The Duke Case Continues

According to the second Duke stripper, if you are rich enough to hire an attorney, it's okay to be charged with rape--even if you might be innocent. If these young men turn out not to be guilty of this crime, saying you're sorry is not enough. If found innocent, perhaps the charges should be reversed and the accuser should be charged with the rape of these guys' reputations.

Update: Newsweek has more on the Duke case. What I find troubling is a statement from a student at the college that the accuser attends:

Across town, at NCCU, the mostly black college where the alleged victim is enrolled, students seemed bitterly resigned to the players' beating the rap. "This is a race issue," said Candice Shaw, 20. "People at Duke have a lot of money on their side." Chan Hall, 22, said, "It's the same old story. Duke up, Central down." Hall said he wanted to see the Duke students prosecuted "whether it happened or not. It would be justice for things that happened in the past." (On a bulletin board in the student lounge was a long list of students with grades high enough to qualify for the Golden Key International Honour Society. On the list was the name of the alleged rape victim.)

Wow, Chan Hall, your form of vigilante justice is really admirable--if the Duke students are prosecuted "whether it happened or not," when can we expect you to get your just deserts? Perhaps it will only be a matter of time.

Update II: La Shawn Barber has more on the Duke case--make sure you check out the must-read comment on her site linking to the problems NCCU has had with assaults and crime.

Podcast on China and the Middle East

Today, we are talking again to Jim Dunnigan of Strategy Page and Austin Bay of AustinBay.net about China (did you know that there are 100 million internet users there?), Iran and the possibility of an electromagnetic bomb, and Iraq updates. We also caught up with Michael Totten who is just back from the Middle East where he has been blogging about his experiences. He talks about how he was treated as an American, the despair of Cairo, and the beauty and wonder of Istanbul.

You can listen to the podcast here (no iPod needed) or subscribe via iTunes here.

As always, comments and suggestions can be left below.

McDonald's Supersized Profits

I just read that McDonald's is doing better than ever--good for them (Hat Tip: Instapundit). The supersized profits occurred despite Morgan Spurlock's negative documentary, Super Size Me, detailing how bad McDonald's is for your health. In the documentary, Spurlock eats McDonald's for three meals a day and often supersizes everything. Spurlock finds that his health suffers--well, duh. Ever heard of too much of a good thing? Of course, the real message of the documentary seems to be that corporations are bad and telling people what to eat is good.

I often think of making a rather different documentary than Spurlock's. This one would entail my eating about ten cakes of Tofu for each meal; after all, eating lots of tofu leads to "accelerated brain aging," one study says. Or I could eat gallons of raw bean sprouts every day and then describe the horrible effects on my health. Even Dr. Andrew Weil, the health food guy, is against eating raw sprouts due to toxins. Heck, why not pick on Panera Bread (which seems to seduce so many organic yuppie types to it's doors) instead of McDonald's-- take a look at the fat and calories in their chicken sandwich--Hint--it makes a Big Mac look like a veggie burger in terms of calories. Or how about the Turkey Artichoke Panini? Sounds healthy until you see it has 840 calories and 37 grams of fat--much more than a Big Mac (540 calories and 30 grams of fat).

Anyway, you get the idea. If you want to take care of your health, it is up to you to evaluate your choices--whether it be McDonald's for a healthy salad or Panera for one that has three times the fat. Me -- I eat better at home.

MySpace to the Rescue

Dateline says that posting too much information on social networking sites like MySpace may be dangerous. But sometimes, it can save lives:

Kansas law officials say they've foiled a plot to attack a rural high school. Cherokee County Sheriff Steve Norman says five students are in custody. He says deputies found guns, ammunition, knives and encoded messages in the bedroom of one of the suspects.

Norman says officials got wind of the Riverton High School plot after a threatening message was posted on the Web site MySpace.com.

I wonder if we will see Dateline or other MSM outlets run positive stories about internet social networking sites--probably about the time they run an hour long series on gun owners who saved themselves with their weapons. In other words, I won't be holding my breath.

Cathy Young looks at another side of "husband management" in this post.

What would you do if your ex-wife tried to thwart your dying wish to spend time with your kids? Maybe something like this (Hat tip MND).

Black Teens Involved in NYU Student Murder Get a Slap on the Wrist

The black teens involved in robbing and chasing a white NYU student into an oncoming car are to be tried as juveniles rather than adults. What does this mean?

The effect of the transfer is that the teens, who faced nine years to life in prison if they had been convicted as adults, now face a maximum initial sentence of five years "restrictive placement" if convicted in Family Court, said Larry Busching, head of the city Law Department's Family Court Division.

In commentary from Mens News Daily, Jim Kouri describes how black-on-white crime is rarely recorded as a hate crime:

One NYPD police officer said, on condition of anonymity, “This is a travesty. These street punks are getting a slap on the wrist. They did complete a felony — assault — when they grabbed the student and punched him. They just didn’t want to throw the book at these kids.”

He also said, “They didn’t want to charge them with a bias crime because they don’t want the [crime] stats to show a black-on-white bias crime. You can be sure if the roles were reversed — if it were a white-on-black incident — it would have been treated as a bias crime,” he said.

So, when you see ludicrous posters like this which state absurdities such as "80% of all hate crimes are committed by straight white men under 23," just remember all the victims like Broderick Hehman, the 20-year-old NYU student, who never got a chance to tell his side of the story.

Israeli Soldiers

I wouldn't mess with these women.

I found these pictures beautiful, heroic and touching. Unfortunately, the photographer projects her own feelings of vulnerability, depression and meaninglessness onto her subjects (from her statement):

I decided to portray female soldiers in Israel during their mandatory military service as a way for me to revisit my own experience. I served as a photographer in the Israeli Air Force between 1988-1990. It was a period marked by continuous depression and extreme loneliness, and at the time I was too young to understand these emotions. Through a series of images showing female soldiers in army bases and outside, individually or in groups, I attempt to reveal a facet of this experience that is generally overlooked by the global community.

Rather than portraying the soldier as heroic, confident, or proud, my images disclose a complexity of emotions. The soldier is often caught in a transient moment of self-reflection, uncertainty, a break from her daily reality, as if questioning her own identity and state of contradiction. She is a soldier in uniform but at the same time she is a teenage girl who is trying to negotiate between these two extreme dimensions. She is in an army base surrounded by hundreds like her, but underneath the uniform there is an individual that wishes to be noticed.

I realized that although I was in a vulnerable emotional state during my service and thought of ways out of it, there was a certain level of acceptance involved. The girls I encountered were so immersed in this lifestyle, in their new reality, and completely divorced from the outside world. How could I explain to them that what they are doing means nothing in the outside world, yet will affect them for the rest of their lives? They have given up who they are for now; they have put their dreams on hold; their lives for the next two years have become a wistful compromise.

Yes, best to downplay any type of heroism and instead, decide that these women must be vulnerable, depressed and wasting their time serving.

More Male Bashing

Larry sent me this picture today to let me know the kind of trashy posters this "tolerant" University posts on it's campus. Take a look.

Home Alone

You know, come to think of it, maybe staying in mom and dad's basement is not such a bad idea for young men. After all, at any time, the press makes it appear that you can be hauled away in the middle of the night on rape charges. It might be best to avoid college, never marry, live at home until you are in your 30's and then go out in the world as a middle aged guy who no one bothers with much anymore. Not a bad plan these days.

Moussaoui May have Schizophrenia

Yes, Moussaoui, you're right. It is a lot of American B.S.

Update: Well, the American B.S. continues with this gem:

A defense psychologist said Tuesday he concluded Zacarias Moussaoui is a paranoid schizophrenic based on observations of the actions and writings of the terrorist conspirator, a man described earlier as convinced President Bush will set him free....

Psychologist Xavier Amador said the clincher in his diagnosis was an April 2005 encounter with Moussaoui in which the defendant in the nation's only Sept. 11, 2001, prosecution repeatedly spit water on him — and appeared to be talking to himself.

Dr. Amador, I say spitting on you only proves Moussaoui's sanity is intact.

How Dare Those Guys Think They are Entitled to a Good Time?

Here is a good article that really sums up the incident at Duke. The rush to judge the young men in this case is disturbing:

"We don't know all the facts about the alleged Duke lacrosse rape, but ..."

That's more or less how most commentators have introduced their remarks on the case that has reduced the Durham, N.C., community to prayers, tears and recriminations.

Let me interpret the code for you: Men are bad.

Even though we don't know what happened, we're not going to let the absence of facts interfere with our indictment of a team, a coach, a school, but more to the point - of boys.

About the only thing to emerge with any clarity since a black exotic dancer claimed that three white lacrosse players raped her last month is our willingness to believe the worst about males.

That belief is all the more rewarding if the males happen to be white, as well as athletes, and especially if they're perceived to be privileged. If there's one thing we can't bear in this country, it's spoiled white boys who think the world owes them a good time.

The author of this article hits the nail on the head with these statements:

While we wait to hear what the grand jury decides, we might turn our harsh judgment inward and recognize that the anti-male groupthink that permitted a presumption of guilt in Durham is little different than the lynch-mob mentality that once channeled rage against blacks.

Obviously, no woman deserves to be raped for any reason, under any circumstances. But nor do men deserve to be presumed guilty just because they're men.

Perhaps the real crime here is that our man-bashing society has declared itself judge, jury and hangman without ever hearing the other side of the story.