Today is Wrongful Conviction Day.
Topic: Men's Movement
Source: SAVE
Today is Wrongful Conviction Day. SAVE is issuing this press release that highlights an egregious example of prosecutorial misconduct that led to a wrongful conviction in the state of Maine.

Due process reflects human nature
Topic: Individualist Feminism
Source: The Hill
Author: Wendy McElroy
[Ed: and it is our best chance for fairness] In common parlance, due process is the fair treatment that every individual deserves from law enforcement and the judiciary. Accusers should be heard without bias; defendants should be judged on the evidence and through unbiased procedures. In America, the legal meaning of “due process” derives from the common law tradition, the Bill of Rights, laws and court precedents. The protections include “innocent until proven guilty,” the right of cross-examination, legal representation and transparent proceedings. Because the protections apply to defendants, however, due process is often said to obstruct justice for accusers.

Crypto’s Means Are Its End – as Crypto-Statists Well Know
Topic: Individualist Feminism
Source: bitcoin.com
Author: Wendy McElroy
My latest article for bitcoin.com has just appeared: Wendy McElroy: Crypto’s Means Are Its End – as Crypto-Statists Well Know I hope to see you in the commentary section. Enjoy! Shares appreciated.

Excerpt: The 20th century French Christian philosopher Jacques Maritain saw End and Means as the problem of political philosophy. He based his conclusion on political science, religion, and the lessons of history. The French Revolution provided a model of how an End failed because the Means used to achieve it were “intrinsically evil.” France transformed from an absolute monarchy that ravaged the rights of common people into “a superior person called the Nation State” that acted the same way. “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” never materialized. The Revolution did not achieve the “final aim and most essential task of the body politic or political society,” which is to “better the conditions of human life itself” and “to procure the common good of the multitude, in such a manner that each concrete person, not only in a privileged class…may truly reach that measure of independence which is proper to civilized life.”

Cryptocurrency resolves the problem of political philosophy because it is a means and an end at the same moment. The strategy: decentralize financial exchanges through a blockchain in order to bypass trusted third parties and return monetary control to the individual. The political end: decentralize financial exchanges in order to bypass trusted third parties and return monetary control to the individual. Mahatma Gandhi famously pronounced, “the means are the ends in progress.” Cryptocurrency further collapses the distinction so that the means are the ends.

Kellyanne Conway: I'm a victim of sexual assault
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: NBC News
Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to President Donald Trump, said during a conversation about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh Sunday that she had been the victim of sexual assault. “I feel very empathetic, frankly, for victims of sexual assault and sexual harassment and rape,” Conway said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” She then paused, cleared her throat and said, “I’m a victim of sexual assault.” Conway, over the course of an intense and emotional conversation with CNN’s Jake Tapper, seemed to express frustration that all sexual assault allegations get lumped together. She said the current saga surrounding Kavanaugh, who is facing one allegation of sexual assault and three allegations of sexual misconduct, was a product of “raw partisan politics.” “I’ve just had it. I’ve just had it with it all being the same,” Conway said.

Minnesota Senate candidate calls to investigate Ellison DV allegations
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: FOX News
Karin Housley, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, has officially requested an investigation into the allegations of domestic abuse against Rep. Keith Ellison. Ellison, a Democrat running for attorney general in Minnesota, has been accused by his former girlfriend of physical and emotional abuse throughout the time they dated. Karen Monahan alleged Ellison once dragged her off a bed while shouting profanities and sent multiple abusive text messages. Ellison has vehemently denied the accusations and asked the House Ethics Committee to launch a probe into the allegations. Minnesota’s Democratic Party has also commissioned an investigation.

Man at Heart of Nobel Literature Scandal Convicted of Rape
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: Associated Press
The man at the center of a sex abuse and financial crimes scandal in Sweden that has tarnished the academy that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature was convicted of rape and sentenced Monday to two years in prison. Jean-Claude Arnault, 72, a major cultural figure in Sweden, had faced two counts of rape for the same woman in 2011. He was found guilty of one rape but was acquitted of the other because the victim said she was asleep at the time and judges said her account wasn't reliable. Arnault had denied the charges. Stockholm District Court said the ruling by the judge and three jurors was unanimous. In Sweden, rape is punishable by a minimum of two years and a maximum of six years in prison, reports the AP.

Catholic University dean suspended over Kavanaugh tweet
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Campus Reform
Catholic University of America Dean Will Rainford issued a tweet from his official university account in which he cast doubt on one of Brett Kavanaugh's sexual assault accusers. CUA President John Garvey later suspended Rainford, saying the school does not take official political positions. But one student argued that by suspending Rainford, the university is taking the side of Kavanaugh's accusers.

California is 1st state to require women on corporate boards
Topic: Affirmative Action
Source: Yahoo Finance
California has become the first state to require publicly traded companies to include women on their boards of directors, one of several laws boosting or protecting women that Gov. Jerry Brown signed Sunday. The measure requires at least one female director on the board of each California-based public corporation by the end of next year. Companies would need up to three female directors by the end of 2021, depending on the number of board seats.

Anti-Defamation League, Facebook, Google, & Youtube...
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: CNet
[Ed: Appoint Themselves As Official Internet Censor] Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft, among others, are joining with the ADL to form a Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab, the companies and the civil rights group said Tuesday. They’ll exchange ideas and develop strategies to try to curb hate speech and abuse on the companies’ various platforms and across the internet. “These companies have an added responsibility to do everything within their power to stop hate from flourishing on their watch,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “We look forward to tackling this pressing challenge together.

Judge holds that preponderance of evidence standard
Topic: Men's Movement
Source: The FIRE
Last week, a federal judge in New Mexico allowed a student’s due process lawsuit to proceed against the University of New Mexico and its president, but dismissed his claims against several individual administrators, holding that because the “contours of [the plaintiff’s] due process rights were not clearly established,” the university administrators who punished him were entitled to qualified immunity. In his opinion, Judge James Browning made some of the strongest and most remarkable statements to date in favor of a student’s right to due process in a campus proceeding.

Kentucky's Last Abortion Clinic Learns Fate. Pro-choice victory
Topic: Abortion
Source: Associated Press
In a victory for abortion-rights supporters, a federal judge struck down a Kentucky law that had put the state's last abortion clinic at risk of closing when Gov. Matt Bevin's administration cited it in a licensing fight with the facility, the AP reports. US District Judge Greg Stivers, in a long-awaited ruling, said Friday that the two-decade-old law violates constitutionally protected due process rights. The law required Kentucky's abortion clinics to have written agreements with a hospital and an ambulance service in case of medical emergencies. Stivers says the so-called transfer agreements "do not advance a legitimate interest" in promoting the health of women seeking abortions.

Grassley Refers Potential False Kavanaugh Accuser
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Zero Hedge
[Ed: To FBI/DOJ For Criminal Investigation.] This will dissuade others from coming forward, especially if their stories are false or inaccurate.] The Senate Judiciary Committee has referred an individual to the FBI/DOJ for criminal investigation after for potential "materially false statements" about US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. On Monday, Jeff Catalan of Newport, RI called Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse's office with "allegations concerning a rape on a boat in August of 1985," according to a transcript of the phone call...

Deported Dad Made Desperate Attempt to Reunite With His Son
Topic: Father's Rights
Source: The Intercept
Hundreds of children who were separated from their mothers and fathers at the border earlier this year remain in the U.S. without their parents — parents who were deported by the Trump administration. In late June, an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit won reunification for children with their mothers and fathers who remained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. But the suit does virtually nothing for parents already deported. With very few exceptions, they have no right to return to the U.S. Reunification will happen only if they agree to have their children deported — which could put many in mortal danger. Some of these parents are attempting to sneak across the border to get back together with their children.

Sweden turns Pippi Longstocking into homeless Roma migrant
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: RT
[Ed: living in Stockholm ghetto ] In a new version of the children's story, to be broadcast despite initial objections from the creator’s family, the naughty ginger heroine will become a Roma “warrior against injustice” living in a troubled immigrant suburb. Pippi in Rinkeby is to be transmitted as a radio series on state-funded Radio Sweden not just in Swedish, but popular minority languages, including Romanian and Arabic. The story, in which Pippi is a homeless migrant, who inhabits a car wreck, will then be published as a book. "She is the world's strongest and most self-sufficient girl and takes total care of herself. Everything is as in the original, but we have made it our own version," 12-year-old Felicia Di Fransesco, who helped develop the story in a children’s writing workshop, told Sweden Radio.

Free speech not necessary in a democracy?
Topic: Abortion
Source: Jonathan Turley
The European appear committed to this trend of curtailing free speech and subjecting speech to coercive definitions of what the majority deems acceptable. That commitment was made all the more evident, and chilling, by the decision of the European Court of Human Rights rejecting a German anti-abortion activist’s challenge to court orders enjoining him from referring to abortions as “aggravated murder” and comparing them with the Holocaust. So now the courts are enforcing speech controls over clearly religious and political viewpoints in Europe. The court in Strasbourg, France simply brushed aside the freedom of speech elements of a man who views abortion as murder and doctors performing abortions as murderers. It upheld the prior restraint on any future speech for Klaus Guenter Annen, in barring his views from being posted on his website or spoken in other forums. The reason is all too familiar to the free speech community. He cannot be allowed to speech freely because it “might have incited hatred and aggression.”

California divorce courts go to dogs as pets gain status
Topic: Children and Family
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
California courts could be going to the dogs — and maybe cats, too — under a new law granting judges authority to settle disagreements over who keeps the family pet in divorce cases the same way they handle child-custody disputes. Until now, Fido and Kitty have been considered family property, a status giving them little more standing in a divorce than a family's big-screen TV. Under a bill signed Thursday by Gov. Jerry Brown, pets will still be considered community property but a judge deciding who gets to keep them will have the discretion of weighing such factors as who feeds them, who takes them to the vet and on walks, and who protects them.

Transgender Man Used Massachusetts Gender Law
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Breitbart
A biological man who claims to identify as a woman filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office to use the state’s gender identity law to force a female-oriented spa to wax the area around his genitals. The man demanded that the South Shore spa provide him with a “full Brazilian” wax and other beauty services under the state’s gender identity law, reports the New Boston Post. The complainant claimed other spas in Braintree and Quincy also refused to service him because, he stated, they “said I was not really a woman because I had a penis.”

So is it nature not nurture after all?
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Guardian (UK)
Plomin believes that Freud sent society looking in the wrong place for answers to the question of what makes us as we are. The key to personality traits does not lie in how you were treated by your parents, but rather in what you inherited biologically from them: namely, the genes in your DNA. He finds that genetic heritability accounts for 50% of the psychological differences between us, from personality to mental abilities. But that leaves 50% that should be accounted for by the environment. However, Plomin argues, research shows that most of that 50% is not attributable to the type of environmental influences that can be planned for or readily affected – ie it’s made up of unpredictable events. And of the environmental influences that can be moderated, much of it, he argues, is really an expression of genetics.

My problem with black identity
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Spiked
Remi Adekoya, a Polish-Nigerian journalist and academic, is different. Not that he doesn’t think racism is a problem in 21st-century Britain. He has lived here for nearly four years, and racism does exist, he says. But it is not the huge problem it is being hyped up to be. It is not a daily experience. And it is not everywhere. What is more, he contends, the black identitarians promoting the racism-is-rife narrative, and portraying white people as deeply, even if unwittingly, racist, are making things worse – for white people and black people.

3 Ways That Colleges Suppress a Diversity of Viewpoints
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
As colleges adopt an ever-growing array of diversity programs, one form is still in woefully short supply, with little effort being directed toward a remedy: diversity of viewpoints. The lack of an array of freely voiced perspectives on social and political issues is buttressed by a strict set of largely unwritten rules constraining the opinions that can be expressed on campuses, the research that can be performed, the discussions that can be held. Complaints of "political correctness" in academe go back decades. But recently the dynamic has changed: Social media are increasingly employed as a tool both for direct censorship and for strengthening the pressures to self-censor, significantly narrowing the range of permissible academic discourse.