† The Dating Game: Carnivore Counteroffensive (second item): University of British Columbia researchers find that “vegetarian men are seen as wimps … even by women who do not eat meat themselves,” reports The Daily Mail of London:

 

Researchers gave hundreds of young men and women descriptions of fictional students varying only according to diet, and asked them to rate aspects of their personalities.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, the vegetarian characters were seen as being more virtuous.

 

Further questioning revealed that men who do not eat meat were also viewed as less masculine than the others – even by vegetarians. …

 

Previous research has found that vegetarians are seen as pacifist, weight-conscious and liberal, while fast-food lovers are perceived as patriotic, pro-nuclear and conservative.

 

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times:  Since 2006, the percentage of incoming college freshmen who say they don’t drink alcohol has jumped from 38 percent to 62 percent, according to Outside the Classroom, which provides alcohol education training at colleges. CEO Brandon Busteed tells USA Today that with the tough economy, students "are taking (college) more seriously because they realize it's their future."

 

Other surveys of teen alcohol consumption also show that fewer enter college as habitual drinkers:

 

The percentage of high school seniors who didn't drink in the past 30 days was up from 54.7% in 2006 to 58.8% in 2010, according to the Monitoring the Future survey, which has been conducted by the University of Michigan each year since 1975. Since 1997, the number has risen 11.5 percentage points. This survey queries about 50,000 students who are in the eighth, 10th and 12th grades about their behaviors, attitudes and values.

 

In contrast, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System finds that while the number of 12th-graders who abstain from alcohol has increased since 1999, it hasn't moved much since 2005. In 1999, 38.3% of 12th-graders reported no drinking in the previous 30 days, says the CDC's Laura Kann, an expert on youth risk behaviors. In 2005, that number had risen to 49.2%.

 

In 2009, though, the last year for which numbers are available, the rate of non-drinking 12th-graders was 48.3%, and "it's held pretty level during those years," Kann says.

 

† Fed Up With Farmers: Not content with reaping billions of dollars in subsidies from put-upon taxpayers, some farmers are resorting to insurance fraud, reports Los Angeles Times:

 

Such crimes are being perpetrated by farmers who fraudulently claim that weather or insects destroyed their crops to cash in on a government-backed insurance program. Some cheats never bother planting at all. Others sell their harvests in secret and then file claims for losses, collecting twice for the same crop. …

 

These growers - along with crooked insurance agents and claims adjusters - are using the program to bilk insurance firms and the U.S. government out of millions of dollars a year, according to prosecutors, industry officials and high-tech experts who review questionable claims for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

 

Taxpayers are on the hook for many of those losses.

 

The federal government has been fighting back against such criminals, using satellite technology, advanced data-mining techniques and other tools to spot fraud. The penalties, too, have grown stiffer. These efforts have saved taxpayers at least $730 million over the last decade, by some estimates.

 

Critics, however, say that such high-tech oversight catches only the most egregious cases, and that insurance companies have little incentive to be more aggressive lest they lose lucrative federal subsidies to sell crop policies.

 

† What Freedom Of Speech Means To Muslims (The U.S. Edition): After 11 Muslim students shouted down Michael B. Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. when he tried to give a speech last February at the University of California, Irvine, administrators suspended the Muslim Student Union for a quarter. Orange County D.A. was not satisfied with the slap on the wrist and charged the protesters with disturbing a public meeting and engaging in a conspiracy to do so, triggering what The New York Times calls “a feisty argument about the role of free speech on a college campus”:

 

For years, Jewish and Israeli advocacy groups have said that the Muslim Student Union has fostered a hostile environment on campus. …

 

Much of the controversy on campus centers on Palestinian Awareness Week, which the Muslim Student Union has sponsored each spring. In the past, the week has included bloody Israeli flags and speeches delivered under signs that read “Holocaust in the Holy Land” and “Israel - the Fourth Reich.”

 

Many students came to dread the events, which some began to refer to as “hate week.” A few students have said they felt uncomfortable walking across campus wearing a Star of David or any other overtly Jewish symbol during the week. Some have had loud shouting matches, while others have chosen to stay home and avoid campus altogether.

 

A hundred faculty members urged the D.A. to drop the charges, but his spokesperson framed the issue in terms to which they could better relate: “[W]hat if this were the Klu Klux Klan who conspired to silence a speech by Martin Luther King?”

 

† Are You Smarter Than A Fifth-Grade Atheist? (Obama Isn’t.): On his HBO show “Real Time” on Friday, host Bill Maher said that he thinks President Barack Hussein Obama is a secular humanist but pretends to be a Christian for the sake of his political career: “I think he's a centrist the way he's a Christian – not really.  … His mother was a secular humanist and I think he is.” Given how he little Obama appears to know about the Old and New Testaments, Maher may be on to something.

 

For his part, on NBC's "Meet the Press" House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) allowed that “[t]he state of Hawaii said he was born there - that's good enough for me" and that “[t]he president says he's a Christian. I accept him at his word" – but he also made it clear that, “It's not my job to tell the American people what to think” if they choose to believe that Obama is a foreign-born Muslim.

 

† Skinny Is Out, Curvy Is In: Based on an interview Carole White - head of London’s Premier agency and Naomi Campbell's ex-agent – gave to the Daily Mail of London, New York magazine notes that the preferred model look may be evolving:

 

"I now look for girls with breasts, and that is something we wouldn’t have countenanced ten years ago. Our biggest demand in the past two years has been for a D cup, but obviously you have to have a really fit body.

 

'Now, we talk to our models about nutrition, make sure they have a personal trainer. Even our language has changed. A decade ago, we would have just said: “Don’t eat!” ’…

 

Is "having boobs" the new "being thin"? We just hope more designers start putting them in bras and breast-concealing undergarments on the runway. Runway nips are always unsettling, especially since sometimes you don't know if the girl is 14. But hopefully if large chests are in fashion, designers will have to hire girls who are at least a little bit older.

 

New York notes that plus-size models are coming into their own:

 

“Last year, model Crystal Renn appeared in five major ad campaigns and seven French Vogue spreads, walked two Chanel shows, and worked with top photographers including Steven Klein and Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. Perfectly normal for a top model, of course, except for one thing: Renn has 38-inch hips, making her roughly a size 8, which is considered plus-size in the fashion world. As recently as a few years ago, her best hope for work would have been catalogue jobs.

 

But now that may be changing. While Renn has a lot to do with the level of chatter around plus-size models, she's not the only one getting work. Plus-size models like Alyona Osmanova, Gitte Lill, and Marquita Pring are booking major editorials and ad campaigns and walking top designer shows.

 

Renn, Osmanova, Lill, and Pring all work for Ford Models, which can take much of the credit for pioneering the plus-size category. …

 

Formerly a straight-size model represented by Supreme, Osmanova …decided to cross over to plus-size modeling when she was tired of tormenting herself to fit into sample sizes. …

 

Osmanova was introduced to Ford+ bookers by agents who had left Supreme to work at Ford. Though it felt "kind of weird" at first to be a plus-size model, she was happy to be working again. "I met all these great people who were happy and smiling and more normal," says Osmanova, whose recent bookings include Teen Vogue. "It’s a different kind of work. Maybe the people just take it easier."

 

And it’s not just the girls who walk the runways. Menswear designer Michael Bastian, for one, prefers beefier men to what he calls “weird waifish, girlie-dude” types: “Last season someone said it looks like I’m casting from old Falcon movies. … Beauty doesn’t equal perfect, it equals imperfect. You need something to latch onto, to fall in love with.”

 

† Iced, Iced Baby: Chance Kracke, 24, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and lifetime probation for putting his 7-month-old son in a freezer while he was high on meth. His wife, Leanne, was also sentenced to lifetime probation for child abuse.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Honor Killing And Beheading: Stereotype Or True To Type?): Under sharia law, women have no rights so a man who beheads his wife in an honor killing doesn't need a lawyer. It's an open-and-shut case: he's innocent of murder. Until and unless sharia law is incorporated into our own legal system, such a man would be well advised to get a lawyer to defend him. Case in point, Muzzammil Hassan, who was convicted of second-degree murder because jurors did not buy his claim that he “decapitated his estranged wife after stabbing her dozens of times because she'd abused him for years and he was afraid of her,” reports The Associated Press:

 

The Hassan verdict, delivered after barely an hour of jury deliberation, seemed to surprise no one who had watched him plod through three weeks of testimony. Hassan called defense witnesses who seemed only to help the prosecution, drew endless objections from prosecutors and put himself on the stand, where he tested jurors' patience by spending four days meticulously detailing years' worth of marital rows with Aasiya Hassan, only to tell them he didn't have "much recollection" of killing her. …

 

On one damaging day, Hassan called to the stand a psychiatric expert, Gary Horwitz, to describe the traits of an abuser. To observers, Horwitz could have been describing the stocky, 6-footer Hassan, rather than the much smaller wife he claimed had battered him.

 

"They often are not aware they are over-controlling," Horwitz testified. "They would tend to blame the victim as the cause of their distress and problems."

 

Prosecutor Colleen Curtin Gable said everything Horwitz said on the stand supported the prosecution's theory of the case.

 

"And what surprised me," she said, "was that the defendant was acting as though he was getting information that would benefit him."

 

Erie County District Attorney Frank Sedita called it "an incredible lack of self-awareness." …

 

Hassan faces up to 25 years to life in prison when he's sentenced next month.

 

Though he tried to dissuade Hassan from representing himself, Erie County Court Judge Thomas Franczyk concedes that, "He does have the right to steer his own ship, even if, unwittingly, he steers it into an iceberg."

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (seventh item, Multiculturalism: Jihad By Other Means): Like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron concludes that "we need a lot less of the passive tolerance [to Sharia law] of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism." He told participants at the annual Munich Security Conference that under the "doctrine of state multiculturalism", different cultures have been encouraged to live separate lives” and that “Europe needs to wake up to what is happening in our own countries." BBC News reports: 

 

He argued the UK needed a stronger national identity to prevent people turning to all kinds of extremism. …

 

"Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism," the prime minister said.

 

"Let's properly judge these organisations: Do they believe in universal human rights - including for women and people of other faiths? Do they believe in equality of all before the law? Do they believe in democracy and the right of people to elect their own government? Do they encourage integration or separatism?

 

"These are the sorts of questions we need to ask. Fail these tests and the presumption should be not to engage with organisations," he added. …

 

"We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values."

 

Building a stronger sense of national and local identity holds "the key to achieving true cohesion" by allowing people to say "I am a Muslim, I am a Hindu, I am a Christian, but I am a Londoner... too", he said.

 

The Prime Minister also pointed out that “when a white person holds objectionable views – racism, for example – we rightly condemn them, but when equally unacceptable views or practices have come from someone who isn’t white, we’ve been too cautious, frankly even fearful, to stand up to them.”

 

For his part, in a television interview French President Nicolas Sarkozy agreed with his German and British counterparts:

 

"Of course we must all respect differences, but we do not want... a society where communities coexist side by side.

 

"If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France," the right-wing president said. …

 

"We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him," Sarkozy said in the TFI channel show.

 

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Douglas Murray, director of the Center for Social Cohesion in London, argues that multiculturalism is “the most pernicious and divisive policy pursued by Western governments since World War II” because “Britain, Germany, Holland and many other European countries have nurtured more than one generation of citizens who seem to feel no loyalty toward their country and who, on the contrary, often seem to despise it”:

 

People were led to believe that "multiculturalism" meant multiracialism, or pluralism. It did not. Nevertheless, for years anybody who criticized multiculturalism was immediately decried as a "racist."

 

But the true character and effects of the policy could not be permanently hidden. State-sponsored multiculturalism treated European countries like hostelries. It judged that the state should not "impose" rules and values on newcomers. Rather, it should bend over backwards to accommodate the demands of immigrants. The resultant policy was that states treated and judged people by the criteria of whatever "community" they found themselves born into.

 

In Britain, for instance, this meant that if you were a white English girl born into a white English family and your family decided to marry you against your will to a randy old pervert, the state would intervene. But if you had the misfortune to be born into an "Asian-background" family and the same happened, then the state would look the other way. …

 

The multicultural model may have continued a lot longer if it hadn't been for radical Islam. The terrorist assaults and plots across Britain and Europe - often from home-grown extremists -provided a breaking point that few sentient people could ignore.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Philly Abortionist Charged With Murder Of Seven Newborns): In writing about the horrific practices of (alleged) baby killer Dr. Kermit Gosnell, The Stiletto wanted to make the point that his practices were as dangerous as the “back alley” abortions before Roe v. Wade, and went to the CDC Web site to research the number of women who died during late-term and partial birth abortions. The most recent data she could find was from 2006, which was odd. RedStateNews’ Erick Erickson explains why more recent data is not to be found:

 

Each year since 1969, the Centers for Disease Control has published its “Abortion Surveillance System” the week after Thanksgiving in its professional journal, The Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report (”MMWR”).

 

Two weeks ago, RedState contacted the CDC to inquire if and when the data would be released. We were told by their press office - direct quotes - that the CDC “will not have stats available at any time in the near future” and there “are no plans for them to come out any time soon.”

 

[T]he CDC reversed its position and … said the data would be out February 25th. …

 

Today, our “friends” at Media Matters confirm for us the CDC did cover up the abortion data and try to avoid publishing it. Media Matters obtained an internal CDC memo showing “that the report was submitted for review and editing on November 12.”

 

That would be exactly when one would expect the report to go for editing with a publication date the week after Thanskgiving. …

 

What this means is that someone at the CDC received the report to review and edit, and caused it not to be released on its usual schedule, with no publicly stated reason why and no apparent interest in releasing it until we publicized the issue.

 

Well, when the data is finally available, The Stiletto will revisit her argument that abortion may be legal, but there are enough practitioners like Gosnell out there that it is it’s not “safe” – despite the pretense of pro-abortion activists that it is.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, There’s Many A Slip ‘Twixt The Cup And Lip): VA Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is all for fast-tracking his constitutional challenge to ObamaCare to the Supreme Court, but not surprisingly, the Justice Department would rather not, reports Bloomberg News:

 

The government’s approach would give it a chance to rack up lower court victories and perhaps build popular support for the law before the justices take up the case. It might also set the stage for a Supreme Court ruling only months before the 2012 presidential election.

 

The chances of the court agreeing to hear the case in the face of government opposition are “zero,” said Carter Phillips, a lawyer in Washington at Sidley Austin LLP who has argued more than 60 Supreme Court cases.  …

 

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond is scheduled to review the Virginia challenge in May - alongside an appeal of a different judge’s decision upholding the law. A ruling by that court this year would give the losing side time to seek Supreme Court review during its 2011-12 term, which begins in October. …

 

The Justice Department might find an especially receptive audience at the 4th Circuit. Although that court developed a reputation as a conservative bastion in the 1990s and 2000s, it may now lean in the other direction. Of the court’s 14 active judges, eight were appointed by Democratic presidents and a ninth, Roger Gregory, was nominated first by Democratic President Bill Clinton and then by Republican George W. Bush.

 

Party affiliation has made the difference so far with health care. The two trial judges who declared the law unconstitutional - Hudson and Florida’s Roger Vinson - are both Republican appointees. The judges who upheld the law - Norman Moon of Virginia and George Caram Steeh of Michigan - were appointed by Democratic presidents.

 

Some of the other states that joined VA in the suit against ObamaCare plan to take a different tack, which seems even less likely to succeed than going straight to the Supremes: Asking the Obama administration to petition the high court to hear the case. Meanwhile, The Washington Post favors an expedited approach – but at the appellate level. Under this scenario, the cases would be heard “by the full appeals courts, not a randomly selected three-judge panel” and such en banc review “would give the justices the benefit of hearing from more of their appellate colleagues.” On the face of it, this seems a reasonable approach but the longer ObamaCare is on the books the harder it will be to dismantle the government and regulatory machinery being built around it. And with our personal liberty and economic well-being imperiled, there’s too much at stake and no time to waste.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (seventh item, Restorative Capital Punishment): In 2006 U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel halted executions in CA because the converted gas chamber where lethal injections took place and the procedures for administering them may have inflicted cruel and unusual punishment. Now that the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has spent $900,000 to bring San Quentin State Prison’s executioners and death chamber up to snuff, the shortage of sodium thiopental may further delay the resumption of executions, reports Los Angeles Times:

 

The sole U.S. supplier of sodium thiopental - the only anesthetic allowed under the California lethal injection protocols that Fogel is evaluating - has ceased making the drug. Attorneys for six death row inmates from California, Arizona and Tennessee have sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for failing to inspect and approve foreign-made versions of the drug when supplies were imported by the three states.

 

While the outcome of that lawsuit remains uncertain, it has the potential to raise fresh legal questions that could further delay any restart of executions in California.

 

Asked after the formal fact-finding tour whether the suit against the FDA would factor into his decision, Fogel said, "It's not before me" in the case involving the execution of killer Michael A. Morales that was suspended in February 2006.

 

"The source of the state's sodium thiopental is something the California Supreme Court is going to be asked to weigh in on, but it is not an issue in the Morales case at this point," Fogel said.

 

If the federal court in Washington, D.C., grants the prisoners' request for an injunction against importing sodium thiopental and orders the FDA to seize shipments that entered the country without its approval - as is the case with California's stock - the state could be forced back into the lengthy process of rewriting the execution laws. Other states' execution protocols aren't as specific as California's and they have been able to substitute another anesthetic for the scarce sodium thiopental. …

 

California has 718 prisoners on death row, but only seven have exhausted all appeals.