In The Mailbox: 04.02.14

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— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Trigger Warning – Is That You, Liz Warren?
Michelle Malkin: Dear Mr. Colbert – Me So Stupid. You So Funny!
Twitchy: Thousands Of Gun Rights Supporters Rally In Albany Against SAFE Act


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: The Big Picture On Obamacare’s Politics
American Thinker: Democrats’ Sixty-Year War Against Conservative Voices
Conservatives4Palin: Governor Palin’s Own Final Four Bracket For America’s Future
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, April 1
Jammie Wearing Fools: LA Times Pulitzer Prize Winner – Leland Yee Might Be A Bad Guy, But KOCH BROTHERS!
Joe For America: Reverend Graham – Obama And Holder “Have Turned Their Backs On God”
JustOneMinute: We Shoulda Hired The Smart Regulators
Pat Dollard: Group Tied To Democrat Senator Attacks Triple Amputee Vet – “You Should Have Lost More Than Your Limbs”
Protein Wisdom: DNC Chair Can’t Think Of A Single Obamacare Fix
Shot In The Dark: An Idea Whose Time Is At Least Three Years Away
STUMP: Obamacare Watch – Obamacare’s Fools
The Jawa Report: One Shot, Six Kills
The Lonely Conservative: GOP Candidate For NY Governor Has Kids Opt Out Of Common Core Testing
This Ain’t Hell: Marines Take Flag From Hippie
Megan McArdle: Venezuela Wants To Spread The Suffering


In The Mailbox will be on hiatus until April 9 while I am Minnesota with family and friends and the animes and the mangas.
The FMJRA will also be delayed until then, and Rule 5 Sunday will get a double helping on April 13.
Y’all behave yourselves, now.


‘Unintentionally Heteronormative’!

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Readers will please pardon my long silence this evening, but I was doing deep research on (yet another) long post about feminism, the completion of which will have to wait because . . . this:

Emily Nagoski is a Ph.D. “college health educator in Massachusetts.” Both an atheist and a progressive, Nagoski has “worked for well over a decade in the field of sexuality education and has grown into an impassioned advocate for social justice through sexual fulfillment.”

All of which is to say, no one could accuse Professor Nagoski of being a homophobic right-wing Christofascist. (Like us.)

So, in the fall semester of 2010, Professor Nagoski was eight weeks into teaching an entry-level course in Women’s Sexuality when she gave her lecture on the subject of “gender”:

After it, I received an email that, among a great deal else, described my curriculum — the entire curriculum, mark you — as “unintentionally heteronormative.”
Which made me stare, with one eyelid twitching, at my computer, because it means that for the last 8 weeks I have been failing, for two hours each week, over and over again, to make the most fundamental point of the class.
Because my class is neither unintentional nor heteronormative.

What’s the problem? In a word, science:

I’m, like, SO active in not assuming that anyone has any particular sexual orientation or gender identity and in teaching students not to make assumptions, to think critically about the science and the politics that live in the science. And of course I have an entire lecture on gender variation and another entire lecture on sexual orientation and identity (that’s next week).
But I AM teaching that humans are a sexually reproducing species wherein some have sperm (males) and some have eggs (females).

(Oops. Is it still legal to say that in Massachusetts?)

I suppose I’ve been relying on students to find their own way to embracing biology as a valuable way to think about sex. But this point of view is so foreign to many of them, many of them Sociology or Women’s Studies majors who have never thought about sex in terms of biology or reproduction, many politically active around these issues without ever having studied them academically. And I suppose it was too much to ask that they get there on their own.
I wanted them to find their way to the notion that it’s not “heteronormative” to recognize that sex is an evolutionarily adaptive reproduction strategy that, in humans, involves males and females; it’s just our biology, and there’s a complex, mutually interacting relationship between the biological and the social. I’ve been working toward that all semester. But they have not gotten there.

You see where the advocates of Progress and Equality have led us: The basic biology of sex is now politically incorrect, so that even an avowed progressive cannot escape condemnation for the unforgivable Thought Crime of preferring facts to theory.

Professor Nagoski might want to invite me up as a Women’s Sexuality guest lecturer. My daughters have been instructed in the subjects of “Boys Have Cooties” and “Keep Your Britches On,” which I would argue are the most valuable lessons of all.

“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)

 

Voodoo and Welfare: $2 Million Methamphetamine Bust in Florida

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Florida: The Crazy State!™

LAKELAND — Nearly $2 million worth of methamphetamine was seized and 13 people arrested in what Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd is calling one of the biggest meth busts they’ve had in recent years.
In a press conference Wednesday, Judd laid out the details of the bust, known as Operation Hoodoo Voodoo, which involved 25 suspects distributing drugs across county and state lines, a stockpile of military-grade weaponry and a Voodoo priest. . . .
“We seized about 44 pounds,” said Judd. “That’s 20 kilos of pure methamphetamine.”
Investigators said drug lord Javier Flores, also known as “El Don,” managed large scale methamphetamine shipments to Lakeland, Florida, Atlanta, Georgia, and Las Vegas, Nevada through southern California from Mexico. The organization included a network of couriers, managers and distributors.
Flores would consult a Voodoo priest who would provide predictions, prophecies and readings regarding the organization’s decisions and welfare, officials said.
“This is Polk County vernacular, how we hoodoo the Voodoo man,” said Judd. “The day we served all the search warrants and made all the arrests, he told them, ‘Don’t worry about it, everything is fine.’
“Well, I agree with the Voodoo man, everything is fine. Polk County is safe and there’s a lot of drugs not in central Florida.”

Tucked down at the very end of the story:

Officials said that of the 25 suspects involved in the organization, 11 of them are currently receiving federal/public assistance.

 

Yes, ObamaCare Kills Jobs

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File this under “Not Exactly News.” Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of basic economics understood that the complex and burdensome system of mandates in ObamaCare would impede job creation. But nothing is true until the “experts” say so, I guess:

The Republicans just got a big gift from the Congressional Budget Office: It’s going to be a lot easier for them to call Obamacare a “job killer.”
That’s because the budget office’s new economic report, released Tuesday, says the health care law will cause Americans to work fewer hours — enough to be the equivalent of 2 million fewer jobs in 2017.
The latest number is nearly three times as high as the budget office’s previous prediction, and it’s supposed to rise in later years to the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs in 2024. . . .
The projection will put the White House, and especially red-state Democrats, in an even more awkward position heading into November. Until now, they’ve mostly had to worry about stories of canceled health plans and, of course, the botched website rollout. Now they’ll need to figure out how to counter, or at least explain, the new CBO job figures.

There are two Americas. In one America, people understand economics. In the other America, people vote for Democrats.

It might help to read Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. Just sayin’ . . .

 

Sir Dana @Milbank, White Knight

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Being a liberal means you have license to speak for the oppressed, as the enlightened and beneficent custodian of their interests. White male Dana Milbank goes “mansplaining” a Women’s History Month Event because ladies don’t understand this stuff:

The conservative minds of the Heritage Foundation have found a way for Republicans to shrink the gender gap: They need to persuade more women to get their MRS degrees.
The advocacy group held a gathering of women of the right Monday afternoon to mark the final day of Women’s History Month — and the consensus was that women ought to go back in history. If Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s mantra is “lean in,” these women were proposing that women lean back: get married, take care of kids and let men earn the wages.

See? Mona Charen, Mollie Hemingway and Karin Agness shouldn’t worry their pretty little heads. They should just outsource their thinking to the gallant Sir Dana Milbank, and let him speak on their behalf. He’s got an Honorary Vagina, you know.

And hey, it’s not like there are any facts involved:

An unmarried woman with children is much more likely to be poor than her married counterpart. According to the National Poverty Center, “Poverty rates are highest for families headed by single women, particularly if they are black or Hispanic. In 2010, 31.6 percent of households headed by single women were poor, while 15.8 percent of households headed by single men and 6.2 percent of married-couple households lived in poverty.” Those aren’t numbers made up to scare women into voting Republican; they’re facts.
According to a 2013 Gallup poll, a whopping 56 percent of 18 to 34 years olds are unmarried men and women who want to get married. In contrast, only 9 percent are unmarried and not interested in getting married. . . . The desire to be married isn’t something conservative scam artists made up; it’s something that most young adults want.
Nor is it only conservatives who are pushing for women with kids to work part-time or not at all. In 2012, a whopping 67 percent of mothers of minor children surveyed by the Pew Research Center wanted to either work part-time or not work. That’s what women say they want, not what conservatives say women want.

That’s from Katrina Trinko, who is merely a woman, and not a feminist like Sir Dana Milbank, Knight of the Honorary Vagina.

 

Why Damon Linker Is Wrong To Say That Christianity Demands Pacifism

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by Smitty

Now, as a retired veteran, I’ll come under accusation of rationalizing my actions. Fair enough. But there is a simple explanation for why, according to Linker’s subtitle, “In the teachings of Christ, there is no endorsement of a just war”: Christianity is about the individual; war is about nations.

Thus, what we have here is a fallacy of composition. To claim that, because Christians should subdue their own flesh, and therefore should not go around kicking other’s flesh translates into pacifism is simply wrongheaded. It also ignores the whole Word of God. Read the Book of Judges, for example. (There was once a day when judges walked the earth who didn’t need their flesh kicked, John Roberts.)

Pacifism is a luxury. Forgive those who wrong you. Pray for them. But just because Christ was crucified, and the disciples (traditionally) tended toward horrid demises is does not make it a requirement for you to seek to be a doormat. The Holy Spirit may call you in some special way to take one for the team, as when a soldier lays it down for the comrades.

Nor am I tacitly endorsing Team America: World Police here. Like it or not, the U.S. is coming to a critical point in our post-WWII maintenance of a pax Americana. We can only “borrow it forward” so much more. If Damon Linker could articulate a consistent foreign policy with lower costs, that would be great. But basing military policy on pacifism is neither Christian nor wise.

In The Mailbox, 04.01.14

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— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
American Power: New IPCC Report Warns Of Floods – And Earthquakes, Locusts, Tsunamis…
First Street Journal: Child Molestation By The Rich And Powerful In Delaware
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: How I Met Your Mother Dies A Screaming Death, Covered In Its Own Blood
Doug Powers: Covered California
Twitchy: Nancy Pelosi Says 9.5 Million Now Covered By Obamacare; Byron York Offers Reality Check


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Thinker: Conservative Critics Of Government Are “Freaks” Who “Will Need Kevlar”
Conservatives4Palin: LA Times – No More Bushes Or Clintons
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, March 31
Jammie Wearing Fools: National Science Foundation Spends $700,000 On Climate Change Musical
Joe For America: No, President Obama, I Will Not Purchase Obamacare!
JustOneMinute: Phony Obamacare Success Statistics
Pat Dollard: Obama Cancels Hellfire Missile, Spends $400K On Camel Statue In Pakistan
Protein Wisdom: The New York Times Wonders “Was Marx Right?”
Shot In The Dark: Governor Choom Nasty
The Jawa Report: Oops – When Terrorism Goes Right (Again)
The Lonely Conservative: Don’t Fall For Dems’ “Mend It Don’t End It” Fixes
This Ain’t Hell: Jihadist Hunted By FBI, Military
Megan McArdle: Obamacare – What We Know And What We Don’t


USCU Lesbian Professor Lisa Johnson Described ‘Serious Mental Illness’

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Professor Merri Lisa Johnson.

The director of the University of South Carolina Upstate (USCU) Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (CWGS) suffers from a “serious mental illness” and in 2010 described herself as a “newlywed lesbian” whose partner was apparently her former student.

Professor Merri Lisa Johnson published a 2010 book about her struggles with borderline personality disorder. The description of her partner in that book appears to fit a young “butch” lesbian who graduated from USCU in 2008, two years after Professor Johnson joined the faculty of the school in Spartanburg, S.C.

USCU became the focus of controversy when it was reported that the school would host a performance of “How to Be a Lesbian in 10 Days or Less” next week as part of the CWGS-hosted symposium, “Bodies of Knowledge.” When asked by Campus Reform reporter Lauren Cooley “what percentage of the funding” for the symposium “was coming from the university,” Professor Johnson replied: “Until you call and ask how much money has been spent on heterosexual literature, I’m not going to answer that question.”

In her 2010 book, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality, Professor Johnson describes herself as a “psycho girlfriend” with a history of dysfunctional relationships with both men and women: “Johnson combines her late-in-life coming out story (between ages 31-37) with the story of what amounts to a nervous breakdown as the result of an affair with a married lesbian colleague.” That affair “prompted her to seek professional help,” apparently around the time Professor Johnson  left Coastal Carolina University to become director of USCU-CWGS in 2006. An article about the book describes Professor Johnson:

A newlywed lesbian-after-marriage, Johnson currently resides in South Carolina with her partner Stace and their two loyal shih tzus.  The mixed species pack of four shares a 1920s-era craftsman bungalow fondly known among family and friends as The Haney-Johnson Halfway House for the Bright but Broken-Hearted.

Stacey Haney was one of Professor Johnson’s most honored students at USCU, receiving one of four Campus Consciousness-Raising Awards for the 2006-2007 school year and also winning an Award for Scholarly Achievement in Women’s and Gender Studies for the 2007-08 school year. Professor Johnson selected the annual CWGS award winners in her role as the center’s director. Haney served as president of the student group Upstate Feminists, and in 2008 presented a paper at the Wofford College Conference on Gender entitled, “Butch is Back: The Marginalization of Butch Feminists Across the Feminist and Queer Communities.” Haney, who graduated from USCU in December 2008, subsequently served as a teaching assistant at CWGS and in 2009-2010 took graduate courses at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, researching “new theoretical approaches for understanding transgendered identity and embodiment.”

Professor Johnson has edited feminist anthologies, including Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire (2002) and Third Wave Feminism and Television: Jane Puts It in a Box (2007).

In an article last fall, Professor Johnson described her “queer feminist insistence on the importance, validity, and complexity of women’s pleasure” and her “Marxist feminist distrust of pleasure under patriarchy,” adding that “teaching Women’s and Gender Studies 101 since fall 2006 . . . has firmed up my radical side.”

The National Institutes for Mental Health describes borderline personality disorder (BPD) as “a serious mental illness marked by unstable moods, behavior, and relationships. . . . People with this disorder also have high rates of co-occurring disorders, such as depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, and eating disorders, along with self-harm, suicidal behaviors, and completed suicides.”