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Click below for the Gerald McBoing-Boing Required Reading List.

MahaBlog’s No Excuse Left Behind:

From the Administration’s perspective, what’s not to like? NCLB is a wonderful program. The title of the Act is both catchy and warm/fuzzy at the same time. It provides an excuse for the President to get his picture taken with children (more warm/fuzzy). And even though in the long run it is unlikely to result in better educated children, I’m sure eventually some numbers will be creatively crunched, or cooked, to make it look as if something is being achieved, which to the Bushies is all that really matters.

The only flaw that I can see is that NCLB hasn’t resulted in any big defense industry contracts, but give ‘em time.

An interview with Roy Hazelwood at the Crime Library. Hazelwood was among the original profilers in the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI and his speciality for two decades was sexual crimes. In this interview he lays out the major categories for sexual offenders.

Your major categories of rapists are these:

Power-reassurance: That’s what law enforcement calls the “gentleman rapist.” He has a complex fantasy of a consensual relationship with a woman.

Power-assertive: That’s the individual who believes that he is entitled to do whatever he wants to women. They’re to be used for his gratification. His fantasies are minimal.

Anger-retaliatory: This person assaults because he’s motivated by anger and he’s getting even with women for real or imagined wrongs. He has almost no fantasy. He simply strikes.

Anger-excitation: He’s a sexual sadist. He’s punishing women because he believes them to be evil and powerful, so he’s trying to take away that power. He has deep and complex fantasies.

Opportunistic: He’s there to commit another crime like robbery or burglary. The victim is there and he simply seizes the opportunity. He’s frequently under the influence of alcohol or drugs. If he starts robbing and raping repeatedly, he gets classified into one of the major categories.

Gang rape: This involves three or more offenders and you always have a leader and a reluctant participant. Those are extremely violent, and what you find is that they’re playing for each other’s approval. It gets into a pack mentality and can be horrendous.

Roni has an encounter with Kos himself at a book signing:

At one point, he mentions something about feminists and about not dismissing them. I jump into his speech and ask, “But on your blog, you have been dismissive of feminists and abortion rights.” He retorts, “No, I haven’t. I’m as pro-choice as anyone else.” I can’t recall the exact words, but he essentially says that while he’s all pro-choice and knows and sees that abortion rights are under attack (“Look at SD!”) the thing is that we need to see the big picture.

Here’s the big picture:

More Democrats = More rights for women

Gawd damn do I wish it were that simple!

PZ Myers writes on fetal pain:

The first step is to work out when the machinery of the nervous system is first present, and when it is simply possible for the fetus to detect unpleasant stimuli. The nervous system has its beginnings early in development, with neurulation at around 3 weeks after fertilization, but it is initially little more than a thread of dedicated tissue that is more focused on raw proliferation than on putting together connections. The first pain sensors grow into the periphery around 7 weeks, and the first projections from the spinal cord to the thalamus of the brain also occur at 7 weeks. Prior to that time, there’s just no way for signals to travel to the brain, so sensory information doesn’t exist.

Bark/Bites’ Do You Tell a Football What Time the Superbowl Starts?:

And that captures the aspect of [homosociality] that I’m thinking about in relationship to the beer commercials. The idea that men can always count on other men to stand with them against women. It defines the male-male relationship as the primary allegiance that men should have, and thereby relegates the male-female relationship to a secondary status. The effect of this is that, as I was bitching about in my previous post on the topic, that men can always be counted on (or so the ideology goes) to conspire with you, and against women. Women become the enemy–even if they’re an enemy into whose pants you are trying to get–and they are to be avoided, deceived, manipulated or appeased as necessary.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 29th, 2006 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Round Up. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.