Month: January 2014

‘They Are Not Allowed to Fail’

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Amanda Carpenter called attention to a letter a Maryland middle-school teacher wrote to the Washington Post‘s education writer:

I am paid to give out gold stars to everyone so that no one feels left out, to give everyone an A because they feel sad if they don’t have one. I take the perpetual, insane harassment from parents who insist that their child’s failings are solely my fault because I do not coddle them to the point of being unable to accept any sort of critique; if each student is not perfect and prepared for college and life by age twelve, then I must be wrong about the quality of their work. I lower my own standards so much that I have been thinking my grades were generous. After years of being harangued, I gave Bs to D-quality work, but that is never good enough. All I can do is field the various phone calls, meetings, and e-mails, to let myself be abused, slandered, spit at because that is my career, taking the fall for our country’s mistakes and skewed priorities. So if you want your child to get an education, then I’m afraid that as a teacher, I can’t help you, but feel free to stop by if you want a sticker and a C.

You should read the whole thing, because part of the blame belongs to the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) legislation, which was and is bad policy, directly opposite to the conservative critique of public education. Conservatives are against centralized bureaucracy and against an expanded role for the federal government in education. The invocation of “standards” as a magic word — Abracadabra! — seems to have deceived many Republicans into supporting NCLB, imagining that standardized testing would somehow solve problems. But the problems of public education are beyond reach of such “solutions”:

Eventually, the meeting came down to two quotes that I will forever remember as the defining slogans for public education:
“They are not allowed to fail.”
“If they have D’s or F’s, there is something that you are not doing for them.”
What am I not doing for them? . . . I was called down to the principal’s office many more times before I was broken, before I ended up assigning stupid assignments for large amounts of credit, ones I knew I could get students to do. Even then, I still had students failing, purely through their own refusal to put any sort of effort into anything, and I had lowered the bar so much that it took hardly anything to pass. According to the rubrics set forth by the county, if they wrote a single word on their paper, related or not to the assignment, I had to give them a 48 percent. Yet, students chose to do nothing. Why? Because we are forced to pass them. “They are not allowed to fail,” remember?

The teacher decided to quit:

I would love to teach, but I refuse to be led by a top-down hierarchy that is completely detached from the classrooms for which it is supposed to be responsible. . . .
I quit because I’m tired of being part of the problem, and as only one soul in the river Styx, it is impossible for me to be part of the solution.

Hear! Hear! More and more good, honest, decent, caring teachers are quitting the public school system. The deteriorating quality of faculty and administration is increasingly pervasive because no intelligent person would willingly submit themselves to such an oppressive bureaucratic yoke. The public education system is doomed beyond all hope of redemption, and the sooner Americans cease cooperating with the system — get your children out and support alternatives — the sooner its final collapse will arrive.

 

 


It Had to Be Written

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As soon as David Brooks shared his drug experiences with an unwilling world, the gonzo version was inevitable:

The silver 2001 BMW 535i roared through Adams Morgan, occasionally screeching over the sidewalks as my accountant wrenched both hands from the wheel for another toke at the weed-pipe. “Gadzooks, man!” I shouted. “Can you keep it together for another fifteen miles, or at least outside the District limits?” We were halfway through our 35 mile journey from Bethesda to Falls Church, with enough dangerous narcotics to stun a grizzly bear in the trunk: We’d started with nine ounces of weed, six rocks of crack, a sugar jar full of blow, 36 vicodin tablets, a cage filled with live Bolivian arrow toads, and two jars of ketamine. Plus two quarts of Beefeater gin, a case of Schlitz malt liquor, and a four ounce ball of Afghan hash: Surely enough to get this pair of degenerate drug addicts to Fall’s Church. After that what man could say? . . .

Read the rest at Popehat.

 

Florida: The Crazy State

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Yes, I’m aware I used the same headline yesterday, but our national lunatic asylum continues to earn its moniker:

A Palm Bay man was arrested after police say home surveillance video caught him in sexual acts involving his family’s dog.
Joshua Werbicki, 22, was charged last week with animal cruelty and sexual acts involving animals.
According to the police report, the family had noticed the German shepherd mix showing signs of physical injury and was fearful when approached by family members, so they installed a video system.
Police said the sexual acts involving the dog were caught on video, leading to Werbicki’s arrest his place of employment, Papa John’s on Minton Road in West Melbourne.

Maybe Werbicki will claim this was a “consensual relationship,” which is kind of a popular defense for Florida sex offenders.

Remember: Obama got 4,235,270 votes in Florida in 2012, and at least Joshua Werbicki didn’t eat the dog.

 


Bill Schmalfeldt’s Clown Show, and a Certain Dog That Has Not Barked

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That is Bill Schmalfeldt’s clumsy summary of certain allegations made by Brett Kimberlin in the Maryland lawsuit Kimberlin v. Walker, et al., but Schmalfeldt doesn’t say this, does he? No, he cites no source for these claims, but merely repeats them as if they were statements of fact, which can be dangerous. Is the irony here intentional? John Hoge doesn’t seem to care for ironic interpretations:

That tweet accuses Aaron Walker and me of stealing money. Theft is a crime. If Bill Schmalfeldt has evidence that I have stolen money, he should give that information to law enforcement. If he doesn’t, he would be well advised to publish a retraction.
That tweet accuses Aaron Walker and me of attempting to force someone to commit perjury. That is a crime also. If Bill Schmalfeldt has evidence that I have attempted to force someone to commit perjury, he should give that information to law enforcement. If he doesn’t, he would be well advised to publish a retraction.
Very soon.

It’s an odd thing: Brett Kimberlin can allege any damned thing he wants in a lawsuit without any risk that a false allegation would be deemed libelous, even while his Maryland suit would seem to rest on his claim that persons reporting on legal actions against Kimberlin thereby commit defamation, harassment, stalking, etc.

Meanwhile, ignoring Kimberlin’s own unusual theory of defamation, Schmalfeldt treats the allegations made in Kimberlin’s legal actions as if they were gospel truth, and without any apparent fear that Hoge or Walker might sue for defamation.

There is a problem, however, which any reader of Sherlock Holmes mysteries would recognize as the dog that did not bark.

As Hoge says, perjury and subornation of perjury are both criminal offenses — not civil torts — and if the sworn statements which Tetyana Kimberlin made in her criminal complaint of July 29 were deliberate falsehoods, why isn’t the state of Maryland prosecuting Brett Kimberlin’s wife for the crime of perjury? Furthermore, if one believes Brett Kimberlin’s claim that Hoge and Aaron Walker somehow influenced Tetyana to make statements which Hoge and Walker knew to be false, why is the state of Maryland not prosecuting them for that crime?

In case you have forgotten the charge in this alleged effort “to force Tonya Kimberlin to perjure herself,” of which Bill Schmalfeldt wishes to remind his readers, here is the July 29 complaint:

Charges State v Kimberlin (Redacted)

The charge was subsequently dropped, for reasons that were never fully explained to me. However, the only people who accuse Tetyana Kimberlin of having perjured herself are (a) Brett Kimberlin, and (b) Bill Schmalfeldt, although for some reason neither of them seems interested in a criminal prosecution of that case.

What we have instead is a $1 million civil suit, in which I am named as a defendant because . . . Well, why do you think this is?

Bill Schmalfeldt says I am dragging Tetyana Kimberlin “through the mud once more,” but he’s the one accusing her of perjury! And it was Bill Schmalfeldt who recently raised the subject of how, he says, Tetyana was enticed “to run off with a PIZZA BOY!”

So if I quote Bill Schmalfeldt, I’m defaming Tetyana?

The rule seems to be that Bill Schmalfeldt can write anything he wants about anyone and never suffer consequences, but if you dare quote him, you’ve committed a hateful atrocity. Whatever.

Here is an allegation from the Kimberlin v. Walker, et al., lawsuit:

What I find interesting about this allegation is that it involves only Walker and Hoge. I have never filed a civil suit, a peace order or a criminal charge against Brett Kimberlin and yet find myself a defendant in this lawsuit. It seems to be Kimberlin’s theory that I have somehow conspired with Walker and Hoge in these “false, malicious filings” from which they have allegedly “enrich[ed] themselves.”

Kimberlin’s conspiracy theory is false, and if either Hoge or Walker have been enriching themselves, they’ve managed to keep it a secret from me. Certainly, I’ve never seen them cruising around in Ferraris or lighting their Cohibas with $100 bills. Meanwhile, however, Bill Schmalfeldt has doubled down on stupid, making more unsourced accusations against Walker, Hoge and Ali Akbar.

Save some of those Cohibas for me, you guys.

 

BOMBER SUES BLOGGERS





 

This Was Probably Predictable

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Ace of Spades:

American troops spilled their guts fighting Al Qaeda in Fallujah in 2004.
And now, AQ has driven out all representatives of the Iraqi government and raised its flag over government buildings.

Like nature, Islamic extremism abhors a vacuum:

Black-clad Sunni militants of Al Qaeda destroyed the Falluja Police Headquarters and mayor’s office, planted their flag atop other government buildings and decreed the western Iraqi city to be their new independent state on Friday in an escalating threat to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whose forces were struggling to retake control late into the night.
The advances by the militants — members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS — came after days of fighting in Falluja, Ramadi and other areas of Anbar Province. The region is a center of Sunni extremism that has grown more intense in reaction to Mr. Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad and the neighboring civil war in Syria. . . .
The group’s fighters cut power lines in Falluja late in the day and ordered residents not to use their backup generators. In one area of Falluja, a militant said over a mosque loudspeaker: “We are God’s rule on Earth! No one can defeat God’s will!”

Donald Douglas at American Power:

This is specifically a result of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, and it’s going to come back a bite the U.S. and our allies for years to come.

Yep. And like I said, predictable.

 

Everybody Hates Cathy Brennan: Troll Under the Bridge on the Crazyville Road

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The unstable isotope of insanity that is feminism reached critical mass a few months ago when radical feminist Cathy Brennan threatened legal action against the socialist magazine Jacobin, which published an article by Samantha Allen that included this:

A small but vocal band of activists known as “Radfems” see transgender women like myself as a blight on the feminist movement, but — because their views are not representative of the feminist movement as a whole — many trans-inclusive feminists refer to them as TERFs, or Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists.
The chief TERF figurehead is a Maryland attorney named Catherine Brennan who once served as a liaison on the American Bar Association’s Commission on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. In July of 2012, a petition circulated to have Brennan removed from that position because, to put it mildly, she flatly rejected the “Gender Identity” half of her job description.
Apart from a sordid internet history of harassing, misgendering, and mocking trans people, Brennan co-authored a letter with Elizabeth Hungerford to the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, to argue against — yes, against — legal protections based on “gender identity or expression.”

Yeah, she’ll sue you: “Catherine Brennan, whose views are critiqued in the essay as being transphobic, has instructed her lawyer David Diggs to prepare litigation against Jacobin magazine.”

Truth is an unassailable defense, however, and it is difficult to answer “no” to the question, “Is Cathy Brennan transphobic?”

Among other things, Brennan has engaged in “doxing” transgenders, most notoriously a 17-year-old high school student, a June 2012 incident that inspired one advocate to write:

Cathy Brennan you potentially jeopardised this youths life to satisfy your hate of all people diverse.
I have resisted in the past contacting your law firm and exposing you as the vile monster you are, but you are really really trying my desire to remain above your contemptuous behaviour. Quit this Brennan or I will.
You are despicable Cathy Brennan. I will tell you that to your face. Use that for your next screen grab.

Is that as bad as it gets? Actually, no. While attending a July 2012 radical feminist conference in Oregon, Brennan sent this photo to a transgender journalist named  Marti Abernathey:

Brennan’s transphobic zeal is, at some level, entirely rational.

That is to say, once you buy a ticket on the baby-killing man-hating lesbian feminist express bus to Crazyville, it makes perfect sense. A transgender porn performer named Drew Deveaux coined the term “cotton ceiling” to describe the division between genetic women (called “ciswomen”) and “transwomen”:

Basically, it means that cis queer women will be friends with us and talk day and night about trans rights and ending transmisogyny, but will still not consider us viable sexual partners.
The term cotton ceiling is a reference to the “glass ceiling” that second wave feminist identified in the workforce, wherein women could only advance so high in the workforce but could not break through into positions of power and authority. The cotton represents underwear, signifying sex.
The theory of the cotton ceiling is useful in identifying the dynamic trans women are experiencing, and is meant to open up conversation around desirability’s intersections with transmisogyny and transphobia.

Ri-iiight. If you were a radical lesbian feminist, wouldn’t you be angry about this? This wasn’t the trip you signed up for, after all. By blurring the line between male and female, transgenderism challenges your radical feminist commitment to man-hating.

To combat this existential threat to her radical worldview, Brennan created an anti-transgender blog called “Pretendbians,” which is funny as hell, if you’re a right-wing sexist homophobe like me. As a lesbian feminist, Brennan feels she is at liberty to say stuff about trannies that would make Fred Phelps blush with shame.

Transgender “inclusion” is the trendy left-wing cause now, so everybody hates Cathy Brennan, e.g., feminist Aaminah Khan:

Cathy Brennan . . . is a lesbian radical feminist who’s made it her life goal to stalk, humiliate and endanger the lives of trans women, whom she believes are “fake” women trying to destroy feminism by infiltrating it. . . .
Cathy Brennan is a despicable human being, and if she hates you, you know you’re doing something right.

The anti-Brennan backlash has gathered such momentum that when Brennan went to court against black feminist Phylicia Sampson, the latter was able to raise more than $4,500 for her legal defense:

Revolutionaries always end up fighting each other this way. The feminist movement has clearly reached a stage analogous to Stalin’s NKVD sending Ramon Mercader to assassinate Leon Trotsky. And of course, there is the “white privilege” accusation:

Sorry You’re A Vanillacentric
Privileged Trans Oppressor
. . . Why should the trans community have respect for a group of racist white radical feminists who have attacked our humanity and femininity for four decades with deleterious effects on our lives?  . . .
[Brennan] also published the pre-transition names of trans feminine activists who have called out her vile behavior, used her access to the legal system as an attorney to frack with the legal gender change of another trans critic . . .
Oh yeah, did I forget to mention she was on the opposing side when Baltimore County, MD was debating passing trans human rights coverage? . .
Trans community, you cannot ignore in the vain hope she will go away someone who has the access to policy making tables that Brennan has and the willingness to use it against us. It’s a dangerous combination when you have a trans bigot willing and unrepentantly able to not only express anti-trans attitudes, but is actively working to inject them into policies that will have deleterious effects upon the entire trans community not only here in the United States but around the world.

Yes, that’s it: Welcome to the transgender Two-Minute Hate, with Cathy Brennan in the role of feminism’s Emmanuel Goldstein.

How much further down the Crazyville Road can these radical moonbats travel before they begin killing each other in the manner of Cambodia, Yugoslavia or Rwanda? When that happens, I’m sure, they’ll find a way to blame it on the heteronormative patriarchy.

But all we ever wanted was for them to fix us sandwiches . . .

PREVIOUSLY:

 


What The Flu-Shot Is A “Federal Dollar”?

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by Smitty

Great article over on Town Hall by Conn Carroll about ObamaCare. Worth reading in full, but I’d like to pick up where he ends for a bit of a rant on a fundamental conceptual flaw that cuts across so much of our jacked-up contemporary thinking (emphasis mine):

We already see this happening in Massachusetts where all of Obamneycare’s cost containment claims have been exposed as complete frauds. Yes, almost everyone in Massachusetts does have health insurance, but the state simply can’t afford it. Don’t believe me? Just ask Obamacare architect Donald Berwick who is running for governor. His website explains:

In the Massachusetts state budget, almost every key line item has gone down by 20%, 30%, or 40% in real terms since 2000 except health care, which has gone up by 60%. In 2013, 43% of state expenditures are for health care – that’s more than double what we spend on education.

Berwick’s solution? “It is time to explore seriously the possibility of a single payer system in Massachusetts,” Berwick writes.
And that is where the only common ground will ever be on health care policy in Washington: allowing states to choose their own health care futures. If California, Massachusetts, and New York want to become single-payer health care systems, fine, let’s reform Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare to let them do that.
But, if Indiana wants to provide their citizens more freedom, and use federal dollars to set up health savings accounts for the uninsured, then Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare ought to be reformed to let them do that, too.

Our “dollar” shows up in Article 1 Section 9 of the Constitution. But it’s Just. A. Dollar. Sure, we’ve blown off our original requirement for solid metal backing for the currency. See Ron Paul for pertinent rants.

And, yes, I do understand the intent of this common usage. The point of this rant is to underscore the problem with accepting artificial distinctions like “federal”, “state”, and “local” dollars. No. There is only one currency, the dollar. Dollars expended by government are ultimately taxpayer dollars, and, sooner or later, overtly through taxation, or covertly through opportunity costs, are going to come from those taxpayers, sure as the wool comes from the sheep.

The term of art “federal dollars” is just a ruse to quell fears that, somehow, the pain is going to fall on voters, who might punish their collection of rodeo clowns at election time. We’ve pretty much seen that there is no other feedback loop in the system; no amount of wanton jackwagonry on ObamaCare (or Fast & Furious, or Benghazi, &c) can trigger any laxative effects at the White House.

Let’s start a campaign to let the dollar be the dollar, reform the Federal Reserve, have budgets, and otherwise quit living this Peter Pan Progressive Pot Party. Extremist, I know. Can’t help it.

Feminists Accused of ‘Transphobia’: Competitive Victimhood Derby

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“If gender is inherently detrimental as the radical feminists maintain and if trans identification occurs in part because gender is rigidly interpreted and represented through normative modalities of behaving, then there will be unceasing dissonance between these two groups.”
— Julian Vigo, “The Left Hand of Darkness”

Following up on last night’s post, “Mental Illness and Radical Feminism,” I arrived at a feminist blog that rejects capitalization:

this is what our oppression consists of and what it is. men get to name it (sex, fucking, knocked up, mother, father) men get to execute it (intercourse, impregnation) and men get to enforce it (rape, heteronormativity, marriage, and legal remedies and lack thereof for sexual and reproductive offenses). note that i am considering rape to be the violent enforcement by men of womens sex role as fuckholes and breeders.

Well, OK, then. Notice the sequence “rape, heteronormativity, marriage” that radical feminism views as equally forms of oppression, assigning women to a “sex role as fuckholes and breeders.” This particular blog, by the way, has an entire category about “PIV” (penis-in-vagina) which is what “heteronormativity” is all about, eh?

By the time a feminist reaches the radical point at which normal sexual intercourse is regarded as inherently oppressive, she has already marched a good distance down the Crazyville Road. Sane, normal people become the Enemy and, in order to maintain her delusions, the feminist seeks out the company of her fellow radicals, who share and confirm these extreme beliefs. The maladjusted thereby exile themselves to a sort of voluntary asylum, where they only encounter lunatics like themselves.

So, RadFem 2013 was a conference in London, which resulted in a gigantic controversy because radical feminists insisted on excluding the “transgendered” from their female-only event, and one of the featured speakers, Australian lesbian feminist Professor Sheila Jeffreys, was about to publish a new book, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism, that was deeply offensive to the “T” people represented in the LGBT acronym.

How crazy did that conflict become? At one point in April, the venue tried to cancel the event after discovering that “certain language was used and some statements were made about transgender people that would go against our equalities and diversity policy.” Another RadFem conference organizer, Cathy Brennan of Baltimore, was meanwhile all over Twitter announcing “transwomen are men” and comparing them to MRAs (men’s rights advocates). Brennan’s outspoken hostility to transgenders led her to take legal action against a transgender activist:

A Twitter message about spitting led Towson lawyer and lesbian advocate Cathy Brennan to file for a peace order against a transgender advocate.
Phylicia Sampson, a 28-year-old Baltimore resident, and Brennan, 42, were engaged in a heated debate on the social media site when Sampson wrote that she wanted to spit in Brennan’s face.
Baltimore County Distict Court Judge Barbara Jung ordered Sampson to stay away from Brennan’s home and place of employment, and to cease contact, according to the peace order. . . .
Brennan, a former member of the Boards of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Baltimore, said she has been a gay activist since 1995, but is of the opinion that transgendered women are male and should not have access to “female spaces.” . . .
Brennan said she met Sampson, a graduate student, through mutual friends in fall 2011, and had invited her into her home on several occassions.
“At some point, we came to a fork in the road because she believes transwomen are women,” she said.
Brennan said Sampson had been sending her a slew of aggressive messages and continued to do so even after Brennan asked her to end their communications.
“I’m afraid of this person at this point,” said Brennan, who added that she has received several death threats for her stance. “I take [threats] very seriously.”

The Competitive Victimhood Derby is ultimately a zero-sum game, you see. There can only be one winner, and the transgender claim to equal victimhood is rejected by radical feminists, who view this as an attempt to usurp their own categorical claim.

It’s like a traffic jam on the Crazyville Road, where two politicized groups of wackjobs are compelled by the implicit logic of their arguments to fight each other for supremacy. Therefore, “equality” as codified by British law is oppressive:

How have men/queers/transactivists been so successful at shutting down female-only space? It stems back to the slow, evolving, way the debate about “equalities” cancels out women’s oppression in favour of “gender-based” oppression. . . . By calling it “gender-based” violence, there is political space to deny the structural power men have over women and claim that violence comes from all individuals, equally.
As radical feminists, we know that the true source of women’s oppression, and other oppressions, are embedded in the institutions, systems and structures of society and that this, together with cultural norms, creates “patriarchy”.
Patriarchy is never going to acknowledge that oppression is enshrined in the very fabric of society. The myth of the state, as a neutral arbitrator, supporting the rights of equally competing interests/groups within society, props up that fabric. . . .
Unsurprising then that the Equality Act 2010 has been used with such relish by male extremist groups and queer/transactivists to try and stop radical feminists naming our truths.

Transgender activists are actually part of the patriarchy! Somehow, they prevent radical feminists from naming their truths!

Crazy? Sure. But you only reach this kind of radical insanity by passing every exit along your journey down the Crazyville Road.

Do not for a moment doubt what “truths” were named at RadFem 2013:

Sheila Jeffreys then went on to discuss compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian feminism.  She noted that it was very strange that so many women in this modern resurgence of feminism are not becoming lesbians as they did in the second wave, despite the horrific tidal wave of male violence and creepy male sexuality that is even more visible culturally.  Some reasons she thought this might be were that mixed-space organizing was dulling women’s revolutionary impulses.

The fight for “female-only space” is necessary to radical feminism because only within such space can “women’s revolutionary impulses” lead them to becoming lesbians, as all feminists should be.

They are all about “transcending the norms of gender,” you see.

Men are obsolete, and nobody’s fixing sandwiches for us anymore.