Gucci Little Piggy

Kicking. Squealing.

Links

1.  A story close to home about a man who is being pursued by the state of Kansas for child support after he donated sperm to a lesbian couple.  The trio thought they covered all of their legal bases by signing a contract stating that the donor would be off the hook financially. In Kansas, as with many other states, when a single parent applies for state support the state pursues the absent parent for child support.

2.  Walter Russell Mead on Philadelphia’s school closures.

3.  Via Heartiste:  Why Is Male Nature More Homicidal Than Female Nature?  Brief answer: because in an evolutionary sense, males are more desperate.”

4.  Perhaps psychopaths are useful.

5.  A blurb of a WSJ piece on college tuition and school administration costs:

The number of employees hired by colleges and universities to manage or administer people, programs and regulations increased 50% faster than the number of instructors between 2001 and 2011, the U.S. Department of Education says. It’s part of the reason that tuition, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has risen even faster than health-care costs.

Student loans make this possible.

6.  Umberto Eco:  “we like lists because we don’t want to die”.  This is more true when we think of the general human behavior of enumerating and list making.  The human species itself does not want to cease existing so it creates lists to document and therefore recognize and anchor its existence.

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15 Responses to Links

  1. Fiddlesticks 01/02/2013 at 9:18 am

    #5: Administrative bloat is happening everywhere. Colleges are just getting more scrutiny because they’re subject to open-records laws. This is more a function of a winner-take-all, Ricky Bobby “If you ain’t first, you’re last!” society where nobody trusts that they’ll be treated fairly unless they carry around some kind of VIP pass.

  2. PA 01/02/2013 at 9:56 am

    nearly 2 in every 100 persons is a psychopath [in linked article]

    Is there data on intelligence distribution within that 2 percent? My guess is that in most cases moral retardation is a function of a specific kind of mental retardation, underdeveloped prefrontal lobes in otherwise healthy individuals.

    This woudl mean that high-functioning psychopaths (ones that the article calls “useful”) are extremely rare and tend to be found high in legitimate social hierarchies, their success limited by an imperfect ability to mimic empathy. All the others end up killed or imprisoned early in their lives.

  3. PA 01/02/2013 at 10:05 am

    From my earlier readings, recklessness is another potential downfall of high-functioning psychopaths.

  4. Camlost 01/02/2013 at 10:19 am

    All of the list-making I see is being done by people of European origin, with their propensity for naming, describing, defining and analyzing… I don’t think it’s a “general human characteristic”.

  5. PA 01/02/2013 at 10:22 am

    dudes who have their hands up near their face in their twitter avatar [CR tweet]

    You see those portraits on Facebook profile pics or in brochures with college faculty bios. The hand-at-face pose (normally touchign the chin) is one of the most reliable signs of the person, almost always a man, being a leftie. The pose signals “thoughtful.”

    Above all, lefties are extremely ego-invested in beeing perceived as intelligent. Now, this woudl be a specific kind of intelligence. Not so much strategic prowess, erudition, or genuinely strong critical skills. Its more about signaling that he can see through the superstitions of one’s raditional customs and prejudices. It also softens the portrait, a handicap principle similar to Asian upper classes’ growing long fingernails to show that they do not do manual labor.

  6. Camlost 01/02/2013 at 11:09 am

    Speaking of sperm donors, does anyone remember Cecil Jacobsen? He didn’t do any jail time despite abusing his researcher position in a donor clinic to father up to 75 children. I wonder why he hasn’t been hit with humongous child support bills.

  7. Camlost 01/02/2013 at 11:12 am

    Oh, actually it looks like Cecil Jacobsen did 5 years but he should be paying through the nose (financially) for what he did.

  8. Scott 01/02/2013 at 11:14 am

    Lesbian gets pregnant and expects society to take care of her unnatural spawn. Color me surprised. If you can’t afford kids, don’t have them.

  9. miss c 01/02/2013 at 11:41 am

    In tribal cultures, psychopaths would be #1 warriors, killing and scalping away. My co- worker’s nephew is a psychopath, currently staying on a ranch with other psychopaths, and all the other psychopaths are scared of him. I told my co-worker, if he was in Africa a couple of hundred years ago he’d have been Shaka Fucking Zulu!

  10. peterike 01/02/2013 at 11:59 am

    if he was in Africa a couple of hundred years ago he’d have been Shaka Fucking Zulu!

    These days it’s more Shaka Up than Shaka Zulu.

    Snap!

  11. nick digger 01/02/2013 at 1:15 pm

    Those two turkey-basting Kansans are ridiculous. They are allegedly “supporting” the donor’s fight against paying child support, but they are all talk. To actually support the guy, they could simply reimburse the State’s $6000. They also should have kept their mouths shut about his paternity, a not-impossible task, since he isn’t listed on the birth certificate.
    Funny side note, from the Mail Online article: the dyke couple has split, and one of them has a “new partner” — a man who looks just like the fat butch she left.

  12. Maya 01/02/2013 at 4:21 pm

    Why don’t they ever go after the other lesbian? Shouldn’t the contract include the non biological parent’s rights and responsibilities regarding the child? If I formed a family with a man who, I dunno, reproduced with a hooker and then took full responsibility for that child a la Benjamin Franklin, and I were expected to fill the role of the mother, my first concern would have been to ensure that the child is legally mine.Just in case.

    People who are present during assaults or burlaries as friends of the perp, without doing much, often get charged if the judge feels that the perp wouldn’t commit the crime if it weren’t for his/her feeling of strength in numbers and the moral support. If the other lesbian weren’t there, the child would not have been planned at all. She shares the responsibility.

  13. The fourth doorman of the apocalypse 01/03/2013 at 12:01 am

    It the state of Kansas has ever pursued the husband for support after divorce where the couple used a sperm donor, then it would seem that they have set precedent to go after the female partner in this case. That is, they have established that the sperm donor has no liability.

  14. Discard 01/03/2013 at 5:24 am

    1. A man who would give up his own flesh and blood to a lesbian couple deserves every bad thing that comes to him.

    4. Society does not need psychopaths, it needs strong men who see their duty and do the dirty work it entails.

    5. In Tudor England, the monarch could reward a favorite with a local monopoly. The favored one might be given the right to license brewing in some county, which simply amounted to the right to extort a fee from the local brewers. These fat administrative jobs are simply the 21st Century version of an old abuse. The play never changes, only the actors and costumes.

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