Janay Rice and the Domestic Violence Narrative

It didn’t take long ruminating on the Ray Rice story to realize that it provided not just one—not two—but three touches of the Third Rail. How could I resist?

Prepare to be offended...

I’ll start by acknowledging that not only do I have no knowledge or interest in the principals involved, but I have little interest in the sport itself. It usurped the name from the greatest sport on the planet—for a game, evolved from rugby, in which kicking the ball isn’t allowed in the normal course of play.

Part of the enjoyment of watching sports is the vicarious fantasy of imagining yourself in the athlete’s boots. I have no affinity for the typical football player.

So, I had never heard of Ray Rice. From what I’ve seen of the video, he’s one more argument for ignoring the sport.

 

What I find compelling about this story is that it rides on the intersection of two politically correct paradigms. The victim-feminist narrative meets the imperative to minimize and rationalize black violence.

Let’s begin with the video.

Once the video from the inside of the elevator emerged, it was obvious by the careful editing what had happened.  The video cut started almost immediately at Ray Rice throwing the knock-out blow. But even with the careful editing, it was evident that his wife was the aggressor. She wasn’t cowering with her back to the wall of the elevator, covering her face. She was moving towards him, arms swinging.

The only question then was how long it would take to see the rest of the video.

Now that it’s available, we learn that Janay spat in her husband’s face, and threw punches at him. That’s assault and battery, by the way. What I get from the video is two trashy human beings, and quite frankly, I don’t give a whit for either of them.

But we need to analyze this, regardless of the quality of the individuals, because this is being played out in the court of victim-feminist political correctness.

When a man is physically attacked by a woman—especially one with whom he is intimately acquainted such as a wife or girlfriend—he essentially has four options:

1. He can defend himself by fighting back.
2. He can attempt to defend himself by raising his arms to ward of the blows or otherwise constraining his attacker’s movements.
3. He can flee to avoid the assault.
4. He can stand by and let himself be beaten.

Most, if not all women know that if there is a physical altercation between a man and a woman, the man is toast once law enforcement and the judicial system get involved.

This is why women are empowered to assault men. They know they can get away with it, and they presume that their victim knows it.  And so they can strike with impunity.

Perhaps Janay was operating on this assumption. But what happens in a fight is not predictable. Adrenalin flows. Emotions flare. I don’t know if Ray Rice was in control of his emotions and he lashed out in cold, calculating fashion to put his wife in her place, or if he acted impulsively, under duress, and retaliated in rage. Whichever it was, I doubt Janay was expecting it.

So, for whatever reason, perhaps sheer stupidity, Ray chose the first option. Let’s examine the options he didn’t take.

Option 3 was not available to him. He was in a small enclosed area from which he couldn’t escape.

Most reasonable people would say that the only appropriate response was Option 2: try to thwart his wife’s blows in a purely defensive manner. The most obvious way would be to grab her wrists, disabling her arms. His wife would then likely kick him, and perhaps keep spitting. The struggle would likely continue as Ray would try to maneuver his much weaker wife into a position where she couldn’t kick him until the elevator arrived at their destination when he could exit and get away from her.

But here’s what people don’t understand about how domestic violence is handled thanks to the “feminist jurisprudence” that reigns in the legal system in domestic relations cases.

Option 2 is treated no different than Option 1. Regardless of who initiates violence, once a man lays hold of the woman—or even raises his arms to ward of blows—he is the aggressor, the guilty party. He is the criminal, and he will suffer the legal consequences, which can include jail, probation, and if the altercation occurs within a family breakup, loss of his children, as in the criminalization of any contact with his children and the legal stripping of all his parental custodial rights (except to provide financial support for them).

So, in a scenario such as the Rice’s, Ray really only had one choice: Option 4.

The only way that he might emerge legally blameless in this situation would be to put his arms down and his let his wife spit on him and repeatedly strike him. Or he could curl up, turn his back, and cower in a corner of the elevator.

That is the only option that the legal system allows for a man in this situation.

At this point, you might think that I am being sympathetic to a wife-beater. I’m not. I have no sympathy for Ray Rice. His response was despicable.  But I am attempting to tear away the utter bullcrap of how this incident is being presented. Janay Rice is no victim. She spit in her husband’s face and assaulted him. She is a violent woman. And she made the mistake of thinking her thug of a husband was smart enough to realize that he had no choice but to take his punishment.  

Enter Whoopi Goldberg, the only person I have seen to date who has actually stated that women should not be surprised to get hit back if they hit their husbands/boyfriends. Therefore, she says, don’t do it, gurrls.

As if this actually has to be said. But sure enough, Whoopi was met with quick condemnation for stating the obvious.

I was raised to never hit girls. It was considered un-manly. I passed that life-lesson on to my boys. All boys were raised this way. If they were raised by a mother and a father.

But that was a different time. A time when men aspired to be “gentlemen” and women to be “ladies.”  Feminism has since remedied that.  “Lady” is a term of patriarchal oppression.

And hence we get the present-day, post-feminism of Whoopi Goldberg, essentially erasing the code of chivalry that established men’s protective role of women—even if being assaulted by one.  Just deck the bitch... Women, if you don’t want to get clocked by your man, don’t hit him.

What a world we have carved out for our children thanks to feminism.

And now the third touch to the Third Rail: the violence of the African-American population.

We are now getting inundated with domestic violence propaganda, targeting its prevalence in the NFL.  I have no doubt that there is a large amount of domestic violence committed by football players. The overwhelming majority of football players are African-American. And they, as a population sub-group, are incredibly violent, in relation to whites, Asians, ... the rest of the population.

But we’re not supposed to notice this. Mentioning it is tantamount to professional suicide, depending on your career. I heard Jesse Jackson say on TV, in Ferguson, MO, addressing the ostensible violence systematically perpetrated by racist white cops against blacks, that “black-on-white crime is rare.”

He actually said this.

When counting violent crime (which includes things like robbery as well as assault and battery), black-on-white violent crime occurs at rate of 5 : 1 compared against white-on-black violence.

But that’s not the whole story. The population ratio of whites-to-blacks is also, coincidentally 5 : 1.

That means, on a population weighted normalizing of these statistics, the ratio of black-on-white to white-on-black violent crime is 25 : 1.

Furthermore, if we single out purely violent crime, that is, aggravated assault, the ratio jumps to an incredible 200 : 1.

When African-American youths make a game out of knocking out a random white person on the street with a single punch, and videoing it to broadcast on social media, the affirmative denial of black violence by white liberals reaches the diabolical.  “Flashmobs” are really groups of African-American youths ransacking and looting a place of business; occasionally pausing to join in a beat down of a shopper.

The incredible level of violence in the African-American population is directly a result of what I have coined the War on Fatherhood. Two-thirds of black children are raised without their father in the home. Without the male role model provided by the father, African-American youth look to successful black role models: pimps, rappers, and athletes. Like Ray Rice.

It’s not inferior schools. It’s not institutional racism. It’s not racial profiling. It’s not racist cops. It’s not white privilege. It’s fatherlessness. The destruction of the biological nuclear family; the ultimate failure of the African-American culture.

I offer a conjecture. It is my opinion that levels of fatherlessness of two-thirds cannot be attributed solely to inherent defects in the black culture.  Of course that is what feminism attributes it to: failures of men.  But single-maternal households are rising in the white population, too.  I assert that fatherlessness is attributed to public policies, laws and social engineering that are demanding it. Fatherless families are now part and parcel of our culture, promoted in our schools, the media and the entertainment industry.

I attribute it to one more “success” of feminism, the open-ended goal of which is female empowerment. Nothing may contradict it. After all, a woman needs a man like ...

But on the Rice case, the domestic violence narrative is trumps.  And there’s no need to downplay Ray’s violence because he’s African-American, because this can easily be masked under the ‘domestic violence in sports’ paradigm.

I still have yet to hear a whimper of even questioning Janay’s behavior in the elevator.  Victim-feminism is many things. Here, it serves as an instruction to stop thinking. Man knocks out wife. What’s to question?

When a woman assaults her husband, on those rare occasions when it breaks the news, the typical line of inquiry begins, “What did he do to her?” And the words “domestic violence” are assiduously avoided in any news coverage.

Victim-feminism is more than an ideology of hate, it’s quasi-religious. One of its fruits is the new definitions of family, specifically, the fatherless family. Hence, the growing toxicity in African-American communities like Ferguson, and people like Ray and Janay Rice.

The family civilizes the beast in man. And it provides the safe environment for a woman to procreate. Without it, especially in the African-American population, we see boys and girls brought up with no concept of civility, no apparent understanding and appreciation for the value of life, and young men committing violent crimes of senseless brutality.

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Book review: "Who Owns the Future?" by Jaron Lanier

Reviewed by Mark Charalambous

“Who Owns the Future?” attempts to answer the big question: where is this all going?

By “this” I mean the big picture from an economic perspective.

“Income disparity” is a popular meme.  The growing concentration of wealth, complemented by the shrinking of the middle class—or, more accurately, the lowering of the standard of living of the middle class.

Jaron Lanier does not promote the usual explanations that typically involve socio-political sloganeering of some sort. He explains the technological trend that is the real underlying cause, a change every bit as profound as the industrial revolution that transformed the world in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

According to Lanier, the concentration of wealth in market economies is the norm.  Visualize a curve of exponential growth. The genius of democratic societies organically creates artificial barriers (Lanier calls them “levees”) to this inexorable movement of wealth from the many to the few. These are things like labor unions, the minimum wage, social security, Medicare, and tenure regimes for teachers. To Lanier, these are necessary adjustments to a system that otherwise would leave the mass of the population eventually impoverished.

But relax; Lanier is no socialist laying down a treatise on “social justice.”

After identifying the technological causes leading to the erosion of the middle class and an ever-increasing concentration of wealth, Lanier proposes a solution.

What we are presently undergoing is the equivalent of the industrial revolution: the inexorable growth of the digital world. The transferring of information into digital bits accessible to everyone with a computer or smartphone. The universal accessibility of information in the “cloud” via the internet is upending and outright destroying traditional business models and industries one by one, such as the music and travel industries.

Businesses and industries presently entering the process of slow disintegration because of simpler and cheaper online alternatives include real estate (Zillow and Trulia), taxi service (Uber), education (MOOCs), book publishing and brick-and-mortar retailing (Amazon), as well as newspapers and magazines.

What replaces these businesses is an online service. The service is centered at what Lanier refers to as a “siren server” —yes, the Sirens that lured sailors to their doom in Homer’s Odyssey. They lure the user with the promise of “free.”  But as Lanier painstakingly details, nothing is really free in the new digital economy. We pay—we just don’t realize it right away because the price we pay is subtle and diffuse. One price we are paying is, in effect, the loss of middle class jobs—jobs replaced by online transactions. Another price we are paying is privacy. Every transaction we make is tracked. A small step to every thought we make...

In the digital world, wealth becomes concentrated about a relatively small locus of points in the immediate vicinity of the siren server.  This aspect of the economic revolution we are undergoing has been noticed. It is present in the dire warnings constantly given about the need for better STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) education.  The argument is that future jobs—those that supposedly will replace all the disappearing jobs in pre-digital world businesses that have been supplanted by free software apps on the Net—will require mathematical, science and (computer) engineering skills. That may be technically true; however—and it’s a big however—there will never be anywhere near the same quantity of jobs created in the digital world economies to balance those lost to the middle class. Furthermore, believing that we can train thousands of students who can’t add fractions to compete for jobs in hi-tech is, well, laughable.

Lanier views this new concentration of income wealth as a consequence of the natural laws of economics responding to a technological revolution.   Formerly middle class jobs will continue to be destroyed, and furthermore, what we have seen in the music industry, the newspaper industry, and brick-and-mortar book stores, is just the beginning. It’s going to get a lot worse.

Lanier provides several future scenarios to argue his case. What is the logical conclusion of 3D-printing?  Only the end of manufacturing as we know it, perhaps.  Consumer products, including electronics and clothes, will be manufactured individually in the home. Plumbers will ‘print out’ a necessary pipe fitting, obviating the need not only for factories, but also for both distributors and plumbing supply stores! Besides the printer itself, the new commodity will be the software designs for the items “printed.”  Once again, siren servers will emerge. A finite number of smart technicians, cranking out software designs. Lost: entire industries. Uncountable number of middle-class jobs.

We have already seen how some industries have attempted to cope with the digital revolution. The music industry fought tooth, claw and lobbyist against Napsta and the inevitable digitizing of “music product.”  Ultimately in vain. Ask your son/daughter how they get their music, if you don’t already know.

But other industries appear completely oblivious to the writing on the wall. In the case of education, teachers, the soon-to-be-displaced workers, have actually cooperated with the siren servers to destroy their own professions!

Do colleges and universities really believe that their monopoly on academic accreditation will insulate them from online education provided by MOOCs (massive open online courses)?  Newsflash: it will be the Googles and the Facebooks that will be the first to acknowledge academic competence of the skills that matter (to them) earned via MOOCs. Once hi-tech opens the floodgates... 

It is only a matter of time before private enterprise MOOCs muscle their way into the college accreditation business, and essentially nullify the value of a BA from PCU. It is only a matter of time before college students (and especially their parents) rebel at the notion of paying $50,000 to take online courses at a college, when the exact same value can be obtained with the same effort from a far cheaper alternative.

Jaron Lanier is not some dystopian futurist; he is a bona fide computer scientist with Silicon Valley pedigree. He is part of the industry. He presently works for a siren server: Microsoft. Some of his predictions for future technological advancements driven by digitizing the world will surprise and shock you.  But no matter how wild, they are all eminently plausible, and no doubt several startups will have as their genesis an idea first read in this book.

If the book did no more than this, it would be a must-read for anyone curious about where “this” is all going. But Lanier does more—he offers a way out, a solution.

Whenever Lanier explores the mechanism of a particular siren server, he exposes the free informational input necessary for its success.  This is the information that we users give to the servers, sometimes unknowingly through cookies but just as often consciously by volunteering information. If you have ever written an online review of a product, a book or concert video, you have given away monetary value to a siren server. A good review generates Likes. And Likes generate sales. Text might be lifted directly out of a review for use by another review or the siren server itself.

Credit scoring provides another example.  A lender relies on a credit score. The credit score is derived from a scorecard that is only possible because of strategic credit information culled, without knowledge or consent, from thousands of people. The lender profits from the information in the credit score by using it to determine credit risk. The tens of thousands of consumers who contributed to that algorithm receive no remuneration for their contribution that made the scorecard possible.

A dating site similarly relies on an algorithm. The algorithm in turn is constructed by analyzing data points. A particular couple who used the site and ended up marrying are considered a success. The parameters for the ‘perfect match’ algorithms are based in some part on this particular couple. They receive no remuneration.

What we are talking about here is the source of the data. The data’s historical record. Lanier’s solution to the growing economic dislocations we are experiencing is to establish the provenance of all data, and then a payment (“nano-payments”) system of, in effect, royalties for any and all originators of data.

So, in this scenario, any clever post in a FB timeline that gets Shared can earn a royalty. What Lanier is proposing, keeping the history of all data with the data itself, requires new internet protocols. But he insists it is not only doable, but actually was a choice in the original inception of the internet, one that could have been made but wasn’t.  He also offers several fanciful schemes for how the payment scheme would actually work.

Lanier’s analysis of the digital revolution and its impact on the middle class is compelling. He offers one solution. I have yet to hear others that make as much sense. I think his suggestions are worth considering.

The Wonder Years

It’s either a Tuesday or a Thursday, whichever is first in the month, 1965. If during the school year, it would be afternoon.  The place: Brooklyn, the local candy store. The occasion?  The day the comics come out.

I might arrive before they’ve been put up. If so, they’re in a stack, maybe a foot high, wrapped by wire on four sides like Christmas ribbon.  I’d ask Mr. Z, the Jewish proprietor, to pleeeez open them up. No need to look for a scissor, just unwind the wire. I can do it! Don’t delay!

And there they were!  Maybe three or four of the first batch of this month’s titles. Perhaps Tales of Suspense or Tales to Astonish. Perhaps a Sgt. Fury.  Hopefully at least one of the major titles: Fantastic Four, Thor, Spider-Man. Gold.

Those stunning Jack Kirby covers, jumping out at me, demanding to be lovingly picked up and oh-so carefully opened. Or a Steve Ditko Spider-Man or Strange Tales.  Beautiful also, though in a distinctly different way.

This was the ritual that dominated my youth at ages eleven, twelve, and thirteen. If I remember correctly, the comics would come out as early as the first Tuesday or Thursday in the month. It might take two weeks of Tuesdays and Thursdays for the full complement of the month’s Marvels to come out.  Then would come the unbearable two week-or-so wait for next month’s issues.

Kirby spoke about the importance of the covers. It was a business, after all, and the cover was the sizzle that sold the steak. Those covers had to leap out at you and demand ownership!  This was why Kirby drew most of the covers regardless of who drew the stories inside (except for Steve Ditko’s, the lesser giant).

My first Marvel was Thor #114. It’s not hard to see why it grabbed my attention and compelled me to part with 12 cents—which was probably a lot of money to me back then.

You could buy 2 candy bars and have enough left over to buy two Tootsie-rolls or 2 Bazooka Joes with 12 cents.

Who can remember that far back?  My weekly allowance—if I had any—might’ve been 25 cents. Possibly a buck?

Look at this image!  Imagine seeing it through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy. The noble hero combating an escaped convict. Kirby is the acknowledged 'King' of the medium, and this picture illustrates why. That hammer is hitting that ball and chain! Like, really! The motion of the arm and the body twisting in concert; the surefooted stance from which derives the upper-body strength. The brutal ferocity of the “Absorbing Man,” seemingly equal in power to the noble Thunder God.

They were a revelation.  Where have you been all my life?  Within a couple of months I became a collector of every single Marvel title. I read them and re-read them, in the most delicate fashion. Fingertips only. Never—ever!—bending back. No one was allowed to touch them, let alone read them. Not even my brother. They were safely stored in a box; unfortunately, not in bags with boards.

As these moments defined my life at this time, I naturally sought companionship to share this with. I made friends with the other kid in the neighborhood who understood. He was a Puerto Rican kid from across the street.

After buying the new comics we didn’t take them home to read them—we read them immediately. Wherever we were. We’d find a stoop to squat on, or just stand on the sidewalk. First the awesome splash page, almost as good as the cover. As we looked at the panels, at the action in those panels, we were those characters! We became Captain America jiu-jitsuing Batroc the Leaper. This was the power—no, the magic!—of Jack Kirby’s art.  He had an ability to capture motion, not just fighting motion, but just normal movement of the body, in a naturalistic way that no other artist came close to approximating.

And Kirby’s figures lived within frames of exquisite composition and masterful design, often with stunning background detail.

After discovering Marvel comics, we began a daily routine. Every afternoon, as soon as we got home from school, we went on our pilgrimage to track down past issues. Some stores did a business in buying and selling used comics. I don’t recall what they sold them for—it might’ve been a dime.  There was no premium on older issues.  Perhaps the storekeepers bought them for a nickel.

Perhaps they were just taken for free off the hands of some mom who was sick of her son reading “those comic books.” An alternative to throwing them into the garbage—which was the common final resting place for most comics.

When we first discovered this trick, we of course bought every single old Marvel around. There were maybe three or four merchants in the neighborhood who sold used comics. They kept them in boxes behind the counter, so you had to ask for them. These were places that did a brisk trade in 15-cent egg-creams and nickel bags of Wise potato chips.

So our daily routine was to hit these stores and see if someone had brought in any Marvels since the last time we checked. In a way, this was almost as exciting as the thrill of seeing the brand new comics, because you never knew what might turn up.  This was before there were any reprints. We had no idea what previous issues contained. Who the FF fought in some random previous issue. Earlier costumes. We didn’t know that a few months prior “Thor” was titled “Journey into Mystery.”  A Tales of Suspense with no Captain America feature? Imagine the thrill of finding one of those!

These excursions were for us, literally treasure hunts. Any old Marvels that we found were, indeed, treasure to us. There is nothing—nothing!—we wanted more. Treasure.

We were relentless in pursuit of the older issues. We researched leads. We traded with each other. My goal in life was to get every single Fantastic Four and Thor. We wanted them all.

What actually happened is that these ‘behind the counter used comic books’ sources eventually dried up.

And then I moved. From the ghetto that was Williamsburg to a better neighborhood: Bay Ridge. I continued collecting Marvels... for a few years. My Puerto Rican friend’s family returned to Puerto Rico. We wrote a few times. I eventually made new friends who collected Marvels.

But it was Junior High now, and I was discovering new interests. Music (after all, it was the mid-sixties). Girls.  I kept collecting for awhile, but the magic incrementally disappeared.  In fact, it wasn’t just growing up—the magic really had gone!  With hindsight, it’s clear that there was a peak period for Marvel comics, roughly spanning the years 1964 through 1967. When Jack Kirby and Stan Lee fed on each other’s creativity like Lennon and McCartney.

Jack Kirby eventually left Marvel, but the decline began some years before. Some of the titles began simply reprinting older issues. That seemed like outright theft to me.

It’s hard to be completely objective, but looking back it really does appear as if latched on just in the nick of time. Very lucky, I guess.

Here’s to you, Jack Kirby, and to my Puerto Rican buddy from Williamsburg, wherever you are. Thank you. And yes, I still have my comics.

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Jack Kirby Gallery

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Profiling: The Elephant in the Room at Zimmerman Trial

Those that want to “hang” George Zimmerman rest their hopes on the prosecution’s success in showing that he profiled Trayvon Martin—singled him out for suspicion—because he was black.

If the jury can be convinced of this, they reason, then regardless of who jumped who, of who was in fear for their life during the fight, the shooting of unarmed Trayvon constitutes murder in the 2^nd degree because of the racial animus implicit in the racial profiling, without which there would have been no altercation.

“Profiling” is commonly thought of as using a person’s race, sex, ethnicity, religion, or cultural background (the list continues to grow...) as a primary predictor of their likelihood to commit some egregious act.  To get an operational definition of “profiling” we need to append the clause: “when the target of the profiling belongs to an acceptable victim group.”

Profiling is inextricably linked with political correctness.

It turns out that there had been many recent break-ins at the Twin Lakes gated housing development in Sanford, FL where Zimmerman lived and Trayvon was visiting. The recession had decimated the property values of the homes in the relatively young housing development. Units that originally sold in the $250k range to owner-occupiers had since plummeted in value to the $80k range—a situation familiar to many throughout the US, and especially so to communities in Florida which was particularly hard-hit by the housing bubble collapse.

Subsequently, many of the units at Twin Lakes were rented, and a crime-wave of burglaries ensued. According to statements heard at the trial and corroborated by crime reports, all of the most recent 7 break-ins were committed by black men. Therefore, there is a likelihood that the next break-in will also be committed by a black man, or put another way, it is statistically more likely that a black male rather than a white male will commit a burglary at the housing complex.

But under the prohibition against profiling, any crime-prevention efforts must ignore the statistical likelihood that break-ins at the development are caused, perhaps exclusively, by black males. This begs the question: When does it become okay to acknowledge that the perpetrators of the break-ins are black males, and act accordingly with that knowledge in any preventive measures to address crime in the complex?  What if there were 10 break-ins, all perpetrated by black males? One hundred? 

At what point does it become not only an absurdity but also, and more importantly, does it actually undermine law enforcement efforts, when the demographic profile of the people committing the crimes is deliberately ignored?

Apparently no one questions that profiling is an evil practice, the accusation of which will cause an alleged “profiler” to twist and turn in linguistic contortions trying to explain how recognizing the racial identity of past criminal behavior in a given community is not ...  recognizing the racial identity of past criminal behavior in the given community.  Yes, it’s an impossible task, and amusing to watch in the Zimmerman trial, in a perverse sort of way.

This illogical, counterproductive obeisance to political correctness is not restricted to the disproportional prevalence of black crime. It also explains why TSA agents avoid profiling the group solely responsible for all the acts of terrorism at our airports since 9/11—middle-eastern/northern-African Islamics—by also body-searching white grandmothers in wheelchairs and 4-year-old children.

But as stated above, profiling is only profiling when the target group is a legitimate “victim group” as established by the canons of political correctness.

One particularly virulent strain of profiling occurs each and every day throughout the nation, but it is never acknowledged as such and hence it’s never in the news and never the subject of a “study” by well-meaning, progressive social science academics. Nor is it fodder for a Hollywood drama starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, screaming out for social justice and warmly rewarded with an Oscar on that night when Hollywood celebrities revel in their circle-jerk of self-righteousness.

The most pernicious, pervasive, unjust —and apparently completely invisible!—form of profiling is visited upon men accused of “gender crimes,” mired in everyday courtroom dramas that never make it to cable TV.  Accusations of domestic abuse/violence that coincidentally occur when a divorce is filed and custody of children is an issue. Men accused of sexual assault or rape in so-called “date-rape” cases after the “victim” has second thoughts the following morning. Men who seek custody of their children, even when there are no allegations of abuse made by the mother.

In the abstract, profiling is akin to the process of using discrimination (in the textbook, i.e., good sense of the word) to make decisions. That is, the process whereby we employ observation, logic, perhaps supported by some probability and statistics analysis, all in concert to make strategic decisions about a future action.  To optimize a choice. An example might be in industry whereby decisions are made in Quality Control on how to test a production line of widgets in the most efficient and cost-effective manner.

 

“Profiling” in the common, legal usage, i.e., circumscribed by the parameters of identity politics, transmogrifies this process into something evil.

Somehow, when it comes to matters of crime prevention and air-traffic safety, to use two of the more familiar examples, we have all been brainwashed to pretend that recognizing a profile of the criminal perpetrators is somehow wrong and must be condemned and prohibited. George Zimmerman should be found guilty of 2^nd –degree murder because he profiled Trayvon Martin, regardless of the facts of the actual altercation that are emerging in the trial.

If you lived in the Twin Lakes gated community and were aware of the history of break-ins, would you be more suspicious of a strange black man in a hoodie than you would of a white man you didn’t recognize? If no, then you deserve the politically correct seal of approval for your bias-free powers of observation; however you fail miserably in life skills and common sense, and if it were your job to safeguard the security of the residents you would be woefully derelict in your duties and should be fired.

Consider these crime statistics: 

• Blacks commit 42% of all burglaries, a rate exceeding 3 times their proportion (13%) in the general population.[i]
• Blacks commit 55% of all robberies, 4 times their proportion in the general population.[ii]
• Blacks are 7 times as likely as whites to commit murder.[iii]
• The single biggest predictor of violent crime levels in an area is the percentage of the population that is black and Hispanic.[iv]
• 28% of people arrested for burglary are black.[v]

Look closely at the last stat. How do we account for the fact that though 42% of all burglaries were committed by blacks, only 28% of those arrested were black?

This is not an aberration. It turns out that, contrary to what we are led to believe, blacks are not arrested “en masse” on suspicion of criminality. In fact they are arrested at rates less than the actual rates at which they statistically commit the crimes. With respect to arrest rates, blacks are in fact, “reverse-profiled.” The explanation for this is that in response to political pressure, police departments have adjusted policies to afford especial leniency to blacks and minorities.

An example of this can actually be found in the Zimmerman trial. Trayvon Martin had a criminal history—though the jury has been protected from this knowledge. Trayvon benefitted from a policy of the Miami-Dade Sanford Police Department geared to minimize school arrests of black males. Trayvon had been apprehended with a burglary tool and also with pilfered jewelry. These offenses should’ve been arrestable, but political pressure to show improvements in juvenile delinquency in the school district fudged the reports, including one for pot possession, such that Trayvon’s punishment was limited to two school suspensions.

Unfortunately I suffer from an acute case of rationalism, so to me it seems a no-brainer that rather than looking for ways to hide these politically incorrect inconvenient truths by attacking “profiling” and “stop-and-frisk” policies, we should be using any and all legal means at our disposal to actually deal with these crimes, including profiling.

And if you’re really interested in the ‘why’ of the appallingly high rates of black crime, refer to the paragraph above regarding the “invisible” profiling. The strategic correlation to be made is with children raised without their fathers...  but that leads to a 3rd rail even hotter than racial profiling.

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[i] NCVS incident-level data for the years 2001 to 2003 were extracted from US, Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics

[ii] ibid

[iii] Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2011, Nov. 16, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/press/htus8008pr.cfm

[iv] The Color of Crime: Race, Crime, and Justice in America, 2005, New Century Foundation

[v] US, Dept. of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Crime in the United States, 2002 [This is the official title of document that is based on the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR).]

Online Education: Full-speed ahead, or time for a fire drill?

by R Tarpaeian

Education isn’t the first industry to be upended by the internet, and it surely won’t be the last. Online education, aka distance learning, is rapidly proliferating throughout colleges and universities; its future appears inevitable. But there are other seismic trends and innovations ongoing in education. How these trends eventually intersect is unpredictable, but one thing seems certain: higher ed. as we know it will grow increasingly unrecognizable.

With online and self-paced education, the role of the ‘chalk-and-talk’ lecturer gradually disappears, being replaced by students essentially doing the work themselves. Learning is done through a variety of “delivery systems,” all accessible online: video lectures, the e-book textbook, e-tutoring chat systems, etc. The course needs a real teacher to set up, but once that’s done the process can be easily automated.

The second trend affecting higher education is economic. We’re all familiar with the dismal employment statistics of recent college grads due to a global recession that shows no sign of abating.  Chances are you were served your Starbucks coffee this morning from one. Likewise the salesman who put you in that new car. It’s an inconvenient reality and an ugly truth, but in the employment stakes derby a college degree today serves the same purpose formerly satisfied with a high school diploma: a certification of sorts that someone is educable, as in capable of learning tasks required for a specific job for a prospective employer. But there’s one big difference: the high school diploma is free.

College grads struggling to get a job that comports with their expensive education are asking themselves if the thousands of dollars of debt are actually worth it? When considering $250 textbooks, overpriced room-and-board, and perhaps the ultimate injustice: required internships where students pay for the full cost of the credits “earned” from their (usually) unpaid work, the answer for many of them will be “no.”

A third trend is related to the first: open education. Many universities are experimenting with open online classes. These courses don’t qualify for actual credits toward a degree, but at some point that distinction becomes unjustifiable. Why is math expertise learned from khanacademy.org inferior to that obtained by taking a credit course from a university–especially when it’s an online course?  It’s only a matter of time before students rebel at this educational apartheid and demand that their self-directed academic work be treated equally, once institutional rubrics on the same material are satisfied and some appropriate fee is paid.

Colleges are racing to embrace online education. Unless one looks at long term consequences, it appears to be the best thing since sliced bread. A profit-generating machine. Essentially, once an online course is set up, a monkey can be trained to administer it. Classrooms and much of the attendant overhead are eliminated. Costs are slashed. Why is a full-fledged professor required to merely process data from an application program, occasionally communicate with students through the software and generally make sure that everything operates smoothly? Think of the epic labor battles to be waged by teachers’ unions fighting to defend full pay and status—or just simply require a (human) administrator!—in an online-education environment where students teach themselves.

Perhaps the ultimate nightmare scenario on the horizon is the “turnkey” college degree. The criminal mind is always one step ahead of the forces of law and order. Can we really expect humanities professors to recognize every plagiarized paper given the virtually unlimited wealth of literature available online with a few mouse clicks, not to mention the growing number of online businesses created explicitly to service this ‘need’?  How long until it’s possible to purchase a Harvard degree for some fixed but presumably substantial amount of money, from an enterprise that will guarantee a degree after the requisite years of “enrollment”? The ‘customer’ will be required to provide vital statistics including social security number and the infrequent but unavoidable flight-in for the occasional face-to-face.

In short, educators need to carefully consider the consequence of the following trends:

• Functional equivalence of college degree with high school diploma of generations past.
• Sky-high college tuition costs resulting in crippling debt loads for graduates.
• No guarantee that a college degree will be rewarded with a secure, good-paying, professional job, and the growing awareness in students and parents that a college education isn’t necessarily required for a happy, debt-free, prosperous life—there are alternatives.
• Online education that is ripe for fraud, and not worth the cost as professors (the main cost factor) are removed from their teaching role.
• Competing, often free, online education systems delivering a product of equal quality.

Educators rushing to take advantage of technological advances in education should be careful what they wish for...

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Domestic Violence "Science" on Trial with Jodi Arias

Guest Op-ed, from R. Tarpaeian

Alyce LaViolette, domestic violence expert extraordinaire with over 30 years’ experience, is giving battered women a black eye.  She is the star witness for the defense, brought in to convince a jury that Jodi Arias, who admits to the brutal slaughtering of her ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander, was actually a battered woman—a domestic violence victim.

Bear in mind that this murder was particularly gruesome. Arias stabbed Travis 29 times, one cut an ear-to-ear throat slashing, and for good measure shot him in the face with a handgun.

Other than Ms. Arias’ own testimony after the fact, there is no evidence to support any allegation of domestic violence on the part of Mr. Alexander. There is, however, ample evidence that Jodi Arias stalked Travis, and of course eventually savagely butchered him.

It should come as no surprise that Ms. LaViolette has come under severe criticism. Feminists and “battered women’s advocates” fear that she is doing irreparable harm to their cause.  She is being criticized as a typical defense shill, no different than one of the other expert witnesses for the defense, psychologist Richard Samuels. He attempted to paint Arias as a sympathetic victim who suffered an abusive childhood. Because Arias eventually admitted to the murder only after floating several alternate realities (including one claiming that two ninjas did the deed), the primary goal of the defense is to avoid a murder-1 conviction that could bring the death penalty.

Enter domestic violence expert Ms. LaViolette.  

As everyone knows, using behavioral “scientists” of one breed or another in criminal cases is standard operating procedure.  Everyone in the courtroom recognizes these people as hired guns. They are hired only if their analysis bolsters the side’s case. It’s a game. After they lend their expertise in the direct, the opposition attempts to discredit them in the cross-examination.

But it is a big mistake to view Ms. LaViolette through this lens.  She is not just a hired gun who, had she been hired by the prosecution would have testified just as authoritatively on Mr. Alexander’s behalf. There is ample evidence that Travis was afraid of Jodi. Friends warned him that she was dangerous. The state has a much stronger case that Jodi Arias fits the “batterer profile,” someone that could carefully plan and commit the ultimate act of domestic violence, which after all is what this trial is about.

She stalked him. She was obsessed with him. If she couldn’t have him, nobody would. Her behaviors are in line with many of the classic benchmarks of “abuse” defined by the “experts” such as LaViolette—one of which asserts that an “abuser” will eventually kill “his” victim if there is no intervention.

But there is no circumstance that would ever find Ms. LaViolette defending a male victim of domestic violence. In fact, under intense cross-examination she admitted that she had never served as an expert witness on behalf of a man.

But rest assured Alyce LaViolette knows men very well. Most of her employment has been counseling “batterers,” a profitable business these days. Had the prosecutor been on the ball he could have easily discredited LaViolette at jump street by simply asking her about the circumstances of the men in the “batterers groups” that she runs.

Are they all guilty of beating women? Undoubtedly some of them are—but most people don’t understand the legal machinery involved in domestic violence allegations. An accusation of domestic abuse, something routine in a contested divorce involving custody of children, usually results in an “abuse protection” order. Once in place, it requires literally nothing other than a verbal claim to haul the man into court for a criminal prosecution of a technical violation of the abuse protection, or “restraining,” order (which is “civil” in nature when issued, but transforms to criminal when a violation is alleged).

Men are prosecuted for ridiculously innocuous things, such as phoning their child at a day or time not “allowed” by the restraining order; happening to be in the same public place as the “victim,” or even being intentionally invited by the “victim” for the express purpose of entrapment.

Once accused, the punishment often results in probation to avoid a jail sentence if the accused successfully completes a “batterers program.” Besides her forensic career as a domestic violence expert witness, which pays her $300 an hour, this is what LaViolette does. She runs batterer programs for men who have been accused of domestic violence.

Another pertinent question the prosecution could have asked is: Do the men LaViolette treats volunteer for her counseling? Well, in the first place, if they don’t, they go to jail, as it’s a condition for probation.

Once wringing this admission from LaViolette, the prosecutor should have then probed her on the issue of guilt or innocence of the men assigned to her program under threat of jail time. Do they ever claim innocence, i.e., that they were falsely accused? 

Well, under the rules of these batterer treatment programs, this can’t happen. In order to be admitted into the program the men have to sign a lengthy document that among other things requires them to confess to committing domestic violence. And of course, if they refuse to sign they violate probation and... go to jail.

This then, is the captive audience for LaViolette’s treatment. If it sounds like something out of Stalin’s Soviet Union, it should. These are, in fact, re-education camps.

Back to LaViolette’s defense of Jodi Arias.

Ms. LaViolette is symptomatic of all domestic violence experts. When confronted with a situation where a woman has abused, battered, or even killed a man, the response is always the same: 1. Deny.  2. Minimize. 3. Excuse.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s part of the standard mantra of domestic violence pseudo-science.  It is presented in the canonical literature as the pattern of responses by (always) male perpetrators of domestic violence when confronted. First they deny that it happened. Then they minimize the extent of the abuse, and/or they attempt to excuse it by blaming the victim for doing something to provoke them.

Battered women advocates like LaViolette at first even refused to acknowledge that domestic violence runs both ways. Unbiased research, what little there is, has shown going back to the late seventies that women are at least as likely to initiate domestic violence as men. Eventually they were forced to acknowledge it, as even LaViolette grudgingly did on the stand once or twice. But having been forced to admit that female-on-male domestic violence exists they then resort to... minimizing and excusing it. They claim that the frequency of women abusing men is insignificant , and in the same breath are careful to remind us of why women do what they do... i.e., they rationalize it by claiming that the man was ultimately responsible because of some past actions and behaviors.  They excuse it.

And this is exactly what LaViolette attempted to do on the stand to support the murderess, Jodi Arias.  The only problem is that she is trying to excuse an unbelievably brutal murder using testimony solely from the murderer! Incredibly, in response to a juror’s written question directly putting it to her if the gruesome butchery of Travis Alexander wasn’t the “greater act of domestic violence” than those supposedly committed by Travis as represented to her by Jodi; she actually answered “No.”

Alyce LaViolette, with her 20-page CV, and her 30-some-odd years in the field, is not an aberration. She is the face of victim-feminism, of a worldview that has indoctrinated two generations of women and men into believing that relationships between men and women are based on power and control, rather than love and reciprocity.

It is no secret that many of the women in this arena have evolved into lifestyles that exclude men from their beds. It is no secret that the majority of lesbianism is the product of learned, adaptive behavior. To believe that women who suffer bad marriages and turn into man-hating harridans (often disguised as compassionate, well-meaning, learned “educators”) and “discover” a latent sexual preference for women that was actually innate, is almost as absurd as believing that incarcerated men who turn to homosexuality were born that way but just required the right environment to discover their true sexual appetites.

Quite frankly, the notion that women—or men—who are incapable of having intimate relations with the opposite sex are gainfully employed as experts presiding over any aspect of male-female relationships should give pause to any rational person. Surely, it’s time to recognize that the inmates have been given the keys to the asylum.

Alyce LaViolette defending Jodi Arias as a victim of domestic violence is Exhibit A of the corruption of the behavioral sciences. I won’t say that psychobabbling behavioral experts have no place in the courtroom... they do: as criminal defendants.

It’s time to take the keys back. 

# # #

RTarpaeian@gmail.com

Predator Drones and American Exceptionalism

It’s estimated that US drone attacks have killed between 3,000 and 4,500 people since 2002... and that less than 10% of those were the actual targeted terrorist killers. Among the “collateral damage” are about 200 children.

Now, I will listen to arguments that these remote-control killings are necessary and justified; however, if that is what you believe, you cannot, in my opinion, make any claim as to the US’s moral leadership in the world. The argument that “the behavior of {country X} is worse,” doesn’t cut it. We now, as official policy, strike and kill people in other nations with whom we are not at war. We also have a policy of (foreign) assassination. Furthermore, we practice torture and often employ agents in foreign countries to do this work (“extraordinary rendition”).

So, if you believe this is all justified, fine, but please put aside any claims to any moral superiority.

The idea of other countries acting this way­—targeting victims in the US with the use of drones, for example—is of course, unthinkable. But this notion that we alone are justified in such action is the original meaning behind the expression “American exceptionalism,” which was first used by the Brits under Tony Blair. It did not mean that the US is exceptional in the sense of “the best,” it meant that rules that apply to everyone else do not apply to us.  We are the “exceptions” to the rule. We are exempt. For whatever reason, the usage has since changed to reflect the more pedestrian interpretation.

So, “American exceptionalism,” in its original coinage, is in fact the justification for killing people in foreign countries by remote control. Can you say “manifest destiny?”

The post-9-11 CIA Predator Drone attacks on al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan began under President Bush. But they have vastly increased under President Obama’s tenure. Now, why is this so?  Isn’t Obama a ‘leftist’?  Didn’t he campaign on closing Guantanamo, ending the Iraq War and in general reining in military excesses? Was he some kind of closet right-wing militarist who showed his true colors once he gained the office of Supreme Commander?

Of course not. When faced with the reality of the military-industrial complex, he and his cabinet, including (former) Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, lacked the personal strength and will to oppose them. This is one of the pitfalls of hiring a weak chief executive.

What would have happened if Obama or (W) Bush were president during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962?  Would either of them have had the will, wisdom and personal power to say ‘No’ to the Joint Chiefs’ recommended course of action?  Would we still be here today if it wasn’t someone of the caliber of John Kennedy in the White House at the time? Perhaps it takes someone who has experienced the horrors of war firsthand, such as an Eisenhower, Kennedy or a McCain, to man-up to the task of responsibly executing the job of Commander in Chief of the world’s most powerful nation.