At the outset, when Mary Anne Franks was first trying to establish revenge porn as a crime and denying to anyone who would listen that it didn’t violate the First Amendment, there was one hurdle even she couldn’t ignore. Mind you, she was too petty a person to admit she was wrong, but she quietly changed course to include a carve out for newsworthiness, as she was told and vehemently denied, from Day 1, was a fundamental flaw with her cries.

First term congresswoman Katie Hill, 32, resigned following the publication of photographs of, among other things, her engaging in a sexual relations with a 24-year-old staffer. What these say about her,and her decision to resign, is for others to worry about. But the cry immediately rose across the internet that Hill was a victim of revenge porn.

From the usual coterie of crazies, Jessica Valenti somehow managed to blame it on Harvey Weinstein. Continue reading →

In a scathing op-ed, professor emeritus at the University of Kent, Frank Furedi, ripped the decision by the Oxford student union to replace applause with “jazz hands.”

A new nadir was reached last week with reports that Oxford University Students Union is to replace clapping with ‘jazz hands’, where participants signal approval by silently waving both hands at the sides of their bodies, palms facing outwards.

The purported justification for this is to avoid offending those who are upset by loud noise.

In the words of the student union’s welfare and equal opportunities officer: ‘The policy was proposed to encourage the use of British Sign Language clapping to make events more accessible and inclusive for all, including people who suffer from anxiety.’

Continue reading →

It’s all there for the finding. All we have to do is look. It seems so obvious to so many, particularly those with an abiding faith in the power of algorithms to accomplish the task of sifting through millions of exchanges online for key words that could save lives, unearth crimes, help people. Who doesn’t want to help people?

Dozens of female high school students gathered at Maxar Technologies on Friday for an event to encourage them to further their interests and capabilities in STEM. The keynote speaker at the American Heart Association’s “Bring Stem To Life” event was 18-year-old Sherya Nallapati, a science, technology, engineering and math student who is working on a technology that scans social media profiles for potential mass shooting threats.

Getting girls interested in STEM is a goal on its own.  It’s an oddity, since the majority of college students are female, they can major in science or math if they so choose and to the extent the rationalization is that guys in STEM are unwelcoming to them (as if being made to feel special and welcome is the primary criterion for what one studies for their future career), they could seize control of STEM majors by their sheer numbers and leave the nasty male geeks in the dust. But anything involving women in STEM gets extra attention. Continue reading →

An op-ed in the New York Times has caught fire because it’s, well, completely nuts. Two 17-year-old boys of Indian descent are alleged to have engaged in some truly awful conduct toward four black middle school girls, including urinating on one of them. What this indicates, beyond two kids engaged in bad behavior, is unclear to any rational person. But Nell Irvin Painter isn’t such a person, so naturally she was given real estate in the Times.

While it’s tempting to see the reported ethnicity of the boys suspected in the assault as complicating the story and raising questions about whether the assault should be thought of as racist, I look at it through a different lens. Instead of asking what the boys’ reported racial identity tells us about the nature of the attack, we should see the boys as enacting American whiteness through anti-black assault in a very traditional way. In doing so, the assailants are demonstrating how race is a social construct that people make through their actions.

Don’t try. You’ll just hurt yourself. Nothing about this paragraph makes any logical sense, and Painter’s position as a professor at Princeton suggests that you might want to send your children elsewhere if they’re into history. Continue reading →

It probably seemed like a foolproof idea in 1955, and it worked exceptionally well for most of Mark Hernandez Chacon’s 64 years. Except that may not be his name, and he has no idea how old he is because the great idea in 1955 turned out not to be so great in 2017.

All because Eva Hernandez Chacon, who raised him as her son, gave him the birth certificate of her child who died at just 8 days old. When authorities discovered that fact more than 60 years later, it wasn’t long before they came knocking — loudly and early in the morning — at his door.

By comparing databases of death certificates with social security, since technology exists today that was unthinkable back then, it became clear that his Chacon’s “mother” made him her child and gave him the birth certificate of a child who died to use for all purposes. Whoever he was before, he was now Mark Hernandez Chacon. Except Mark Hernandez Chacon died eight days after he was born. Except Mark Hernandez Chacon lived a full life too. Continue reading →

When I decided to put a Becker Europa AM/FM cassette radio in the Healey, I realized I was compromising. It was a 1980s radio going into a 1960s car. Most people wouldn’t realize that it was inauthentic, but I did. For someone who went to great pains to restore the car to its original condition, it was a very hard choice.

But I wanted to be able to listen to music, to play the great many cassette tapes I recorded back in college when music was still good, and the radios from the 60s, AM only, were not going to cut it. So I closed my eyes, held my breath, and compromised by getting a Becker Europa 599.

The problem with buying an old radio is that it might not function as it did when new, so I sent mine off to Becker AutoSound in New Jersey for a clean and lube when it arrived in 2003. And, having no particular memory of anything concerning, it came back and worked fine. Into the Healey it went, and old songs came out of it. Continue reading →

To its credit, the New York Times published an op-ed by Indiana University law prof Steve Sanders. The subtitle should have sufficed, as the content was so uncontroversial as to require nothing more to be said.

Those College Students Who Used the N-Word Shouldn’t Have Been Arrested

They were guilty of vulgarity and ignorance, but “ridicule” is not a crime.

Nevertheless, more had to be written or it wouldn’t have made the cut as an op-ed, so Sanders explained. Continue reading →

A Teen Vogue Op-Ed recently stumbled into my newsfeed. After giving the matter some thought, and consulting with the local Junior Curmudgeon’s Legal Aid Society, I’m announcing today that I’m applying to trademark the word “journalist” to stop Teen Vogue writers from ever using it as a descriptor.

Before you immediately dismiss my application as some sort of conservative/Republican stunt, I can assure you this is no partisan political issue. I also want to profess my respect for actual journalists like Radley Balko, Liliana Segura, and Brad Heath. All three and their colleagues are deserving of the “journalist” title for tirelessly working to expose truth to the public.

No, what’s troubling is hack writers for a site with front page listicles like “22 Gifts For Your Friend Who Would Rather Be Napping” and deep insights like “Miley Cyrus Said She Had To Be Gay in An Instagram Live” calling themselves “journalists.” It’s an embarrassment to the profession* and something needs to be done about it. Continue reading →

Appeals to morality have become all the rage, as they not only serve to make us feel better about our choices but can’t be challenged. After all, everybody wants to be moral, and have everyone recognize them as such (or at least not call them immoral). And since morality has no rational basis, there is no battle to be waged against it.

It’s not that there aren’t universally accepted moral beliefs, like don’t kill*, but tipping 30%?

So when you’re thinking about compensating servers, it’s best to start from the assumption that tipping will be around for a while. The smart thing to ask is, how can we make the best of a bad situation? Continue reading →

In the aftermath of the UConn outrage, the ACLU of Connecticut issued its statement.

Policing is an inherently white supremacist institution, and we remain skeptical of its ability to address racism and bigotry. Under existing free speech case law the students who were arrested will almost certainly not be convicted, making it imperative for the university to immediately address racism on campus, including but not limited to these recent incidents.

This could be read in different ways, and people inclined to lie to themselves might read it sufficiently weaselly to not read it as the ACLU-CT saying that it was a shame that there will be no conviction, so it’s left to UConn to punish the evildoers, who, obviously, must be punished.

But to those who haven’t been paying attention, they find some comfort in the quote from David Cole, believing that maybe this is just some rogue local chapter that hates the Constitution too much. Continue reading →