitment to the safety and security of Israel. These are important questions we in the Jewish community will be asking.”

Now Alan Solomont from the Obama campaign claims that statement is misleading.

Solomont referred to e-mails from the Republican Jewish Coalition, which put out a news release Monday in which Executive Director Matthew Brooks said “people should be very skeptical of Barack Obama’s shaky Middle East policies.”

“I have seen statements by the Republican Jewish Coalition which are distortions and misinformation, and I find it reprehensible,” said Solomont, who is Jewish.

Unfortunately, Solomont provides not a shred of evidence that the statement from the Republican Jewish Coalition contains factual errors. He merely expresses outrage that somebody criticized the candidate that he is employed by. Notice also that The Washington Post tells us that Solomont is Jewish, as if that’s actually supposed to give his response more credibility. I also presume that Solomont was chosen by the Obama campaign to respond to this attack for that very reason. It’s very transparent, and it’s not going to fool anyone. So, either Solomont or someone else from the Obama campaign needs to step up to the plate and actually prove that what the RJC stated is wrong, or the Obama camp needs to shut the hell up.

Turns out parents have ‘parental instincts’ having to do with their own children. These are not a result of culture, but the result of parents being the ones to take care of their children through the ages, because no one else, despite what is said, can care for them better than the parents (even not so great ones).

Daycare workers, pre-kindergarten workers, by this research will not have the same responses and so will not have the same focus on care. This is not to say that many of them don’t do a commendable job, they do (and others do horrid work), though the genetic parents will on average do better. Ultimately they would be willing to die for the child, while the worker collecting a salary would most of the time not.

Before someone crows that you can switch kids and the parents will not know, this may appear to be, but research into MHC compatibility and recognition would put question if the same level of action was present. Given that this is whole new territory, only ideology can assert since it knows everything (that’s sarcasm).

Recent work by Susan Pinker is evolving out view of how we are as people and it certainly is not the ideological view.

Turns out that we are made to fulfill a purpose, and that our lives desires and such are only secondary to that purpose. Without that purpose, there wouldn’t be anyone here to have desires let alone assert them past the reason for their existence.

Comparative advantage in dissimilar but complimentary individuals leads to increased pair efficiency. This is a mathematical truth. A heterosexual pair outperforms all other mate combinations and this can be expressed mathematically (which explains why heterosexual couples are supposed to arbitrarily share tasks 50/50, that then makes the other combinations seem to perform on par).

Take the work below and in a pop analysis through Evolutionary Psychology, one can easily work out that these programmed proclivities create such advantages. We are tuned to the world, and as conditions change our proclivities change with them to help keep the pair result within better operating conditions for the FAMILY.

A mother is programmed to respond to her kid through site and touch. She is VERY good at that. A father while JUST AS DEDICATED, is dedicated in a different way. He isnt as sensitive and so things easily become clear in crisis. Her focus and ability to identify at the natal stages, would allow her to run over to where babies are together while the women work, and instantly know which is hers. The FATHERS programing will be to be dedicated to both, but mostly her. This would cause the father to seek out her in crisis, which would mean that she then would seek out the kids, they converge together. he being the outer walls, her being the last chance inner walls.

Mates that didn’t do that didn’t get to have children in the next stage in the game of dynasty. End of story. Remember every person born is the end result of billions of years of development, and to not have the ones that do better move forward, but have them truncate their lineages, denies us all our best futures. Including the ones that ride on the coat tails of greatness (which is most of us).

We are slowly discovering despite ideological imperatives and impositions, that we are made to pair and to have children in which we invest our excess productivity to insure that they grow and are healthy. Only the pair that has comparative advantage above the mean can have that extra productivity that creates the situation where children are healthiest. Society can’t replace that, since this situation is not only in the small category of remuneration.

Mom AND Dad have instincts to their OWN children, and they act on them. If culture changes to some bad state that interferes, they are then internally in conflict, they don’t know how to act, things fall apart, and mental states become problematic. People who were normal before become aberrant.

There is a difference between first and second place. So people don’t hunt me down and try to pare me to size, second place is not that far from first. It’s NOT AS GOOD nor will it EVER BE, but it is in the ball park, which is why adoption, and other combinations can be effective. Though they will always be number two, number three, and so forth, their abilities are not the ‘complimentary pair’ that nature invested in.

It also stands to reason that similar research on children will find that children will light up with recognition for their parents. In the crisis event above, that would mean older children will run to the parents. As they get older they change which they favor running to. Earliest always run to mom, which makes sense. Later runs more towards the nearest parent, which also makes sense. Even later they diverge when the male is large enough to help the father or be another line of defense, and a daughter can help the mother in the inner area.

This is why, despite lots of movies kissing women’s egos, when stuff happens and the woman is not paid to react (and sometimes when she is), its usually a male that jumps into action, often risking his life for strangers, and often in situations where most think action would be crazy. When they succeed they are heroes, when they fail they are fools.

Ideology will either have to fade away or will have to assert it to destroy the alternative sources of information that over time will end up building a case against the whole of the ideas that we have been living for 40 years. We will be freer when we no longer are chained to act in ways that we are not meant to act, and be in ways we are not meant to be, in order to prove a false ideology right. To act any other way, is to be shackled into a form that through its tight control makes one conform, and reforms one in the shape that it wants through contortion.

Tabula Rasa, is more like the blank idea, than truth. Most moms will tell you that, which is probably why feminists don’t really want women to be moms who are close and involved with their children. They would naturally know that what ideology asserts for political and control reasons is not real. One only has to cruise online to discover the testimony of feminist’s moms who have more than one kid of each sex. Or read Susan Pinker and find out how hormones and responses that stimulate or restrict them help control or mediate out proclivities throughout our life and the stages of life we enter and participate in.

Of course those that are most in line with our biological purpose are the ones we find most satisfying on deep levels. We find family satisfying, we find partners more satisfying than being alone. We like being in family groups, and we like being together, and depending on which stage of life we are in, we have needs to be closer or farther away. Serving ideology means you can’t serve yourself and those you love (if it allows you to have any), which means you deny those around you and they deny you the best life you can have. Is it any wonder when you look back from the revolution today, that we realize that it was better, and not in the same way that the people then said the old days were better. Theirs was a cry for familiarity, while ours is a cry for sanity.

Parental instinct found in the brain

A possible basis for parental instinct has been found in the brain, according to a team led by Oxford University scientists.

A report of the team’s research, published in the open-access journal PLoS One, describes how a region of the human brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex rapidly responds to the faces of unfamiliar infants but not to the faces of unfamiliar adults. The medial orbitofrontal cortex is located in the front of the brain, just over the eyeballs: it is a key region of the emotional brain and appears to monitor reward-related stimuli in the environment.

‘What we found was that the medial orbitofrontal cortex shows high activity within a seventh of a second of a person seeing an infant face but not an adult one,’ said Dr Morten Kringelbach of Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry, who led the work with Professor Alan Stein. ‘These responses are almost certainly too fast to be consciously controlled and so are probably instinctive.’

The finding could have important implications for approaches to postnatal depression, which affects approximately 13% of mothers in the UK. Depression has been linked to changed activity in the nearby subgenual cingulate cortex which is strongly connected with the medial orbitofrontal cortex. This lends support to the possibility that changes to activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex secondary to depression may adversely affect parental responsivity.

The researchers used a neuroimaging method called magnetoencephalography at Aston University to observe the brain activity of volunteers as they pressed a button as soon as an on-screen cross changed colour. Images of infant and adult faces, interspersed between these colour changes and not important to completing the task, were briefly shown for a third of a second.

‘What our experiment revealed was that the medial orbitofrontal cortex may provide the necessary emotional tagging of infant faces as special and plays a key role in establishing the parental bond,’ said Professor Alan Stein. ‘Further research could identify whether the responses to infant faces we have observed are affected – and even dampened – by depression.’

The researchers hope that the results could eventually help health professionals to develop interventions to help vulnerable parents.

Source: University of Oxford

One should compliment the “Pioneer of Criminal profiling” for coming forward and recanting that he helped jail an innocent man, however, how much damage will this revelation cause when later they then review ALL of his work?

However, possession is nine tenths of the law, and the state possesses Eddie Gilfoyle, and of course will not just let him go. Those who read as to such things will notice that after a woman recants a rape charge, the person stays in jail, as they claim its guilt of the woman, not recantation of false assertions.

Time will tell whether Eddie will get a break, though I will guess that is not much of a consolation prize being that he has been resident in prison for quite a while.

Hope for prisoner as expert recants on wife’s suicide letter

The pioneer of criminal profiling in Britain has switched sides to say that a man he helped to jail for life for murdering his wife is innocent.

Eddie Gilfoyle was prosecuted after David Canter, a psychology professor, told police that his hanged wife’s suicide note betrayed signs of having been faked. But research prompted by the case into the difference between genuine and false suicide notes has persuaded Professor Canter that Paula Gilfoyle, 32, was, indeed, the sole author of her final words.

Now campaigners for the jailed husband are hoping to use Professor Canter’s analysis of the suicide note as part of a fresh appeal.

On a June evening in 1992, Paula Gilfoyle’s body was found hanged in the garage of the home in Upton, Wirral, Merseyside, that she shared with her husband.

Mrs Gilfoyle, who worked in a local factory, was eight months pregnant and presented a cheery front to the world. But the long suicide note that she left spoke of a feeling of failure and unhappiness, and hinted at strains in her marriage. She told her husband not to blame himself, and even suggested that the baby was not his. There is an overwhelming feeling of guilt and self-blame in the note.

Friends and relatives refused to believe that she could have killed herself. They insisted that she had no cares and was looking forward to the birth of her first baby. Suspicion soon turned on her husband. Some work-mates told police that she had said that her husband, a hospital porter, had persuaded her to write a bogus suicide note as part of a course that he was taking on suicide. No such course existed.

However, Professor Canter points out, in a 10,000-word report on the case, that for the bogus suicide plot to have worked Gilfoyle would have had to persuade his wife to climb a ladder in the garage and allow a noose to be placed around her neck. There were no signs of force on her body.

Gilfoyle has always protested his innocence of what was portrayed as a calculated, evil plot to make his pregnant wife’s killing look like suicide.

When Merseyside police began to investigate Mrs Gilfoyle’s death, they consulted Professor Canter, who had been the first psychological profiler to be used by British police and who shared their doubts about the note.

His evidence formed part of the prosecution case, though it was never heard by the jury. He nonetheless believes that it helped to reinforce prosecutors’ determination to press ahead against Gilfoyle, who was convicted unanimously of murder in July 1993.

Professor Canter used a technique of linguistic analysis to try to establish whether Mrs Gilfoyle had composed her note. Police suspected that her husband had dictated it to her. But studies since, including one supervised by Professor Canter, have shown that errors can be produced by using simple word counts as the main basis for deciding authorship.

By chance, a couple of years after the conviction, Professor Canter moved to Merseyside, taking a post at the University of Liverpool. There, he came into contact with Gilfoyle’s relatives and eventually met the prisoner himself. “He wasn’t that creative an individual,” Professor Canter said. The academic then began looking closer into the science of suicide notes.

The most pertinent study was conducted 50 years ago by the founders of the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Centre, Edwin Schneidman and Norman Farberow. The two psychologists, pioneers in suicide prevention, compared genuine suicide notes with artificial ones written by people who had never been suicidal.

Their purpose was to look for ways to stop people taking their own lives. But Professor Canter made a study of those 1950s notes, along with other samples, to seek clues to how a genuine suicide note could be distinguished from an imagined one. It became clear that it is difficult to simulate the elements in a real suicide note. Professor Canter now uses Mrs Gilfoyle’s final handwritten lines, beginning “Dear Eddie” and ending “Goodnight and God bless, love Paula”, in his lectures.

“It is my opinion that the suicide note was written, unaided, by Paula Gilfoyle,” he said. “That this intention was genuine is difficult to determine, but the way in which the note appears to be the culmination of months of thinking of various possibilities for dealing with her situation, and indicates so directly that Paula could see no other way, is consistent with a very real determination to kill herself.”

Gilfoyle’s brother-in-law, Paul Caddick, a retired police sergeant who found Mrs Gilfoyle’s body and now runs the miscarriage of justice campaign, praised Professor Canter.

“He is a brave man,” Mr Caddick said. “We are very pleased he has come on to the defence side because he is a man of integrity. Obviously, for a long time, Eddie didn’t like him. When he came on to our side he said, ‘The bastard, he should’ve said the right thing in the first place’. But now he realises it was a dreadful mistake.”

Gilfoyle has already lost two appeals against conviction but his new legal team at Birnberg Peirce is preparing evidence to bring before the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

Merseyside Police said: “There was a lot of other evidence heard by the jury and he was convicted on that evidence.”

In making a point to a friend, I dusted off history (ok, my histories are not dusty, they are always used), and pulled out a poem. Reading it I couldnt help but see that if you changed a few of the words, it might apply to today. I quickly dashed off a version, though I will assume that a better one is possible with more careful selection.

First they came for the drug users,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a drug user.
Then they came for the fathers,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a father and didn’t believe.
Then they came for the oppressor class,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I thought I wasn’t on that side.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.

The original was written by Rev. Martin Niemoller on what happened to him in Germany.

First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945, version from TIME magazine

Rev. Martin Niemoller was protected until 1937 by both the foreign press and influential friends in the up-scale Berlin suburb where he preached. Eventually, he was arrested for treason. Perhaps due to foreign pressure, he was found guilty, but initially given only a suspended sentence. He was however then almost immediately re-arrested on Hitler’s direct orders. From then on until the end of WW II, he was held at the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. Near the end of the war, he narrowly escaped execution. [from Charles Colson’s Kingdoms in Conflict]

Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the antisemitic and homophobic organization Nation of Islam, has endorsed Barack Obama.

Speaking to thousands of members of the Nation of Islam at their annual convention Sunday in Chicago, Minister Louis Farrakhan praised presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama as the only hope for healing the nation’s racial divisions.

Farrakhan, 74, the longtime leader of the Nation of Islam, said the war in Iraq, the nation’s faltering economy and the increased number of natural disasters were signs of “a nation in peril.” He said those problems provide the broader context for Obama’s rise.

Now, how did the Obama campaign respond to an endorsement from this piece of garbage?

“Senator Obama has been clear in his objections to Minister Farrakhan’s past pronouncements and has not solicited the minister’s support,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton.

So, Obama objects to things in the past that Farrakhan has said. He doesn’t actually object to Farrakhan, the man himself. It’s as if you could actually separate what Farrakhan has said from his true nature, as if they don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other.

Is Obama so afraid of losing some black votes that he won’t denounce Farrakhan? Obama should state flat out that he doesn’t share Farrakhan’s beliefs and wants no part of his endorsement. And, if Obama is that gutless, or worse, if Obama really doesn’t repudiate what Farrakhan believes in, why should any reasonable person give Obama their support?

In fact, it appears that Obama’s failure to denounce Farrakhan may well indicate that he and Farrakhan are really kindred spirits.

During his interview on “Meet the Press,” Nader said that Sen. Obama had reversed his positions on Israel. Nader said Sen. Obama’s “better instincts and his knowledge have been censored by himself” and that Sen. Obama was “pro-Palestinian when he was in Illinois before he ran for the state Senate” and “during the state Senate.”

Sen. Obama has caught criticism for pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel statements and sentiments before. In March 2007, Sen. Obama was criticized for saying that “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinians.” Obama has also been criticized for stocking his campaign with several controversial advisors including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Malley, Samantha Power and Susan Rice.

“People should be very skeptical of Barack Obama’s shaky Middle East policies. When a long-time political activist like Ralph Nader, with a well-documented, anti-Israel bias, claims that Senator Obama shares this anti-Israel bias, that is alarming,” said RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks. “If Senator Obama supports Ralph Nader’s policies, which consistently condemn Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism, and if Sen. Obama has only reversed his positions to run for president, it once again raises serious questions about his grasp of the geo-political realities of the Middle East and puts into doubt his commitment to the safety and security of Israel. These are important questions we in the Jewish community will be asking.”

So again I ask, why would any reasonable person vote for Barack Obama given the information above? And, will Jewish Americans continue their reflexive support for the Democratic Presidential candidate despite his obvious animosity towards Jews and Israel?

There are 37 research reactors in the United States, mostly located on college campuses. Of these, 33 reactors are licensed and regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Four are operated by the Department of Energy and are located at three national laboratories. Although less powerful than commercial nuclear power reactors, research reactors may still be attractive targets for terrorists.

The US House of Representatives requested the Government Accountability Office to examine the basis on which DOE and NRC established the security and emergency response requirements for DOE and NRC-licensed research reactors, and to examine the progress that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has made in converting US research reactors that use highly enriched uranium to low enriched uranium fuel.

The DOE developed the security and emergency response requirements for its research reactors using its Design Basis Threat — a process that establishes a baseline threat for which minimum security measures should be developed. These research reactors benefit from the greater security required for the national laboratories where they are located, which store weapons-usable nuclear materials.

The DOE also has concluded that the consequences of an attack at some of its research reactors could be severe, causing radioactivity to be dispersed over many square miles and requiring the evacuation of nearby areas. As a result, all facilities where DOE reactors are located have extensive plans and procedures for responding to security incidents.

NRC based its security and emergency response requirements largely on the regulations it had in place before September 2001. NRC decided that the security assessment it conducted between 2003 and 2006 showed that these requirements were sufficient. While it was conducting this assessment, NRC worked with licensees to improve security when weaknesses were detected.

However, GAO found that NRC’s assessment contains questionable assumptions that create uncertainty about whether the assessment reflects the full range of security risks and potential consequences of attacks on research reactors. For example, Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) — a contractor NRC used to assist in performing its assessment — found that some NRC-licensed research reactors may not be prepared for certain types of attacks.

However, NRC disagreed with SNL’s finding. In 2006, NRC concluded that the consequences of attacks would result in minimal radiological exposure to the public. In addition, NRC assumed that terrorists would use certain tactics in attacking a reactor but did not fully consider alternative attack scenarios that could be more damaging.

The NRC assumed that a small part of a reactor could be damaged in an attack, resulting in the release of only a small amount of radioactivity. However, according to experts at Idaho National Laboratories and the Department of Homeland Security, it is possible that a larger part of a reactor could be damaged, which could result in the release of larger amounts of radioactivity.

The NNSA has made progress in changing from HEU to LEU fuel in U.S. research reactors but may face difficulty in converting some of the remaining research reactors. Since 1978, NNSA has converted eight currently operating U.S. research reactors, including two in 2006.

Also, the NNSA plans to convert 10 more U.S. research reactors by September 2014 — five of which are scheduled for conversion by 2009. However, NNSA faces difficulties in converting the remaining five reactors because these reactors cannot operate with the currently available LEU fuel. NNSA is now developing a new LEU fuel that will allow the remaining five reactors to operate.

But, according to NNSA, developing this fuel has been problematic, as early efforts experienced failures during testing. NNSA officials acknowledged that further setbacks are likely to delay plans to convert these research reactors.

Jim Kouri, CPP is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police and he’s a staff writer for the New Media Alliance (thenma.org). Kouri also serves as political advisor for Emmy and Golden Globe winning actor Michael Moriarty.

He’s former chief at a New York City housing project in Washington Heights nicknamed “Crack City” by reporters covering the drug war in the 1980s. In addition, he served as director of public safety at a New Jersey university and director of security for several major organizations. He’s also served on the National Drug Task Force and trained police and security officers throughout the country. Kouri writes for many police and security magazines including Chief of Police, Police Times, The Narc Officer and others. He’s a news writer for TheConservativeVoice.Com and PHXnews.com. He’s also a columnist for AmericanDaily.Com, MensNewsDaily.Com, MichNews.Com, and he’s syndicated by AXcessNews.Com. He’s appeared as on-air commentator for over 100 TV and radio news and talk shows including Oprah, McLaughlin Report, CNN Headline News, MTV, Fox News, etc. His book Assume The Position is available at Amazon.Com. Kouri’s own website is located at http://jimkouri.us

NewsMax.com. WASHINGTON — Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama are paying a price for artful dodges on trade over the years.

Thanks to past equivocations, the Democratic presidential candidates
have left themselves open to the criticisms and misrepresentations they
are now turning against each other as they scramble to dissociate
themselves from a trade agreement they once praised _ with
qualifications.

The root of their ambivalence is their shared belief in “free and
fair trade,” which, on the surface, almost anyone can subscribe to.

The problem is that “fair” trade means restrictions on “free” trade,
a gloss-over that allows politicians to have it both ways when saying
where they stand on NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and
similar deals.

In picking apart the other’s this-but-that position, they are
seizing on the “this,” and ignoring the “that,” in the interest of
winning voters in the primary next week in Ohio, where the trade deal
is blamed for lost jobs.

The dustup spilled into the streets Tuesday when dozens of
protesters who oppose free trade gathered outside Clinton’s office in
New York City. Several apparently shackled themselves to a front door
of the building before police came.

continue …

Stiff Right Jab responds. To get the honest-to-goodness scoop on NAFTA and how you can fight it, there is no better place to visit than JBS.org,
and no better organization to join hands with in this fight for
American sovereignty and American jobs. NAFTA, and the larger project
the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas,
and yet again, The Transatlantic Union, is not about free trade nor
fair trade, but managed trade and forced interdependence at the expense
of the American economy and your liberties. Click here to learn more.

Technorati Tags: stiff right jab, barach obama, campaign 2008, democrats, fair trade, free trade, ftaa, hillary clinton, managed trade, nafta, Transatlantic Union

The Chicago Sun Times has a list of 8 things that voters need to know about Obama and Tony Rezko.  And, uh, they aren’t good (just in case you were wondering).

1. They met in 1990. Obama was a student at Harvard Law School and got an unsolicited job offer from Rezko, then a low-income housing developer in Chicago. Obama turned it down.

2. Obama took a job in 1993 with a small Chicago law firm, Davis Miner Barnhill, that represents developers — primarily not-for-profit groups — building low-income housing with government funds.

3. One of the firm’s not-for-profit clients — the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp., co-founded by Obama’s then-boss Allison Davis — was partners with Rezko’s company in a 1995 deal to convert an abandoned nursing home at 61st and Drexel into low-income apartments. Altogether, Obama spent 32 hours on the project, according to the firm. Only five hours of that came after Rezko and WPIC became partners, the firm says. The rest of the future senator’s time was helping WPIC strike the deal with Rezko. Rezko’s company, Rezmar Corp., also partnered with the firm’s clients in four later deals — none of which involved Obama, according to the firm. In each deal, Rezmar “made the decisions for the joint venture,” says William Miceli, an attorney with the firm.

4. In 1995, Obama began campaigning for a seat in the Illinois Senate. Among his earliest supporters: Rezko. Two Rezko companies donated a total of $2,000. Obama was elected in 1996 — representing a district that included 11 of Rezko’s 30 low-income housing projects.

5. Rezko’s low-income housing empire began crumbling in 2001, when his company stopped making mortgage payments on the old nursing home that had been converted into apartments. The state foreclosed on the building — which was in Obama’s Illinois Senate district.

6. In 2003, Obama announced he was running for the U.S. Senate, and Rezko — a member of his campaign finance committee — held a lavish fund-raiser June 27, 2003, at his Wilmette mansion.

7. A few months after Obama became a U.S. senator, he and Rezko’s wife, Rita, bought adjacent pieces of property from a doctor in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood — a deal that has dogged Obama the last two years. The doctor sold the mansion to Obama for $1.65 million — $300,000 below the asking price. Rezko’s wife paid full price — $625,000 — for the adjacent vacant lot. The deals closed in June 2005. Six months later, Obama paid Rezko’s wife $104,500 for a strip of her land, so he could have a bigger yard. At the time, it had been widely reported that Tony Rezko was under federal investigation. Questioned later about the timing of the Rezko deal, Obama called it “boneheaded” because people might think the Rezkos had done him a favor.

8. Eight months later — in October 2006 — Rezko was indicted on charges he solicited kickbacks from companies seeking state pension business under his friend Gov. Blagojevich. Federal prosecutors maintain that $10,000 from the alleged kickback scheme was donated to Obama’s run for the U.S. Senate. Obama has given the money to charity.

Just another important set of facts to keep in mind as Election Day rolls around.

Heather MacDonald takes the feminists to task with one of the best articles exposing the campus rape myth and the feminists that make it so.

The Campus Rape Myth
The reality: bogus statistics, feminist victimology, and university-approved sex toys

It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged campus rape epidemic—but no one calls. Could this mean that the crisis is overblown? No: it means, according to the campus sexual-assault industry, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering.

The campus rape movement highlights the current condition of radical feminism, from its self-indulgent bathos to its embrace of ever more vulnerable female victimhood. But the movement is an even more important barometer of academia itself. In a delicious historical irony, the baby boomers who dismantled the university’s intellectual architecture in favor of unbridled sex and protest have now bureaucratized both. While women’s studies professors bang pots and blow whistles at antirape rallies, in the dorm next door, freshman counselors and deans pass out tips for better orgasms and the use of sex toys. The academic bureaucracy is roomy enough to sponsor both the dour antimale feminism of the college rape movement and the promiscuous hookup culture of student life. The only thing that doesn’t fit into the university’s new commitments is serious scholarly purpose.

The campus rape industry’s central tenet is that one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years (completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes by a ratio of about three to two). The girls’ assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.

This claim, first published in Ms. magazine in 1987, took the universities by storm. By the early 1990s, campus rape centers and 24-hour hotlines were opening across the country, aided by tens of millions of dollars of federal funding. Victimhood rituals sprang up: first the Take Back the Night rallies, in which alleged rape victims reveal their stories to gathered crowds of candle-holding supporters; then the Clothesline Project, in which T-shirts made by self-proclaimed rape survivors are strung on campus, while recorded sounds of gongs and drums mark minute-by-minute casualties of the “rape culture.” A special rhetoric emerged: victims’ family and friends were “co-survivors”; “survivors” existed in a larger “community of survivors.”

An army of salesmen took to the road, selling advice to administrators on how to structure sexual-assault procedures, and lecturing freshmen on the “undetected rapists” in their midst. Rape bureaucrats exchanged notes at such gatherings as the Inter Ivy Sexual Assault Conferences and the New England College Sexual Assault Network. Organizations like One in Four and Men Can Stop Rape tried to persuade college boys to redefine their masculinity away from the “rape culture.” The college rape infrastructure shows no signs of a slowdown. In 2006, for example, Yale created a new Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center, despite numerous resources for rape victims already on campus.

If the one-in-four statistic is correct—it is sometimes modified to “one-in-five to one-in-four”—campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No crime, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20 or 25 percent, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in America, was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants—a rate of 2.4 percent. The one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, millions of young women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience. Such a crime wave would require nothing less than a state of emergency—Take Back the Night rallies and 24-hour hotlines would hardly be adequate to counter this tsunami of sexual violence. Admissions policies letting in tens of thousands of vicious criminals would require a complete revision, perhaps banning boys entirely. The nation’s nearly 10 million female undergrads would need to take the most stringent safety precautions. Certainly, they would have to alter their sexual behavior radically to avoid falling prey to the rape epidemic.

None of this crisis response occurs, of course—because the crisis doesn’t exist. During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory had discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results—very few women said that they had been. So Ms. commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way of measuring the prevalence of rape. Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had experienced actions that she then classified as rape. Koss’s method produced the 25 percent rate, which Ms. then published.

Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further—though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her—42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.

All subsequent feminist rape studies have resulted in this discrepancy between the researchers’ conclusions and the subjects’ own views. A survey of sorority girls at the University of Virginia found that only 23 percent of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped—a result that the university’s director of Sexual and Domestic Violence Services calls “discouraging.” Equally damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice. Sixty-five percent of what the feminist researchers called “completed rape” victims and three-quarters of “attempted rape” victims said that they did not think that their experiences were “serious enough to report.” The “victims” in the study, moreover, “generally did not state that their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries,” report the researchers.

Just as a reality check, consider an actual student-related rape: in 2006, Labrente Robinson and Jacoby Robinson broke into the Philadelphia home of a Temple University student and a Temple graduate, and anally, vaginally, and orally penetrated the women, including with a gun. The chance that the victims would not consider this event “serious enough to report,” or physically and emotionally injurious, is exactly nil. In short, believing in the campus rape epidemic depends on ignoring women’s own interpretations of their experiences—supposedly the most grievous sin in the feminist political code.

None of the obvious weaknesses in the research has had the slightest drag on the campus rape movement, because the movement is political, not empirical. In a rape culture, which “condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as a norm,” sexual assault will wind up underreported, argued the director of Yale’s Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center in a March 2007 newsletter. You don’t need evidence for the rape culture; you simply know that it exists. But if you do need evidence, the underreporting of rape is the best proof there is.

Campus rape researchers may feel that they know better than female students themselves about the students’ sexual experiences, but the students are voting with their feet and staying away in droves from the massive rape apparatus built up since the Ms. article. Referring to rape hotlines, rape consultant Brett Sokolow laments: “The problem is, on so many of our campuses, very few people ever call. And mostly, we’ve resigned ourselves to the under-utilization of these resources.”

Federal law requires colleges to publish reported crimes affecting their students. The numbers of reported sexual assaults—the law does not require their confirmation—usually run under half a dozen a year on private campuses and maybe two to three times that at large public universities. You might think that having so few reports of sexual assault a year would be a point of pride; in fact, it’s a source of gall for students and administrators alike. Yale’s associate general counsel and vice president were clearly on the defensive when asked by the Yale alumni magazine in 2004 about Harvard’s higher numbers of reported assaults; the reporter might as well have been needling them about a Harvard-Yale football rout. “Harvard must have double-counted or included incidents not required by federal law,” groused the officials. The University of Virginia does not publish the number of its sexual-assault hearings because it is so low. “We’re reticent to publicize it when we have such a small ‘n’ number,” says Nicole Eramu, Virginia’s associate dean of students.

Campuses do everything they can to get their numbers of reported and adjudicated sexual assaults up—adding new categories of lesser offenses, lowering the burden of proof, and devising hearing procedures that will elicit more assault charges. At Yale, it is the accuser who decides whether the accused may confront her—a sacrifice of one of the great Anglo-Saxon truth-finding procedures. “You don’t want them to not come to the board and report, do you?” asks physics professor Peter Parker, convener of the university’s Sexual Harassment Grievance Board.

The scarcity of reported sexual assaults means that the women who do report them must be treated like rare treasures. New York University’s Wellness Exchange counsels people to “believe unconditionally” in sexual-assault charges because “only 2 percent of reported rapes are false reports” (a ubiquitous claim that dates from radical feminist Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 tract Against Our Will). As Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson point out in their book Until Proven Innocent, however, the rate of false reports is at least 9 percent and probably closer to 50 percent. Just how powerful is the “believe unconditionally” credo? David Lisak, a University of Massachusetts psychology professor who lectures constantly on the antirape college circuit, acknowledged to a hall of Rutgers students this November that the “Duke case,” in which a black stripper falsely accused three white Duke lacrosse players of rape in 2006, “has raised the issue of false allegations.” But Lisak didn’t want to talk about the Duke case, he said. “I don’t know what happened at Duke. No one knows.” Actually, we do know what happened at Duke: the prosecutor ignored clearly exculpatory evidence and alibis that cleared the defendants, and was later disbarred for his misconduct. But to the campus rape industry, a lying plaintiff remains a victim of the patriarchy, and the accused remain forever under suspicion.

So what reality does lie behind the campus rape industry? A booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands. Students in the sixties demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. “We’re adults,” the students shouted. “We can manage our own lives. If we want to have members of the opposite sex in our rooms at any hour of the day or night, that’s our right.” The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora’s box of boorish, sluttish behavior that gets cruder each year. Do the boys, riding the testosterone wave, act thuggishly toward the girls? You bet! Do the girls try to match their insensitivity? Indisputably.

College girls drink themselves into near or actual oblivion before and during parties. That drinking is often goal-oriented, suggests University of Virginia graduate Karin Agness: it frees the drinker from responsibility and “provides an excuse for engaging in behavior that she ordinarily wouldn’t.” A Columbia University security official marvels at the scene at homecomings: “The women are shit-faced, saying, ‘Let’s get as drunk as we can,’ while the men are hovering over them.” As anticipated, the night can include a meaningless sexual encounter with a guy whom the girl may not even know. This less-than-romantic denouement produces the “roll and scream: you roll over the next morning so horrified at what you find next to you that you scream,” a Duke coed reports in Laura Sessions Stepp’s recent book Unhooked. To the extent that they’re remembered at all, these are the couplings that are occasionally transformed into “rape”—though far less often than the campus rape industry wishes.

The magazine Saturday Night: Untold Stories of Sexual Assault at Harvard, produced by Harvard’s Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, provides a first-person account of such a coupling:

What can I tell you about being raped? Very little. I remember drinking with some girlfriends and then heading to a party in the house that some seniors were throwing. I’m told that I walked in and within 5 minutes was making out with one of the guys who lived there, who I’d talked to some in the dining hall but never really hung out with. I may have initiated it. I don’t remember arriving at the party; I dimly remember waking up at some point in the early morning in this guy’s room. I remember him walking me back to my room. I couldn’t have made it alone; I still had too much alcohol in my system to even stand up straight. I made myself vulnerable and even now it’s hard to think that someone here who I have talked and laughed with could be cold-hearted enough to take advantage of that vulnerability. I’d rather, sometimes, take half the blame than believe that a profound evil can exist in mankind. But it’s easy for me to say, that, of the two of us, I’m the only one who still has nightmares, found myself panicking and detaching during sex for many months afterwards, and spent more time looking into the abyss than any one person should.
The inequalities of the consequences of the night, the actions taken unintentionally or not, have changed the course of only one of our lives, irrevocably and profoundly.
Now perhaps the male willfully exploited the narrator’s self-inflicted incapacitation; if so, he deserves censure for taking advantage of a female in distress. But to hold the narrator completely without responsibility requires stripping women of volition and moral agency. Though the Harvard victim does not remember her actions, it’s highly unlikely that she passed out upon arriving at the party and was dragged away like roadkill while other students looked on. Rather, she probably participated voluntarily in the usual prelude to intercourse, and probably even in intercourse itself, however woozily.

Even if the Harvard victim’s drunkenness cancels any responsibility that she might share for the interaction’s finale, is she equally without responsibility for all of her behavior up to that point, including getting so drunk that she can’t remember anything? Campus rape ideology holds that inebriation strips women of responsibility for their actions but preserves male responsibility not only for their own actions but for their partners’ as well. Thus do men again become the guardians of female well-being.

As for the story’s maudlin melodrama, perhaps the narrator’s life really has been “irrevocably” changed, for which one sympathizes. One can’t help observing, however, that the effect of this “profound evil” on at least her sex life appears to have been minimal—she “detached” during sex for “many months afterwards,” but sex she most certainly had. Real rape victims, however, can fear physical intimacy for years, along with suffering a host of other terrors. We don’t know if the narrator’s “look into the abyss” led her to reconsider getting plastered before parties and initiating sexual contact with casual acquaintances. But if a Harvard student doesn’t understand that getting very drunk and becoming physically involved with a boy at a hookup party carries a serious probability of intercourse, she’s at the wrong university, if she should be at college at all.

A large number of complicating factors make the Saturday Night story a far more problematic case than the term “rape” usually implies. Unlike the campus rape industry, most students are well aware of those complicating factors, which is why there are so few rape charges brought for college sex. But if the rape industrialists are so sure that foreseeable and seemingly cooperative drunken sex amounts to rape, there are some obvious steps that they could take to prevent it. Above all, they could persuade girls not to put themselves into situations whose likely outcome is intercourse. Specifically: don’t get drunk, don’t get into bed with a guy, and don’t take off your clothes or allow them to be removed. Once you’re in that situation, the rape activists could say, it’s going to be hard to halt the proceedings, for lots of complex emotional reasons. Were this advice heeded, the campus “rape” epidemic would be wiped out overnight.

But suggest to a rape bureaucrat that female students should behave with greater sexual restraint as a preventive measure, and you might as well be saying that the girls should enter a convent or don the burka. “I am uncomfortable with the idea,” e-mailed Hillary Wing-Richards, the associate director of the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Women’s Resource Center at James Madison University in Virginia. “This indicates that if [female students] are raped it could be their fault—it is never their fault—and how one dresses does not invite rape or violence. . . . I would never allow my staff or myself to send the message it is the victim’s fault due to their dress or lack of restraint in any way.” Putting on a tight tank top doesn’t, of course, lead to what the bureaucrats call “rape.” But taking off that tank top does increase the risk of sexual intercourse that will be later regretted, especially when the tank-topper has been intently mainlining rum and Cokes all evening.

The baby boomers who demanded the dismantling of all campus rules governing the relations between the sexes now sit in dean’s offices and student-counseling services. They cannot turn around and argue for reregulating sex, even on pragmatic grounds. Instead, they have responded to the fallout of the college sexual revolution with bizarre and anachronistic legalism. Campuses have created a judicial infrastructure for responding to postcoital second thoughts more complex than that required to adjudicate maritime commerce claims in Renaissance Venice.

University of Virginia students, for example, have at least three different procedural channels open to them following carnal knowledge: they may demand a formal adjudication before the Sexual Assault Board; they can request a “Structured Meeting” with the Office of the Dean of Students by filing a formal complaint; or they can seek voluntary mediation. The Structured Meetings are presided over by the chair of the Sexual Assault Board, with assistance from another board member or senior staff of the Office of the Dean of Students. The Structured Meeting, according to the university, is an “opportunity for the complainant to confront the accused and communicate their feelings and perceptions regarding the incident, the impact of the incident and their wishes and expectations regarding protection in the future.” Mediation, on the other hand, “allows both you and the accused to discuss your respective understandings of the assault with the guidance of a trained professional,” says the school’s sexual-assault center.

Rarely have primal lust and carousing been more weirdly paired with their opposites. Out in the real world, people who regret a sexual coupling must work it out on their own; no counterpart exists outside academia for this superstructure of hearings, mediations, and negotiated settlements. If you’ve actually been raped, you go to criminal court—but the overwhelming majority of campus “rape” cases that take up administration time and resources would get thrown out of court in a twinkling, which is why they’re almost never prosecuted. Indeed, if the campus rape industry really believes that these hookup encounters are rape, it is unconscionable to leave them to flimsy academic procedures. “Universities are equipped to handle plagiarism, not rape,” observes University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors. “Sexual-assault charges, if true, are so serious as to belong only in the criminal system.”

Risk-management consultants travel the country to help colleges craft legal rules for student sexual congress. These rules presume that an activity originating in inchoate desire, whose nuances have taxed the expressive powers of poets, artists, and philosophers for centuries, can be reduced to a species of commercial code. The process of crafting these rules combines a voyeuristic prurience and a seeming cluelessness about sex. “It is fun,” writes Alan D. Berkowitz, a popular campus rape lecturer and consultant, “to ask students how they know if someone is sexually interested in them.” (Fun for whom? one must ask.) Continues Berkowitz: “Many of the responses rely on guesswork and inference to determine sexual intent.” Such signaling mechanisms, dating from the dawn of the human race, are no longer acceptable on the rape-sensitized campus. “In fact,” explains our consultant, “sexual intent can only be determined by clear and unambiguous communication about what is desired.” So much for seduction and romance; bring in the MBAs and lawyers.

The campus sex-management industry locks in its livelihood by introducing a specious clarity to what is inherently mysterious and an equally specious complexity to what is straightforward. Both the pseudo-clarity and pseudo-complexity work in a woman’s favor, of course. “If one partner puts a condom on the other, does that signify that they are consenting to intercourse?” asks Berkowitz. Short of guiding the thus-sheathed instrumentality to port, it’s hard to imagine a clearer signal of consent. But perhaps a girl who has just so outfitted her partner will decide after the fact that she has been “raped”—so better to declare the action, as Berkowitz does, “inherently ambiguous.” He recommends instead that colleges require “clear verbal consent” for sex, a policy that the recently disbanded Antioch College introduced in the early 1990s to universal derision.

The university is sneaking back in its in loco parentis oversight of student sexual relations, but it has replaced the moral content of that regulation with supposedly neutral legal procedure. The generation that got rid of parietal rules has re-created a form of bedroom oversight as pervasive as Bentham’s Panopticon.

But the post-1960s university is nothing if not capacious. It has institutionalized every strand of adolescent-inspired rebellion familiar since student sit-in days. The campus rape industry may decry ubiquitous male predation, but a campus sex industry puts bureaucratic clout behind the message that students should have recreational sex at every opportunity.

In late October, for example, New York University’s professional “sexpert” set up her wares in the light-filled atrium of the Kimmel Student Center. Along with the usual baskets of lubricated condoms, female condoms, and dental dams (a lesbian-inspired latex innovation for “safe” oral sex), Alyssa La Fosse, looking thoroughly professional in a neatly coiffed bun, also provided brightly colored instructional sheets on such important topics as “How to Female Ejaculate” (“First take some time to get aroused. Lube up your fingers and let them do the walking”) and “Masturbation Tips for Girls” (“Draw a circle around your clitoris with your index finger”). In a heroic effort at inclusiveness, she also provided a pamphlet called “Exploring Your Options: Abstinence,” but a reader could be forgiven for thinking that he had mistakenly grabbed the menu of activities at a West Village bathhouse. NYU’s officially approved “abstinence options” include “outercourse, mutual masturbation, pornography, and sex toys such as vibrators, dildos, and a paddle.” Ever the responsible parent-surrogate, NYU recommends that “abstinence” practitioners cover their sex toys “with a condom if they are to be inserted in the mouth, anus, or vagina.”

The students passing La Fosse’s table showed a greater interest in the free Hershey’s Kisses than in the latex accessories and informational sheets; very occasionally, someone would grab a condom. No one brought “questions about sexuality or sexual health” to La Fosse, despite the university’s official invitation to do so. NYU is not about to be daunted in its mission of promoting better sex, however. So it also offers workshops on orgasms—“how to achieve that (sometimes elusive) state”—and “Sex Toys for Safer Sex” (“an evening with rubber, silicone, and vibrating toys”) in residence halls and various student clubs.

Similarly, Brown University’s Student Services helps students answer the compelling question: “How can I bring sex toys into my relationship?” Brown categorizes sex toys by function (“Some sex toys are meant to be used more gently, while others are used for sexual acts involving dominance and submission . . . suc