August 14, 2013

University Of Southern California Mislabels Sexual Assaults As ‘Personal Injuries’

Students at the University of Southern California (USC) are alleging that their university routinely mislabels incidents of sexual assault in an attempt to artificially lower its statistics on rape and sexual abuse.

According to the Huffington Post, when USC senior Ariella Mostov reported being sexually assaulted in March, the school’s Department of Public Safety filed a crime report listing the incident as an “injury response.” Not labeling it as sexual assault meant that neither Department of Public Safety or the Los Angeles Police Department had to follow up on the case.

Mostov was told by USC police that her particular case was not labeled as rape because her rapist didn’t orgasm.

Along with other USC students who have been victims of sexual assault, Mostov filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education accusing USC of frequently failing to address sexual assault cases and misreporting incidents. According to the complaint, the school is “persistently underreporting sexual battery, sexual assault, and rape in the Annual Clery Security Report by … categorizing instances of ‘rape’ as ‘personal injury,’ ‘domestic dispute,’ and other less serious crimes or non-crimes.”

These could be blatant violations of the Clery Act, a federal law which requires colleges and universities to accurate report crimes. USC could be fined up to $35,000 per violation if the Department of Education finds that the school indeed violated that law.
<snip>
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/08/13/2457581/usc-mislabels-sexual-assault/

USC should be stomped hard about this.
Yale and UNC are also facing the heat because of the way they handle sexual assaults. I'm sure there are more.

August 13, 2013

This Amazing Animated Chart Shows The Aging Of America 1900-2060:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/13/this-amazing-animated-chart-shows-the-aging-of-america/

Cool!

August 13, 2013

And if Russia bans 'homosexual propaganda' then how will they deal with this?

http://juanitajean.com/

ha!

August 13, 2013

Forever friends:

@Earth_Pics

Heh!

August 13, 2013

Another key provision of Obamacare delayed

The Obama administration has delayed implementation of another key provision of Obamacare — the cap on out-of-pocket insurance costs for consumers.
1
The Obama administration has quietly delayed for one year, until 2015, another key provision of Obamacare: the cap on out-of-pocket insurance costs. That means that some insurers will be able to set their own limits starting in 2014. The cap is supposed to be $6,350 for individuals or $12,700 for families.
2
"We knew this was an important issue. We had to balance the interests of consumers with the concerns of health plan sponsors and carriers, which told us that their computer systems were not set up to aggregate all of a person's out-of-pocket costs. They asked for more time to comply."
– senior administration official
A senior administration official who asked to remain anonymous told The New York Times the delay is attributed to a technology issue. The delay has been outlined on the Labor Department's website since February. But it was buried and went unnoticed until recently.
<snip>
http://cir.ca/story/obamacare-provisions-delayed-1

BS on their technical issues!

August 13, 2013

In a letter, George Orwell explains why he wrote 1984 (foreshadowing):

In 1944, three years before writing and five years before publishing 1984, George Orwell penned a letter detailing the thesis of his great novel. The letter, warning of the rise of totalitarian police states that will ‘say that two and two are five,’ is reprinted from George Orwell: A Life in Letters, edited by Peter Davison and published today by Liveright.

18 May 1944
10a Mortimer Crescent NW 6

Dear Mr Willmett,
Many thanks for your letter. You ask whether totalitarianism, leader-worship etc. are really on the up-grade and instance the fact that they are not apparently growing in this country and the USA.

I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers° of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it.1 That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.

As to the comparative immunity of Britain and the USA. Whatever the pacifists etc. may say, we have not gone totalitarian yet and this is a very hopeful symptom. I believe very deeply, as I explained in my book The Lion and the Unicorn, in the English people and in their capacity to centralise their economy without destroying freedom in doing so. But one must remember that Britain and the USA haven’t been really tried, they haven’t known defeat or severe suffering, and there are some bad symptoms to balance the good ones. To begin with there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you realise, for instance, that no one in England under 26 now has a vote and that so far as one can see the great mass of people of that age don’t give a damn for this? Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history2 etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side. Indeed the statement that we haven’t a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look for their fuhrer elsewhere. One can’t be sure that that won’t change, nor can one be sure that the common people won’t think ten years hence as the intellectuals do now. I hope 3 they won’t, I even trust they won’t, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.

You also ask, if I think the world tendency is towards Fascism, why do I support the war. It is a choice of evils—I fancy nearly every war is that. I know enough of British imperialism not to like it, but I would support it against Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as the lesser evil. Similarly I would support the USSR against Germany because I think the USSR cannot altogether escape its past and retains enough of the original ideas of the Revolution to make it a more hopeful phenomenon than Nazi Germany. I think, and have thought ever since the war began, in 1936 or thereabouts, that our cause is the better, but we have to keep on making it the better, which involves constant criticism.

Yours sincerely,
Geo. Orwell
http://thebea.st/1cwx0bO

August 12, 2013

Check out the great Google Doodle in honor of Schrodinger. He was born 126 years ago today:

Ha!

August 12, 2013

It won't erase the trauma, but authorities did find one small way to help Hannah Anderson:

<snip>
Authorities also say Hannah Anderson has been reunited with a gray cat that she had with her in the wilderness last week.
<snip>
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/12/hannah-anderson-rescue-chance-meeting-wilderness-james-dimaggio_n_3742769.html

If she was worried about the cat, they did a great thing for her.

August 12, 2013

It won't erase the trauma, but authorities did find one small way to help Hannah Anderson:

<snip>
Authorities also say Hannah Anderson has been reunited with a gray cat that she had with her in the wilderness last week.
<snip>
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/12/hannah-anderson-rescue-chance-meeting-wilderness-james-dimaggio_n_3742769.html

If she was worried about it, they did a great thing for her.
Hopefully it won't be a constant reminder.

August 12, 2013

Baltimore researchers turn carnivorous fish into vegetarians

Cobia is a sleek and powerful fish that devours flesh and doesn’t apologize for it. Open its belly and anything might pop out — crab, squid, smaller fish, you name it.

Recently, three Baltimore researchers — Aaron Watson, Frederic Barrows and Allen Place — set out to tame this wild and hungry fish sometimes called black salmon. They didn’t want to simply domesticate it; hundreds of fish farmers have already done that. They sought to turn one of the ocean’s greediest carnivores into a vegetarian.

The researchers announced last week that they pulled off the feat at a laboratory in the Columbus Center in downtown Baltimore. Over the course of a four-year study, Watson said, they dabbled with mixtures of plant-based proteins, fatty acids and a powerful amino acid-like substance found in energy drinks until they came up with a combination that cobia and another popular farm fish, gilt-head bream, gobbled down.

The conversion of these carnivorous fish to a completely vegetarian diet is a first, according to the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, and a key to breaking a cycle in which the ocean’s stocks of small fish — menhaden, anchovies and sardines — are plundered by industrial fishing partly to provide fish feed to aquaculture, one of the fastest-growing economic sectors in the world.

“It would take the pressure off harvesting the menhaden fishery,” Place said, referring to the bony and oily little fish billed as the most important in the sea. Menhaden, caught off Virginia’s coast, feed a plethora of marine animals, including dolphin, swordfish and birds.
<snip>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/baltimore-researchers-turn-carnivorous-fish-into-vegetarians/2013/08/11/46fc967e-0130-11e3-9711-3708310f6f4d_story.html?hpid=z1

Muh....
Who knew?