Recently in Society & Culture Category

Today's SCOTUS ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller was a strong statement protecting one of our most valuable civil rights: the right to self-defense. The reactions from various politicians are especially interesting considering that while an expected 100% of Republicans quoted approve of the decision, so do three out of five Democrats.

Ilya Somin writes that most science fiction fans come to it early in life, but Megan McArdle says that love for science fiction can be acquired by adults, even women. I would have agreed with Somin a year ago, but over the past few months my wife has had a revelation: Battlestar Galactica, Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, and even Star Trek: The Next Generation are now among her favorite works of fiction. I'm amazed and derive great joy from this newly shared interest.

It's amazing that there are still uncontacted tribes anywhere in the world, and it's very sad to me that anyone hesitates to bring them into modernity.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — One of Brazil's last uncontacted Indian tribes has been spotted in the far western Amazon jungle near the Peruvian border, the National Indian Foundation said Thursday.

The Indians were sighted in an Ethno-Environmental Protected Area along the Envira River in flights over remote Acre state, said the Brazilian government foundation, known as Funai. ...

"Four distinct isolated peoples exist in this region, whom we have accompanied for 20 years," Funai expert Jose Carlos Meirelles Junior said in a statement.

The tribe sighted recently is one of the last not to be contacted by officials. Funai does not make contact with such Indian tribes and prevents invasions of their land to ensure their autonomy, the foundation said.

I think it's morally perverse to leave these human beings living in absolute destitution -- doomed to disease, starvation, and misery -- simply because they're ignorant of modern civilization. Any one of us, in their place but knowing what we know, would instantly choose modernity over savagery; it's only due to the twisted logic of "multiculturalism" that we hesitate to rescue these people from their pointless suffering.

These Indians need to be given the same choices we have, the same respect for their human dignity, and they can't make informed decisions if we leave them in ignorance. They aren't "cute" or "quaint", they aren't pets or specimens to be studied. They're people. Just because they're ignorant doesn't mean we should abandon them to lives of barbarism.

From a Christian perspective, evangelism alone is sufficient reason to make contact. Ignorance of the Gospel is no excuse, and the eternal futures of these Indians are at risk. They need to hear about Jesus Christ, how their sins can be forgiven, and how much God loves them. Anything less is in direct violation of the Great Commission.

Matthew 28:18-20: Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

I wouldn't approach it like the Harrises do, but the idea of voluntary simplicity is very appealing to me.

Like many other young couples, Aimee and Jeff Harris spent the first years of their marriage eagerly accumulating stuff: cars, furniture, clothes, appliances and, after a son and a daughter came along, toys, toys, toys.

Now they are trying to get rid of it all, down to their fancy wedding bands. Chasing a utopian vision of a self-sustaining life on the land as partisans of a movement some call voluntary simplicity, they are donating virtually all their possessions to charity and hitting the road at the end of May. ...

“The idea in the movement was ‘everything you own owns you,’ ” said Dr. Grigsby, who sees roots of the philosophy in the lives of the Puritans. “You have to care for it, store it. It becomes an appendage, I think. If it enhances your life and helps you do the things you want to do, great. If you are burdened by these things and they become the center of what you have to do to live, is that really positive?”

The people profiled in the article seem to be more like hippies than I am, but I do my best to minimize my accumulation of junk. I'm not good at throwing things away, but I am good at not buying things in the first place. Generally I follow a less well defined version of the $100-per day rule.

For every $100 that I want to spend on the purchase of a new product, I must wait one day before I make the purchase. This creates a self-imposed ‘cooling-off’ period.

If a new gadget costs $100, I have to wait one day until I can purchase the gadget.

If a new gizmo costs $400, I have to wait four days until I can purchase the gizmo.

If a new thingamajig costs $1400, I have to wait two weeks until I can purchase the thingamajig.

But I pretty much let every potential purchase rattle around in my mind for at least a week.

(HT: My Money Blog.)

Spengler identifies a fascinating parallel between the failed cultures of antebellum white slave-holders and modern black "ghettos".

From this great suffering arise two genres of American popular culture, the Gone With the Wind ilk of Civil War epic, and the "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" brand of gangsta tale. Both try to take the edge off the revulsion and placate the dishonored dead by turning them into folk-heroes. That is understandable, but also unfortunate, for America still has a great deal of killing left to do around the world, and might as well get used to it.

"Get Rich or Die Tryin'" would have been a good epitaph for the Confederate dead, who fought for land and slaves, not for "states' rights" or the sanctity of their soil. Slave-owners along with want-to-be slave-owners had it coming. The Union general William Tecumseh Sherman who said after he burned Atlanta, "I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand, I have told you of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them."

Given the sad history of racial oppression in the South for a century after the Civil War, the only thing to regret is that Sherman didn't finish the job. I stopped watching the film version of Gone With the Wind after Scarlett O'Hara saved her plantation from the tax-collector. I wanted her to pick cotton until her back broke.

It is appalling that the criminal justice system has devoured one out of three young African-Americans, to be sure, but the number must be too small, because the police will have failed to apprehend some who still commit crimes. I did not attempt to watch the film Get Rich or Die Tryin'. I want the police to incarcerate such people before they commit enough crimes to fill a screenplay.

His conclusion is one I've drawn before in a different context: sometimes we need to put our merciful sentiments aside and allow the losers to really lose. The South didn't quit fighting until they simply lacked the manpower to continue, and those of us who value liberty must be willing to let oppressive, dangerous cultures kill themselves off -- or even give them some help dying, when necessary. Wishing this were not so is baseless idealism.

The National Security Agency says Japanese is hard... so hard that you shouldn't even try to learn it.

(HT: Nick and Bernardo.)

It's frustrating to me when people wrongly attribute substantial disagreements to a "failure to communicate". Here's Barack Obama speaking:

"I am confident that when you come to a general election, and we are having a debate about the future of this country -- how are we going to lower gas prices, how are we going to deal with job losses, how are we going to focus on energy independence -- that those are voters who I will be able to appeal to," he said.

"If I lose, it won't be because of race," Obama said. "It will be because ... I made mistakes on the campaign trail, I wasn't communicating effectively my plans in terms of helping them in their everyday lives."

No matter who wins the race for the presidency, the losing party should concede that they lost on substance, not merely on process. In the quote above, Obama basically asserts that voters cannot possibly reject him for the presidency once they understand his plans for America. In Obama's mind, if he loses it's because he just didn't articulate his ideas clearly enough, not because America both understood and disliked his ideas. An Obama loss would be due to process -- "mistakes on the campaign trail" -- not substance. He admits no possibility that his ideas are unappealing to voters. Anyone who doesn't vote for me doesn't really understand my positions.

I don't mean to pick on Obama, because this sort of phrasing is common among politicians and "commoners" alike. Sometimes it's legitimate. Most of my disagreements with my wife are due to miscommunication... but some are the result of real differences. Whether the dispute is domestic or international, it's important to recognize when it can be resolved by clearer communication and when there are substantial issues that need to be addressed through compromise, disengagement, violence, or whatever means are appropriate.

When conflict is wrongly attributed to a "failure to communicate" but there are actually substantial differences to be resolved, the conflict becomes harder to deal with from both sides. Unless you're willing to recognize that there's a substantial disagreement, how can there be resolution? Additional "clarification" is pointless when there's already both understanding and disagreement. Furthermore, the other party will be insulted by your continuing insistence that the disagreement is merely a product of their ignorance.

Part of the reason presidential campaigns drag go on for so long is to ensure that voters get all the information they need to cast their votes based on substance, not process. As Obama has pointed out, he and Hillary have debated each other 21 times -- by now voters have the measure of the man. If Obama loses to either Hillary or McCain, he would be wise to consider that his ideas, and not merely their delivery, may be to blame.

Sometimes adolescent boys need their heads cracked. If no one teaches kids who's in charge, the kids will assume they are.

Outside of school hours, my Cornish village of St Day descends into a state of anarchy. Feral yobs run wild while adults live in fear of threats, vandalism and intimidation. I despair that while we spend millions battling global warming, terrorism and drugs, the biggest threat is harassment by degenerate thugs. ...

For local residents, the protocol on Fore Street is simple: do not confront, do not engage, stay inside. A resident who raised thousands of pounds for a village youth club was repaid with a bag of horse manure, mixed with petrol, set ablaze against his front door.

Things got worse at the end of the summer. A gang broke into a funeral wake in the church hall. They smashed ornaments and hurled abuse at terrified guests, who were ferried home while the attackers ransacked the vicarage.

Days later a church wedding rehearsal suffered a similar attack. Despite plenty of witnesses, and evidence, no arrests were made because the police wanted to catch the suspects in the act.

The adults on the scene should lay the smack-down on these kids, not wait for the police to rescue them. Yet another example of emasculated men who are unwilling to take responsibility for their society. It seems like the Brits are especially pathetic these days.

Jason Steen isn't an obvious target for muggers. The 40-year-old heads his own company advising on mergers and acquisitions, and usually strides through life like a Master of the Universe. This evening, though, he looks shaken. Two days earlier, he was accosted outside his central London home by eight kids — the youngest was 11 — who punched him to the ground, hustled him to the nearest cash machine and forced him to reveal his PIN number. After a series of attacks in the area, local residents have gathered in Steen's apartment to talk to the policeman handling the case. His advice: "Don't go out unless you have to."

This is what happens when law-abiding citizens aren't allowed to carry guns.

And yes, to be clear, I'm advocating the use of force against these "yobs" -- if it came to that. I doubt it would take much to scatter these ruffians and put the fear of God in them.

British men, who once ruled the world, are now whining about feeling emasculated.

Asked what it meant to be a man in the 21st century, more than half thought society was turning them into "waxed and coiffed metrosexuals", and 52 per cent say they had to live according to women's rules.

What they apparently want is what some American academics have dubbed a "menaissance" - a return to manliness, where figures such as Sir Winston Churchill were models of manhood. ...

Men said they "felt handcuffed" by political correctness - only 33 per cent felt they could speak freely and say what they thought, whereas two thirds found it safer and to conceal their opinions.

Men have the power to reverse this trend by simple force-of-will. If men would stop responding negatively to other men who say politically incorrect things, the whole charade would quickly disintegrate. Sure, we'd get clucked at by women, but c'mon. We're stronger, smarter, and control the vast majority of the world's wealth. If our only response to the feminization of society is to whine, then dude, the game is over.

With the feminization of our culture I think we're losing an appreciation for some of the male-oriented social skills that have helped propel Western civilization to the dominant world position we presently enjoy; perhaps chief among those skills is the art of intimidation. (That's a pay link, but I recommend reading the whole article.) Everywhere you turn is another fuzzy feel-good message about how we all need to be nice and get along, but the fact of the matter is that male-dominated social structures naturally coalesce around strong leaders, and strong leaders rely on intimidation to drive their followers. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Zander and Weinstein are examples of what I call great intimidators. They are not averse to causing a ruckus, nor are they above using a few public whippings and ceremonial hangings to get attention. And they’re in good company.A list of great intimidators would read a bit like a business leadership hall of fame: Sandy Weill, Rupert Murdoch, Andy Grove, Carly Fiorina, Larry Ellison, and Steve Jobs would be just a few of the names on it. These leaders seem to relish the chaos they create because, in their minds, it’s constructive. Time is short, the stakes are high, and the measures required are draconian.

But make no mistake – the great intimidators are not your typical bullies. If you’re just a bully, it’s all about humiliating others in an effort to make yourself feel good. Something very different is going on with the great intimidators. To be sure, they aren’t above engaging in a little bullying to get their way.With them, however, the motivating factor isn’t ego or gratuitous humiliation; it’s vision. The great intimidators see a possible path through the thicket, and they’re impatient to clear it. They chafe at impediments, even those that are human. They don’t suffer from doubt or timidity. They’ve got a disdain for constraints imposed by others.

The modus operandi of great intimidators runs counter to a lot of our most deeply entrenched preconceptions about what it means to be a good leader these days. We’ve all read the books and articles describing people who lead quietly and with great empathy and humility. But as you’ll see, the leaders I’ve been studying think and work in an entirely different way: They’re rough, loud, and in your face.

Beneath their tough exteriors and sharp edges, however, are some genuine, deep insights into human motivation and organizational behavior. Indeed, these leaders possess what I call political intelligence, a distinctive and powerful form of leader intelligence that’s been largely ignored by management theorists and practitioners. In all our recent enchantment with social intelligence and soft power, we’ve overlooked the kinds of skills leaders need to bring about transformation in cases of tremendous resistance or inertia. It’s precisely in such situations, I’d like to propose, that the political intelligence of the intimidating leader is called for.

The article expresses in very clear terms a concept I started to recognize in my later years of high school. Intimidating behavior doesn't come naturally to me, but I've tried to develop my abilities in this area and have found that a little bit of intimidation applied at the right time can often work wonders in business and social relationships. The flip side is that once you learn to use the power of intimidation it's very hard not to apply it in situations where it's not appropriate, such as on friends and family.

I also would never want to be (or be perceived to be) a bully, so that undermines my utilization of intimidation techniques. Most of the time I'd rather stay friends than make every effort to push a group towards an efficient or productive end, so intimidation certainly isn't the only tool in my social toolbox. Being an effective leader in a family, church, or group of friends where the primary reward to the group members is a positive social interaction is a much more difficult balancing act than leading a business that's paying its employees to get some job done. I'm far from perfect at this (as my wife will attest) but I'm working very hard to increase my experience.

Barack Obama gave his bigspeech on race, and as usual he was eloquent. Also as usual, he shied away from any practical policy proposals and displayed a disingenuous ignorance of how liberty and free markets could be applied to bridge the racial divide, if not so hampered by taxes and regulations. (Drudge had the text of the speech first, but I expect that link will expire.)

First, Obama appears to have a solid grasp on some of the concerns of whites that are rarely broached in public.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

The purpose of the speech seems to be to transform racial division into class division: all us poor people of every color need to fight against our common enemies, the rich! And the only solutions he can come up with involve the coercive use of government power:

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I think the bolded part is particularly insincere. Obama knows that the majority of Americans are shareholders in these evil corporations -- directly or indirectly through pension funds -- and those profits go straight into American pockets. What's more, the primary beneficiaries of lower prices are the poor.

And so forth. As you'd expect, I find the policies that Obama vaguely hints at to be antithetical to liberty and ruinous to our economy, facts that far outweigh the common eloquence of his words. I think this speech made a meaningful contribution to the discussion of race in our country, but the conclusions he'd have us draw are misguided and dangerous.

I feel like I've written about UCLA students versus Planned Parenthood before, but I can't find a post of mine that mentions that earlier incident in which a PP employee told a supposedly-15-year-old girl to lie about her age so she could get an abortion.

Anyway, lately students from my alma mater have been calling Planned Parenthood and getting the employees to admit to explicit racism.

The call to Idaho came in July to Autumn Kersey, vice president of development and marketing for Planned Parenthood of Idaho.

On the recording provided by The Advocate, an actor portraying a donor said he wanted his money used to eliminate black unborn children because "the less black kids out there the better."

Kersey laughed nervously and said: "Understandable, understandable. ... Excuse my hesitation, this is the first time I've had a donor call and make this kind of request, so I'm excited and want to make sure I don't leave anything out." ...

The student editor-in-chief of The Advocate said she's not surprised by Planned Parenthood's response and that the unedited recordings speak for themselves. The activist students think Planned Parenthood targets minorities and minority neighborhoods.

Well there's certainly statistical evidence that Planned Parenthood targets minorities, but I'll admit that I'm surprised it's due to racism rather than greed. I guess they're returning to their roots: Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger, advocated the abortion of black babies "by force if necessary".

A writer who claims to be a former booking agent for a high-priced New York escort service gives the inside scoop on the employees and the kinds of men that patronized them. (There's no evidence the author is who she says she is, but it's still interesting!) As for the men:

Remember that scene from Casablanca, when Captain Renault declares that he is shocked, shocked to find gambling going on — just as the croupier hands him his winnings? I keep thinking of that scene when I read about all those politicians who are baying for Spitzer’s blood. Because I know, and they know, that almost all of them have been escort agency clients too. Show me a rich and powerful man between the ages of 35 and 60 who has never paid an escort for sex, and I will show you a man who is a very rare exception.

But why would a rich, powerful and handsome man pay for extra-marital sex? Aren’t there tons of women waiting to throw themselves at him for free? Yes, there are. But those women always want something: they want attention, intimacy and romance. They want to enjoy the high of sleeping with a powerful man. Escorts don’t want or care about any of those things. At least one of the articles about the 22 year-old escort who slept with Spitzer implied that she didn’t even know who he was. Based on my experience, I think it’s highly unlikely that she knew or cared. She was in it for the money, and she had as much to hide as he did.

One high-powered New York attorney explained it to me like this: “Of course I love my wife. Escorts have nothing to do with that. She comes to my hotel room and I don’t have to know her name, because they all use fake names like Amber and Kimberly. I don’t have to worry about how she feels or what she wants. It’s a simple exchange: I give her a thousand bucks, we have a good time for a couple of hours, she goes away and we never have to see each other again.”

A thousand dollars is nothing for these men. Money has little value; because no matter how hard they try they will never be able to spend their hundreds of millions. And if you are about to say that for a thousand bucks those girls must supply the best sex in history, then you really do not understand this world. Because it is not about sex; it is about power. And the simple act of ordering up an anonymously pretty 22 year-old girl to do your bidding in the salubrious confines of a luxury hotel suite is an act of power.

Of course there's an obvious selection bias here: the only rich and powerful men the author would come into contact with are prospective clients. Maybe I'm naive about wealth and long-enduring marriages, but I know plenty of people with both who don't fit this author's mold.

The fates of the women are even sadder:

Yes, I did become cynical, jaded and confused. On the one hand I could not deny the basic reality of supply and demand. None of these girls was coerced into selling her body for money. Most of them came from middle-class backgrounds, and many had been accepted to universities. But they dropped out as soon as they discovered that they could make $20-30,000 a month as an escort.

Then they got addicted to the money and the lifestyle. And then one day, usually between the ages of 25 and 28, once they’d developed that knowing, experienced look that clients instinctively disliked, they found that themselves in a classic bind: they were addicted to high living but could no longer pay for it; they had no marketable skills; and years of late nights and lazy days had left them with no self-discipline. What to do? The really smart ones pulled themselves together and, with the help of a sympathetic client, started some kind of a business. Others married rich, cynical, older men in a sort of paid-wife arrangement. Those were the most common stories. I did not inquire into the fate of the girls who sort of faded away. I did not want to hear about their loneliness and poverty.

So the value of the escorts declined rapidly as they aged. Meanwhile, the value of the clients increased because they accumulated more money and more power. I could not make my peace with the power imbalance, even though I understood intellectually that the men would always want to pay women for sex, and there would always be women who wanted to be paid for sex.

Perhaps the initial money is just too hard for these women to resist, despite the obvious long-term damage they're doing to their lives. But again, the author can only write about the women she came into contact with, all of whom were at least considering prostitution. I know plenty of beautiful young women who would never have done it, for any amount of money. Or maybe I'm naive about them too.

Barack Obama is struggling to catch up to a story which I predicted a year ago would sink his campaign: he's denouncing the "Reverend" Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.'s statements but doesn't seem to understand the big picture.

On Friday, Mr. Obama called a grab bag of statements by his longtime minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., “inflammatory and appalling.”

“I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue,” he wrote in a campaign statement that was his strongest in a series of public disavowals of his pastor’s views over the past year.

These words must have been chosen very carefully, so let's analyze them a bit. First, "inflammatory". Obama thinks the racist, insane rantings of his pastor might "arouse anger, hostility, passion, etc.", but the word doesn't carry any implication that Obama disagrees with Wright's views. "Appalling" is a bit better, but are only the statements "appalling"? What about the man who made them?

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this story isn't what it says about Barack Obama, but what it may say about the beliefs of American blacks more generally.

Mr. Wright, 66, who last month fulfilled longstanding plans to retire, is a beloved figure in African-American Christian circles and a frequent guest in pulpits around the country. Since he arrived at Trinity in 1972, he has built a 6,000-member congregation through his blunt, charismatic preaching, which melds detailed scriptural analysis, black power, Afrocentrism and an emphasis on social justice; Mr. Obama praised the last quality in Friday’s statement.

His most powerful influence, said several ministers and scholars who have followed his career, is black liberation theology, which interprets the Bible as a guide to combating oppression of African-Americans.

He attracts audiences because of, not in spite of, his outspoken critiques of racism and inequality, said Dwight Hopkins, a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, in an interview last year.

But Mr. Wright’s blistering statements about American racism can shock white audiences.

“If you’re black, it’s hard to say what you truly think and not upset white people,” said James Cone, a professor at Union Theological Seminary and the father of black liberation theology, who has known Mr. Wright since he was a seminary student.

Cone is attempting to defend Wright and Obama by asserting that the beliefs behind Wright's racist, hateful, evil sermons are widespread. In doing so, rather than acquiting Wright and Obama Cone broadly indicts all American blacks. If these beliefs are really as widely shared as Cone asserts (which I refuse to believe) then the peddlers of this malicious evil need to be called to account and their followers need a severe reality check.

Jessica and I have been working our way through The X-Files and it has struck me recently that the series has a tendency to take rape and non-consensual impregnation rather lightly in some circumstances. This treatment is especially surprising considering that one of the ongoing conflicts in the series' story arc is that Agent Scully's eggs have been stolen (leaving her infertile) and are being used by nefarious scientists to create alien-human hybrids.

Example the first: in the episode "Small Potatoes" a shapeshifter takes on the appearances of the husbands of various women and impregnates them. Most of the episode is a set-up for the final scene in which the shapeshifter takes on Agent Mulder's form and nearly seduces Agent Scully, until the real Mulder bursts through the door to discover the two of them on the couch. The conclusion to the episode is classic, and quite amusing, but writer Vince Gilligan works hard to keep the earlier rapes and impregnations from spoiling the light-hearted mood.

Example the second: in "The Post-Modern Prometheus" -- my least favorite episode thus far in the series, written by creator Chris Carter -- a stereotypical mad scientist (and/or his farmer father) create human-animal hybrids by drugging women and implanting embryos while they're unconscious. The hybrids are born with distinctive animal characteristics -- such as a chicken-women whose neck pecks like a bird -- with intended comedic effect. The "Frankenstein"-inspired episode ends with the villagers forming a mob to lynch the mad scientist, but he saves himself by pointing out all happiness he brought to the town through their children. All is forgiven! (The mad scientist is arrested, with an aw-shucks tenor.)

Come to think of it, non-consensual impregnations is a major theme of The X-Files. Numerous episodes feature it as a plot device (such as "Emily"), but the matter isn't typically considered to be as serious as I would expect.

A state appeals court has ruled that homeschooling is illegal in California unless the parent has a teaching credential.

A California appeals court ruling clamping down on homeschooling by parents without teaching credentials sent shock waves across the state this week, leaving an estimated 166,000 children as possible truants and their parents at risk of prosecution. ...

Yet the appeals court said state law has been clear since at least 1953, when another appellate court rejected a challenge by homeschooling parents to California's compulsory education statutes. Those statutes require children ages 6 to 18 to attend a full-time day school, either public or private, or to be instructed by a tutor who holds a state credential for the child's grade level.

"California courts have held that ... parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children," Justice H. Walter Croskey said in the 3-0 ruling issued on Feb. 28. "Parents have a legal duty to see to their children's schooling under the provisions of these laws."

Parents can be criminally prosecuted for failing to comply, Croskey said.

"A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare," the judge wrote, quoting from a 1961 case on a similar issue.

Setting aside some thousands of years of common law and custom on the matter, I've known plenty of homeschooled kids in California -- this law has never been enforced. I'll be surprised if this ruling is allowed to stand without intervention by the state Legislature, even in California.

The usual parasites are naturally pleased:

The ruling was applauded by a director for the state's largest teachers union.

"We're happy," said Lloyd Porter, who is on the California Teachers Association board of directors. "We always think students should be taught by credentialed teachers, no matter what the setting."

And I think no one without a degree in computer science should be allowed to program a computer!