"The hammer of justice is unisex."

"A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided." - Tony Robbins

Social Justice on the Small Screen: Primetime Tackles GamerGate, Men's Rights, & Campus Rape - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "I'm not sure that teaching young people to trust some vague feelings of wrongness as a basis for sexual assault allegations are a good idea. Here we literally have on character saying, "It doesn't really matter whether you said yes or no, what matters is your impression of the incident the next day." And throughout the episode, we have characters pushing the idea that Bay was "too drunk to give permission...

...the idea seems to be that vague, subjective impressions are key. Even though Bay didn't say no, and may have said yes, this consent isn't supposed to have counted because she was had been drinking. Tank's drunkenness, meanwhile, is ultimately presumed not to matter, with his guilt or innocence predicated on whether he felt any shame during the act. What kind of impossibly unworkable consent standards are these? To her credit, Switched at Birth's creator doesn't necessarily seem to think this is optimal, only the way things are. In an interview with Cosmopolitan magazine, Weiss said "we want to help guys understand: Even if it's a yes, if she's too drunk to know she's saying yes or to remember it the next day, you might be called to the carpet for that. And, you need to be aware of that making those choices going forward." I suppose that may be a smart lesson to teach in this current climate. But it's also a relatively insane way to look at rape law: No doesn't mean no, yes doesn't mean yes, and all drunk sex is rape. Because, honestly, college kids (and grown adults) aren't going to stop having sex while drunk. Which leaves us only the takeaway that nothing said during a sexual encounter matters at all. "

  

  

That's just funny. Ebola Czar Leaves On Top –: "When Ron Klain came into the new office of Ebola Czar last October, there were up to two cases of Ebola raging in the United States. Now there is one. In terms of government results, this borders on stunning..."

Science often isn't.  How the flawed ‘science’ of bite mark analysis has sent innocent people to prison - The Washington Post: "The field of forensics has reached an important moment. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences published a congressionally commissioned report on the state of forensic science in the courtroom. The report was highly critical of a wide range of forensic specialties, from fingerprints to hair and fiber analysis to blood spatter analysis. It found that many of the claims forensic analysts have been making in courtrooms for decades lacked any scientific foundation to back them up. Yet judges and juries have taken and continue to take those claims as foolproof science, often because the experts themselves frame them that way. 

The report was particularly critical of an area of forensics loosely known as pattern matching. That area encompasses a group of largely subjective specialties in which an analyst looks at two pieces of evidence, such carpet fibers, hair fibers or marks made by tools, and simply declares based on his or her experience and expertise whether the two are a match. Bite mark analysis is also part of this group. But even within the pattern matching disciplines, the NAS report singled out bite mark matching for some especially harsh criticism. The report found “no evidence of an existing scientific basis for identifying an individual to the exclusion of all others.” The problem is that this is precisely what bite mark analysts do — and what they have been doing for decades."

 21 Kids Who Refused To Play Along With The Teacher's "Rules":