(no subject)

Sometimes mine and my parents' notions of financial security don't really jibe. Yesterday my dad was like, "Why don't you get a job as a ticketing agent at an airline or something? They make good money. [some daughter of some guy I don't know] has a job as one and she makes [x amount] a year." Yeah Dad, I'm going to throw away my whole fucking college education so I can stand in front of a computer and issue tickets to irate airline passengers.

And this morning, my mother was like, "Why don't you get a government job? You'll always get pay raises because Congresspeople are always voting them in." So I replied, "Yeah Mom, I'll go along with a corrupt government as long as it benefits me." And she said, "Why not?" Oh, the joys of the generational/cultural gap.

Christ.

As awareness of rape increased from 1960 to 1973, when the National Crime Victimization Survey began, the number of attacks that police classified as rapes more than doubled.

It's unclear how much of the change was an increase in real crime and how much involved the change in the definition of rape. Some police, for example, are just beginning to acknowledge that date rapes and spousal rapes actually occur.

. . .

In an ill-conceived effort to make Philadelphia look safer, for example, police hid hundreds of sexual assault complaints each year, leaving victims without protection as suspected rapists remained on the street. The rape complaints of prostitutes and homeless women were routinely shelved.

The city of Atlanta this year uncovered a similar pattern of detectives hiding rape complaints in secret files.

Isn't America wonderful?