The Death of the ICANN monopoly?
Topic: Individualist Feminism
Source: bitcoin.com
My latest article has appeared at bitcoin.com: The Death of ICANN: Is This Blockchain’s Chance for Internet Freedom? I will be checking in all day to answer any questions people may have or just to chat.

Excerpt: The context in which the Internet operates may dramatically change…or not.At issue is who or what will control the “non-profit” Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which assigns and coordinates unique identifiers, such as IP addresses, on a global basis to create a single connected Internet. It is “responsible for the global coordination of the DNS Root, IP addressing, and other Internet protocol resources.” ICANN does not directly control content (except through denial of applications) but it does regulate access and traffic. It is currently overseen by the an obscure agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce: the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

Teen Acid Attack Survivor Becomes Fashion Week Model
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: ABC News
Two years ago, Reshma Quereshi was permanently disfigured in an acid attack while walking to school in India. She was only 17. On Thursday, she walked in New York Fashion Week, ABC News reports. According to the Independent, Quereshi was held down by a group of men, including her sister's estranged husband, who poured sulfuric acid on her. The acid ate through the skin of her face and cost her an eye. For a year following the attack, she was suicidal. Then she became the face of Make Love Not Scars, a nonprofit fighting acid attacks. The organization's videos featuring Quereshi have been viewed by 1.3 million people, Reuters reports.

4 Fired After Cops Allegedly Had Sex With Teen Sex Worker
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: Los Angeles Times
Four Oakland police officers are being fired and another seven suspended without pay after a teenage sex worker claimed she had sex with more than a dozen officers, some while she was underage and occasionally for tips about future prostitution raids, the Los Angeles Times reports. According to CNN, the scandal broke last fall when an Oakland police officer killed himself. The sex worker claimed to have had a sexual relationship with that officer while she was 17, and his suicide note named other officers sleeping with her, the Washington Post reports. That launched an investigation that ended up implicating 28 officers across five departments. The Oakland Police Department alone burned through three police chiefs during the investigation.

Ala Sheriff Indicted on 10 Charges re: Prison Drug and Sex Trafficking
Topic: Porn, Prostitution, and Sexual Freedom
Source: Montgomery Advertiser
Found in “Coats’ Quarters” was a television, bus seats from Clark’s old campaign bus, a couch, a toolbox and a laptop labeled “Sheriff” that Coats used to monitor his drug operation from jail, testimony indicated. One woman testified that she was held against her will in a trailer controlled by Coats, which was equipped with surveillance cameras that fed into his jail laptop. She said she was regularly made to bring drugs to Coats in his quarters, where he and other detention officers raped her. She also accused Clark of sexual assault. Clark denied her allegations, as well as being aware that she had been brought to Coats.

Brown University mandates tampons in mens bathrooms
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Campus Reform
Brown University’s student body president will be hand-delivering menstrual products to all nonresidential bathrooms on campus, including men’s rooms, with the help of 20 other students. Viet Nguyen, President of the Undergraduate Council of Students, announced the initiative in a campus-wide email Tuesday, saying he wants to communicate the message that not all people who menstruate are women, according to Newsweek. “There’s been a lot of conversation about why pads and tampons are a necessity, not a luxury, but not a lot of action. We wanted to take it into our own hands,” Nguyen explains in the email, observing that “low-income students struggle with having the necessary funding for food, let alone tampons.”

Change law, say GOP members on marriage case fight
Topic: Gay/Lesbian Issues
Source: WorldNetDaily
Lawmakers in Alabama are proposing changes to state rules regarding their Judicial Inquiry Commission to rein in what they regard as politically motivated charges against state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore. In a complaint filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the JIC alleges Moore ordered the state’s probate judges to disobey federal law when he told them not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples until an apparent conflict with state and federal law is resolved. The JIC’s findings resulted in Moore’s suspension from the bench May 6. [Ed: just privatize marriage and get rid of the circus on both sides]

ISIS to Yazidi girls, Once we rape you, you will be Muslim
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: CNS News
The Islamic State wants to torture and destroy the Yazidi people, wipe “them off the face of the Earth,” said lawyer and humanitarian Jacqueline Isaac, who added that the jihadists try to force Yazidi girls to convert to Islam and, if they refuse, tell them this is pointless because once they rape them, which they do, they become Muslim. “[i]t is a philosophy to destroy them and to torture them,” said Isaac in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in May 2015 — testimony that was not covered by the major U.S. news networks ABC, CBS and NBC, according to a search of the Nexis news database. [Ed: most interesting part is the news blackout]

U of Iowa looking to create social justice bachelors degree
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Campus Reform
[Ed: it has been approved] The University of Iowa could become the first school in the state to add a bachelor’s program in social justice to its list of degrees, provided its Board of Regents approves the motion. Currently, the school already offers a first-year seminar on social justice as well as a “Justice for All” living learning community where students can live and “learn about systemic problems in our society.”

Cubs of the Caliphate
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Wired
A few weeks ago the world once again witnessed ISIS’s use of at least one child bomber, perhaps two. A child between the ages of 12 and 14 was reportedly the culprit behind a suicide attack – blowing up the wedding of Besna and Nurettin Akdogan in Gaziantep, Turkey and killing 54 people on August 20. Although now the Turkish government is not certain whether it was a child or an adult, it’s certainly not the only time children have been used by terrorist networks to perpetrate attacks. The following day, a child was caught before he could detonate a suicide bomb at a Shia school in Kirkuk, Iraq. During the course of research for our book, Small Arms: Children and Terror, John Horgan and I have learned how ISIS socialises children into their terrorist network. We have also had the opportunity to meet with children who have been rescued from terrorist groups in Pakistan.

Title IX And College Rape
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Western Journalism
This is Part 4 in a series outlining the effects of college adjudication of alleged sexual assault cases. In Part 1, a wrongfully accused man proved his innocence, yet the college imposed sanctions that damaged his life anyway. In Part 2, a young dating couple’s lives were disrupted for more than two years after someone else decided that she was raped. Part 3 featured a young man who has had to sue his school to remove the “responsible” mark on his transcripts after “severely prejudicial conduct” by the school’s investigator. Some may feel as though talking about this systematic failure leads to shaming of those who have been raped. This series is not about that. One rape is too many. These stories are only meant to bring to light the lives that have been turned upside-down when a college campus adjudicates an allegation of sexual assault.

State U Introduces Segregated Housing For Black Students Only
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Head Down News
California State University Los Angeles recently rolled out segregated housing for black students. The arrangement comes roughly nine months after the university’s Black Student Union issued a set of demands in response to what its members contend are frequent “racist attacks” on campus, such as “racially insensitive remarks” and “microaggressions” by professors and students. One demand was for a “CSLA housing space delegated for Black students.” “[It] would provide a cheaper alternative housing solution for Black students. This space would also serve as a safe space for Black CSLA students to congregate, connect, and learn from each other,” the demand letters tated.

Child, 4, youngest ever sex change patient
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: WorldNetDaily
Australian officials have confirmed that a 4-year-old child is going through a sex-change procedure despite the warning last month by the American College of Pediatrics that even treatments, much less surgical intervention, can cause sterility and are based on “unscientific gender ideology” that violate “the long-standing ethical principle of ‘First do no harm.'” The Australian case was profiled by Yahoo7 News, which said the child is the “youngest on Australian record to change their gender.” But the report said the New South Wales provincial government admitted hundreds of other children are being “referred to the state’s hospitals for gender dysphoria.”

The occupants of Westworld
Topic: Porn, Prostitution, and Sexual Freedom
Source: Los Angeles Times
Ask straight questions of the creators and cast of “Westworld” and you may not get straight answers. When does “Westworld” take place? Where in the world — or beyond it — is this weird, adult amusement park where humanoid robots cater to all whims and fantasies of visiting guests, located? Are you real? Executive producers Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy, who envisioned the seductive and scary HBO update of the 1973 Michael Crichton film, and the all-star ensemble of actors who populate “Westworld” aren’t ready to talk specifics ahead of the series’ Oct. 2 premiere. (Some won’t even cop to whether they are humans or “hosts,” the show’s nom de robot).

Phyllis Schlafly, The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority
Topic: Women's Studies, Scholarship, and History
Source: National Review
Phyllis died with her pumps on,” one of her close friends told me last night. Indeed, Phyllis Schlafly was in the arena fighting for conservative causes to the very end — when cancer claimed her at age 92 yesterday. Just last month, she was on the floor of the Republican convention in Cleveland ensuring the party’s platform remained pro-life. Her 21st book, a rousing defense of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, is being published today. She was for many a leading symbol of the conservative movement in America. A 1982 biography called her “the sweetheart of the silent majority.”

12 Reasons Science Shows Conservative Women Have The Best Sex
Topic: Porn, Prostitution, and Sexual Freedom
Source: The Federalist
[Some are hogwash, but I like #4, #5, #9, and #12.] James Ball (really? He has the sex beat?) at BuzzFeed reports on a new study of 19,000 people in five European countries that found “very right-wing” people are the most satisfied with their sex lives. Center-right people, however, were slightly less satisfied than centrists, and it all went down from there.

Christian Rights Sex Hangups Turn Zika Into a Bigger Crisis
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: AlterNet
Zika could have been an ordinary epidemic, like the ever-changing influenza that emerges each winter and spreads across the Northern Hemisphere with sad but rare complications. But the Religious Right’s antagonism to birth control and abortion—and honest conversation about sex in general—has transformed the Zika epidemic into a nightmare that will devastate lives for an entire generation. In the absence of pregnancy, Zika usually isn’t a big deal. Only one in five people who contract Zika experience symptoms, and those who do mostly feel like they’ve gotten the flu. This is not to say Zika never does lasting harm to adults, just that, like the flu, those cases appear to be rare.

The injustice of making kids pay
Topic: Children and Family
Source: New York Times
It takes a lot these days to surprise anyone with the irrationalities of the American criminal justice system, rife as it is with harsh and counterproductive practices that do little or nothing to improve lives or keep the public safe. But a new report, published by the Juvenile Law Center, shocks nonetheless. It illustrates the destructive results of charging court fees and fines to juveniles, many of whom come from impoverished families. Courts impose costs on defendants in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to cover all sorts of expenses — day-to-day courtroom operations, drug and mental-health tests, even public defenders, who exist solely to represent people who can’t afford a lawyer. These charges, which mount quickly, are disruptive enough for lower-income adults who are trying to get their lives back on track. They can be an even heavier burden on juveniles, one million of whom find themselves in court each year.

What is the value of an education?
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Lew Rockwell
This is a really good presentation. He recommends apprenticeship. So do I. He recommends learning a skill. So do I. He recommends community colleges because the teaching is better. So do I. He does not recommend online accredited schools for under $15,000. He warns about the Ph.D. glut. I knew this was coming in 1966. I knew it would hit in 1969. I was warned by the president of the University of California, Clark Kerr. He knew.

First they came for Gawker...
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Spiked
The prosecution of Gawker ostensibly centred on the website’s publication of excerpts from a sex tape involving celebrity wrestler Hulk Hogan. But, as previously detailed on spiked, there was far more going on behind the screen. Hogan’s legal case has been secretly directed and bankrolled by Silicon Valley billionaire Thiel, a venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal, was the first outside investor in Facebook, and still sits on the board of that web giant. The aim of the lawsuit was not so much to protect Hogan’s long-gone privacy, as to publicly humiliate and close down Gawker. Thiel effectively used Hogan as a human shield for his war on Gawker. He has been determined to silence the website ever since 2007, when they defied his orders and reported that Thiel is ‘totally gay, people’

Backpage police stings...prostitution stings
Topic: Porn, Prostitution, and Sexual Freedom
Source: Cops R Corrupt
When you are trying to avoid 'the Backpage Police' only two things matter. First, know and understand the law. Second, realize 'the Backpage Police' don't always follow their own rules. Here are tips to keep yourself safe...