Category Archives: Culture

Female inmates sterilized in California prisons without approval – Health and Medicine – The Sacramento Bee

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"As soon as he found out that I had five kids, he suggested that I look into getting it done. The closer I got to my due date, the more he talked about it," said Christina Cordero, 34, who spent two years in prison for auto theft. "He made me feel like a bad mother if I didn’t do it."

Cordero, released in 2008 and now living in Upland, agreed to the procedure. "Today," she said, "I wish I would have never had it done."

The allegations echo those made nearly a half-century ago, when forced sterilizations of prisoners, the mentally ill and the poor were commonplace in California. State lawmakers officially banned such practices in 1979.

via Female inmates sterilized in California prisons without approval – Health and Medicine – The Sacramento Bee.

On the assumption of progress – National Review Online

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We treat technological progress as though it were a natural process, and we speak of Moore’s law — computers’ processing power doubles every two years — as though it were one of the laws of thermodynamics. But it is not an inevitable, natural process. It is the outcome of a particular social order.

When I am speaking to students, I like to show them a still from the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street in which the masterful financier Gordon Gekko is talking on his cell phone, a Motorola DynaTac 8000X. The students always — always — laugh: The ridiculous thing is more than a foot long and weighs a couple of pounds. But the revelatory fact that takes a while to sink in is this: You had to be a millionaire to have one. The phone cost the equivalent of nearly $10,000, it cost about $1,000 a month to operate, and you couldn’t text or play Angry Birds on it. When the first DynaTac showed up in a movie — it was Sixteen Candles, a few years before Wall Street — it was located in the front seat of a Rolls-Royce, which is where such things were found 25 or 30 years ago. By comparison, an iPhone 5 is a wonder, a commonplace miracle. My question for the students is: How is it that the cell phones in your pockets get better and cheaper every year, but your schools get more expensive and less effective? (Or, if you live in one of the better school districts, get much more expensive and stagnate?) How is it that Gordon Gekko’s ultimate status symbol looks to our eyes as ridiculous as Molly Ringwald’s Reagan-era wardrobe and asymmetrical hairdos? That didn’t just happen.

via iPencil | National Review Online.

Rob LaZebnik’s Message for the Class of 2013 | Saturday Essay – WSJ.com

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But let’s not understate the big achievements you’ve racked up during the 70 or so days you’ve actually spent on campus. The first, and perhaps finest accomplishment, is having persuaded your parents to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to extend your childhood for four years.

Let’s also not forget how hard you’ve worked to find something to protest against. In my day, it was apartheid in South Africa. In yours, it’s championing people who wanted the God-given right to use a gender-neutral bathroom. Thrillingly, you petitioned the President and Trustees and won: Now guys can make both bathrooms on every dorm floor equally disgusting.

via Rob LaZebnik's Message for the Class of 2013 | Saturday Essay – WSJ.com.

Margaret Thatcher Helped Invent Soft-Serve Ice Cream – Business Insider

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Though the Iron Lady is recognized for her vast political and economic impacts, her culinary contribution to the world is less known.

As a chemist for food manufacturer J. Lyons and Co. in the 1940s, Thatcher was part of the British research team that made soft-serve ice possible, according to The Washington Post’s Caitlin Dewey, citing a 1983 New Scientist article.

Thatcher, and colleagues, invented a way to add more air into the ice cream so that it was less dense and used less ingredients, which also made it more cost-effective.

via Margaret Thatcher Helped Invent Soft-Serve Ice Cream – Business Insider.

Firearms Company Relocating To North Texas « CBS Dallas / Fort Worth

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A firearms company that makes AR-15 style rifles for the iconic brand Colt, will open a plant in Breckenridge in Stephens County. Oregon company Bold Ideas confirmed the development Friday.

Bold Ideas goes by the name Colt Competition, making high accuracy rifles for competition shooting.

The company has not officially announced the opening, but employment applications are already available at the Breckenridge Chamber of Commerce. A non-specific, help wanted ad appeared in the local newspaper classifieds earlier in the week.

Sources say Colt Competition will move into a large vacant industrial space on the north side of town, previously used by Karsten Homes to manufacture mobile homes.

The move by Colt Competition into Breckenridge comes as the CEO of Colt Manufacturing in Connecticut has said there will soon be few good answers to keep his company in the state. Connecticut passed some of the nation’s most restrictive gun laws this week.

via Firearms Company Relocating To North Texas « CBS Dallas / Fort Worth.

7-year-old faces felony charges for BB gun incident | CharlotteObserver.com

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A 7-year-old boy’s alleged errant shots with a BB gun will have him in a Catawba County courtroom this week, facing felony charges for shooting into an occupied vehicle.

Prosecutors in Catawba County have charged Sam Grant, in connection with a February incident off Buffalo Shoals Road near the Catawba community in the southeast part of the county.

Deputies say Sam, who turns 8 on Thursday, was outdoors shooting a BB gun. His parents told WGHP-TV of High Point that their son was shooting at an abandoned house across the two-lane road. However, some of his shots struck passing vehicles. Nobody in the two vehicles was injured, deputies say.

The boy was charged with two felony counts of discharging a firearm into an occupied vehicle.

Family members told WGHP they were shocked with prosecutors’ decision to charge their son. His initial court date is Friday in Newton.

via 7-year-old faces felony charges for BB gun incident | CharlotteObserver.com.

Sex Abuse Scandals Rock the BBC | Via Meadia

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I’ve said it before – you could probably take just the LA School District and have more sex scandals than the entire Catholic Church over the same time period.

It’s almost enough to make a person think that when a society casts sexual restraint and self control to the winds, the young and the weak become victims of a culture of exploitation and gratification. It’s almost enough to make someone wonder if unbridled and socially glorified libertinism rather than celibacy is the leading cause of the sexual exploitation of minors.

But no… Thoughts like that are much too depressing. That train of thought leads to the dismal conclusion that some sort of, well, original sin has twisted human nature so that terrible things happen in all our institutions, however modern and freethinking they are. Let’s stop that kind of thinking as quickly as possible; it’s much more comfortable to think that good resolutions, lots of police, and a healthy attitude toward recreational sex will make everything right. Eventually.

via Sex Abuse Scandals Rock the BBC | Via Meadia.

Lupica: Morbid find suggests murder-obsessed gunman Adam Lanza plotted Newtown, Conn.’s Sandy Hook massacre for years – NY Daily News

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I don’t believe video games are the problem, or at least not the main problem. I think it’s the emphasis on self-promotion and the awful narcissism of our age that is the issue, without even mentioning mental illness, a broken home, and a mother who provided access to guns but not to help.

“They don’t believe this was just a spreadsheet. They believe it was a score sheet,” he continued. “This was the work of a video gamer, and that it was his intent to put his own name at the very top of that list. They believe that he picked an elementary school because he felt it was a point of least resistance, where he could rack up the greatest number of kills. That’s what (the Connecticut police) believe.”

The man paused and said, “They believe that (Lanza) believed that it was the way to pick up the easiest points. It’s why he didn’t want to be killed by law enforcement. In the code of a gamer, even a deranged gamer like this little bastard, if somebody else kills you, they get your points. They believe that’s why he killed himself.

via Lupica: Morbid find suggests murder-obsessed gunman Adam Lanza plotted Newtown, Conn.’s Sandy Hook massacre for years – NY Daily News.

The New Unmarried Moms – WSJ.com

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But if later marriage has been a boon for the college educated, the same cannot be said for Middle Americans—the more than 50% of young adults who have a high-school diploma and maybe some college, but not a bachelor’s degree.

In fact, a key part of the explanation for the struggles of today’s working and lower middle classes in the U.S. is delayed marriage. When the trend toward later marriage first took off in the 1970s, most of these young men and women delayed having children, much as they had in the past. But by 2000, there was a cultural shift. They still put off their weddings, but their childbearing—not so much. Fifty-eight percent of first births among this group are now to unmarried women.

Among college grads today, only 12% of first births are outside marriage. For high-school dropouts, who tend to be the poorest population, 83% of first births are outside marriage, the CDC data show.

Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute asserts that women in their 20’s should seek stability in marriage before childbirth. WSJ’s Wendy Bounds asks why.

If postadolescent mothers and fathers were simply marrying each other a year or two after the arrival of their bundle of joy and remaining together, these trends might not be so troubling. But that’s not what’s happening. Many unmarried mothers in their 20s are living with their baby’s father when they give birth. But about two-fifths of those couples break up before their child’s fifth birthday; that’s three times the rate for married couples of their age.

via The New Unmarried Moms – WSJ.com.