There are sound reasons why the polity would want both female and male legislators. Each brings different perspectives to the process, and all perspectives ought to be brought to the forefront, discussed, understood. Law needs to be considered, vetted, appreciated, from all points of view. Anything less will produce myopia, and result in more of the unintended consequences that plague society.

So Nevada, with 39.7% female legislators, “near the top” as it’s vaguely described, seems to be doing pretty well, right? Except it’s not just percentages or lady parts.

Cheaper tampons. Office breaks to pump breast milk. No co-pay on birth control.

These are not the talking points of a ladies’ happy hour. They are among the State Senate and Assembly bills being considered in the Nevada Legislature. Not only were the bills designed solely with women in mind, they each were sponsored by a female lawmaker.

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After reading the post at the conservative student newspaper, the Claremont Independent, and the letter sent to Claremont College president, David Oxtoby, the impression was that this was just another Wellesley College debacle, stupid children filled with an excess of passion and empty jargon, and just shy of a full complement of logic. But then I saw Walter Olson’s reply to a twit by some random fool.

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It sucks to be Israel, a rational player in an irrational game. You can rightfully criticize its policies. This sentence has two very distinct meanings, one beingthat its policies toward the Palestinians can be justifiably criticized as unduly harsh and aggressive. But it also means you have the ability to criticize its policies, because it allows for criticism. Its neighbors are not so generous.

Marwan Barghouti was a member of the Palestinian parliament. He was also the head of the Tanzim militia. In the former, he was a proponent of the two-state solution, a position that many, Jews included, agree with. In the latter, he was convicted of killing five people in what was described as a terrorist attack, for which he was sentenced by an Israeli court to five life sentences.

Notably, he was neither stoned to death nor had his head chopped off. Also notably, he was able to write an op-ed for the New York Times to express his views. It’s a political polemic, for sure, reflecting his perception of the legitimacy of his views and the horrors of his captors. Continue reading →

Creating new constitutionally protected “rights” with warm and fuzzy sounding names has become the weapon of choice for the progressive left. Who can be against dignity and privacy? And as is invariably the case, the other team eventually figures out the method to the madness and does it too.

A Colorado State Senator, Kevin Lundberg (R-Berthoud), has introduced a bill to protect “the fundamental right of conscience.” Senate Bill 283 is called, “The Right To Disagree.”

The main point of this bill:

Discrimination laws (rightfully) demand that all people are treated equally, and the business must provide those products and services to all who seek them. But business owners should not be forced to provide products and services that violate their conscience. The business owner should be able to identify the scope of their business and not be forced to go beyond, into any business practice with which they disagree.

What person doesn’t want the right to disagree? This person. Continue reading →

Josie Duffy Rice’s twit got 197 hearts and 73 retwits. By any empirical measure, she won.

In response, Josie twitted: “you’re making things mutually exclusive that aren’t.” That’s kinda true, but not really. There will be times, circumstances, when the two overlap, but that doesn’t change the job. Continue reading →

This is the conversation that began it all, assuming the cynical voice in my head is telling the truth:

Student A: Charles Murray is going to speak here and he’s a racist!
Student B: Oh my god, that’s awful. We can’t let that happen! We must stop him before he normalizes racism!  Who’s Charles Murray?
Student A: He’s a racist! Everybody says so. He says blacks are genetically intellectually inferior.
Student B: Such hate speech! Where did he say that?
Student A: In a book called “The Bell Curve.”
Student B: That’s horrifying. Did you read it?
Student A: Are you kidding? I would never read that racist’s filth.
Student B: Oh, absolutely. It’s our privileged duty to stop this racist.
Student A: So you’ll come out and protest, burn down the auditorium if we have to so that this racist can’t spread his hate speech?
Student B: Of course! If I can find something black that’s cute. It’s so exhausting finding just the right outfit to wear to a riot.

A simple study, using the text of Charles Murray’s talk, stripped of his name, ended up showing that he was, at worst, spreading ideas that were deemed “moderate.”  Not moderate by shitlord racist standards, but by the standards of academics. Continue reading →

There was a march yesterday, a glorious march, to force Trump to release his tax returns, or at least force Congress to make him. Perhaps word spread across the resistance Facebook page that if the march was glorious enough, Article VIII of the Constitution would kick in, Trump would be stripped of the presidency and Hillary would be installed in his place. A few hundred showed up. The rest twitted their heads off.

Trump remains president. How could this be since they are the majority and so very passionate?

Nobody noticed that Liberty House was closing its doors. They were too busy saving the world, one twit at a time. Liberty House was how those greedy, evil, materialistic, racist, sexist boomers who ruined everything did activism.

In 1966, a small store called Liberty House, with precisely this in mind, opened at 343¼ Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. Abbie Hoffman, through his involvement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was the manager. Liberty House sold handbags, book bags, dresses, children’s clothes, pillows, quilts and other “crafts of freedom,” as they were known, produced by an outfit called the Poor People’s Corporation.

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Not being deeply engrossed by the sort of general tech stuff that typically appears at Wired, this would never have come onto my radar but for Radley Balko’s twit: “This article is badly misinformed.” That’s sort of like saying that 2 Girls 1 Cup is inappropriate for a kid’s birthday party. At risk is that readers of Wired aren’t lawyers, or likely remotely aware of the scope and depth of issues at the intersection of law and science. It was a post about “forensic science.” Oh boy.

For those who believe Wired to be a credible source, and aren’t put off by a freelancer, Emma Grey Ellis, who has nothing in her background to suggest she’s qualified to write on the subject, offering a “think piece” on something about which she’s incapable of intelligent thought, this presents a problem. Every person who reads it is likely to be stupider for having done so. Not that they’ll realize it, and they will bask in the certainty of Dunning-Kruger that they are now well-informed.

Radley runs through a twitstorm of problems with the article. Like Ellis, he’s not a lawyer. Unlike Ellis, he knows forensic science well. Indeed, having put in serious effort to debunk junk science, he’s worthy of being called an expert on the subject. It’s not that Ellis, not merely a non-expert, but exceptionally shallow, isn’t allowed to expound on her baseless views, but that the attributed credibility of appearing in Wired suggests to the unwary that she knows what she’s talking about. She does not.

While the post is long and simplistic, one fundamental point Ellis raises is so utterly absurd as to demand further attention. Continue reading →

Unbeknownst to many, if you’re a federal agency, you have regulations. And if you have regulations, you need people with guns to enforce them. NASA is not special. They have their enforcers too. The difference may be that the kind of law enforcers who go to war for NASA lack the enemies who engender the fear and fury of regular folks, so they feel a bit lonely, unappreciated, less than respected.

But when an enemy of the state appears, giving them reason to flex their law enforcement muscle, they seize the opportunity with gusto. Norman Conley saw his opening and he went for it.

Joann Davis, and her late husband Robert, worked together at North American Rockwell, which had a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (“NASA”) in connection with the nation’s space program. By all accounts, Robert was a brilliant engineer, and he ultimately became a manager of North American Rockwell’s Apollo project. While working on the space program, he received many items of memorabilia, including two lucite paperweights. One contained a rice-grain-sized fragment of lunar material, or “moon rock;” the other contained a small piece of the Apollo 11 heat shield. According to unverified family lore, the paperweights were given to Robert by Neil Armstrong in recognition of Robert’s service to NASA.

A heartwarming tale of hard work, brilliance, contribution to the space program and the appreciation of an astronaut. Except Conley’s heart was cold. Continue reading →

The death of New York Court of Appeals Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam was tragic and shocking. But that her death is being attributed to suicide makes it also bewildering.

In the hours after her body was found, the police said they were treating her death as a suicide. The judge, 65, had recently told friends and a doctor that she was suffering from stress. And tragedy had followed her closely: On Easter in 2012, her mother committed suicide at age 92, according to two law enforcement officials. Two years later, around the same holiday, her brother shot himself to death, the officials said.

There would appear to be a thread of mental illness in her family, though no one has come out and said this, and I’m certainly not qualified to offer a meaningful opinion. Her doctor spoke of the stress she was under, the demands of her job as a judge on the state’s highest court, for speeches, for life with her new husband of eight months, her third new husband.

Still, no one saw this coming. Continue reading →