Monthly Archives: August 2015

Who Gets Hurt In Our Hook-Up Society?

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I realize that things have changed since the age of dinosaurs when I was dating. I don’t know how anyone survives the current dating scene unscathed. I assume there are people out there with some sort of moral values, but they don’t seem to be the ones getting the publicity. Even nice kids can make mistakes, though, and sometimes the cost of those mistakes is way out of proportion to the mistake.

RTV6 posted a story about a 19-year old boy from Indiana who is now a registered sex offender because a girl he hooked up with lied about her age. She told him she was 17 when she was 14. I am not condoning the behavior of either teenager, but I am wondering why he is the one who has to pay a very high price.

The story reports:

According to court documents, the girl’s mother told the judge, “I don’t want him to be a sex offender because he really is not.” Her daughter added, “I feel nothing should happen to Zach.”

But the judge condemned what he called a culture of “meet, hook-up, have sex, sayonara, totally inappropriate behavior,” according to court documents.

Zach was sentenced to 90 days in jail and ordered to register as a sex offender.

“The hardest part probably for me was to see him being led away, because he turned and looked at us, and it’s like, we want to give him a hug, and you don’t even have that opportunity,” said his father, Les Anderson.

Zach will be listed on the sex offender registry until 2040. His parents say the label is incredibly unfair.

I have no problem with the judge condemning the behavior and the hook-up culture, but I am not sure what is accomplished by declaring this young man a sex offender.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

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There are parents who support the ‘everybody gets a trophy’ mentality, but what happens when their children enter the business world. What happens when the CEO of a company tries to practice ‘everybody gets a trophy’ in his business. We have a recent example.

Yesterday Business Insider posted a story about Dan Price, founder and CEO of the Seattle-based credit-card-payment processing firm Gravity Payments. Mr. Price decided to raise the minimum salary at his company to $70,000. At first his employees were thrilled, but things do not work out as well as planned.

Employees are leaving. Why? Because some employees feel that some less valuable employees got increases bigger than some more valuable employees. One employee complained that the new policy did not reward work ethic–there was no incentive to do more or work extra hours to complete tasks. People who had done that in the past were treated no differently than the less conscientious employees.

The company is struggling financially because of the decision to pay everyone $70,000 a year. There is also a court case filed by Dan Price’s brother, a minority owner, which was filed soon after the pay raise.

There is something in the American psyche that expects to be paid a fair wage for a hard days work. There is also something in the American psyche that resents it when people who do not do a good job are paid the same as people who do. That is why socialism will fail in America, just as it has failed in all the other places it has been tried.

A Liberal I Can Respect

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The political debate continues. The gap between both sides widens. However, every now and then someone accidentally bridges the gap and says something that most of us can agree on.

On Thursday, Newsbusters posted a portion of an interview of Camille Paglia by Salon.

The article reports:

“Liberals think of themselves as very open-minded, but that’s simply not true!” she said. “Liberalism has sadly become a knee-jerk ideology, with people barricaded in their comfortable little cells. They think that their views are the only rational ones, and everyone else is not only evil but financed by the Koch brothers. It’s so simplistic!” Bring it, Camille!

Then, Paglia really got going. “Now let me give you a recent example of the persisting insularity of liberal thought in the media,” she said. “When the first secret Planned Parenthood video was released in mid-July, anyone who looks only at liberal media was kept totally in the dark about it, even after the second video was released.” 

“It was a huge and disturbing story,” she continued, “but there was total silence in the liberal media. That kind of censorship was shockingly unprofessional. The liberal major media were trying to bury the story by ignoring it.” 

“Now I am a former member of Planned Parenthood and a strong supporter of unconstrained reproductive rights. But I was horrified and disgusted by those videos and immediately felt there were serious breaches of medical ethics in the conduct of Planned Parenthood officials.”

“But here’s my point,” she concluded. “It is everyone’s obligation, whatever your political views, to look at both liberal and conservative news sources every single day. You need a full range of viewpoints to understand what is going on in the world. 

The videotapes about Planned Parenthood are disturbing. I attempted to bring them up in a discussion with a liberal friend on Facebook and got called a lot of things I won’t repeat. A discussion of the issue was not possible. The video tapes were false and men were trying to control women’s bodies. I don’t know if our culture has reached the point of no return, but if we haven’t, we are definitely close. Selling aborted baby body parts is evil. We should at least be able to agree on that.

 

Closer To The Truth

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The Daily Caller posted an article today about the ongoing quest for Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The article reports:

A federal judge has ordered Hillary Clinton and two of her top aides at the State Department, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, to attest, under penalty of perjury, that they have turned over all official government records in their possession.

…In his ruling, Sullivan (U.S. District Court judge Emmett Sullivan) ordered the Staet Department to “identify any and all servers, accounts, hard drives, or other devices currently in the possession or control of the State Department or otherwise that may contain responsive information.”

The State Department must also request that Clinton, Abedin and Mills “confirm, under penalty of perjury, that they have produced all responsive information that was or is in their possession as a result of their employment at the State Department.”

“If all such information has not yet been produced, the Government shall request the above named individuals produce the information forthwith,” Sullivan ruled.

The State Department must also require the trio “describe, under penalty of perjury, the extent to which Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills used Mrs. Clinton’s email server to conduct official government business.”

The use of a private email server was illegal. It also posed a security risk because the private server did not have the anti-hacking software that would have been on the government server. It would probably be easier to ask the Chinese to give us everything that was on Mrs. Clinton’s server. Chances are that they have it.