Liberals have produced a study “proving” that sexual abstinence does not prevent pregnancy. It also supposedly proves that contraception is more reliable.

The Telegraph reports:

Sexual abstinence as an effective tool in reducing teenage pregnancy is a complete “myth”, the Government’s advisory body on the issue claimed yesterday.

The Independent Advisory Group on Teenage Pregnancy said that research from the United States showed that contraception was the way to bring down rates.

We’ve all heard of one case in Palestine two thousand years ago in which sexual abstinence apparently failed to work, but it’s difficult to see how researchers in the United States can really use that as an effective basis for arguing that contraception is more reliable than abstinence.

The New York Times reports:

Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery.

Should people be allowed to alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery? Under the rule being considered by the city’s Board of Health, which is likely to be adopted soon, people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and asserting that their proposed change would be permanent.

Applicants would have to have changed their name and shown that they had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years, but there would be no explicit medical requirements.

Read the whole thing.

I tried using Just For Men just once to “get the grey out,” and got endless grief from my wife and friends for trying to fight reality.

China Daily reports a major blog controversy.

Chinabounder, an anonymous British expat and self-confessed wastrel in his early 30s, likes to boast on his weblog of his sexual conquests of Chinese women, including some of his students.

This has so outraged Shanghai’s web citizens that they have resolved to track him down and “kick the foreign trash out of China”.

In racy language suggesting a Terry-Thomas-like rogue cutting a dash in the seedy bars of Shanghai, Chinabounder describes seducing a different girl every night of the week.

The postings are also critical of Chinese male sexual prowess and contain occasional snipes at womanising and the frustrations of Chinese housewives.

The collection of juvenile if provocative musings on sexual mores in contemporary China may even be a hoax cooked up by artists to gauge the reaction in China to such unsavoury comments from a foreigner.

Access to his “Sex and Shanghai” blog – which attracted millions of readers – is currently denied as the author hides from a wave of contempt. Cyber-vigilantes, furious at his claimed seductions of married women and teenagers, have threatened him with a beating if they track him down and some comments are couched in dangerously xenophobic language.

Today, someone is claiming the whole thing was only a hoax, intended to test on-line vigilante behavior.

The not-currently working url is: http://www.chinabounder.blogspot.com

Ted Frank, at Overlawyered, reports the delightful case of Thomas Joseph Bentey, a first year student at St. Thomas University School of Law, who was dismissed (over his own objection) in May of 2006 for failing to maintain a 2.5 GPA.

The astute Mr. Bentey responded by bringing a federal class action lawsuit against St. Thomas Law School, the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami (owner & operator of the law school), and a variety of school officials and administrators for accepting large numbers of students only later to cull out nearly 30% of first- and second-year students for low GPAs, in order to improve the law school’s bar examination passing percentage. Mr. Bentey alleges that the school is “culling” students it should not have admitted in the first place, since they should not be accepting students who do not have a reasonable prospect of completing law school. So, in essence, he’s suing his law school for admitting as poor a student as himself in the first place.

Bentey is also suing the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar and the United States Department of Education for failing to adequately oversee the school by not detecting the alleged scheme and by not taking the necessary action to enforce the ABA accreditation standard which requires that law schools admit only applicants who appear capable of completing their programs and being admitted to the bar.

He got 2 B’s in Torts. They should certainly upgrade those to A’s.

Bentey’s complaint

In one of the Foxfire books, the 1970s-era high school students out collecting Appalachian folklore come upon an old ridgerunner rebuilding a tractor engine. They express astonishment at his abiity to undertake such a project, and the old farmer dismissively replies: “A man built it, didn’t he?”

Things were mostly different then, and they’re gettng more so today, as Matthew B. Crawford observes

an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to “hide the works,” rendering the artifacts we use unintelligible to direct inspection. Lift the hood on some cars now (especially German ones), and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the cavemen in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood. This creeping concealedness takes various forms. The fasteners holding small appliances together now often require esoteric screwdrivers not commonly available, apparently to prevent the curious or the angry from interrogating the innards. By way of contrast, older readers will recall that until recent decades, Sears catalogues included blown-up parts diagrams and conceptual schematics for all appliances and many other mechanical goods. It was simply taken for granted that such information would be demanded by the consumer.

A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part.

So perhaps the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world.

The late Robert A. Heinlein agreed with him.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

–Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, 1978.

Hat tip to Tim of Angle.

Slate commentator Seth Stevenson argues that the commonly used homophobic pejorative has become legitimized by the frequency of its application, could have other linguistic origins (right!), and is simply too useful to avoid.

Are you offended by the word sucks? Do you loathe the way it’s crept into everyday conversation? Are you shocked that preteen children and primetime television shows blithely employ a vivid slang term for oral sex? Do you wish sucks would just fade away, like other faddish colloquialisms that were eventually discarded?

Well, sucks to be you.

Sucks is here to stay. And what’s more, it deserves its place in our lexicon, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s impossible to intelligently maintain that sucks is still offensive. The word is now completely divorced from any past reference it may have made to a certain sex act…

What’s far more interesting to me is the word’s utility.

Sucks is the most concise, emphatic way we have to say something is no good. As a one-syllable intransitive verb, it offers superb economy.

Air Force Academy cadet uses hidden camera to tape his dancing-fool roommate dancing to hip hop.

video

Today’s youth!

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Hat tip to Tim of Angle.

Homosexual marriage has been legalized in Massachusetts and in a number of European countries. Canada and the Netherlands recognize polygamy as a form of civil union, and there has been one Dutch group marriage.

In Vancouver, seven Canadian women have decided to go for the next logical step: they plan to marry themselves.

Makes sense to me. That’s the kind of relationship that really is likely to make it all the way to “’til death us do part.”

The BBC reports that the old-time comic book heroine Batwoman is to make a comeback as a “lipstick lesbian” who moonlights as a crime fighter.

“Don’t we all?” quips Ratty.

The Dutch will not protect their own members of parliament from Islamic threats these days, but they are still breaking new ground by legalizing group, as well as homosexal, marriages. But some citizens of the Netherlands think sexual latitudinarianism has not gone far enough. Reuters is reporting that Dutch pedophiles have formed a new political party with an ambitious agenda.

Dutch pedophiles are launching a political party to push for a cut in the legal age for sexual relations to 12 from 16 and the legalization of child pornography and sex with animals.

The Charity, Freedom and Diversity (NVD) party said on its Web site it would be officially registered Wednesday, proclaiming: “We are going to shake The Hague awake!”

The party said it wanted to cut the legal age for sexual relations to 12 and eventually scrap the limit altogether.

“A ban just makes children curious,” Ad van den Berg, one of the party’s founders, told the Algemeen Dagblad (AD) newspaper.

The party said private possession of child pornography should be allowed although it favors banning the trade of such materials. The broadcast of pornography should be allowed on daytime television, with only violent pornography limited to the late evening, according to the party.

Toddlers should be given sex education and youths aged 16 and up should be allowed to appear in pornographic films and prostitute themselves. Sex with animals should be allowed although abuse of animals should remain illegal, the NVD said.

The party also said everybody should be allowed to go naked in public.

A retirement community reports.

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Hat tip to MeaninglessHotAir.

Gin took the slender shaft of the tube in her palm.

For several years now, stories that the progress of today’s flaming youth towards perdition has reached the point where girls in middle school are routinely expected to provide oral sexual services to boyfriends have been appearing regularly in the MSM.

This news meme has culminated in stories of Lipstick, or Rainbow, Parties in which several girls, wearing different lipstick colors apply the same to you-know-what. An enterprising author of teen fiction has even produced a Young Adult novel, titled Rainbow Party, complete with suitable moral.

Cathy Young, in this month’s Reason, blames the Clinton-Lewinsky Oval Office hijinks for producing a national oral sex fixation, and dismisses the phenomenon as an urban legend, quoting 2005 National Center for Health Statistics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study statistics.

(I’ve always wondered why journalists of both the Left and the Right think teenagers answer questions for such studies truthfully? I would expect boys to lie in one direction, and girls in the other.)

I asked the teenage daughter of a college friend about all this, and she said she thought this sort of thing did go on, just not as much as the press accounts suggest.