Train Men Not to Rape? Or Train Women to Shoot to Kill?

 Doug Giles

Last week on Hannity a “Democratic Strategist” named Zerlina Maxwell told Sean and his audience that guns are not the proper deterrent to dissuade rapists, but rather “teaching men not to rape is the key”. When I heard that chunk of stupidity I blew apple juice out of my nostrils -- and I haven’t had any apple juice in the last eight years.

That’s what you call “strategy”, Zerlina? Man, I hope she advises the Dems in the upcoming midterms and in 2016, because she’s denser than a chunk of Turkish walnut.

First off, I don’t know what planet Maxwell hails from, but here on Mother Earth I would say, aside from certain countries influenced by the religion of peace, pretty much everyone and their dog knows it’s wrong to put a knife or gun up to a woman’s noggin and then forcibly molest her.

Secondly, I don’t think, from a viability standpoint, her plan is workable. Primarily, because no matter how much men are “trained not to rape women” our society counters that tutelage by fueling notions of entitlement and narcissism within an atmosphere of violence that’s saturated with porn, where if you don’t get what you want then you act out.

From Zerlina’s zinger of teaching men not to rape, we then move to the brilliance of a girl named “Liberal Chick” who, in order to eschew an “evil gun” firearm defense in rape situations, states that we should train boys to …

1. Play with dolls so they will learn to be gentle.

2. Avoid hunting, football and other macho stupid activities that lead to rape.

3. Be vegetarians and suppress their love of eating meat that also leads to rape.

4. Purchase Prius’s instead of big SUV’s, which we all know macho, stupid rapists drive.

5. Become gay, or at least metro sexual, so that as men they will be more delicate and complex.

Look, if I were a lass I’d tell both Zerlina and Liberal Chick, “No, gracias, senoritas”. Liberal Chick’s and Maxwell’s brain farts are right up there with Democratic Congressman Salazar’s “rape whistle” and University of Colorado’s “pee your pants” prevention in molestation situations.

Given our malevolent milieu, here are three ditties that’ll greatly decrease your chances of getting raped, ladies.

1. Hone your BS Detector. The BS detector is essentially that little voice inside your head telling you to listen to the little voice inside your head. It’s an internal salvific alarm alerting you to dangerous situations. If you hone your BS Detector and listen to it when it starts screaming at you, you’ll be safer.

2. Become an expert in self-defense. In this violent environment you’re crazy to play the damsel in distress. Learn to kick some ass. Take formal training, throughout your life, as much as you can, by the best of the best.

3. Get a gun. Forget rape whistles, pepper spray and screaming for help. Get a firearm, sister. It is the great equalizer. A 5’1” petite coed with a Colt Python or a pump 20-guage, who knows how to use it, is a scary girl indeed. Think Lara Croft.

The thing that’s truly pathetic and evil is that Maxwell and her Leftist cabal, in order to forward their anti-gun agenda, will table such unworkable, scat-based nonsense to the very women they claim to champion.

SOURCE

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How the demographic shift could hurt Democrats, too

Since the November election, in which President Obama won huge majorities among minority voters, it’s been taken as gospel that the Republican Party must, for its own survival, seek to appeal to those groups by moving to the left on topics such as immigration reform. But as the nation becomes more diverse, the demographic shift can cut the other way, too: Some Democratic voters are likely to move to the right.

It’s assumed that, as the United States becomes increasingly non-white, white Democrats will continue to support the party. But a substantial amount of social-science evidence suggests a different conclusion: As the United States becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, liberal whites might start leaning Republican.

Consider a straightforward experiment I conducted last year: Over two weeks, I sent pairs of Latino men in their 20s to ride commuter trains in the greater Boston area, often cited as one of the nation’s most liberal regions.

These people were not asked to do anything out of the ordinary, just to wait for the train and ride it. The pairs I sent were native Spanish speakers, so when they spoke to each other, it was probably in Spanish. To gauge other riders’ attitudes about Latinos, I surveyed them before the experiment and two weeks into the tests. In each case, the trains and times were randomly selected and were later compared with a control group of riders on different trains. These trains originated in communities with very few Latino residents, and the men I sent to ride the trains were often the only Latinos at those stations on a day-to-day basis. In this sense, the experiment was testing how people react when a very small group of Latinos moves to a new community.

The results were clear. After coming into contact, for just minutes each day, with two more Latinos than they would otherwise see or interact with, the riders, who were mostly white and liberal, were sharply more opposed to allowing more immigrants into the country and favored returning the children of illegal immigrants to their parents’ home country. It was a stark shift from their pre-experiment interviews, during which they expressed more neutral attitudes.

Political scientists, economists, sociologists and psychologists have long noted that, under most circumstances, when people from different ethnic, racial and religious groups come into new contact, conflict ensues. Just look at the battles over busing students from different neighborhoods into public schools in the 1960s and ’70s.

And those conflicts often change the way people vote.

In the 1930s, political scientist V.O. Key found evidence that, in Southern counties with large numbers of African Americans, white voters were politically mobilized: They voted more than whites in neighboring counties and supported candidates espousing discriminatory views in greater numbers. A similar trend recurred a generation later, when liberal Sen. Paul Douglas of Illinois lost his 1966 reelection bid, in large part because of votes cast by whites living in parts of Chicago that had seen an influx of African Americans.

In a more recent example, the city of Chicago began a massive effort in 2000 to overhaul its public housing. Large and notorious housing projects, such as Cabrini-Green, were demolished, and their residents were relocated. More than 99 percent of the relocated residents were African American. The outcome of the effort was the reverse of my experiment in Boston — rather than coming into contact, groups were separated.

Did that separation result in more liberal political views? Voting patterns among white residents living near these projects before and after their demolition showed that it did. After their African American neighbors left, fewer white residents turned out to vote, and voters became less likely to choose Republican candidates, whom they had previously supported at higher levels than had residents in other parts of the city. It seems that the contact with African Americans had politically mobilized whites in Chicago, similar to how Southern whites were mobilized in the 1930s.

To explore whether there was a similar effect among minority voters, in 2008 I conducted an experiment in which I sent a letter to African American voters just before an election in Los Angeles. The content of the letter was simple: It reminded people to vote and included a map noting how often people on their block voted compared with a nearby block. In some randomly selected cases, the comparison block consisted of African American residents; in others, it was largely Latino. When the letter pointed to a majority-Latino block, African Americans were significantly more likely to vote, suggesting that they were concerned about political competition with Latinos — even though both groups vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

In that same year, I examined the voting of Latinos in Los Angeles and found that those who lived near predominantly African American neighborhoods were far less likely to vote for Obama than Latinos who lived farther away — suggesting that contact with their African American neighbors may have prompted them to vote against an African American candidate.

As different groups come into contact, people often have adverse reactions, and this can cause them to vote for a party that represents opposition to other groups. In today’s electoral landscape, that might mean white Democrats would be more willing to vote Republican. There is some evidence that when most people vote against their party identification — perhaps as a Reagan Democrat, just once — they return to their regular partisan identity within an election or so. However, if people make that switch during their impressionable years, in their teens or 20s, it can last a long time. And if they become familiar with members of the other group on a personal level, then the initial aversion might diminish. For example, this might be why attitudes about same-sex marriage are changing — as more people come to know gay friends, neighbors, co-workers or family members.

Of course, people might change the way they vote for reasons other than the race or ethnicity of their neighbors, such as a change in their job or the birth of a child. However, these experiments tell us that, all else equal, contact between different groups, such as native whites and Latino immigrants, leads to more conservative voting.

None of these findings bode well for Democrats. As ethnic groups mix, voters become more exclusionary and tend to vote for more racially conservative candidates — which may make it more difficult to maintain a diverse Democratic Party and could tilt the field in favor of Republicans.

SOURCE

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Amateur Beats Gov't at Digitizing Newspapers: Tom Tryniski’s Weird, Wonderful Website

A retiree with a scanner builds one of the world's largest historic newspaper sites while tax-funded projects stall.

One computer expert working alone has built a historic newspaper site that's orders of magnitude bigger and more popular than one created by a federal bureaucracy with millions of dollars to spend. Armed only with a few PCs and a cheap microfilm scanner, Tom Tryniski has played David to the Library of Congress’ Goliath.

Tryniski's site, which he created in his living room in upstate New York, has grown into one of the largest historic newspaper databases in the world, with 22 million newspaper pages. By contrast, the Library of Congress' historic newspaper site, Chronicling America, has 5 million newspaper pages on its site while costing taxpayers about $3 per page.[*] In January, visitors to Fultonhistory.com accessed just over 6 million pages while Chronicling America pulled fewer than 3 million views.

Fourteen years ago, Tryniski, a retired engineer, launched his website after a friend loaned him a collection of old postcards of Fulton, New York, the town where he's lived all his life. He decided to scan and share them online with his neighbors.

Fulton fell on hard times in the mid-1970s, and Tryniski is nostalgic for the thriving factory town in which he grew up. He relishes in particular the small details of life in old Fulton—wedding announcements, obituaries, school events, society gossip—the sort of information that's the bread and butter of local newspapers.So after the postcards, he digitized the entire run of the Oswego Valley News, which is the paper of record for Fulton and its surrounding county. It took about a year to finish scanning by hand the entire run of the paper, which began publishing in 1946.

Fultonhistory.com really got going in 2003, when Tryniski, a high school graduate, bought a scanner that handles microfilm for $3500 in a fire sale. That meant he didn't need access to the original newspaper copies and he could work quickly because microfilm scanners are largely automated. He installed a keyword recognition program, set up a network of PCs to do the heavy processing, and began uploading his scans to a server that's located in a gazebo on his front deck. He never bothered to change the original name of his website.

Tryniski pays all expenses for the site himself. The only significant costs are bandwidth, for which he pays $630 per month, and hard drives, which run him about $200 per month. He gets his microfilm at no cost from small libraries and historical societies. In exchange, he gives them a copy of all the scanned images analyzed for keyword recognition. Most of the papers Tryniski has digitized are from New York, but he’s rapidly expanding his coverage to other states as well. He is adding new content at a rate of about a quarter-million pages per month with no plans to slow down.

SOURCE

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Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery



Russia’s ruling party put up patriotic billboards around the city of Orel last month showing an image of a soldier in a tank and wishing residents a Happy Defender of Fatherland Day. Rather than showing a Russian soldier and tank, however, the photo actually featured an Israeli soldier in an Israeli-made Merkava III tank.

The United Russia party of President Vladimir Putin commissioned the billboards in honor of the Russian nationalistic holiday, celebrated on February 23, which is dedicated to soldiers serving in the Russian Armed Forces.

A Russian blogger identified the armored vehicle as an Israeli-made Merkava III. The photo, showing a reserves exercise by the IDF’s Armored and Engineering Corps, was quickly traced back to the IDF’s Flickr account.  

The blogger drew attention to the irony of a foreign-produced tank featuring on a sign in honor of Defender of the Fatherland Day.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

British fashionista criticizes Mrs. Obama's style:  "Dame Vivienne Westwood is giving Karl Lagerfeld a run for his money in the provocative quotes stakes. Speaking to the New York Times , Westwood seemed to recoil when asked about Michelle Obama's style, saying "Don't talk about her. It's dreadful what she wears… I don't want to talk about it. Really, I can't." "She's a very nice looking lady, but it's a non-starter regarding clothes that suit her," she elaborated, before going on to compare her to the eternally-stylish Jackie Kennedy. "Jackie Kennedy was a different matter altogether. It just has to suit her and be something that makes a human being more glamorous.  That's what fashion is there for. It's there to help, not just to make you look more conservative."

U.S. unemployment is nearly double the official figures:  "The official unemployment rate is 7.7%. However, if you start counting all the people who want a job but gave up, all the people with part-time jobs that want a full-time job, all the people who dropped off the unemployment rolls because their unemployment benefits ran out, etc., you get a closer picture of what the unemployment rate is. That number is in the last row labeled U-6.  U-6 is much higher at 14.3%. Both numbers would be way higher still, were it not for millions dropping out of the labor force over the past few years.    Digging under the surface, much of the drop in the unemployment rate over the past two years is nothing but a statistical mirage. Things are much worse than the reported numbers indicate."

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