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By "stupidity", I don't mean a traditional provincialism, or the simple ignorance of the uneducated or uninformed. No. This stupidity is the result the rise of the infotainment age, and the massive flow of propaganda -- instigated by mostly liberal politicians and bureaucrats, as well as activist academics and Hollywood -- that now is released so easily into the public discourse. A list would merit its own webpage. There is just so much. The Dartmouth "oppression". OWS. Critical race theory. "Diversity feminism". Brandeis and the shunning of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. All the little children suspended from elementary schools because of transgressions such as "pointing a finger like a gun" or eating a pop tart into the shape of a gun. Delta Smelt over-the-top and unproductive environmentalism. The nonsense surrounding fracking, and the Keystone Pipline. Liberal media race-baiting, such as over the Trayvon Martin - Zimmerman case. And any criticisms of Obama. ACA. The stonewalling and corruption and incompetence in our government agencies. Extremist activism of stakeholders in organizations whose significant causes long have dried up. Common Core "educational" standards. The shunning of merit in favor of crap such as, last June, so many high schools having multiple valedictorians -- 12, 18 and more. And on and on. Here's a headshaker from this week: a popular Los Angeles high school science teacher suspended after two students in the science fair turned in projects that looked to nincompoops in the school administration like "weapons". Article by Howard Blume.

The Red Line and the Rat Line -- Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdogan and the Syrian rebels, London Review of Books: "In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the 'red line' he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons. Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention..." (PDF)

(I.e. Obama's gun-running plan from Libya through Turkey to the Syrian rebels aka Islamic terrorists, in cahoots with Turkey and Saudi Arabia. And the rebels' -- not the Syrian government's -- use of sarin on Syrian people. Etc. Expose, expose. You already knew this if you were paying attention.)

Article at National Review: "Mozilla's press office merely asserted that the company was such a diverse, tolerant, and live-and-let-live sort of place that it was all but obliged to hound a man out of office because he possessed slightly different political views from the majority of its staff... Mozilla informed the public that the resignation had struck a blow for 'free speech and equality.' Gay conformity agency GLAAD went one further, praising corporate America for demonstrating its commitment to providing an environment that is 'inclusive, safe, and welcoming to all'."

[Powerline Blog] Admiral Jeremiah Denton died yesterday at the age of 89. ...a story of almost unbelievable endurance, courage and patriotism... [Wapo] ...a retired Navy rear admiral and former U.S. senator who survived nearly eight years of captivity in North Vietnamese prisons, and whose public acts of defiance and patriotism came to embody the sacrifices of American POWs in Vietnam... More at wiki.

David Wright, the director of the U.S. government office that monitors scientific misconduct in biomedical research, ORI, wrote in his recent resignation letter that most of his time at work was spent "navigating the remarkably dysfunctional HHS bureaucracy". Read the article, Top U.S. Scientific Misconduct Official Quits in Frustration With Bureaucracy at Science Insider.

Has this society become so delusionally sickwit pro-fathers' rights and Hollywood propaganda that what would be an assault on a woman's medical and sexual privacy actually required a court case? And now that the decision has been written, is being debated in the dimwit media with multiple "what do you think" articles?

From the text of the decision:

"...checking himself [or herself] into a hospital, a patient may well waive his [or her] right of privacy as to hospital personnel, it is obvious that he [or she] has not turned [his or her] room into a public thoroughfare..." [State v. Stott, 171 N.J. 343, (2002) (quoting People v. Brown, 88 Cal. App. 3d 283, 291 (Cal. Ct. App. 1979)).]

...requiring the mother to notify the father that she has gone into labor and or require his physical presence would be an undue burden on her. There can be no question that any mother is under immense physical and psychological pain during labor, and for the State to interfere with her interest in privacy during this critical time would contradict the State's own interest in protecting the potentiality of human life. The order the father seeks would invade her sphere of privacy and force the mother to provide details of her medical condition to a person she does not desire to share that information with. Thus the court finds that the mother's constitutionally protected interests before the child is born far outweigh the State's and father's interests during the delivery period.

The father's application for a temporary mandatory injunction to be notified when the mother enters labor and to be present during the birth is hereby denied. The father's application for a temporary mandatory injunction to be present to sign the birth certificate and have his surname added to the certificate on the exact date of birth is denied as it is not an irreparable injury.

In addition, the mother's protected constitutional interests further require the court to deny adding the father's surname and signing the birth certificate on the day of the child's birth. The father's application for a temporary parenting time schedule is denied because it is non-emergent. Moreover, the application is not ripe for judicial consideration because further factual information including the child's health is required before the court could begin a best interest evaluation.

Badger Pundit reports: Heriot and Sander demonstrated that affirmative action on campus routinely involves not a thumb on the scale to give underrepresented minorities a leg up, but instead massive preferences that significantly impair their ultimate prospects. For example, underrepresented minorities having a straight "B" (3.0) average are admitted on par with Asians and whites having an straight "A" (4.0) average; those receiving large preferences on admission to college are 50% to 75% more likely to drop out of a science career, and will often drop out of college entirely; the median African American student at an American law school has credentials lower than 99% of the Asian and white students; and underrepresented minorities admitted to law school based on a large preference are 2-3 times more likely to fail the bar exam.

As Professors Heriot and Sander explained in detail, the empirical evidence (which has not been rebutted by even a single peer-reviewed study) proves that due to the "mismatch" effect inherent in using such large preferences, affirmative action has significantly reduced the number of African American scientists, doctors, lawyers, and professors that would exist absent such large preferences -- it is an "epic policy failure," as Heriot put it.

Comments by Prof. Jonathan Turley at Judiciary Committee. For complete witness testimony and transcripts, see Enforcing the President's Constitutional Duty to Faithfully Execute the Laws.

2012 LLM thesis by Amelda Schrenk pretty much sums up why the family courts can't get it right. Includes a nice historical exposition on parens patriae. At http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/handle/10289/6626

Spot on, at Above the Law:

My parents separated for a brief period of time when I was in the fourth grade. I don't remember there being too much controversy over where I would be crashing as (a) the separation didn't last long and (b) I was not exactly the prize pig over which anyone in their right mind would compete. Anyway, the one thing I remember about that time was how my dad treated me. My father, who had previously acted as the proximate cause in his son's nervousness and irritable bowels, was now a prince among men. He took me to a basketball game and laughed at my jokes in a deeply insincere way...

(Neither does this -- UCLA professor accused of "micro-aggression" for correcting spelling and grammar errors in papers written by "brown" students.). Enough already with "micro-aggression" theory, race-baiting, and the rest of the PC thought-policing crap that has burgeoned out of control in the past decade or so.

And enough with the horseshit that constitutes due process (and passes for intelligence) in certain sectors of some universities these days. Amanda Childress, Sexual Assault Awareness Program coordinator at Dartmouth, thinks that students accused of sexual harassment should be expelled solely on the making of an allegation. (People this ignorant should be expelled from employment in any teaching institution.) PDF

From John D. McKinnon's article at the Wall Street Journal blogs: PDF

"We now know that the IRS targeted not only right-leaning applicants, but also right-leaning groups that were already operating as 501(c)(4)s" Mr. Camp said in a statement. "At Washington, DC's direction, dozens of groups operating as 501(c)(4)s were flagged for IRS surveillance, including monitoring of the groups' activities, websites and any other publicly available information. Of these groups, 83% were right-leaning. And of the groups the IRS selected for audit, 100% were right-leaning."