Little Boys, Roller Coasters, and Angelina Jolie

The British have come up with the solution to sexual abuse of minors.  Namely, we must act now to prevent young boys (and girls, TOF supposes) from using their wiles to seduce vulnerable older men. 

The age of consent for sex should be lowered to 13 years-old to end the ''persecution of old men'' in the wake of the Savile sex abuse scandal, a leading barrister has claimed.
.... The barrister added: ''Instead, we should focus on arming today's youngsters with the savoir-faire and social skills to avoid drifting into compromising situations, and prosecute modern crime.

''As for law reform, now regrettably necessary, my recommendations are remove complainant anonymity, introduce a strict statute of limitations for criminal prosecutions and civil actions and reduce the age of consent to 13.''

Ms Hewson argued that ''touching a 17-year-old's breast, kissing a 13-year-old, or putting one's hand up a 16-year-old's skirt'' are not comparable to cases such as the Ealing Vicarage rape or Fordingbridge gang rape and murders from 1986.

This reminds me of the book with the Worst Release Date Ever.  TOF no longer recalls the title or author, but it was a professor at Univ. of Minn. and the thesis was that we cruelly deny the sexuality of children.  We should instead allow the little darlings to be, well, darlings.  What made the release date so bad was that the clergy abuse scandal erupted shortly after and the opportunity to pound the Church took precedence over poking a stick in the eye of bourgeois morality.   For a while everyone pretended to be outraged over fondling young boys; at least until it became far too obvious that it was nearly always boys that were being molested (80% of accusations). 

Marriage-go-round

Remember the woman who married the Eiffel Tower?  The warehouse?  His pet dog?  Herself?  Another lesson in the ongoing decline of the Modern Ages has surfaced: a woman has decided to marry a roller coaster.  

Amy Wolfe, a US church organist who claims to have objectum sexuality, a condition that makes sufferers attracted to inanimate objects, plans to marry a magic carpet fairground ride.

Most of this would be much simpler if folks actually realized that the term "marriage" has a specific meaning and that not every attraction or appetite should be called that. 

Angelina Jolie and Denialism

Any scientific theory that argues from an appeal to celebrity should always be discounted for that reason.  But the headline Will Angelina Jolie Help End Climate-Change Denial, And Help The Republican Party? is too remarkable to pass by with no comment. 

The gist of the story is that Ms. Jolie's decision to have a double mastectomy in the absence of any positive evidence of breast cancer will help people get in line with the pravda on global warming climate change.  "By modeling how to think with data when data do not tell us what we would otherwise want them to say, she displayed a level of decision-making courage that business and political leaders should strive to emulate."

Or perhaps not.  It is a mistake to suppose that a scientific fact or -- as in this case -- a mathematical model determines a policy of action.  Facts by themselves have no values. 

Everybody dies. Therefore, Jolie will die of something. Might be cancer, might be a worn-out heart, or by apoplexy brought on by reading the NYT. Jolie will not now die from breast cancer (almost certainly), though she might exit via ovarian cancer—or maybe by some other cancer (colon, skin, pancreatic, etc.). Her liver might fail or she may stroke out. Anyway, she will die, though she may (only may) live longer and then dye from something else. All she has done, then, was to remove one of these many, many choices of death. 

There are also the possibilities of false positives on the test for "the gene" and of negative outcomes on the surgery.  Or to put it more plainly, it is not at all clear that anyone was "thinking with data" or at least not all the data.  A certain amount of emotional commitment was involved.