Significant upward trends in the female share of degrees over time since 1971 include the fields of psychology (from 44.8% in 1971 to 79.3% in 2020, a new record high), Biology (from 29.1% in 1971 to 64.5% in 2020, a record high), Architecture (from 11.9% to 48.1%, a record high), Business (from 9.1% to 46.5%), Engineering (from 0.8% to 23.8%, a new high), and Physical Sciences (13.8% to 43.2%, a new high). Slightly less significant upward trends in the female share of degrees since 1971 include the fields of Math (from 38.0% to 42.0%), Computer Science (13.6% to 21.3%) and Social Studies (Economics, History, Political Science, and Sociology) from 36.8% to 51.7%.
The female share of Computer Science degrees follows a unique trend – it more than doubled from 13.6% in 1971 to 37.1% in 1984, and then decreased steadily and stabilized at about 18-19% a decade ago. In 2020, the female share of Computer Science degrees at 21.3% was the highest since a 22.2% share in 2005.
There is a shift in the demographics where almost all groups of voters are shifting to Republican except for college-educated women, especially childless women. In 2010, Dems had a 10-point lead among women with college degrees; it’s now ballooned to 38 points.
The typical face of America’s opioid epidemic has long been that of a white man from a post-industrial town in the Appalachian mountains. White victims have accounted for 78% of the more than 500,000 opioid-overdose deaths since the late 1990s. In 2017 counties in Appalachia experienced rates 72% higher than the average for the rest of the country. But Black Americans are catching up.
In 1928 the Nazis got 2.6% of the popular vote. Two years later they were the majority.
10% of Twitter contributors are responsible for 92% of the content.
The government has created a "Disinformation Governance Board" in Homeland Security, a sort of Ministry of Truth. The government has a Ministry of Truth. Self-parody.
“The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.”--Mencken
A scary notion from Reason: Russian billionaires will probably survive economic sanctions in relative comfort. But the precedent set by labeling people as untouchables and then imposing penalties without proof of a crime will set the tone for future abuses. Powers used against wealthy Russians now will be deployed in the years to come against people who cross the authorities and have fewer resources for defending themselves.
The word 'discuss' is a combination of Latin dis- (apart) and cutere (to break up). In other words, to discuss something is to break it apart or to analyze it.
As seen on Weibo: Shanghai residents go to their balconies to sing & protest lack of supplies. A drone appears: “Please comply w covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.”
Global warming has reached an inflection point according to its believers. We are at the point of extinction. Warming is the single threat to human life. Despite man's constant and reliable bellicosity, his incredible destructive nuclear potential, the heavily armed --and threatening--totalitarian countries, the willingness to be totally destroyed over a nationalistic or political point (see Castro).
The West has taken this seriously and has begun to modify its behavior. American CO2 production has been declining. But India and China continue to bull ahead, using cheap carbon fuels to develop their economies, even admitting they will continue to increase CO2 production until they reach their carbon peak in 2030. Kerry and his adherents believe we will be dying at that point.
So, if you believe the world is increasingly vulnerable to global warming, and if you believe the world has a narrowing window of intervention, and if you believe that India and China are, essentially, ending human life with their carbon policies, what efforts aimed at India and China by the rest of mankind are legitimate? And, for the very survival of mankind, is any action too much?
What does the fact that the American Climate Czar is one of the nation's silliest guys and the International spokesperson on Global Warming is a child mean?
Modeling is a common forecasting technique. Stock markets, voting, baseball talent, military, horse racing are all subjects of modeling. The Pittsburgh Pirates are one of the league's most aggressive talent and tactics modelers. Are the models used in those other estimates, financial modeling in the field of investments, for example, accurate? If not, why are climate models more reliable?
Weather predictions over short periods, days, weeks, and months, are not very accurate; why are climate predictions over longer periods held in higher regard?
Does CO2 levels correlate with global temperature? In the last 20 years the global temperature has been flat despite the fact that 25% of CO2 produced by man in history has been produced in the same period; does that undermine the narrative?
Right now, after media blitz and subsidies, wind and solar technology account for 0.2% of energy output in the world and in 2040 it will account for 2.2%. So, are we focusing on the problem and solution correctly?
Hurricane Irma in 2017 was one of the strongest hurricanes ever to come out of the Caribbean and reading about its measurements sounds like quite a success. Yet two days before landfall the hurricane was predicted to strike Miami and move up the east coast when, in fact, it missed Miami entirely and hit high on the west coast. Were those the same models as are used for global warming?
CO2 production might be driven back to the steam age in the West but it will continue unabated in China and India. Since the future of life is said to depend upon this, should something be done about those countries? If so, what?
A British study suggests a lifetime of brisk walking leads to longer telomeres. These are the protective “caps” on the ends of your chromosomes — sort of like the plastic tabs on your shoelaces. Although they don’t carry genetic information, telomeres play a vital role in keeping DNA stable and influence aging.
There's a new book on the impending food shortage crisis. It talks about a famine apocalypse.
In a Washington state county, a quarter of all electricity generated is powering Bitcoin mining.
Americans are making Portugal their home base. The number of U.S. residents in Portugal climbed by 45% last year to 6,921 and has almost tripled in the past decade. I am surprised they're so low.
In his Nobel banquet toast, he [F.A. Hayek] said simply that if he had been consulted, he never would have advocated awarding Nobel Prizes to economists for the simple reason that no economic thinker should ever be provided with such public recognition, as it falsely provides a sense of authority that can be safely trusted to no economist.--from Boettke
The Solomon Islands has reached a security agreement with China. It envisaged the arrival of Chinese military personnel and police and occasional “ship visits” in order “to protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects in Solomon Islands”. Already, China has started training the local force in riot control and handling replica weapons, after years when Australia and New Zealand have taken primary responsibility for dealing with unrest in the Solomon Islands and for reforming the police force.
American politics is getting ever more ridiculous and dysfunctional not because Americans are getting less intelligent. The problem is structural. Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into official policy.--hadt in The Atlantic(!)
Ned's QOD on the IQ of Nazis at the Nuremberg trials is disturbing. (128). I am not sure what the IQ test measures but there are certainly differences of a sort. I've always thought the importance was in the volume of numbers.
The world--and this country--seem to have trouble understanding the turmoil of modern politics. That stems from an under-appreciation of the basic demographics; there are some people, and those numbers are larger than people think, who simply are not going to be able to care for themselves in a modern, non-agricultural world. There are some people who are not going to be able to make good decisions--malice aside. Every single individual on the good side of the norm will have an equal, reciprocal negative reflection on the other side of the norm. For every individual two inches taller than the norm there will be an individual two inches shorter than the norm. For every person with an IQ of 110, there will be a reciprocal of 90. There will be as many with 80 as 120.
The Dreaded Bell Curve
For the normal distribution, the values less than one standard deviation away from the mean account for 68.27% of the set; while two standard deviations from the mean account for 95.45%; and three standard deviations account for 99.73%.
The 68–95–99.7 rule is a shorthand for the values that lie within one, two, and three standard deviations of the mean, respectively.
Let's take something simple like IQ. The mean IQ is 100. Using the shorthand method, 68 of one hundred test subjects will be within one standard deviation from the mean of 100. That standard deviation is 15 points. So, under the single standard deviation from 100, 34 people will be between 100 and 115, and 34 people will be between 100 and 85. 95 people will be in the group testing from 70 to 130, two standard deviations on either side of the mean. This mean 5 % of those tested will lie outside the two standard deviations, that is 2.5% will be below 70 and 2.5% will be above 130.
It is just great that 2.5 percent of the population will have IQs higher than 130. But what about the other end of the curve? 2.5% of the population will test below 70? Google says the current population of the U.S. is 321 million. So 2.5% of that means there are 8,025,000 people in the U.S. with IQs less than 70. Expressing their God-given constitutional rights. Buying weapons. Voting. Should the current problems in the U.S. surprise anybody? Well, maybe 2.5% are surprised.
But maybe the real threat to humans is not the low testing guy, but the higher tester with a higher vision that requires a violent--and exclusive--application.
Easter is the essential Christian event. Every aspect of the Christian church hinges on Christ's resurrection.
The gospel is filled with little particulars (the woman hesitant to enter the tomb, Peter being outrun to the tomb, the meticulous arrangement of the burial cloths, the assumption that the body was stolen--after the assumption by the Pharisees that the apostles would steal it)--all giving misdirection and specificity to what becomes the philosophical earthquake of all time. And, of course, another biblical irony: The first to arrive, the women, could not be legal witnesses.
Yet how does this all hinge? Hearsay? The interpretation of a sacred book? Amulets and magic rites? No. Amazingly it hinges on us.
By the time Christ rises, we know all the players. We even have some insights about them. They are not revolutionaries, not mystics and, while seemingly sincere, they are not special. They are relatively normal working folks with responsibilities and, probably, annoyed families. As seen by their behavior during the Passion, they are not fully aware of what is happening. Nor are they particularly brave. Yet, after this crisis where their leader is tortured and killed, they somehow emerge as philosophers and martyrs. They all, to a man, experience a mind-changing, life-changing event. Scattered and leaderless they raise a religious movement that challenges everything in its time and, eventually, forces mighty Rome to adapt.
Christ performed the great, unarguable miracle. It was the behavior of men, people, who confirmed and developed it. No leap of faith was necessary. They were convinced and changed. Then they convinced and changed the world.
We Americans stupidly recognize April 14 as the day before taxes are due. So we emphasize money and materialism over greatness of mind and soul, greatness that was both a product of and an influence upon the nation. Taxes are trivial compared to what happened on this day in 1865. President Lincoln was shot by Booth on Good Friday, April 14, 1865 and died the next morning. Secretary of State Seward was brutally assaulted as was his son. There is good evidence that General Grant was stalked to his train the same night by the conspirators. This occurred 5 days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox and doomed the South to a reconciliation with the North shepherded by the usual political wolves. More importantly it deprived the nation and politics of the high standard of mind and spirit Lincoln embodied.
Tolstoy on Lincoln: “.... how largely the name of Lincoln is worshiped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.
“Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country — bigger than all the Presidents together.
“We are still too near to his greatness,” Tolstoy concluded, “but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do.
“His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.”
University of Rhode Island and Director of Graduate Studies of History Erik Loomis states that “Science, statistics, and technology are all inherently racist.” Others have agreed with that view, including denouncing math as racist or a “tool of whiteness.” Now, as part of its “decolonization” efforts, Durham University is calling on professors in the math department to ask themselves if they’re citing work from “mostly white or male” mathematicians.
According to the Telegraph and The College Fix, a guide instructs faculty that “decolonising the mathematical curriculum means considering the cultural origins of the mathematical concepts, focusses, and notation we most commonly use.” It adds:
“[T]he question of whether we have allowed Western mathematicians to dominate in our discipline is no less relevant than whether we have allowed western authors to dominate the field of literature. It may even be more important, if only because mathematics is rather more central to the advancement of science than is literature.”
In the Telegraph article, Exeter University Social Science Professor Doug Stokes explains that “[t]he idea behind decolonising maths is that because everyone should be regarded as equal, the status of their beliefs must also be equal.”
...how, if behavioral economists are correct that most individuals suffer from sundry irrationalities, people, including the behavioral economists themselves, can expect paternalistic policymakers to affect positive change.--wright, in a review of Escaping Paternalism
The American Civil Liberties Union helped scuttle a bill this week that would have enabled the Biden administration to liquidate Russian oligarchs’ assets and turn the proceeds over to Ukraine. I can't remember the last time I agreed with these guys.
The demand for racism exceeds its supply--Riley
The phenomenon of slavery was millennia old in 1776, but as Gordon Wood says, “It’s the American Revolution that makes [slavery] a problem for the world.” Sean Wilentz (see his 2018 book “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding”) correctly insists that what “originated in America” was “organized anti-slavery politics,” and it did so because of those Enlightenment precepts in the Declaration’s first two paragraphs.-will
The US was the world’s No. 1 production of motor vehicles in every year from 1950 until 1975 when Japan’s production surpassed the US. From 1975 to 1994 Japan held the No. 1 spot until 1995 when the US out-produced Japan again and moved to the No. 1 spot. Japan moved back to the world’s No. 1 car producer from 2006-2008 before China surpassed both the US and Japan in 2009 to become the global leader in motor vehicle production, a position it has held ever since. Last year China’s motor vehicle production was nearly three times greater than the USA (26.1 million vs. 9.2 million) and Japan (7.8 million), and produced more vehicles than the USA, Japan, Germany, and South Korea combined (24.1 million)!
This is from an article in Yahoo that seems surprised: "Patrick Ho hardly seemed the profile of a big-time international fixer. A short, pudgy man, affectionately known to friends as “Fat Ping,” Ho had been a Harvard-trained ophthalmologist and a Hong Kong government minister. Yet in the fall of 2017, after landing at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City, he was arrested by FBI agents and charged in an audacious plot to dole out millions of dollars in bribes to African leaders in exchange for major energy contracts that appeared to advance Chinese government interests. What emerged in his indictment and later trial and conviction in federal court was a revealing portrait of Chinese influence peddling that included allegations that Ho arranged to broker arms deals — including the sale of rocket and grenade launchers — to countries in war zones in Africa and the Middle East. There was one noteworthy detail, however, about Ho’s global wheeling and dealing that went unmentioned in federal court documents or Justice Department press releases at the time. During the same period that he was being pursued by the FBI for his role in the global bribery scheme, Ho and his boss, Ye Jianming, a billionaire oil tycoon with past ties to a front for the People’s Liberation Army, had entered into a business relationship with two members of the Biden family — President Biden’s son Hunter Biden and the president’s brother, James Biden."
Former first son-in-law Jared Kushner received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — with expected annual management fees of $25 million — according to a new report.
More than a quarter of major Japanese start-ups, those worth more than a billion dollars, involve care for the elderly. The tech is impressive: at care homes, ‘workers now receive a signal when incontinent residents require attention, forewarning them of the need for urgent intervention. There are also devices that track vital signs and indicate irregular heartbeats or breathing, while robotic beds that turn into wheelchairs are also being manufactured.’
Did you know that the U.S. has an Equal Pay Day?
A significant majority of Americans blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for the recent spike in America’s gas prices, but almost as many blame oil companies, according a new ABC News/Ipsos poll released Sunday.
In asked about the sizable increase in fuel prices in 2022, more than two-thirds of those polled blamed Putin — 71 percent — and oil companies — 68 percent — either a “great deal” or a “good amount.”
Outrage has erupted online after a video of a corgi dog being beaten to death by a Shanghai healthcare worker went viral, over unfounded concerns that the pup could be infectious after its owners tested positive for Covid.
Hungary's Orban could have vetoed EU sanctions on Russia, yet allowed them to go through by abstaining from voting.
Now I think Psaki is good at what she does (which is bending the truth) and I wish her well. But, now that she has been hired to work for NBC and is still working for the government as a spokesman, can we drop the nonsense that these are news organizations? And that truth is valued any more than any other archetype?
The current lockdown in Shanghai and a recently relaxed one in Shenzhen forced 43 million people to remain in their homes and rely on government food deliveries. I guess governments love this stuff. According to Jenkins, the government has so hyped the illness and the need for government salvation that "... sane outcome may be impossible because the regime has caused its zero-Covid ideology to morph into something insane. If transmission must be suppressed and anything else is a defeat, then the Communist Party has set a game for itself in which no victory is possible."
Freedom Fighter: "Racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and discrimination remain the main problem for the Turkish community in Europe," Erdogan said at a press conference in Germany in 2021. The government announced in 2020 that it had opened legal proceedings against 597,783 individuals, detained 282,790, and arrested 94,975 for allegedly being behind the 2016 coup attempt.
Today is Palm Sunday, a long and difficult Gospel from Holy Thursday to Christ's burial, filled with drama, conflict, and ambiguity. (That frustrating, "That is what you say.") And this strange back-and-forth which sounds bitterly ironic, even in Christ's mouth: He said to them, “But now one who has a money bag should take it, and likewise a sack, and one who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me, namely, He was counted among the wicked; and indeed what is written about me is coming to fulfillment.” Then they said, “Lord, look, there are two swords here.” But he replied, “It is enough!”
The Gospel is oblique as Christ is passive throughout; the real actors are the humans. Humans fail on just about every level you can imagine. Christ's friends leave Him, the future head of the Church denies Him, the religious organization that He is a member of conspires against Him and the State washes its hands of Him, unable to follow even their own laws.
It's a pretty ugly picture. There are some obvious explanations. Christ is the only answer. Friends are fickle and the world transient. Organizations can not be relied upon. They may all be true. But there seems to be very little faith in human beings or their constructs. Even the tried-and-true customs and institutions that we all think of as society's DNA fall apart at this moment.
It is a view of moral and social dystopia. Chaos of the spirit. The storm that comes later after Golgotha is only an exclamation point.
What does come through in astonishing clarity is the unbelievable gentleness of the victim, gentle and forgiving.
The Pleistocene Epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), is called the Great Ice Age, or Glacial Age, because during that epoch ice sheets developed periodically over vast areas of northern and mid-latitude North America and Eurasia. In North America, the Laurentide glaciers spread from the Hudson Bay area, covering most of Canada and going as far south as Illinois and Missouri. Glaciers covered 30% of Pennsylvania and the ice sheet was up to two miles thick. Given how recently the Ice Age was and how short current times are in comparison, are these presumed temperature changes significant?
Is the current temperature measurement, with technological and social changes, meaningful when compared to earlier ones?
Are rare earth extractions dependent upon child labor? Would that be important to the warming activists?
Have any simulations been run on the implications of the invasion of jungles that would likely be necessary for increased mineral extraction?
What models have been run on global warming? What models have been used in other areas? How do models differ from experiments?
Question 55 Upon reading this CNN report headlined “Biden demands faster drop in gas prices as oil tumbles,” Washington University economist Ian Fillmore wrote: “I immediately imagined some tribal chieftain loudly commanding the sky to rain or a volcano to stop erupting.“
Putin is raising some of the classic contradictions of war. He is being criticized for killing the wrong innocents by bombing a maternity ward and killing the innocents with the wrong instruments, threatening chemical and biological warfare. Governments love to pretend that their savage, murderous campaigns have rules.
Billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel was very critical at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami. During his keynote speech, Thiel named investment icon Warren Buffett, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink as Bitcoin's "enemies," Bloomberg reported. He referred to the trio as a “gerontocracy” against what he portrayed as a revolutionary cryptocurrency movement. He went on to call Buffett “the sociopathic grandpa from Omaha,” adding he was “enemy No. 1,” according to Bloomberg. Next up on Thiel's list of "enemies"? The term ESG, or environmental, social, and governance standards, is an increasingly popular way to evaluate investments, and the impact they have on the world. “The finance gerontocracy that runs the country through whatever silly virtue-signaling slash hate factory term like ESG they have, versus what I would call, what we have to think of as a revolutionary youth movement.”
",,, it focuses on the feminization of Ireland, being set in the mid-century decades after independence. An IRA veteran slowly realizes that the Ireland he fought for — a place for manly men — was a figment of his civil war imagination, and not an actual option for an independent, modernizing Ireland. The latter will be run according to the standards and desires of women, and actually be far more pleasant,"--from a review of 'Amongst Women'
It is not only theoretically possible to have more discrimination where there is less bias or prejudice, and less discrimination where there is more bias and prejudice, this has in fact happened in more than one country. The degree to which subjective attitudes are translated into overt acts of discrimination depends on the costs of doing so. Where those costs are very high, even very prejudiced or biased people may in engage in little or no discrimination.--sowell
The number of US breweries last year reached a new record high of 9,247, the greatest number of American beer makers going back to 1873 when the Brewers Association’s records start and there were 4,131 domestic breweries. Amazingly, the record brewery count in 2021 is almost a doubling of US breweries in just the last six years since 2015 when there were only 4,847 breweries, and more than four times the brewery count nine years ago of 2,252 in 2011.
A joke about a mindset that is more universal than its target.
Two Russian peasant ladies lived across the road from each other. One had a cow, sold milk, and was, therefore (by local standards) rich. The other old lady had no cow and was poorer. A genie appeared and offered the poor lady one wish. Thinking for a moment she answered: ‘Kill my neighbor’s cow.’
A University of Chicago study found that students at public charter high schools had better attendance and test scores than those at non-charter public high schools. More was required of them to advance to the next grade and to graduate. Teachers reported a higher level of trust and collaboration with their colleagues and a greater willingness to innovate. Classes were more academically demanding. The Chicago Teachers Union has used its broad powers to strike—powers granted by state lawmakers—to restrict competition, insisting on a charter school growth cap in their last two contracts.
UFOs had sexual encounters with humans and even left one woman pregnant, witnesses have alleged. The claims were made in Pentagon documents obtained by The Sun from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) as part of a huge Freedom of Information request.
So, that means they're our species, they're us, right?
On SETI: What is more optimistic than sending the message out that life exists and the address of that life? That's a great idea, right? The community of man--which has been such a success--reaching out to the community of life. But why announce your address when you have no idea of the makeup and intent of another species with technology powerful enough to enable them to come here? In fact, it sounds crazy.
So who are these people who are broadcasting our address and why do we let them?
[The] Citizens Air Complaint Program is a NYC public health campaign that invites — and pays — people to report trucks that are parked and idling for more than three minutes, or one minute if outside a school. Those who report collect 25 percent of any fine against a truck by submitting a video just over 3 minutes in length that shows the engine is running and the name of the company on the door. The program has vastly increased the number of complaints of idling trucks sent to the city, from just a handful before its creation in 2018 to more than 12,000 last year. …[a].. Mr. Slapikas said he pulled in $64,000 in rewards in 2021 for simply paying attention on his daily walks for exercise: “I would expect to get three a day without even looking.”
A deer was killed by a coyote in a yard several blocks from St. Bede's Church.
The Russians are outraged that the Ukrainians have bombed their storage centers.
Without any obligation on the part of citizens to earn their legal privileges or welfare benefits by serving the political community, the modern nation-state based on common culture or ethnicity becomes a tribal trust fund, rather like those managed by the U.S. federal government on behalf of Native American nations.--Lind, in an article "The End of Citizenship"
A comprehensive 2013 review of the literature by Carnegie Mellon criminologist Daniel Nagin found that “there is little evidence that increasing already long prison sentences has a material deterrence effect.”…A 2021 analysis by economists Evan K. Rose of the University of Chicago and Yohan Shem-Tov of UCLA found that while serving time behind bars reduces the likelihood that someone will reoffend in North Carolina, there are diminishing returns to longer sentences.
The 10 fastest growing counties last year accounted for nearly 80 percent of the national total, a testament not so much to the rapid pace of change in these places, but to the lack of significant growth in the rest of the nation.
"...now that women are the majority gender for degrees at all levels for more than a decade, and have been the majority gender for Associates and Bachelor’s degrees for 40 years and Master’s degrees for 35 years, why do women need a disproportionate share of campus resources in the form of scholarship funding, student awards, fellowships, mentoring programs, summer STEM programs, clubs, women’s centers, women’s commissions, etc.??"- perry
Just 50 percent of murders were solved in 2020 — the lowest rate in at least 40 years.
Today's gospel is the 'cast the first stone' gospel where Christ forgives the adulterer. It is a lynchpin in Christian thought. Christ turns Mosaic law on its head and demands not retribution for sin but the forgiveness of it.--after showing how one can not judge another.
It has always been curious to me that the common image of Catholicism is the guilt it inflicts on its believers when its nature is the exact opposite. Forgiveness--and self-forgiveness--is a conflict in our DNA that even Freud could not solve yet here, 2000 years ago, it was all crystalized.
And what was Christ writing in the dirt and why didn't anybody tell us?
It was fun and interesting despite the game being between the Pirates and the Orioles, the two lowest payrolls in the Major Leagues, two teams that spend one-tenth, one-tenth, of the team budget of the LA Dodgers. That's the entire Pirate's starting lineup would pay for one Dodger starter. That disparity shows.
Yet the game is so human. And the game is so intricate, so much a gathering of individual strengths and weaknesses, power and subtly, that one regrets the muting of the game's potential with the coarsest of motives, greed.
But the game itself is so strong a distillation of men and human projects that one tries to salute the uniform and not the man.
51 former U.S. intelligence officials signed a letter on Oct. 19, 2020, alleging that the effort to distribute Hunter Biden's laptop contents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” despite not knowing whether the laptop was legitimate.
The letter was at the core of a story from Politico that claimed the New York Post story about the laptop was “Russian disinformation.”
Former DNI James Clapper told the paper that he stands by the statement “made AT THE TIME.”
“I think sounding such a cautionary note AT THE TIME was appropriate,” Clapper said.
“The letter explicitly stated that we didn’t know if the emails were genuine, but that we were concerned about Russian disinformation efforts,” said Russ Travers, former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “I spent 25 years as a Soviet/Russian analyst. Given the context of what the Russians were doing at the time (and continue to do—Ukraine being just the latest example), I considered the cautionary warning to be prudent.”
Now, just for the sake of accuracy, if you think a guy saying that it looked like a Russian disinformation project is "cautionary," do you think that 51 guys saying that in a letter is something more than "cautionary?"
And what are the implications--if these guys are being honest--of all these intel guys being wrong?
