"Fair does not exist... It's a construct we've designed to contextualize chaos." - Tony Stark [via Matt Fraction.]
Awesome.
Awesome.
Hey, I know this expert! Good for him.
Expert laments Japan's limits on craft beer culture - The Japan Times:
"Ry Beville’s love of craft beer has developed into an occupation in which he publishes Japan’s only bilingual craft beer magazine. With the quarterly Japan Beer Times launched in 2010, Beville, 37, from Richmond, Virginia, says he wants to help spread the microbrewing culture in Japan, where craft beer is still not widely recognized by consumers, especially in the Kanto region. “I want more and more people to get to know about craft beer, and develop the craft beer culture in Japan,” said the Yokohama resident. The beer magazine runs features and essays on microbreweries around the country and their local history. In the autumn issue, craft beers from Toyama were covered with beers from outside Japan, along with articles on brewpubs — where beer and food are made and served on the premises — in Japan and elsewhere."
The comparison to laser eye surgery is apt. Best health care experience I've had, probably. The head doctor/surgeon did, in fact, even give me his cell phone # if I had any problems, called me me up on his own to check up on me. Incentives matter, obviously.
Why Obamacare Will Be No More Successful Than Soviet Central Planning - Reason.com:
"Consider just the complexity: The act itself is more than 906 pages long, and again and again in those 906 pages are the words, “the Secretary shall promulgate regulations ...” “Secretary” refers to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. Her minions have been busy. They’ve already added 20,000 pages of rules. They form a stack 7 feet high, and more are to come. Our old health care system was already a bureaucratic and regulatory nightmare. It had 16,000 different codes for different ailments. Under our new, “improved” system, there will be more than a 100,000...
Government likes to think regulations can account for every possibility. Injured at a chicken coop? The code for that will be Y9272. Fall at an art gallery? That means you are a Y92250. There are three different codes for walking into a lamppost -- depending on how often you’ve walked into lampposts. This is supposed to give government a more precise way to reimburse doctors for treating people and alert us to surges in injuries that might inspire further regulation. On Government-Planned World, this makes sense. But it will be no more successful than Soviet central planning...
Compare all that to a tiny part of American medicine that is still free-market: Lasik eye surgery. Its quality has improved, while costs dropped 25 percent. Lasik (and cosmetic surgery) are specialties that provide a better consumer experience because they are a market. Patients pay directly, so doctors innovate constantly to please them. Lasik doctors even give patients their cellphone numbers..."
Action. Up.
Geeksplosion - Yes, Captain Kirk would intervene in Syria:
"A debate broke out over at Foreign Policy magazine when John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis, argued that the Prime Directive should be our model for non-intervention in Syria. Now Foreign Policy writer Michael Peck has a snappy rejoinder, arguing that Kirk would join the revolutionaries.
...While I agree wholeheartedly with Peck, I would add that there is something weird about Arquilla's original assertion that the Prime Directive would apply in this situation. The Prime Directive is designed to prevent a civilization with warp drive from intervening in a civilization without it. Since neither the US nor Syria has warp drive, nor anything remotely equivalent to it, the Prime Directive is totally irrelevant. We are all on the same planet, with the same level of technology."
This Kevin Spacey Photobomb is Tremendous - BroBible.com:
"What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight. This is of course an encouraging finding; it helps arm you against news programs back home that show seething or abject masses of either fanatical or torpid people. In another way it is a depressing finding; the sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere." - Christopher Hitchens
System = Broken. And as always, the rules are only for the little people.
"Eagle Scout Cole Withrow was just a few weeks from graduating with honors from his North Carolina high school, but now the active church member is facing a felony weapons charge and a precarious future after accidentally leaving a shotgun in his pickup truck in the school parking lot.
...ABC11 has uncovered that two school officials both brought guns onto school property in recent years, but were never charged with felonies like Cole. An assistant principal at Cole's school was suspended for three days, but never criminally charged. She still works in the same position at the school..... The Johnston County Sheriff's Office told ABC11 that if a school administrator brings a gun to school, they will be charged with a misdemeanor. For a student, the charge is an automatic felony."
"So: No one was hurt. There's no sign that Wilmot was up to something malevolent. The kid's own principal thinks this wasn't anything more than an experiment, and he says she didn't try to cover up what she had done. What punishment do you think she received? A stern talking-to? A day or two of after-school detention? Maybe she'll have to help clean up the lab for a week? Nope. The budding chemist has been kicked out of school and charged with a couple of felonies...
A statement from Polk County Schools says, "We urge our parents to join us in conveying the message that there are consequences to actions. We will not compromise the safety and security of our students and staff." As far as I can tell, the only person in this story facing a serious threat to her safety and security is the girl who might have to serve a prison sentence -- but then, she doesn't go to Bartow High anymore, so perhaps the school system doesn't think she counts."
"Today, I found my husband's secret stash of condoms. We don't use them. When I confronted him, he said, with a straight face, "In case an anal rapist breaks in here, I want to offer him one before he sodomizes me." I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or choke the shit out of him. FML"
Fuck. Bloomberg.
"In Mike Bloomberg’s head, the made up and emotion-laden "right not to be shot" trumps the actual constitutional and civil right not to be molested by a government agent. His concern over dead children only goes so far; the killing of Ramarley Graham by a police officer over a dime bag of marijuana last year yielded no change of heart from Bloomberg on the senseless drug war his department wages on a daily basis, destroying families and taking lives...
As for his insinuation that stop and frisk could’ve saved the life of Alphonza Bryant; stop and frisk, while it is on trial, has not been suspended, so the argument is spectacularly cynical."
“To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself.” ~ Alan Moore
“People who say they are bored are boring people. Interesting people can entertain themselves anywhere. Boring people have to be entertained by others.” -
Roger Knapp
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” - Joseph Campbell
Smart - Fit Syracuse - Personal Training, CrossFit, Nutritional Health / Fitness: The One Ingredient Diet:
""The One Ingredient Diet" is not a "diet". At least not a traditional "diet". "The One Ingredient Diet" is simply a way to think of what foods you choose to put into your body. Simply put; "EAT FOODS WITH ONLY ONE INGREDIENT!" If you stick to this simple rule you will consume foods rich in all the vitamins, minerals, enzymes and antioxidants your body needs. You will consume foods found in nature; foods the human species evolved on. You will NOT consume man-made, processed foods"
Very cool. The Wisdom of Wil - Imgur:
"May the snozberries be ever in your favor."
"In my experience, kids were homeschooled for one of two reasons: for my brother and me, it was a means of avoiding an awful public school system without going to private school, which our family couldn’t really afford anyway. For some other kids, though, it was a means of escaping the evil, secularist curriculum of public school. The Earth is 6,000 years old, global warming is a myth, Satan buried dinosaur bones in the ground to trick us, and these children must not be taught otherwise, lest the fiery lakes of hell burn the flesh from their little limbs...
Generally, the kids I knew through homeschooling were of a very specific, white, evangelical Christian, Southern type. It was an enclave of sameness, and their instructors taught all sorts of things that scared me then and scared me now. Once a week, we would gather at the house of a teacher I’ll call Mrs. Dawson. She taught science, but was also a strict six-day Creationist, so at some point, the science would always stop being science. I once wrote a report that she demanded I redo, because I implied that global warming was real. She also insisted that the rhythm of pop music resonated with human cells at a frequency that caused cancer. She tried to be tactful when she explained why she didn’t like Halloween, though: “Participating in Halloween is a choice that is up to your parents, and I will respect that. I personally feel that it’s a celebration of the devil, and that you dress up in service of him.
When the media started fixating on sheep cloning in 1996, Mrs. Dawson turned the science class into wildly speculative discussion of the evils it would bring about: “What’s stopping someone from cloning an evil army of Hitlers? I think this will be the issue of your lifetimes when you grow up. You’ll have to fight evil legions of clones.”
...If you know someone from the South who was raised in that kind of fundamentalist Christian environment, you may be familiar with that dinosaur-bones bit I mentioned earlier. We’re not lying, y’all. It wasn’t taught in my household, but I heard it in others: if the Earth is only 6,000 years old, how do you explain all these dinosaur bones we keep digging up? These days, the Creation Museum opts to show Old Testament personalities riding triceratops, complete with a saddles, but a lot of homeschooled kids I knew were provided a terser explanation: satan buried them in the ground in order to, lead us astray and make us believe that the world really was ancient."
And if you’re unfamiliar with this world, the homeschooler’s history of the Civil War ought to terrify you. “You know what they say,” a teacher-mother said. “Winners always write the history books. Up North, they don’t understand what we were fighting for. It wasn’t really about slavery, it was about fighting for our freedom.”
“You know,” she said, “the Bible does instruct slaves to submit to their masters. Slavery does have its foundation in the Bible.” I had watched Ken Burns’s The Civil War when I was six, before I moved to Georgia, and when they talked about slavery and lingered on a photo of a man’s back, his flesh torn open by a whip, I had the same reaction a lot of six-year-olds would probably have: I ran to the other end of the house and cried. So when I heard this, I knew there was something wrong. Some of the kids around me were absorbing the message, though, and saying things like, “I think the South was right. You know, I probably would’ve fought for the South. To stand up for my freedom.” Upon realizing how alone I was, on an issue I never imagined would be up for debate, I kept quiet.
...During this co-op unit, each kid was to prepare and perform a monologue as a historical figure from the Civil War era. I chose to be a train conductor from the North, which seemed benign enough. My (white) classmate, though, decided to be a slave. This meant he wore blackface, stood in front of the class, and put on a horrifically offensive slave accent: “I’s a cotton-pickin’ slave! Sho’ is! And we slaves looooove cownbread!” Later, we performed our monologues a second time, in front of our families. My friend’s mother decided that there was a problem with his monologue: the paint used for his blackface wasn’t black enough. He performed the exact same bit, this time with darker paint on his face, and the parents in the room cheered and applauded. “That was the best one,” one of them said. Looking back, it seems like something out of 1950. It was 1995."
Truth.
"It’s an insult to anyone with cancer or diabetes to suggest that addiction is a disease of similar nature. Just because some fancy wizard doctor shows that certain brains crave drugs to get their dopamine fix, that doesn’t mean that their cravings are a “disease”—it might be a real problem for a bunch of people, but that doesn’t mean they’re “sick” and need medical treatment to get better.
But don’t take my word for it—read this blog post by neuroscientist Marc Lewis that spells out how it’s downright silly to proclaim that craving experiences is somehow a disease. You can condition yourself to need booze or meth, but you can get the same craving for gambling, or traveling, or mouth-fucking real bonerable chocolate. And you can reverse that conditioning too. Some therapists claim that there is no cure to addiction and that recovering addicts are simply in remission. What a load of cock and balls.
...Once an addicted individual gets sick of their way of life, suddenly they are “cured,” mostly through getting control of their lives and giving a fuck about themselves. Lewis says, “Alcoholics (which can be defined in various ways) recover ‘naturally’ (independent of treatment) at a rate of 50–80 percent depending on your choice of statistics (but see this link for a good example).” Imagine if folks with real physiological illnesses could get better by trying real hard."
"It’s amazing how one crazy ass anorexic can be the bane of your existence, I mean, unless you’re married to her yourself, but Angelina continues to haunt Jen’s desperate attempts at ever being loved again. Aww. Jennifer has put her wedding plans to that guy with the beard on complete hold now that Angelina and Brad have suddenly announced their own wedding plans after eight years and six Benetton kids. I don’t get girl feuds, but I know they exist. I know they’re ugly. And I know Angelina is still winning."
"When Honey Booboo and other godawful reality shows clog the airwaves, there's only four people you can call. Carl Sagan. Mr. Rogers. Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bob Ross. Together, they are the PBS Avengers, and this world would be a better place if this video were real."
What a horrible person.
"A University of Wyoming student targeted by an anonymous Facebook posting that included a threat of sexual violence had posted the item herself, police said. The university in Laramie, Wyoming announced on Tuesday that campus police cited Meg Lanker-Simons for misdemeanor interference with a police investigation by giving false statements."
Sometimes you can read a book by its cover.
"According to Wyoming’s Star-Tribune, on the non-university affiliated Facebook page UW Crushes, which has since been shut down, a post appeared last week that read: “I want to hatef— Meg Lanker- so hard,” the Facebook post said. “That chick that runs her liberal mouth all the time and doesn’t care who knows it. I think its hot and it makes me angry. One night with me and shes gonna be a good Republican b—-.”
This controversial post Meg Lanker-Simons reported the post to university administrators and campus police, telling the Laramie Boomerang that as a rape survivor this is “one of the worst things someone can threaten.”
On Tuesday, though, it was revealed by University of Wyoming Police Department that they had cited Lanker-Simons herself for the threatening post."
Funny/skilled.
"
"There's more that needs to be said about this guy than just a few sentences, but Lil Dicky (who you may remember from last week's beacon of awesomeness, Ex-Boyfriend) is doing something pretty incredible right now."
"I've excerpted a few things about the movie that I've learned from it, including one of my new favorite pieces of movie trivia of all time: OF COURSE BILL CLINTON HUNG OUT WITH THE CAST WHILE SHOOTING IN BANGKOK. That's the most commonsensical thing I've read all year."
This.
Brawndo. It's got what plants crave.
Why Elementary Schools Going Vegetarian Will Be an Increasing Trend (Money) | Free The Animal: "Guess how this would go over in France? No, really; just guess. And that's just France. Here, you can see that just about every country on Earth cares far more about the nutrition of children than here is good ol' Merca, land of the perpetually moronic, a veritable Idiocracy.
But it's a simple thing, easy to understand. This is about money. It's all and only about money. Real, fresh, quality food—meat, fish, fowl, vegetable, fruit, nuts—is comparatively far more expensive than the cheap, packaged, multi-year-shelf-life industrial EXCREMENT that Bob Groff is feeding the children of that school. And the derelict parents are probably lining up to applaud because they get to be as stupid as they want to be."
"Feminism, which bestowed these women with so many benefits at the expense of men, has now imparted some negative penalties onto these same women, which they thought themselves insulated from. Mothers who are now grandmothers who had kept the birth fathers from their children now realizing that younger women can use this same power against their younger sons!! Essentially keeping them away from seeing their grandchildren.
...Feminists who have championed the cause of women, now realizing just how much power, which women can abuse for frivolous reasons now that this situation has befallen their own male children. In addition, other influential Feminists hearing the truth from the mouth of babes and possibly realizing that their grrl powa may have gone just a bit too far."
"I am a feminist. I have marched at the barricades, subscribed to Ms. magazine, and knocked on many a door in support of progressive candidates committed to women's rights. Until a month ago, I would have expressed unqualified support for Title IX and for the Violence Against Women Act. But that was before my son, a senior at a small liberal-arts college in New England, was charged—by an ex-girlfriend—with alleged acts of "nonconsensual sex" that supposedly occurred during the course of their relationship a few years earlier. What followed was a nightmare—a fall through Alice's looking-glass into a world that I could not possibly have believed existed, least of all behind the ivy-covered walls thought to protect an ostensible dedication to enlightenment and intellectual betterment...
Across the country and with increasing frequency, innocent victims of impossible-to-substantiate charges are afforded scant rights to fundamental fairness and find themselves entrapped in a widening web of this latest surge in political correctness. Few have a lawyer for a mother, and many may not know about the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which assisted me in my research...
I fear that in the current climate the goal of "women's rights," with the compliance of politically motivated government policy and the tacit complicity of college administrators, runs the risk of grounding our most cherished institutions in a veritable snake pit of injustice—not unlike the very injustices the movement itself has for so long sought to correct. Unbridled feminist orthodoxy is no more the answer than are attitudes and policies that victimize the victim."
"But a funny thing happened when I met my son -- I started to realize how destructive girl power can be to boys...
But here is what I sadly realized: Within modern girl power, there seems to be a message that girls are better than boys. Boys are BAD. Boys are MEAN. Boys are silly, weak, stupid, clueless, rough.
...W's favorite tv show is "Sofia the First" on Disney Jr. He watches each episode multiple (MULTIPLE) times to the point that he can recite most of the dialogue. A week ago, he snuggled into me and proclaimed, "boys are not nice." I asked him which boy and he told me ALL boys. All boys are not nice. They are mean. He was right. In almost every "girl triumphs" story there is a slew of "mean boys." Or there are boys that have to be told to be kind..."
"The IL Dept of Health, with funds from the US FDA (“official position: all raw milk is dangerous”), had set up a Raw Milk Steering Subcommittee to investigate if raw milk needed regulation in Illinois. To ensure deep understanding of the product and issues, the regulators picked — for this 19-member committee — exactly ONE person who sold raw milk as a vocation (Donna O’Shaunessy, see her blog post here). Well, that’s not entirely accurate, because she wasn’t asked to be on the committee until they’d already had their first two meetings and had finished their draft recommendations. When Donna inquired as to why the committee was about to propose drastic regulations of a product without actually speaking to anyone who makes or consumes the product, the head regulator replied that she didn’t know how to contact any of those people.
Unsurprisingly, they came up with helpful recommendations like only allowing 100 gallons of raw milk sales per month. And requiring that anyone selling raw milk get a Class A Dairy license. In other words, force raw milk producers to spend tens of thousands of dollars on equipment you don’t need if you’re not a feedlot, volume milk producer, regularly produce hundreds of pages of useless documentation, and then limit their sales to the equivalent of about one cow’s monthly output. Did I mention that seven of the committee members represented the interests of mega-dairy operators Dean Food and Prairie Farms? You know, commodity, low-cost producers who already have to have Class A licenses.
Mad yet?
As it turns out, IDPH couldn’t figure out any way to find anyone involved with raw milk, but Donna sure could! She embarrassed IDPH into adding some more raw milk producers and some consumers to the committee (n.b., that is the only way to get a bureaucrat to do something other than what they had already decided they were going to do). Also, it seems a BUNCH of people started contacting their alleged representatives, who started contacting IDPH asking them why they were making their constituents so mad. People were also contacting the bureaucrats directly. Smart people. Passionate people. Loud people. Bother, bother."
"Imagine what was going through the bureaucrats’ minds. “But, everyone from the FDA told us raw milk was bad, and just a few fringe lunatics drink it. And all of our swell friends from the big dairies had such good ideas — they don’t have any problem with 1o,ooo gallon chill tanks and separate milk parlors and monthly testing. That’s what they let us tell them they have to do!” Hilarious."
The game is almost always rigged.
"The young man today is put in 13 years of public school and university, where people are judged primarily by their ability tosit still and parrot what their teachers say. Where masculine behaviours, such as risk-taking, dominance, and rough-housing are discouraged, banned, and punished. Sometimes these behaviours even result in a regime of drugging...
On the other hand, young males are taught that their natural desires are destructive and to be controlled, but are not taught the discipline necessary to control them. They are taught to get in touch with their emotions, except those school administration think are dangerous. They are taught self-esteem, where no matter what they accomplish (or don’t accomplish) they are special and deserving. They are not taught self-control, they are taught hedonism. This produces a horrible dichotomy of a lack of freedom and a lack of discipline. The entire school system is geared towards teaching young boys subservience and dependence (beta traits) and to destroy their in-born initiative, risk-taking, and ambition (alpha traits). Right from the get go, authorities teach young boys that traditional masculine behaviours are punished, while weakness and beta traits (not always the same) are rewarded...
A good-paying, worthwhile job, a house, a loving wife, social status, and a family.
The good-paying job is dying in the current economic corruption. 50% of our young people are either under- or unemployed. Their college degrees are worthless. They are shackled with near unmanageable student debt. Self-employment is a no-go. Government regulations strangle most industries and are especially painful to small businesses. (Not to mention, the initiative and ambition necessary for self-employment were beat out of him by the school system). Those who do get jobs are usually suffering in useless government busywork or brutally impersonal corporate work.
Simply put, there are no longer any guarantees that hard-work and responsibility will lead to a worthwhile job. But even if he eventually gets a job, he is punished by having half his income is taken by the state and given to the irresponsible.
He can still get a home, but not without the job. That, and the young man doesn’t want a home for himself; he wants it so he can raise a family. This incentive is more an ancillary option to the other incentives.
The primary incentive is a wife and family, but that incentive is becoming meaningless.
The average age of marriage for is 28 (in Canada it’s 31). Think about that. Your average man will not find a wife until a full decade after he graduates from high school and about 15 years after he hits puberty.
...But lets say he’s prepared for marriage. It’s highly unlikely his wife is a virgin: his dating pool probably has more single mothers than virgins. She’s not going to bond to him.
There’s a 50% chance that he will lose his family. When he loses his family, there is a good chance he will be subjected to alimony slavery and have his family kidnapped from him. I’m not going into detail here, because other’s have wrote much more comprehensive articles on the risks of marriage, but marriage is becoming and increasingly bad option.
Social status? Hahaha… Being a responsible person no longer create social status. “Office drones” are looked down upon. The rich and successful are castigated and punished. Everybody is equal now. There is no more of the base respect and social status given to a man who quietly works hard to provide for his family.
So, where are his incentives to be responsible? When having a family is a decade away and is likely to be punished with divorce, alimony theft, and having his children ripped from him? When hard work and an education no longer means a job, let alone a meaningful one? When he’s grown accustomed to the freedom of singledom? When he is punished for career success? When the lazy and irresponsible are rewarded with his hard-earned income?
Overall, the entire incentive structure of society is biased towards men being irresponsible.
If a man is irresponsible, he gets to play video games now. He gets sex now. He gets to hang out with his friends now. If a man is responsible, there is no immediate gain. When there were long-term incentives, this was fine, but the long term incentives are breaking down. Why should men act responsibly, when the incentives are towards irresponsibility?"
"Throughout human history, most so-called “normal” people have actually followed, revered and worshiped people who likely had measurable brain damage. Don’t believe me? OK, let us take a cynical and critical look at the founders, prophets and saints of almost all traditional religions. Have you ever noticed that a lot of their so-called revelations, visitations by non-human deities, mystical or cosmic experiences and voices in their heads have a lot more in common with the symptoms of serious brain disorders such as schizophrenia, temporal lobe seizure, assorted brain tumors, episodes of hypomania and even the effects of hallucinogenic drugs than anything remotely paranormal.
I would go so far as to say that all traditional religions are largely based on creative interpretations of the rantings and ravings of a few people, who were lucky to have the right amount and type of brain damage at the right time. A person who seriously believes in any religion, especially of the traditional ‘revealed’ variety, is therefore basing his or her life and worldview on the selectively edited experiences of a few brain-damaged people. Given the role and importance of traditional religions in shaping human history, customs and behavior- it is fair to say that the world we live in today was largely shaped by the minds of brain-damaged people. Maybe that is why all civilizations, past and present, are so bizarre, irrational, dystopic and generally fucked up."
"You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
"A bit into his set he was working the audience asking about who was with what religious team. Who was Muslim (lots of cheers since the Muslim Student Association was hosting the event), who was Christian (a few cheers), and who was atheist. I'm going to tell you this, I saw a lot of Nazi documentaries when I was a kid and I have grown to dislike cheering in crowds. One minute you're cheering and the next you're invading Poland."
"That headline is basically the summation from Paul Miller, who spent a year offline (on purpose, he wasn’t in jail or anything) and has now posted an article to tell folks what he learned about himself in the process. He’d hoped that being offline would help him get in touch with the “real” him; he found out basically that he was pretty much the same person online and offline. Being off the Internet didn’t make him into a better or purer person, it just made him a dude who didn’t go online. And, well. Yes. Not terribly surprised about that. The online world can be distracting and alienating, but it is often so because people are often inclined to be distracted and alienated. If you’re one of those people, it doesn’t matter where you go or what you do, you’ll still be inclined toward distraction and alienation."
"...the explosion in porn use does not seem to have led to a concomitant explosion in sex crimes, which would have been the prediction by social conservatives and radical feminists if they could have known of the extent of penetration of pornography into culture and private lives over the next 20 years in 1990."
Juking the stats serves no one, collapses your argument on itself.
"The campus rape pandemic seems to be a theory based upon poor survey methodology and repeated lies... Newlon and numerous other activists make the bold claim that one in every four college women is a victim of rape or attempted rape. This number is astonishing and no doubt eyebrow-raising.
...The number seems even more dubious when compared to statistics put forth annually by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The Bureau interviews a random sampling of nearly 150,000 Americans about their criminal victimization, and in 2009 and 2010 they determined that the occurrence of rape of women was 0.23 percent and 0.21 percent, respectively...
So with the figure in mind, it is prudent to see where the one in four statistic comes from. In 1985, Ms. magazine published a study by Mary Koss in which she surveyed over 3,000 college females nationwide asking them ten questions about sexual violence. When determining whether the female was a victim of rape, Koss did not explicitly ask if she had been raped; rather, Koss used her own criteria. From her survey, she determined that 15.4 percent had been raped and 12.1 percent had been victims of attempted rape. However, the survey came with a curious caveat: when directly asked if they had been raped, only 27 percent of the women whom Koss had determined were victims of rape answered in the affirmative. So of the highly publicized (and already exaggerated) one- in-four statistic, 73 percent of those women did not even believe they were raped, and an astonishing 35 percent had intercourse with the alleged rapist again.
...This unreasonable amount of power bestowed on universities led to situations like the 2006 William McCormick case, in which Brown knowingly expelled a student for a rape that he did not commit. Situations like that are unacceptable, and it is even more lamentable when they come about from perpetuated myths that people continue to shout at rallies without ever looking into the facts. So from now on, the “one in four” chant should be abandoned and replaced with the more appropriate, albeit less catchy, 1 in 400."
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