The Progressives insist that the only people capable of bigotry are white and those that can be lumped in with them when convenient. The bigotry of white people can only be directed at non-white people. The pale face is the forever villain, in the morality play that is multiculturalism. Words like “diversity” and “pluralism” don’t really mean what they appear to mean. Instead, they are code for anti-white. It’s why the Left find it perfectly reasonable to exclude the white people from a diversity event.

South Puget Sound Community College says it was a mistake for an employee group to invite only people of color to a diversity “happy hour.”

The group that sent out the email last week apologized the next day and canceled the event, said Kellie Purce Braseth, dean of college relations.

The college believes the best way to celebrate and discuss diversity is to include everyone, Braseth told KING (http://bit.ly/1qvHzjW ).

“If you want to come you should be able to come; that just makes a richer conversation,” she said.

The invitation to all 300 staffers said the “Staff, Faculty and Administrators of Color” encouraged employees to reply to the invitation to find out the confidential date and time of what was being called a “happy hour” to “build support and community” for people of color.

The invite made it clear white people were not welcome.

“If you want to create space for white folks to meet and work on racism, white supremacy, and white privilege to better our campus community and yourselves, please feel free to do just that,” the email read.

Karama Blackhorn, program coordinator for the school’s Diversity and Equity Center, helped write the invitation.

It could have been worded differently, but she maintains the staff members of color would have a more honest discussion about race without white employees.

Explicitly talking about race “can be a really difficult conversation for a lot of people,” Blackhorn said.

Now, diversity meetings are about as fun as spending a week in an asylum, so most people would not be offended by this sort of thing. As long as this stuff is voluntary, these people can be whatever type of bigot floats their boat. That’s the thing though, they are bigots. They hold negative opinions about specific people based on what they see as differences of opinion. They naturally root for and support their side against the side they see holding an opinion or belief that most threatens their authority.

For example, Paul Krugman is a bigot and a flamboyant one. He seems to have some mental health issues, but he could simply be a fanatic. The bug-eyed look and drooling sneer are very creepy. Maybe he thinks that serial killer stare is handsome or maybe what you see is what you get. Either way, he has the look of someone who is struggling to keep it all together. His latest screed offers a good example of the left-wing bigotry.

So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait.

Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.

There you have it. The bigot just assumes “those people” all think as he imagines because, you know, it is how those people are. Again, there is nothing intrinsically immoral about bigotry. It can be immoral, but not necessarily so. In a modern state like America, having a ruling class that hates the people over whom they rule, because the subjects hold the wrong opinions, is a problem. At some point, one side or both decide they cannot live with the morality of the other and hell quickly follows.

Sheila Jackson Lee is not retarded or missing a chromosome. She is just not terribly bright. The reason she is in Congress, however, is the voters of her district are mostly to the left of her on the bell curve. According to Wikipedia, her district is 40% black, 35% Hispanic and 20% white. According to this site, her district is one of the youngest. It ranks 18th in number of children under 5 and 30th in residents under 30. It seems odd that it would have so many babies, yet a declining population of adults. Hmmmm….

The answer is it is home to the Third Ward, a section of downtown Houston. The Third Ward is known as one of the most dangerous neighborhoods on the planet. According to this, you have a 1-in-13 chance of being a crime victim there. Getting a decent murder rate for the area is tough, but news reports claim a murder rate three times the rest of the city, which is 12 so that means over 30. It is hard to know for sure, but we know enough to say it is a hyper-violent place.

The general picture to keep in mind is of a poor urban ghetto filled with violent drug dealers and their underclass partners. You’re not getting a lot of high IQ strivers coming from that district. The median IQ of her district is below 85. It is the old line about the one eyed man being king of the blind. Jackson Lee is a moron by normal standards, but in her district, she’s the smart fraction. In Detroit, a smart fraction with IQ’s in the 90’s resulted in the Haiti-fication of what was once America’s richest city.

It is easy to pick on Lee and the people of her district, but it is the central defect of democracy. No matter how much you spend on education, half of the population is going to be below average. More than half, much more than half in fact, is average or below average in intelligence. The magical thinking of democracy is that one dumb person cannot be trusted to make decisions. A million dumb people will collectively act like a single smart person. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

The people of Lee’s district should not be voting on anything of significance. They are simply too dumb to be trusted. Some could be trusted with the vote. Certainly some own property, run a business and conduct themselves as responsible citizens. Most struggle to keep up with the basics of living. A fair number are unable to understand much more than a child. Why would anyone think it wise to let such people vote? Yet, this is the logic of democracy. It is an appeal to the lowest common denominator.

This is an interesting story. Mel Gibson got in trouble for, among other things, claiming that the Jews run Hollywood. The Jews who run Hollywood did not like Mel saying they run Hollywood, so they have banned him from Hollywood. Gibson is now called an anti-Semite because the Jews who run Hollywood don’t like him. It used to be than an anti-Semite was someone who hated Jews, but now it is someone who is hated by the Jews, which is why Mel Gibson in on the blacklist.

Now, the Jews who run Hollywood and the Jews who run the media, claim that Gibson is blackballed because he is bad for business.  I suspect most people don’t care about what Gibson thinks about anything. Danny Glover, for example, is a raging bigot and paranoid lunatic. Susan Sarandon is probably a schizophrenic. Her former paramour is a communist. Who is worse? A Holocaust denier or a guy in favor of murdering people with whom he disagrees?

No one really knows if Gibson is toxic with the public. He could be. Perhaps the public will not embrace a crazy, drunken anti-Semite. Worse, they could hold it against the studio that hires him or the actors who work with him. There are a lot of unknowns and for any business, unknowns are scary. Even so, the real issue here is the Jews running Hollywood can’t bring themselves to forgive Gibson. These are a people whose holy book is mostly a list of past enemies, so Mel will be waiting a long time.

This story is yet another example of why atheists are terrible people. If Christianity folded up shop tomorrow, they would re-invent it, just so they could cause problems for the Christians.

A humanist advocacy group has filed a federal lawsuit to remove a cross-shaped World War I memorial in Prince George’s County, alleging the display violates the First Amendment.

The American Humanist Association says it does not object to the fact that the Bladensburg Cross memorializes soldiers, but rather the placement of the Christian symbol on property owned by a government agency, The Daily Record reported.

“We are certainly recommending coming up with a monument inclusive of all religious groups,” said Monica Miller, a lawyer with the association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center.

In 2012, the group sent a letter to the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission demanding that the cross be removed from the war memorial. The group said it would have no objection if the cross was on private land, MyFoxDC.com reported.

John Moss, the town’s administrator, said the Bladensburg Cross is not endorsing any faith.

“The cross memorializes our veterans,” he told The Daily Record. “It was never meant to be a religious icon.”

The 40-foot-tall concrete memorial was erected in 1925 by the American Legion to commemorate the 49 men of Prince George’s County who died during World War I.

Look, I’m not a religious guy. The last time I was in church was a couple of years ago for a friend’s ordination. Before that was probably Christmas mass at the insistence of friends, but when that was I don’t recall. Left to my own, I’m not going to church or thinking much about the existence of God. I’m an empirically minded guy which means I don’t dwell on what I can never possibly know. I’m not much of a joiner either so church is not offering much to a guy like me.

Religion does, however, bring joy and happiness to tens of millions of my fellow citizens, so if they want to put up crosses all over the country, good for them. Their expression of their faith is not harming anyone. In fact, I think America was probably better run when most people attended services. It kept the cultural rot at bay and it kept the lunatics under control. An aggressively Christian population would probably be a good antidote to Progressivism, as long as the women are not permitted to vote.

This monument has been up since 1925. No one complained since 1925. Then this collection of dick heads comes along and forces the public to spend tax money to defend normalcy. Here’s the staff list of the Anti-Humanist Society. If you have a chance to make their life a living hell in some way, please take it. With any luck, all of them will come down with an excruciating disease.

Anyway, you’ll notice they steer clear of Jews and Muslims. The former runs the country and has plenty of resources to crush these people. The latter has no qualms about killing for the faith. You can be sure the “humanists” will not be posting Mohamed cartoons on their web page. Christians have foolishly forgotten their roots and let themselves get pushed around by these people. My advice to Christianity is get back to your roots. Kill a few humanists the old fashioned way and the rest will run for cover.

In a previous post on the economics profession, I singled out the profession’s weird belief that public policy is about efficiency. Posts like this one are a good example of the weird myopia. How is it possible that fully formed adults cannot know efficiency and efficacy are of no concern to the welfare state?

If anyone really gave a damn about helping the poor, they would stop welfare altogether. You would think people in a racket allegedly designed to study markets would know you get more of what you subsidize. Paying people to be in the underclass means you get a steady supply of people in the underclass.

Welfare is, in part, about buying grace. The over-class loves these cost-free (relative to them) ways to help the poor. Guys like John Forbes Kerry and Joe Biden don’t give real money to charity. Instead, they give other people’s money to these programs. The added bonus is they get to go around the country bragging about how good they are to poor people, despite the fact they are trying to create more of them.

Even better, their kids get to work in non-profits, funded by government, that allegedly help the poor. That way when they take over for dad in the political rackets, they too can brag about being generous with your money. The politicians in a democracy is like a fireman who runs around setting fires he can heroically battle. They create the conditions for an under-class, then claim to helping the under-class.

Another aspect of welfare is aimed at the middle-class. It is riot insurance. Let the Koreans open their cash businesses in the ghetto. Let the cops figure out how to keep the ghetto savages penned up. That’s where welfare comes in. Give them cash to buy a forty ounce, some weed and some bling. Let ’em sell drugs and shoot one another. If that’s what it take to keep them on the reservation, so be it.

The middle-class looks at welfare as a cheap way to deal with the ghetto. Instead of doing the hard work of enforcing social policy that rewards the fit and punishes the maladapted, they happily pay higher taxes to maintain urban reservations. They move to exurbs without public transport in order to avoid the problem. Welfare is not about helping the poor. It is about political piety and reality avoidance.

On the excitement scale, pension reform is down there with Swedish land reform and women’s basketball. Even for accountants, it is considered dull. It is the small boring things that tend to bring down society. The best example is the Yersinia pestis, which was carried by the fleas on mice. Christendom was nearly wiped out by a tiny pest carrying an even tinier pest. Anyway, this post about pension reform is an example of the small boring stuff that will turn out to be quite important.

The regular session of the Louisiana Legislature is right around the corner and one of the most depressing aspects of it is what won’t be discussed. Pension reform isn’t going to be a prominent topic.

In fact, what could happen is lawmakers will make things worse. That’s because bills to give retired state workers a 1.5 percent cost of living raise have not only been filed but, according to the early handicapping, are likely to pass.

It’s been eight years since the last raise, which is a long time in any context other than one in which the private sector is enduring stagnant wages and chronically high unemployment for years. That is to say, like now.

Under the bookkeeping formulas kept by the state, the money is there for the COLA boost. Now. It may be better to give than to receive, but a pension increase, like a raise, is a gift that keeps on giving for the recipients. This is no bonus forun a job well done, it’s something that stays on the books and has to be met going forward even if balances cause that accounting formula to change.

When economists talk about public debt, they seldom mention the mountain of promises to government employees. If I promise you a job and regular raises for the next 30 years, that’s a debt I owe you. It is no different than borrowing the money and handing it to you. Those promises by state and local government to pay people long into the future cannot be discharged in court in most states, either due to the state constitution or the fact states cannot declare bankruptcy.

Furthermore, it’s no secret that state and municipal governments face few if any looming financial crises greater than pensions. Some governments have taken piecemeal steps to address this, largely copying moves made by the private sector.

More specifically, defined contributions plans like 401ks are now recognized as far more sensible than the rich defined benefits schemes that were once the norm.

Nevertheless, whether the fiscal bombshells created by defined benefit plans — which guarantee a certain payment for life — can be defused remains an open question. By no means is this all the workers’ fault. Lawmakers in states across this great land have frequently underfunded pensions, and states have stuck to a very respectable and probably outdated “anticipated” rate of return of 8.5 percent.

I can provide the answer here. They cannot be defused. They will explode when the cash runs out in the next decade. No one should shed any tears for the workers. They knew, or at least they should have known, that these lavish benefit packages were out of line. They live in the same world as the rest of us. They also knew the money for those lavish pay and benefit plans comes out of their neighbors paycheck. To put it bluntly, they have been screwing the rest of us for decades so too bad for them..

Translated, that means not enough money has been poured into the pension systems and investment returns will have to be forever rosy.

But the relationship between unions – whose power is increasingly concentrated in the public sector – and lawmakers means handsome deals have been struck between decidedly non-adversarial parties. Besides, it all involves other people’s money, and the unions have always provided handsome returns to friendly politicians’ campaign war chests.

Taxpayers are now looking at the monstrous bill produced by such cozy extravagance.

Louisiana, fortunately, doesn’t have as gigantic a burden as states like Connecticut face. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a huge problem in the Pelican State – to the tune of somewhere between $20 billion or nearly $75 billion, depending on which alarming report you consider more accurate.

Louisiana hasn’t adopted sensible reforms like raising the retirement age and moving to defined contribution plans. Louisiana taxpayers are still stuck with an antiquated and expensive arrangement where the defined benefit plan rules supreme.

In 2012 the Legislature did pass a law requiring future state hires to enroll in defined contribution plans, but led by the teachers’ unions and other interested parties – staffers, boards, lobbyists, investment salespeople, accountants, lawyers and the rest who ride like remoras on this bloated whale – the law was repealed.

Of course. Letting public employees unionize was never about the state employees. It was about the democrat politicians hoovering off billions in tax dollars through the unions. The hacks running the unions funnel money to the politicians, who play ball with the unions. The union leaders also keep a nice share for themselves.

It’s hard to predict how deeply we must dip the gourd into the magic fountain of other people’s money to make good on the state’s current obligations. What is clear is regardless of whether one goes with the rosy estimates floated by those in the pension business or the much scarier numbers arguably more objective analysts reach, it would take tens of thousands out of Louisiana wallets just to plug the existing gap.

In other words, what Louisiana and practically every other state across this great land faces is a system that is — all together now — unsustainable.

It is beyond belief everyone doesn’t see this, which means everyone does. The state workers drawing these handsome pensions want them. They fight like cornered tigers over having to contribute another dollar to what they regard not as some extraordinarily generous entitlement paid for by folks who have no such protected eggs themselves, but as some kind of right, confined to them, as sacred as free speech.

There is no magic solution. Detroit is the example states may follow. Over the next decades services will be reduced and budgets cut in areas like public recreation and road maintenance. As the crisis grinds on, bond holders will be hit with demand from states to forgive some debt to avoid defaults. Eventually they will come back to pension plans and force cuts on them. The unions will sue, like they are in Illinois, but you can’t get blood from a stone. When the money runs out, the party is over.

Part of getting older is losing patience for stupid people. That means losing interest in mass media, particularly the commentariat. These are people who spend all of their time opining about things, but never take the time to fact check themselves. They have the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips, yet they can never be bothered to look up basic facts about their topics. Instead they just repeat the same nonsense the other chattering skulls have been saying.

Here’s a good example from John Fund over on National Review. How hard would it be to call someone who knows something about natural gas? They could quickly tell him that it is really hard to ship overseas. They would also tell him we lack the facilities to do it in any sort of volume. It will take decades for us to built out those systems. We have not built a refinery in thirty years. The environmental lobbies will never go along with a large scale LNG facilities near a major port. It’s probably easier to start a nuclear plant than to build a new natural gas facility.

Let’s look at the building of alternative pipelines into Europe. What do you think Russia is doing in Syria and Iran?  They want to build a pipeline through Iran, over northern Iraq into Syria. Tartus would be a very convenient place to build LNG facilities as it already has port facilities capable of handling big sea-going vessels. The GCC and Saudi Arabia would like to build one too, except their pipeline would run through Saudi Arabia into Jordan to the Suez Canal. Neither of these plans will be done anytime soon. Given the problems in the region, both projects are on permanent hold.

Again, all of this stuff can be looked up on-line. Five minutes of time and you quickly see we are not going to be able to do anything about Gazprom. Even if he is unable to work the internet, he works for the Wall Street Journal. he can call people who know about these things. instead, he repeats nonsense. Most likely, the nonsense comes from the neocons who obsess of Russia. They feed these lunkheads in the medial their talking points, knowing that people like Fund will never fact check them.

Even the most disconnected people know the gag about science announcing something and then the next day announcing the opposite. This is most common with food and diet, where everyday brings a new scare. If you follow the soft-sciences, then you know that most of what passes for academic research in some fields is complete nonsense that is easily refuted. This story in the New York Times goes into detail about the origin of what we have come to call junk science.

My first Raw Data column, published in January, was about the controversy over irreproducibility — experiments whose outcomes cannot be verified independently by another lab. Featured in the piece was a study by Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis that has been a source of contention since it appeared in 2005. It was called “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

All scientific results are, of course, subject to revision and refutation by later experiments. The problem comes when these replications don’t occur and the information keeps spreading unchecked.

Dr. Ioannidis’s analysis took into account several factors — things like noisy data, a small sample size or relatively lenient standards for deciding if a finding is statistically significant. His model could be applied to any area of science that met his criteria. But most attention to the reproducibility problem has been in the life sciences, particularly in medical laboratory research and epidemiology. Based on the number of papers in major journals, Dr. Ioannidis estimates that the field accounts for some 50 percent of published research.

The small sample size is a favorite of the health rackets. I wish I had saved it, but my all time favorite was a study on milk using eight Norwegian dairy farmers. I forget the details, but it had something to do with heart disease and dairy consumption. The executive summary made the claim that dairy causes heart disease. They assumed the nitwit reporters would not bother to read the study.

Another area of concern has been the social sciences, including psychology, which make up about 25 percent of publications. Together that constitutes most of scientific research. The remaining slice is physical science — everything from geology and climatology to cosmology and particle physics. These fields have not received the same kind of scrutiny as the others. Is that because they are less prone to the problems Dr. Ioannides described?

Faye Flam, a science writer with a degree in geophysics, made that argument in a critique of my column in Knight Journalism Tracker, and I responded on my own blog, Fire in the Mind. Since then I’ve been thinking more about the matter, and I asked Dr. Ioannidis for his view.

“Physical sciences have a stronger tradition of some solid practices that improve reproducibility,” he replied in an email. Collaborative research, for example, is customary in physics, including large consortiums of experimenters like the teams that announced the discovery of the Higgs particle. “This certainly increases the transparency, reliability and cross-checking of proposed research findings,” he wrote.

He also mentioned more stringent statistical standards in particle physics — like the five sigma measure I mentioned in my second column — as well as sociological factors: “There seems to be a higher community standard for ‘shaming’ reputations if people step out and make claims that are subsequently refuted.” Cold fusion was a notorious example. He also saw less of an aversion to publishing negative experimental results — that is, failed replications.

Another factor, as Ms. Flam suggests, is how constrained a field is in generating plausible hypotheses to test. Almost anything might be suspected of causing cancer, but physicists are unlikely to propose conjectures that violate quantum mechanics or general relativity. But I’m not sure the difference is always that stark. Here is how I put it my blog post:

“What about the delicate and exquisitely controlled experiments that occur in laboratories? Are hypotheses involving intracellular enzyme pathways and the effects of microRNA on protein regulation so much less constrained than, say, solid-state physics and materials science?

Everyone is being polite here. The difference is social science is not science. Physics and chemistry are science. Science relies on math to validate itself. Long before humans walked the earth, arithmetic was true. Two plus two was true at the dawn of time and will be true into the future. Social sciences rely on statistics, which they use to calculate probabilities. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is not science.

You can calculate the probability of you getting black jack on the next deal. You cannot prove you will get black jack. When you get into areas with loads of hard to quantify variables, statistics loses much of it value. The response to that is the creation of simplified models and studies that have no connection to reality. The result provides statistically useful results, but the difference between statistically useful and practically useful is often so large as to make them mutually exclusive.

Dr. Ioannidis said he was struck by an “arrogant dismissal” by some physical scientists of the suggestion that their field might be anything less than pristine. We won’t really know, he said, unless there are empirical studies like the recent ones in medical science.

“I have no doubt that false positives occur in all of these fields,” he concluded, “and occasionally they may be a major problem.”

I’ll be looking further into this matter for a future column and would welcome comments from scientists about the situation in their own domain.

Science is not immune from mischief. This story from last week shows how broken the peer review system is these days. Peer review is intended to weed out the junk science from the legitimate science. Experts in the field review your work, critique your methods, challenge your assumptions and look at your data. If computer generated gibberish is passing through the system it means no one is looking at this stuff. Peer review is useless if there are no peers and no review.

A popular way for campus degenerates to get attention to host a workshop of festival celebrating a depraved sexual act. Sometimes these are part of a whole week of degenerates performing from the public. On the one hand, the left-wing media loves pushing this stuff in the face of white people. On the other the left gets to pretend they are edgy outsiders challenging orthodoxy. This story posted on National Review is about a recent one of these events at Rutgers University.

University of Michigan had a BDSM class. University of Arizona had the Condom Olympics. Many more have Sex Weeks, or some variant of that sort. Now Rutgers, a public university, has jumped into the fray.

On Tuesday, Rutgers hosted a female orgasm workshop as part of a week-long event called “Sexapalooza.” Sex educators Marshall Miller and Maggie Keenan-Bolger conducted the Tuesday night event for “orgasm aficionados and beginners of all genders.” Participants came to “learn about everything from multiple orgasm to that mysterious G-spot.”

The event was particularly marketed to struggling boyfriends who want to help their girlfriends to orgasm.

Other events at Sexapalooza, which ends on March 12, include a Sex Toy Workshop, complete with a sex-toy raffle,  a lecture called “Having Great Sex,” and a Sex Fair with “condom races, condom lollipops, and education tables.”

Sex Discuss Here!, the organization that ran the event, describes the female orgasm workshop as “our most popular program.”

It’s always fun to look up the bios of the people involved in these things.

Kate Weinberg
Kate graduated from DePaul University in Chicago. She describes a “lightbulb moment” she had while taking an intensive HIV/AIDS course in college, when she realized how sexuality “is a thing so intimately connected to politics, religion, guilt, expectation, the ways in which we live and are allowed to live. It’s one of those things that seems to explain the world around it.” Little did she know at that moment, but she had begun her journey toward becoming a sex educator.

Dorian Solot
Dorian co-founded Sex Discussed Here!, co-created all its programs, and trains and supervises our fantastic team of sex educators. She has presented over 500 programs around the country at colleges and universities, businesses, churches, regional and national conferences, and adult education centers, and continues to present a small number of programs each year. However, these days you’re more likely to work with Dorian during the planning process for your event: she is the person who answers our phone and emails, guiding hundreds of students and staff people through the process of making each event a success.

As a breast cancer survivor who discovered a lump in her own breast at age 26, Dorian knows that being comfortable with her own body may have saved her life. As a result, she is passionate about increasing people’s knowledge and comfort with their own bodies. Trained as a sexuality educator at Brown University, Dorian has authored several articles about the scientific study of female orgasm. In addition, she is a certified birth doula, providing professional labor support to women and their partners during childbirth. (As she jokes, “If I’m gonna teach how babies get in there, the least I can do is help women get them out of there, too.”)

One of the fascinating things about this age is that the Jews seem to be trying very hard to prove the anti-Semites are correct. Every single time one of these degeneracy festivals turns up, the people behind it are Jewish. The counter is that it is just a coincidence that two percent of the population is so wildly over-represented in anti-Western and anti-white activity. Maybe, but string together enough coincidences and you have what experts call a pattern.

These women put a lot of importance of “being passionate” about stuff. Hitler was passionate too. At least that’s the claim from the professional anti-fascists, but that is not something they ever consider. For them, passion is always good, while things they don’t like are extremists. Now, the “doula” is a new one. This is not something that comes up in these stories. Wiki provides an interesting story.

A doula also known as a labour coachand originating from the Ancient Greek word δούλη meaning female slave),is a nonmedical person who assists a woman before, during, or after childbirth, as well as her partner and/or family, by providing physical assistance, and emotional support.  The provision of continuous support during labour by doulas (as well as nurses, family, or friends) is associated with improved maternal and fetal health and a variety of other benefits.

Dana Raphael is credited with inventing the term.

Dr. Dana Raphael is a medical anthropologist, writer and lecturer. Her interest in breastfeeding inspired her to found The Human Lactation Center in 1975 with Margaret Mead, an institute devoted to researching patterns of lactation worldwide. The Center is now a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that has consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. She is also the Executive Director of the Eleventh Commandment Foundation, a NGO that researches the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse on women’s experience of pregnancy, labor, childbirth and lactation.

She is credited with initiating the role of the modern doula, a supportive person who pairs up with women during their labor and delivery and helps the new mother to assure her success with breastfeeding.

Dr. Raphael has served as an adjunct professor at Yale University, School of Medicine, and as an invited lecturer in the United States, China, India and Japan. She has received two Fulbright awards, chaired or participated in more than fifty conferences and symposiums, written or edited five books and over 50 articles.

She is not obviously a lesbian, but no mention of children is usually a tell. Even feminist women include the names of their children on the resumes and official bios. It is their signature accomplishment. When you get into the earth goddess type feminism, the children are an even more important totem. Despite the oogily-boogily from feminists about “gender roles” they cannot escape the gravitational pull of biology.

There’s been a theory kicking around for years that the expansion of the state has been about putting people to work in nonsense jobs to keep them busy.  The collapse of the manufacturing base meant millions of idle people looking for work. Putting them into government jobs, where they have something to so was the answer. Walk into any government office and you see lots of people siting around looking busy. Maybe that’s true, but the permission state does result in a high number of grifters.

These people in the sex education rackets are entirely dependent on government and it appears their primary target is the public schools. They are flush with tax dollars to spend on this stuff. They most likely ride the grant rackets too. Billions are funneled to semi-employed social science majors through the grant system. Without it, many of these people are stocking shelves at Target. Instead, they get to fill your kid’s head minds with agit-prop intended to make them hate themselves and their ancestors.

This is a curious story about the security state and the political class. Following World War II, a permanent professional spy agency was created with the National Security Act of 1947. After some fits and starts, it has been a permanent feature in Washington for five decades. Presidents come and go, senators come and go, but the CIA is always there. That’s not a small thing. These semi-independent agencies that sort of report to the executive tend to take on a life of their own.

Congressional aides involved in preparing the Senate Intelligence Committee’s unreleased study of the CIA’s secret interrogation and detention program walked out of the spy agency’s fortress-like headquarters with classified documents that the CIA contended they weren’t authorized to have, McClatchy has learned.

After the CIA confronted the panel in January about the removal of the material last fall, panel staff concluded that the agency had monitored computers they’d been given to use in a high-security research room at the CIA campus in Langley, Va., a McClatchy investigation found.

It remained unclear Wednesday if the monitoring, the unauthorized removal of classified material or another matter were the subject of a recent CIA request to the Justice Department for an investigation into alleged malfeasance in connection with the committee’s top-secret study.

The documents removed from the agency included a draft of an internal CIA review that at least one lawmaker has publicly said showed that agency leaders misled the Intelligence Committee in disputing some of the committee report’s findings, according to a knowledgeable person who requested anonymity because of the matter’s extraordinary sensitivity.

In a combative statement issued Wednesday evening, CIA Director John Brennan chastised unidentified senators for making “spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts.”

“I am very confident that the appropriate authorities reviewing this matter will determine where wrongdoing, if any, occurred in either the executive branch or legislative branch,” he said in an apparent reference to the request for a Justice Department investigation. “Until then, I would encourage others to refrain from outbursts that do a disservice to the important relationship that needs to be maintained between intelligence officials and congressional overseers.”

The removal of the documents is the focus of an intense legal dispute between the CIA and its congressional overseers, said several people who also cited the matter’s sensitivity in asking to remain anonymous.

Some committee members regard the monitoring as a possible violation of the law and contend that their oversight powers give them the right to the documents that were removed. On the other hand, the CIA considers the removal as a massive security breach because the agency doesn’t believe that the committee had a right to those particular materials.