Society's ChildS


Beaker

China clones 'Sherlock Holmes of police dogs' to cut time and cost of K9 training


RT
Wed, 20 Mar 2019 17:06 UTC
good police doggie
© Global Look Press / Ou Dongqu
Beijing used the skin of a veteran police dog, credited with helping to solve many murders, to create its younger clone. Officials hope that the K9 cloning program will drive down cost and time required for dogs' training.

A three-month-old pup named Kunxun, China's first ever cloned police dog, arrived at a canine-training base in the nation's southwestern Yunnan Province, local media reported. She is a Kunming wolfdog, a breed similar to a German shepherd. Kunming dogs are widely used in China by the military, police, border guards and firefighters.

Kunxun's DNA is 99.9 percent identical to veteran police dog named Huahuangma, whose skin was used as genetic material for the clone, police officials stated. Huahuangma is said to have earned the name 'Sherlock Holmes of police dogs' after helping to crack "dozens" of murder cases. The embryo, created from her DNA, was later implanted into a beagle, which gave birth to Kunxun via cesarean section.
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Blue Planet

Why Finlandians seem to be so much happier than Americans

Tess Riley
Huff Post
Wed, 20 Mar 2019 01:01 UTC
Finland’s capital, Helsinki
© Getty ImagesA waterfront view of Finland’s capital, Helsinki. The country’s strong social safety net is just one of the reasons citizens experience a high quality of life.
To be the happiest country, having the top economic growth isn't necessarily the answer. Are you listening, U.S.?

For the second year in a row, Finland has been named the happiest country in the world by the World Happiness Report. What's more, the Nordic nation has pulled "significantly ahead" of the other top 10 countries in the report, which ranks the happiness levels of 156 countries using data from Gallup World Poll surveys.

The U.S., by contrast, has continued its downward trend. This year it's in 19th place for overall happiness. Last year it was 18, down from 14 the year before.

It's not hard to understand why Finland is doing so well. The northern European country has a strong social safety net, including a progressive, successful approach to ending homelessness. It also has a high-quality education system, and its commitment to closing the gender gap is paying off. With a population of just over 5.5 million people, it's the only country in the developed world where fathers spend more time with school-aged children than mothers.


Comment: The article linked to above suggests that it is not actually "closing the gender pay gap" that makes for better quality of life per se. But rather, that Finland also gives new fathers paid paternity leave!

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Star of David

Why Tom Friedman's belief in a Jewish 'ancestral homeland' is a toxic myth

Yossi Gurvitz
Mondoweiss
Wed, 20 Mar 2019 13:48 UTC
Tom Freidman
Tom Freidman
Reading a recent post, I made the critical error of clicking on the link to a Thomas Friedman column. I will not engage Friedman's screed against Ilhan Omar - for the record, I'm on Team Ilhan - because I believe Friedman has too much blood on his keyboard to be seriously engaged. I will, however, take exception to an aside of his. Friedman writes:
I am not dual loyal. I always put America first, but I want to see Israel thrive - just like many Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Indian-Americans and others feel about their ancestral homelands.
Don't know how to break it to you, Tom, but Israel isn't your ancestral homeland. You were born in Minnesota in 1953. Your parents also lived in the US. Wherever your grandparents came from, it wasn't Israel, since it didn't exist at the time.

What you're referring to, Tom, without even noticing it, is the myth that Jews today are all the descendants of Jews who once lived in Palestine, and as such have an eternal right to the land. This is the founding myth of Zionism, and it often masquerades as history. Let's blow it up, shall we?
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Info

JPMorgan Managing Director dies: Sudden tragedy has connections to other JPM deaths

Pam Martens
Wall Street on Parade
Mon, 18 Mar 2019 00:00 UTC
Douglas Arthur Carucci
Douglas Arthur Carucci
When you are the largest bank in the United States and you've been compared to the Gambino crime family in a book by two trial lawyers; when you've pleaded guilty to three criminal felony counts brought by the United States Justice Department in the past five years; when you've paid over $30 billion in fines over charges of crimes against the public and investors since 2008; and when you've had an unprecedented string of employees leaping to their death from buildings, dropping dead at home or on the street, and two alleged murder-suicides by employees - all in just the past five years - one might think that law enforcement might show some interest - especially since this employer - JPMorgan Chase - holds tens of billions of dollars of Bank-Owned Life Insurance (BOLI) on its workers. (This death benefit, by the way, pays tax-free to the corporation, not the employee's family.)

But when it comes to JPMorgan Chase and law enforcement, there does not seem to be a morsel of curiosity over the continuing sudden deaths of its computer technology workers - no matter how high up the corporate ladder they rank or how many floors they are alleged to fall to their death.

Take the case of Douglas (Doug) Arthur Carucci, age 53, who died on Saturday, March 9 under what Sarah Butcher at eFinancial Careers calls "tragic" and unexpected circumstances. Carucci is believed to have been a resident of Manhattan with his wife, Cindy.

Comment: What do these banking execs know? And why are so many of them ending up dead under such tragic circumstances (assuming there's a connection between them)??

See also:

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Bizarro Earth

Mother accused of child molestation and child abuse of her 7 adopted children


FOX10
Wed, 20 Mar 2019 11:51 UTC
Machelle Hackney
© Pinal County Sheriff's officeMachelle Hackney
Court documents from Pinal County are providing graphic details into allegations of child abuse leveled against a woman who lives in Maricopa.

While court documents only referred to the woman by her first name and middle initial, Machelle L., and redacted her last name, FOX 10 has learned that the woman's full name is Machelle Lea Hackney. Hackney, along with Logan D. Hackney and Ryan D. Hacnkey, were arrested on March 15 at their home in Maricopa. Logan and Ryan are noted as Machelle's adult sons, and they were arrested on multiple counts of failing to report the abuse of a minor.

According to the documents, officers responded to the Maricopa Police Department regarding a child abuse case, and spoke with a female, who said her adoptive sister claimed she was being abused at her Maricopa home by her mother. The adoptive sister's identity and age were redacted in court documents, and the abuse was described by the adoptive sister as her being pepper sprayed, left in a locked closet for days at a time with no food, water or restroom. The adoptive sister also stated that her six other siblings, all children, were being punished in the same manner.

A welfare check, according to court documents, was then conducted at the home. During the welfare check, one child, wearing only a pull-up, was found in an unlocked closet that has a locking mechanism. Officers also came in contact with six other children who appeared to be malnourished. One of the children found said he consumed three 16 oz bottles of water within a 20-minute timeframe, and said he was pepper-sprayed numerous times as punishment by Machelle.
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Megaphone

A professor spoke the truth, he still pays the price

David French
National Review
Tue, 12 Mar 2019 14:08 UTC
Sarah Lawerence College
© WikimediaSarah Lawerence College

Dissenters from campus orthodoxy often need a rare kind of personal fortitude.

Last October, Sarah Lawrence College professor Samuel Abrams wrote an important and insightful essay in the New York Times. While critics of higher education have often focused on faculty bias - in part because a small subset of professors is prone to say ridiculous things - a larger problem has gone mostly unnoticed. Abrams's research revealed that college administrators are more uniformly progressive even than college faculties. "Liberal staff members," he wrote, "outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one," making them the "most left-leaning group on campus."

At the conclusion of his piece, Abrams made an argument that rang true to my more than 20 years of litigation experience - "ideological imbalance, coupled with [administrators'] agenda-setting power, threatens the free and open exchange of ideas."

Comment: See also:

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Pistol

Israeli lawmaker known for publicly berating Palestinians guns down rival Arab politician in outlandish campaign ad


RT
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 18:43 UTC
Oren Hazan
© Menahem Kahana / AFPOren Hazan
Incendiary Knesset member and notorious Natalie Portman-hater Oren Hazan has released a "satirical" campaign ad where he shoots and kills Arab lawmaker Jamal Zahalka, who has since filed a report on the ad police.

In Israel's competitive election campaigns, which have included ads of the government's left opposition surrendering to ISIS, several prominent politicians giving the audience the middle-finger and an outlandish mock-commercial for 'Fascism-scented' perfume, candidates hoping to capture the voters' attention have to really go all out.

Comment: Oren Hazan is a despicable pathological bully who is thriving as a part of Netanyahu's Likud party - and a symptomatic part of the problem among so many Israelis that would seek to dehumanize, and ultimately destroy, the neighboring Palestinian and Arab populations (or anyone who would stand iin the way of a 'greater Israel.')

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Books

The celebrity college-admissions scandal has unearthed a deeper fraud

Heather Mac Donald
City Journal
Thu, 14 Mar 2019 21:48 UTC
college grad selfie
The celebrity college-admissions cheating scandal has two clear takeaways: an elite college degree has taken on wildly inflated importance in American society, and the sports-industrial complex enjoys wildly inflated power within universities. Thirty-three moguls and TV stars allegedly paid admissions fixer William Singer a total of $25 million from 2011 to 2018 to doctor their children's high school resumes-sending students to private SAT and ACT testing sites through false disability claims, for example, where bought-off proctors would raise the students' scores. Singer forged athletic records, complete with altered photos showing the student playing sports in which he or she had little experience or competence. Corrupt sports directors would then recommend the student for admission, all the while knowing that they had no intention of playing on the school's team.

None of this could have happened if higher education had not itself become a corrupt institution, featuring low classroom demands, no core knowledge acquisition, low grading standards, fashionable (but society-destroying) left-wing activism, luxury-hotel amenities, endless partying, and huge expense. Students often learn virtually nothing during their college years, as University of California, Irvine, education school dean Richard Arum writes in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. They may even lose that pittance of knowledge with which they entered college. Seniors at Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Berkeley scored lower in an undemanding test of American history than they did as freshmen, according to a 2007 study commissioned by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. College is only desultorily about knowledge acquisition, at least outside of the STEM fields (and even those fields are under assault from identity politics).
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Horse

Outrage culture goes after U of Wyoming's cowboy slogan but school administration stands its ground

Jon Street
Campus Reform
Tue, 12 Mar 2019 19:16 UTC
cowboy
The Wall Street Journal last week published an editorial, titled, "It Pays to Be A Wyoming Cowboy." The story behind that headline goes back to July 2018 when, as Campus Reform reported at the time, the University of Wyoming stood its ground against about two dozen professors who took issue with the school's newly-unveiled slogan, "the world needs more cowboys."

The slogan, critics said was sexist and xenophobic, among other things.

"I am not the only person for whom the word 'cowboy' invokes a white, macho, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, U.S.-born person," associate professor of kinesiology and health Christine Porter said at the time. "The history of cowboys, of course, is much more diverse than that racially, and presumably also for sexual orientation. But the image-what the word 'cowboy' means off the top of almost everybody's head in the U.S.-is the white, heterosexual male."

Despite the criticism, however, the university stood its ground and continued its marketing campaign with the slogan.

And, according to the Wall Street Journal, the university's bet on cowboys has so far paid off.
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Briefcase

Kaspersky Lab slams Apple with antitrust complaint, accuses megacorporation of muscling out competition


RT
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 18:28 UTC
apple building
Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab has filed an antitrust complaint against Apple, alleging that the tech giant removed Kaspersky's 'safe kids' app from the Apple Store to make way for its own rival product.

The Russian firm claims in its suit that Apple removed its 'Safe Kids' app from the online marketplace, ostensibly for a configuration violation but in reality to eliminate competition to its own 'Screen Time' feature. Both apps allow parents to monitor and control their children's device usage and to restrict inappropriate content.

"From our point of view, Apple appears to be using its position as platform owner...to dictate terms and prevent other developers from operating on equal terms with it," a spokesperson told WinBuzzer.
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