Newscastoris Leftus Profundis and Pettifogery

On this day:

1815
The Mount Tambora volcano begins a three-month-long eruption, lasting until July 15. The eruption ultimately kills 71,000 people and affects Earth’s climate for the next two years. (note to sunlight-tampering climate believers)
1821
Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople is hanged by the Ottoman government from the main gate of the Patriarchate and his body is thrown into the Bosphorus.
1826
The 10,500 inhabitants of the Greek town Missolonghi start leaving the town after a year’s siege by Turkish forces. Very few of them survive.
1912
The Titanic leaves port in Southampton, England for her first and only voyage
1919
Mexican Revolution leader Emiliano Zapata is ambushed and shot dead by government forces in Morelos.
1963
129 people die when the submarine USS Thresher sinks at sea.
1972
Seventy-four nations sign the Biological Weapons Convention, the first multilateral disarmament treaty banning the production of biological weapons.
1972
Vietnam War: For the first time since November 1967, American B-52 bombers reportedly begin bombing North Vietnam.

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"To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it."--Henry Kissinger

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The Mount Tambora volcano expelled as much as 150 cubic km (roughly 36 cubic miles!) of ash, pumice, and other rock, and aerosols—including an estimated 60 megatons of sulfur—into the atmosphere. As that material mixed with atmospheric gases, it blocked the sun's rays, eventually reducing the average global temperature by as much as 3 °C (5.4 °F). The immediate effects were most profound on Sumbawa and the surrounding islands. Some 80,000 people perished from disease and famine, since crops could not grow.
In 1816, parts of the world as far away as western Europe and eastern North America experienced sporadic periods of heavy snow and killing frost through June, July, and August. Such cold weather events led to crop failures and starvation in those regions, and the year 1816 was called the “year without a summer.” (from Britannica)

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Patrick Queen is 26.

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Across 45 agencies, the Mamdani plan is organized into seven domains and contains more than 200 agency goals, 800 strategies, and 600 indicators.

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The best estimates suggest that, during Newsome's governorship, fraudsters, scammers, and organized crime rings have stolen at least $180 billion from taxpayers. During this period, there were more applications for unemployment than there were Californians over 18.


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At this moment, we have sent 4 humans around the moon and are precisely targeting annoying Iranians from orbit. So why is it that I have two remotes for my TV, and I can't get either to work?

***

Newscastoris Leftus Profundis and Pettifogery

Freedom of speech guarantees disagreements. And only in America can the slightest of slights, the most courteous of discourtesies, find solace and comfort in the redressing arms of an American attorney.

Enter Lawrence O'Donnell, a somber and stark reader of news. He recently unearthed a major national problem: within the joy and pride of the retrieval of the downed weapons officer in Iran, the generously tattooed head of the erstwhile DOD, Mr. Hegseth, reiterated the cliched promise to "leave no man behind."

Mr. O'Donnell felt the gates of Hell shudder. Only his Olympian duty forstalled a swoon. "Men? Just men?" The audience trembled as he dared open the Pandora's Box of Insincerity and Bias. But the intrepid Mr. O'Donnell stood firm. He knew what must be done.

The military was implying that they would not rescue downed women pilots.

If the military refused to rescue women, would they do worse? Would they aid the enemy and reveal the location of the stranded female pilot? Perhaps pin the women down with judicious fire while the enemy approached? JAG offices twittered. Would women dressing as men fare better? Case studies!

Significance grew from this humble seed.

Did Lincoln's "forefathers" inadvertently slip the leash of censorship and reveal an ugly American truth at Gettysburg?

Did Jefferson's "all men are created equal" invalidate the very Constitution it heralded?

One wonders what will befall us when these great minds move on to the truly egalitarian grave.

Hall of Mirrors

On this day:

1789
The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy or the Triumph of Nature Founded in Truth, is printed in Boston, Massachusetts.
1793
After being found guilty of treason by the French Convention, Louis XVI of France is executed by guillotine.
1950
Alger Hiss is convicted of perjury.
1954
The first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, is launched in Groton, Connecticut by Mamie Eisenhower, the First Lady of the United States.
1966
New Year’s Day in Chinese calendar. Start of the year of the Fire Horse in Chinese astrology.
1968
A B-52 bomber crashes near Thule Air Base, contaminating the area after its nuclear payload ruptures. One of the four bombs remains unaccounted for after the cleanup operation is complete.
1977
President Jimmy Carter pardons nearly all American Vietnam War draft evaders, some of whom had emigrated to Canada.
2008
Black Monday in worldwide stock markets. FTSE 100 had its biggest ever one-day points fall, European stocks closed with their worst result since 11 September 2001, and Asian stocks drop as much as 14%.

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Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except the best. -Henry van Dyke, poet (10 Nov 1852-1933)

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What is Gavin Newsom doing in Davos?

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France will delay this year’s Group of 7 summit to avoid a conflict with the mixed martial arts event planned at the White House on Donald Trump’s birthday.

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A meta-analysis of 168 studies encompassing more than 11 million people found no reliable link between economic inequality and either overall well-being or mental health. In other words, living in a place that has large gaps between the rich and the poor does not affect these outcomes.

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Peace and Love. Obama: hope and change. .. Hillary: change, stronger together... Biden: Build Back Better... Harris: First Forward. Then Joy... All these are promises by politicians to deliver those things in unlimited supply.

***

Hall of Mirrors

The Supreme Court has been the great mirror that democracy holds up to itself. It is the moment of clarity, the final judge. Decisions are made, directions deflected, society and men assessed. The Court reflects itself, its culture's thinking, and its people.

Bork showed that the politician would lead with platitudes and distort with lies, innuendo, and media manipulation to achieve the success of his political tribe, sacrificing quality regardless of the quality of the outcome. Thomas' accuser stuck her complaints in every mind, as did the long-past, uncertain memory of Kavanaugh's accuser. All showed the culture's susceptibility to planned manipulation of unproven and unprovable accusations for the purpose of political advancement at the expense of people's reputations and lives. The value of weaponized gossip.

The most recent Supreme Court-mediated social epiphany has just arrived, folded its tent, and moved on into the night. Several states have been sued for denying boys access to girls' sports. In the early presentation, the trans-girl's attorney admitted, under superficial questioning, that she could not define the nature of the principles in the case, her case. She could not define the qualities of the sexual points or the conflicts, and apparently was asking the court to both define them for her and then decide the debate.

Into this intellectual vacuum stepped the esteemed Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, during her confirmation hearing, was unable to define a woman. Here she delivered a soliloquy that made Kamala Harris sound like William Brennings Bryant.

Again, the Court clarifies and defines both them and us.

The Danger of Opinions

On this day:

539 BC
Cyrus the Great marches into the city of Babylon, releasing the Jews from almost 70 years of exile. Cyrus allows the Jews to return to Yehud Medinata and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
1346
Battle of Neville’s Cross: King David II of Scotland is captured by Edward III of England near Durham, and imprisoned in the Tower of London for eleven years.
1448
Second Battle of Kosovo, where the mainly Hungarian army led by John Hunyadi is defeated by an Ottoman army led by Sultan Murad II.
1604
Kepler’s Star: German astronomer Johannes Kepler observes a supernova in the constellation Ophiuchus.
1660
Nine Regicides, the men who signed the death warrant of Charles I, are hanged, drawn and quartered.
1777
American Revolutionary War: British General John Burgoyne surrenders his army at Saratoga, New York.
1781
American Revolutionary War: British General Lord Charles Cornwallis surrenders at the Siege of Yorktown.
1907
Guglielmo Marconi’s company begins the first commercial transatlantic wireless service between Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada and Clifden, Ireland.
1961
Scores of Algerian protesters (some claim up to 400) are massacred by the Paris police at the instigation of Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, then chief of the Prefecture of Police.

***

"As they say in poker, 'If you've been in the game 30 minutes and you don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.'"--Warren Buffett

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YouTube generated more than $36 billion in advertising revenue in 2024, and executives say annual revenue — including subscriptions like YouTube Premium and YouTube Music — tops $50 billion, with revenues shared with the more than 3 million creators in its Partner Program.

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Car repossessions surged to their highest level since 2009 last year with 1.73 million vehicles seized, up 16% from 2023 and 43% from 2022.

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Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker is reported to have won $1.4 million playing blackjack at a casino in Las Vegas while on holiday with his wife and friends.

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The Danger of Opinions

J.K. Rowling has a negative opinion of transgender ideology, and her opinion has exposed her to fierce criticism (note, not 'disagreement'). Our culture has embraced a strange upper-class approval like the old Index, so an asterisk has developed regarding her, like that on Barry Bonds' achievements, requiring her achievements to be taken 'in a certain context.' 

Interestingly, proving her range and depth, she has reinvented herself as the mystery author, (and transgender pseudonym), Robert Galbraith, and has continued her very successful career — including a Netflix series —in her Strike books. The most recent book is her eighth. These are far from Potter, tough men and women in gritty London, with a preference for the brutal and gory.

The third, Career of Evil, is a particularly gruesome story involving apotemnophilia, a curious mental problem where a healthy patient requests the removal of a healthy body part. There is a very subtle--and peripheral-- connection to transgender ideology, revealing Rowling's opinions are clearly thoughtful and well-sourced. Hers is not a casual opinion.

Emma Watson, the actress and a Rowling critic, has tried to blunt this conflict and offered an olive branch. Here is Rowling's response to Watson's efforts.  

Rowling: “I'm seeing quite a bit of comment about this, so I want to make a couple of points.

“I'm not owed eternal agreement from any actor who once played a character I created. The idea is as ludicrous as me checking with the boss I had when I was twenty-one for what opinions I should hold these days.

“Emma Watson and her co-stars have every right to embrace gender identity ideology. Such beliefs are legally protected, and I wouldn't want to see any of them threatened with loss of work, or violence, or death, because of them.

“However, Emma and Dan in particular have both made it clear over the last few years that they think our former professional association gives them a particular right - nay, obligation - to critique me and my views in public. Years after they finished acting in Potter, they continue to assume the role of de facto spokespeople for the world I created.

“When you've known people since they were ten years old it's hard to shake a certain protectiveness. Until quite recently, I hadn't managed to throw off the memory of children who needed to be gently coaxed through their dialogue in a big scary film studio. For the past few years, I've repeatedly declined invitations from journalists to comment on Emma specifically, most notably on the Witch Trials of JK Rowling. Ironically, I told the producers that I didn't want her to be hounded as the result of anything I said.

“The television presenter in the attached clip highlights Emma's 'all witches' speech, and in truth, that was a turning point for me, but it had a postscript that hurt far more than the speech itself. Emma asked someone to pass on a handwritten note from her to me, which contained the single sentence 'I'm so sorry for what you're going through' (she has my phone number). This was back when the death, rape and torture threats against me were at their peak, at a time when my personal security measures had had to be tightened considerably and I was constantly worried for my family's safety. Emma had just publicly poured more petrol on the flames, yet thought a one line expression of concern from her would reassure me of her fundamental sympathy and kindness.

“Like other people who've never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she's ignorant of how ignorant she is. She'll never need a homeless shelter. She's never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward. I'd be astounded if she's been in a high street changing room since childhood. Her 'public bathroom' is single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door. Has she had to strip off in a newly mixed-sex changing room at a council-run swimming pool? Is she ever likely to need a state-run rape crisis centre that refuses to guarantee an all-female service? To find herself sharing a prison cell with a male rapist who's identified into the women's prison?

“I wasn't a multimillionaire at fourteen. I lived in poverty while writing the book that made Emma famous. I therefore understand from my own life experience what the trashing of women's rights in which Emma has so enthusiastically participated means to women and girls without her privileges.

“The greatest irony here is that, had Emma not decided in her most recent interview to declare that she loves and treasures me - a change of tack I suspect she's adopted because she's noticed full-throated condemnation of me is no longer quite as fashionable as it was - I might never have been this honest.

“Adults can't expect to cosy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend's assassination, then assert their right to the former friend's love, as though the friend was in fact their mother. Emma is rightly free to disagree with me and indeed to discuss her feelings about me in public - but I have the same right, and I've finally decided to exercise it.”

It's unclear whether one's life education must include poverty and intimidation to purify it, but depth, intelligence, and goodwill are certainly crucial to success.

Force-Feeding Children

On this day:

1690
Glorious Revolution: Battle of the Boyne (as reckoned under the Julian calendar).
1770
Lexell’s Comet passed closer to the Earth than any other comet in recorded history, approaching to a distance of 0.0146 a.u.
1858
Joint reading of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s papers on evolution to the Linnean Society.
1863
American Civil War: the Battle of Gettysburg begins.
1879
Charles Taze Russell publishes the first edition of the religious magazine The Watchtower.
1898
Spanish-American War: the Battle of San Juan Hill is fought in Santiago de Cuba.
1916
World War I: First day on the Somme – On the first day of the Battle of the Somme 19,000 soldiers of the British Army are killed and 40,000 wounded.
2004
Saturn orbit insertion of Cassini-Huygens begins at 01:12 UTC and ends at 02:48 UTC.

***

The state has accepted a plea bargain in the Idaho murders; the perpetrator will avoid the death penalty. The families of the victims are outraged; they want the death penalty. They want justice. They want revenge.

But is justice the objective of the law? Or is law a social compromise, a system that allows for the resolution of complex problems in a way that avoids the personal and tribal demand for justice? Avoids blood feuds?

Is the law a "social construct?"

***

The dollar has lost 10% of its value over the last year.

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This book (All Quiet on the Western Front) is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war. -Erich Maria Remarque, novelist (22 Jun 1898-1970)

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Raising taxes, substituting social workers for police, and inserting government into private business is a good way to cause the flight of the only people in NYC who can help. As always, the Left creates what it tries to prevent.

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Force-Feeding Children

The Giant-Brained Judge Jackson delivered an impassioned, wide-ranging dissent from the Supreme Court decision to limit LGBT reading material for children. It sounded more like a fundraiser.

Her two main arguments: first, that children could go elsewhere—implying parents have the financial means of a Washington politico—or that universal vouchers existed, which do not exist because the teachers' lobby and Democrats oppose them; second, that education should expose students to different views.

The latter raises an interesting point. We generally believe that a broad education is beneficial. But is this universally applicable? Should children, for example, be taught dialectical materialism and its inevitable, homicidal resolutions? Theories of eugenics? Socialism? Manifest destiny? Should such a broad curriculum have any boundaries? Perhaps students should at least be able to read.

Sexual ambiguity and confusion are challenging topics. Most adults cannot explain the difficulties; many physicians cannot. Definitions have changed and continue to change, and the older medical definitions no longer apply. How a child is supposed to understand all this is quite perplexing.

What is even more perplexing is why any adult believes a child should try.

And all this time, most people thought Giant-Brained Judge Jackson was just pretending not to know what a woman was.

 

Imane Khelif

On this day:

1536
Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, is arrested and imprisoned on charges of adultery, incest, treason, and witchcraft
1568
Mary, Queen of Scots, escapes from Loch Leven Castle.
1611
King James Bible is published for the first time in London, England, by printer Robert Barker.
1808
Outbreak of the Peninsular War: The people of Madrid rise up in rebellion against French occupation. Francisco de Goya later memorializes this event in his painting The Second of May 1808.
1863
American Civil War: Stonewall Jackson is wounded by friendly fire while returning to camp after reconnoitering during the Battle of Chancellorsville. He succumbs to pneumonia eight days later.
1945
World War II: Fall of Berlin: The Soviet Union announces the capture of Berlin and Soviet soldiers hoist their red flag over the Reichstag building.
2008
Cyclone Nargis makes landfall in Myanmar killing over 138,000 people and leaving millions of people homeless.
2011
Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and the FBI’s most wanted man is killed by the United States special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

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Activists who were planning to sail a ship to Gaza say it was struck by drones in international waters off the coast of Malta - appearing to accuse Israel of being behind the attack.
Two months ago, Israel shut all crossings to Gaza, preventing all goods, including food, fuel, and medicines from entering, and later resumed its military offensive, ending a two-month ceasefire with Hamas.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition said it had planned to sail to Gaza with people, including climate activist Greta Thunberg on board, and "challenge Israel's illegal siege and blockade".


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Rightly understood, capitalism is simply the name for the economic component of the natural order of liberty. It means expansive ownership of property, fair and equal rules for all, economic security through prosperity, strict adherence to the boundaries of ownership, opportunity for charity, wise resource use, creativity, growth, development, prosperity, and abundance. Most of all it means the application of the principle that every human person has dignity and should have that dignity respected. --Sirico

This definition, if true, means that opposition to capitalism should be cautious.

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Imane Khelif

Algerian boxer Imane Khelif remained in the news throughout the Paris Olympics 2024 campaign. Labeled as a biological man by many, Khelif went on to win a gold medal in the women's 66kg category despite her eligibility for the competition being questioned. Months after the conclusion of the Paris Games, a new controversy erupted after a leaked medical report confirmed that Khelif was in fact, a genetic male.

She has internal testicles and XY chromosomes. While, unfortunately, there were no hormone levels revealed, as per the report, the condition hints at a disorder called 5-alpha reductase insufficiency.

This is rare. It was first found years ago in a South Pacific family with characteristic physical findings: atypical genitalia (ranging from female-appearing to undervirulized male), hypospadias, and isolated micropenis. There is usually little facial hair and little male pattern baldness. The internal reproductive structures (vasa deferentia, seminal vesicles, epididymides, and ejaculatory ducts) are normal, but the testes are usually undescended, and prostate hypoplasia is common. Fertility in this group is low but occurs.

The basic defect is an autosomal recessive gene responsible for the conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone, a much stronger androgen crucial to male development. Its deletion has no effect on females.

So genetic males with the enzyme defect have a spectrum of developmental abnormalities, but usually appear female at birth, develop some secondary male characteristics at puberty due to rising testosterone levels, but do not convert those rising testosterone levels to the more powerful dihydrotestosterone.

Enterprising pharmaceutical scientists saw an opportunity to shrink prostates medically--and perhaps reduce baldness--so they spent a fortune isolating the missing enzyme and then trying to block it. The result was finasteride, which blocks the enzyme, shrinks the prostate in adults, may limit prostate cancer development, and reduces hair loss. It's sold as Proscar, Avodart, and, cosmetically, as Propecia. So a small subset is applied to all.

Enter the unfortunate Ms. Khelif, world champion.

Gender Surgery

Just for my personal pride, I would like to state that the father of my children was the first American druid in Diablo to clear the abattoir of zir and ended that season as best in the USA. He was also ranking in Polytopia, and beat Felix himself at the game. I did observe these things with my own eyes. There are other witnesses who can verify this. That is all.--Elon Musk’s ex-wife and Canadian musician Claire Grimes Boucher on Twitter

*** 

President Trump said he wants to “clean out” the Gaza Strip and urged Jordan and Egypt to take in refugees either temporarily or for the long term, a move that has been rejected by Arab countries since the war began.

Sometimes talking off the top of your head is not charming.

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I heard an interview with Iran's 'vice president' He was very reasonable and persuasive. The Middle East problem, however, is beyond reason and persuasion.

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China prides itself on having invented paper, gunpowder, printing and the compass, but hasn’t been known for making gigantic innovative breakthroughs since then. Yet, the Middle Kingdom has time and again managed to awe the world with its latest creations.

It’s because the Chinese are masters of a strategy that aims to achieve practical results rather than striving for perfection. DeepSeek is the latest example of the “good-enough” strategy.--Wei

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Gender Surgery

There is little to no evidence that experimental gender procedures improve the mental health of gender-dysphoric children and teens.

The lead researcher of a government-funded study that began in 2015 admitted this week in an interview with the Times that the study did not support the claims of gender activists and explained that she had not released the data out of fear that opponents of gender medicalization would “weaponize” it.

The study, led by Johanna Olson-Kennedy, the medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, is now under investigation by congressional Republicans, National Review reported. Not by Republicans and Democrats. Republicans. So we respond to bias with bias.

Science does not start with understanding, with an assumption to prove; it starts with ignorance and offers a speculation to disprove. One can see the limits here. Aristotle said that, with the right tools, he could cut anything in half. How, for example, can one evaluate a concept that cannot be measured objectively? 

Science is a process, not a belief system. It is incompatible with activism.  

Riley Gaines

"Make America Great Again" was a bid for nostalgia, to return to a place where, you know, people could be in charge of their lives, feel empowered, say what they want, insult whoever came in their way. And that was really attractive to a significant portion of the Republican base. So it is like a cult and somebody has to break that momentum."
Hilary said this. If you read it closely you will see it's very strange and revealing.

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1 percent is roughly the percentage of the American workforce that is unionized and employed in manufacturing.

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A new study published Monday in the medical journal BMJ found that long COVID is virtually indistinguishable from long-haul symptoms after other infections. In other words, the authors suggest long COVID may not be unique from any other respiratory-illness recovery.
What’s clear is public-health officials have massively exaggerated long COVID to scare low-risk Americans, including healthy children.--makary (hopkins)

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Riley Gaines

Riley Gaines is the woman who lost her national swimming championship to Lia nee Will Thomas and is still furious. She has been traveling through the States giving furious speeches on the unfairness of males competing in women's tournaments. She was attacked and held for ransom by campus trans activists at San Francisco State University. She has been giving furious interviews on conservative radio. She has created several furious foundations.

She is a serious, successful, attractive athlete who is intelligent, funny, and makes a good impression and argument. She recently declared September 10th Real Woman's Day because, in Roman numerals, it's XX.

She has now become my favorite gender entrepreneur.

The Wonders of Academia

The human mind grows only through resistance.--Arnold Schwarzenegger

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Amazon’s first pair of prototypes for its Project Kuiper satellite internet system launched on Friday. Project Kuiper is Amazon’s plan to build a network of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit, to provide high-speed internet access anywhere in the world.

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What is the difference between those illegals who are smuggled into the U.S. at checkpoints in vans and cars and trucks and those who just walk over?

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The Wonders of Academia

This is part of a talk Rufo gave to Hillsdale on the origin and financing of the transgender movement. It has some interesting stuff.

'In the late 1980s, a group of academics, including Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, Sandy Stone, and Susan Stryker, established the disciplines of “queer theory” and “transgender studies.” These academics believed gender to be a “social construct” used to oppress racial and sexual minorities, and they denounced the traditional categories of man and woman as a false binary that was conceived to support the system of “heteronormativity”—i.e., the white, male, heterosexual power structure. This system, they argued, had to be ruthlessly deconstructed. And the best way to achieve this, they argued further, was to promote transgenderism. If men can become women, and women men, they believed, the natural structure of Creation could be toppled.

Susan Stryker, a male-to-female transgender professor currently at the University of Arizona, revealed the general thrust and tone of transgender ideology in his Kessler Award Lecture at the City University of New York in 2008, describing his work as “a secular sermon that unabashedly advocates embracing a disruptive and refigurative genderqueer or transgender power as a spiritual resource for social and environmental transformation.” In Stryker’s best-known essay, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” he contends that the “transsexual body” is a “technological construction” that represents a war against Western society. “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster,” Stryker writes. And this monster, he continues, is destined to channel its “rage and revenge” against the “naturalized heterosexual order”; against “‘traditional family values’”; and against the “hegemonic oppression” of nature itself.

One of these people is Jennifer Pritzker, who was born James Pritzker in 1950. After serving several years in the U.S. Army, Pritzker went into business, having inherited a sizable part of the Hyatt hotel fortune. In 2013, he announced a male-to-female gender transition and was celebrated in the press as the “first trans billionaire.” Almost immediately, he began donating untold millions to universities, schools, hospitals, and activist organizations to promote queer theory and trans medical experiments.

This money was allied with political power, as Pritzker’s cousin, Illinois Democrat Governor J.B. Pritzker, signed legislation in 2019, his first year in office, to inject gender theory into the state education curriculum and to direct state Medicaid funds toward transgender surgeries.'

The Life of Riley

Biden opened his press conference in Vietnam on the G20 with a quote from a Vietnam War movie. They announced the conference over while he was speaking.

***

"After 500 years of 3% inflation, $100,000 will be worth 4 cents. If you're not a socialist when you're 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative when you're 40, you have no head. "--Churchill. 

I've never heard that context before.

***

Last year “Big Pharma” spent over $373 million on lobbying.

***

The Life of Riley

Scholars, journalists, politicians, and activists will lavish attention on a small, badly flawed study if it purports to find bias against women, but they’ll ignore—or work to suppress—the wealth of solid research showing the opposite. Three decades ago, psychologists identified the “women-are-wonderful effect,” based on research showing that both sexes tended to rate women more positively than men. This effect has been confirmed repeatedly—women get higher ratings than men for intelligence as well as competence—and it’s obvious in popular culture.

“Toxic masculinity” and “testosterone poisoning” are widely blamed for many problems, but you don’t hear much about “toxic femininity” or “estrogen poisoning.” Who criticizes “femsplaining” or pretends to “believe all men”? If the patriarchy really did rule our society, the stock father character in television sitcoms would not be a “doofus dad” like Homer Simpson, and commercials wouldn’t keep showing wives outsmarting their husbands. (When’s the last time you saw a TV husband get something right?) Smug misandry has been box-office gold for Barbie, which delights in writing off men as hapless romantic partners, leering jerks, violent buffoons, and dimwitted tyrants who ought to let women run the world.

Numerous studies have shown that both sexes care more about harms to women than to men. Men get punished more severely than women for the same crime, and crimes against women are punished more severely than crimes against men. Institutions openly discriminate against men in hiring and promotion policies—and a majority of men as well as women favor affirmative-action programs for women.

The education establishment has obsessed for decades about the shortage of women in some science and tech disciplines, but few worry about males badly trailing by just about every other academic measure from kindergarten through graduate school. By the time boys finish high school (if they do), they’re so far behind that many colleges lower admissions standards for males—a rare instance of pro-male discrimination, though it’s not motivated by a desire to help men. Admissions directors do it because many women are loath to attend a college if the gender ratio is too skewed.

Gender disparities generally matter only if they work against women. In computing its Global Gender Gap, the much-quoted annual report, the World Economic Forum has explicitly ignored male disadvantages: if men fare worse on a particular dimension, a country still gets a perfect score for equality on that measure. Prodded by the federal Title IX law banning sexual discrimination in schools, educators have concentrated on eliminating disparities in athletics but not in other extracurricular programs, which mostly skew female. The fact that there are now three female college students for every two males is of no concern to the White House Gender Policy Council. Its “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” doesn’t even mention boys’ struggles in school, instead focusing exclusively on new ways to help female students get further ahead.--Thierney

Femaleness and its Discontents 2

 

An attack on Chinese engineers in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan was thwarted by Pakistan’s military, leaving two militants dead and the Chinese workers unharmed, police say.

***

New York Mets slugger Daniel Vogelbach had a night to forget as he was booed off the field by his own fans during Friday's defeat to the Atlanta Braves. The Mets were shut out by the Braves bullpen, with Vogelbach putting in an especially disappointing performance.
The slugger struck out four times in the game and didn't manage to record a single hit in five at-bats on the night, causing fans to boo him and call for him to be DFA'd.

The Pirates got Holderman for him, which is probably more galling for the Mets.

***

In the second quarter, people taking hardship withdrawals from their 401(k) was up 12% compared to the first three months of the year and leapt 36% year over year, according to a new survey from Bank of America, which tracks about 4 million clients’ employee benefit programs.

***

Femaleness and its Discontents 2

The parade of horribles continued: “Hate crimes are on the rise.” Mills and her audience picture white Trumpists beating up blacks, Asians, and gays, notwithstanding the fact that hate crime suspects are disproportionately black. Invocation of climate change? Check. Invocation of the “constant threat of gun violence,” which, like climate change, can “feel overwhelming?” Check again. (Actually, the only people facing a “constant threat of gun violence” are residents of inner-city neighborhoods, who may be caught up in the dozens of fatal black-on-black shootings that occur daily across the country. The answer to that threat is proactive policing, a solution that most college presidents would dismiss as racist.)

Mills issued an invitation to a “university-wide conversation, starting today.” That conversation would address how NYU might “create and sustain a fully inclusive community where everyone can thrive.” The invitation was doubly tendentious. Such “conversations” (i.e., one-way harangues) have been going on nonstop for the last decade—see Beilock’s 2018 pledge to ensure that Barnard was an “inclusive environment free from fear and hate.” Second, the implication that NYU is not already a fully inclusive community is absurd. The groups whom Mills and her colleagues insist are being excluded are in fact preferred at every juncture, whether in admissions or hiring. If the beneficiaries of those preferences do not “thrive” at the same rate as members of non-preferred groups, it is because their academic skills are, on average, weaker. That weakness is the reason for preferential policies in the first place.

Other aspects of Mills’s CV are equally emblematic—her research on race and gender, her oversight of NYU’s Abu Dhabi satellite as senior vice provost for Global Programs and University Life, her directorship of NYU’s film Production Lab, and her collaboration with Chelsea Clinton on a documentary. (Filmmaking is not the liberal arts’ comparative advantage—books are. But the filmification of the humanities continues apace.)

The contemporary university is always on the prowl for new sources of income to support its burgeoning bureaucracy. That means going abroad and overlooking violations of academic morality that would be disqualifying locally. Drag queen story hours are celebrated on American campuses, but they might not be welcomed in Abu Dhabi, where cross-dressing is illegal. The Sharia-inspired legal code in the United Arab Emirates allows for execution for homosexual sex acts. But students in Abu Dhabi pay full tuition at higher rates than American students, so NYU’s bureaucrats will focus their attention on what Mills calls “persistent” discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the U.S. To date, one supposed exemplar of such allegedly persistent discrimination, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, has not called for the criminalization of homosexual sex, or for its capital punishment.

The most far-reaching effects of the feminized university are the intolerance of dissent from political orthodoxy and the attempt to require conformity to that orthodoxy. This intolerance is justified in the name of safety and “inclusivity.” It turns out that females and males assess the value of debate and the legitimacy of speech restrictions unequally. The 2022 FIRE College Free Speech Rankings reported “stark” differences in whether female and male undergraduates would allow speakers with “offensive” ideas (such as the belief that abortion should be illegal) to come on campus. In the 2021 FIRE rankings, over 40 percent of students at Barnard and Wellesley (women’s colleges, all) supported the use of violence against dissenters. In a 2018 Knight Foundation survey of over 4,400 college students, reported in Quillette, 71 percent of males agreed that protecting free speech is more important than promoting an inclusive society; 59 percent of females agreed that promoting an inclusive society is more important than protecting free speech. Two-thirds of male psychology professors from top universities polled in 2021 believed that pursuing truth was more important than pursuing social equity if the two conflict; around a third of male respondents said that the issue was “complicated.” Fifty-two percent of female psychologists answered that the issue was complicated, while only 43 percent prioritized truth. A 2017 YouGov survey of over 2000 U.S. adults found that 56 percent of men said that colleges should not protect students from offensive ideas, whereas 64 percent of females said that they should. Men support the development of knowledge that explains reality, even if such knowledge threatens egalitarian norms, whereas females are more willing to suppress such scholarship if it poses “potential moral threats,” as Quillette put it.

As long as the rhetoric of safety, threat, and trauma remains dominant, the push to shut down non-progressive speech will continue. And now the traumification of everyday life, like other modern academic trends, is fast spreading outside the campus. Emotional-healing coaches help the public “navigate” trauma in the “space of healing and self-development,” as a press release for one such coach, Rebeccah Silence, put it. The media operate in full trauma mode. The use of the word “trauma” in New York Times news stories rose by nearly 30 percent between 2020 and 2021 and by nearly 300 percent from 2000 to 2021. In a June 22, 2022, email to the paper’s senior editors, a Times standards editor said that he was sympathetic to this impulse. After all, the standards editor wrote, “mass shootings, a pandemic, war, the murder of George Floyd and an attack on the U.S. Capitol” had left “wounds, shock and scarring in their wake.” A college president could not have put it better. But trauma, the editor suggested, didn’t need to be the Times’s “go-to term for any and all stress, pain, suffering, scarring, shock, agony and wounds.” Alternatives? How about: “stress, pain, suffering, scarring, shock, agony and wounds,” the editor proposed. The possibility that Times news coverage would simply dial back the hysteria was apparently inconceivable.

Colleges have been the conveyor belt into the outside world of safetyism, of the belief that minorities in the U.S. are endemically victimized, and of the ideas that words wound, that certain beliefs equal hate, and that such “hate” should be banned. Linda Mills may not fully subscribe to all those concepts. But she is part of a monumental shift in university life that has put such propositions into widespread circulation and that affects the principles by which we govern ourselves. The feminized university would be unlikely to choose the motto NYU adopted at its founding in 1831, reflecting its working-class, non-entitled self-image: Perstare et Praestare (Persevere and Excel). Excellence is now understood to underwrite white male privilege. Perseverance, absent a helping bureaucrat, is too much to ask of students who are, as irony-proof Princeton protesters put it several years ago, sick and tired of being sick and tired. A better motto for today (not in exclusionary Latin, of course) would be: Fight hate and recover from trauma!'--From Heather Mac Donald in City Journal

Femaleness and its Discontents 1

More than half of Iraqi oil comes from wells with Chinese involvement, and 30% of Iraq’s oil goes to China.

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Pigeons and doves are technically the same exact animal. In fact, the only real difference is in the name: the word "dove" is more Nordic, while "pigeon" has a French origin. Despite the fact that there's no big difference between the birds, some people tend to categorize them by size, dubbing bigger birds pigeons, while smaller ones are typically called doves.

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There is enough salt in the ocean to cover the Earth's entire surface. If all of the salt was spread out across the entire planet, it would reportedly be about 500 feet thick, or the height of a 40-story office building. Most of the salt in the ocean comes from rocks on land and is typically transported by rainwater runoff.

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Femaleness and its Discontents 1

Pitt has appointed a new president, a woman who will join part of a revolution in education bureaucracy and sensibility. Here's part of an article that believes the advancement of women in academia is not an 'advance,' it's a symptom.

'New York University’s selection of its new president is Linda Mills, a licensed clinical social worker, and an NYU social work professor. She researches trauma and bias, as well as race and gender in the legal academy.

Seventy-five percent of Ivy League presidents are now female. Nearly half of the 20 universities ranked highest by Forbes will have a female president this fall, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia. Of course, feminist bean-counters in the media and advocacy world are not impressed, noting that “only” 5 percent of the 130 top U.S. research universities are headed by a black female and “only” 22 percent of those federal grant-magnets have a non-intersectional (i.e., white) female head.

These female leaders emerge from an ever more female campus bureaucracy, whose size is reaching parity with the faculty. Females made up 66 percent of college administrators in 2021; those administrators constitute an essential force in campus diversity ideology, whether they have “diversity” in their job titles or not. Among the official diversity bureaucrats installed in their posts since July 2022, females predominate

Mirroring the feminization of the bureaucracy is the feminization of the student body. Females earned 58 percent of all B.A.s in the 2019–2020 academic year; if present trends continue, they will soon constitute two-thirds of all B.A.s. At least 60 percent of all master’s degrees, and 54 percent of all Ph.D.s, now go to females.

Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma. For university females, there is not, apparently, strength in numbers. The more females’ ranks increase, the more we hear about a mass nervous breakdown on campus. Female students disproportionately patronize the burgeoning university wellness centers, massage therapies, relaxation oases, calming corners, and healing circles. Another newly installed female college president, Dartmouth’s Sian Leah Beilock, claims that the two “most pressing challenges of our time” are the “mental crisis among young people” and climate change. College institutions “really have a part to play in how we support students” suffering from that mental health crisis, Beilock tweeted recently. (A psychologist, Beilock specializes in improving female success in science by combatting performance anxiety, making her another overdetermined choice for university president.)

Female dominance of the campus population is intimately tied to the rhetoric of unsafety and victimhood. Females on average score higher than males on the personality trait of neuroticism, defined as anxiety, emotional volatility, and susceptibility to depression. (Mentioning this long-accepted psychological fact got James Damore fired from Google.) Victorian neurasthenia has been reborn on campuses today as alleged trauma inflicted by such monuments of Western literature as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Hearing an argument that chromosomes, not whim, make males male and females female is another source of alleged existential threat.

When students claim to be felled by ideas that they disagree with, the feminized bureaucracy does not tell them to grow up and get a grip. It validates their self-pity. On taking the helm of Barnard College in 2018 before ascending four years later to Dartmouth, Beilock pledged to ensure that the college was an “inclusive environment free from fear and hate.” Both terms are overwrought. There is nothing at Barnard or any other American campus that could rationally be cause for “fear” (apart from the possible incursion of violent street crime from surrounding areas); there has never been a more welcoming, supportive, and tolerant institution in human history than a college campus, at least toward humanity’s traditionally marginalized groups. Likewise, “hate” can be found here only under its new definition as a disfavored ideological position—the position, say, that seven-year-olds should not have premature knowledge of sexuality forced upon them via in-school “gender” instruction.

Given the ubiquity on campuses of the language of vulnerability, it is fitting that Linda Mills’s social work specialty is trauma. Her trauma research has centered on domestic violence, where the concept has legitimate applications. But the claim that NYU is a place of pervasive unsafety will likely get an additional boost from Mills’s ascendancy. In her letter of introduction as NYU’s president-designate, Mills adopted the fateful vocabulary of hurt and trauma. “We are a community that is hurting,” Mills asserted, especially after the “traumatic effects” of the pandemic. (The real hurt was inflicted by the unnecessary lockdowns, whose victims were not NYU’s bureaucrats, professors, or even most of its students, but rather small-business owners deprived of livelihoods and children whose parents did not have the capacity to homeschool them. The record does not reflect an effort by NYU’s leaders to combat those lockdowns.)

Mills portrayed the U.S. as endemically biased: “In the United States and elsewhere, we are struggling to address persistent inequalities and discrimination, whether based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, or other factors.” This by-now reflexive condemnation of alleged American bigotry is at best an awkward, and at worst an irrelevant, importation into a president’s first message to her university. In an alternative world, Mills might have celebrated the joy of learning and the grandeur of the Western tradition. But in any case, the real “struggle” should be to close the academic skills gaps whose effects the academy then attributes to racism.'--From Heather Mac Donald in City Journal (to be continued)

 

Equality/Equity Under Attack

Interesting discussion between Sanders and Maher on HBO. Maher asked Sanders the definition of 'Equality' vs. 'Equity' and which he preferred. It was clear Sanders preferred to confuse the two but, when pressed, chose 'Equality.' The others on the stage got upset. Forcing the definition and clarifying the distinction unmasked even Sanders.

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The House and Senate passed an anti-ESG bill.

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Four U.S. citizens have been kidnapped after gunmen opened fire on their vehicle in the northern Mexico border city of Matamoros, the FBI said Sunday.

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"The Bad People thought the lab leak might be true, therefore as journalists we couldn't be expected to actually evaluate the evidence for it."--Nate Silver


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Equality/Equity Under Attack

Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the brains of men and women shows women have a far greater capacity for communicating with and evaluating people than men do. Women have between fourteen and sixteen areas of the brain to evaluate others' behavior versus a man's four to six areas.

The female brain is organized for multitracking -- the average woman can juggle between two and four unrelated topics at the same time. She can talk about several unrelated topics in one conversation and use five vocal tones to change the subject or emphasize points. Most men can only identify three of these tones and often lose the plot when women are trying to communicate with them. 

Vision is a factor too. Most men's close-range and peripheral vision is far poorer than women's.

Constructs

When competition is working as a process, some competitors are almost certain to be hurt. Those for whom equality is not just an ideal but a dogma simply cannot accept this. Sinister theories are one result of their attempts to reconcile their dogma with a reality that repeatedly mocks it.--Sowell

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“If you undertake to divide all these appropriations and have many committees where there ought to be but one, you will enter upon a path of extravagance that you cannot foresee the length of or the depth of, until we find the treasury of the country bankrupt.”--Samuel Randall in 1885

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There’s always been an irony in the haughtiness of America’s coastal elites. These people look down on Middle Americans and their cranky beliefs – they ‘cling’ to religion, as Obama infamously said – and yet they themselves hold far wackier views. They think there’s a hundred genders. That racism is the original sin of the United States that will never be washed away. That whites must engage in the self-mortification of checking their privilege. And that climate change is Mother Nature’s punishment of mankind for his hubristic industrial antics. That last one is positively pre-modern. It makes the other religions in the US look perfectly sane.--O'Neill

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Constructs

According to a recently released report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, a center-right think tank that researches partisanship in academic and scientific fields, almost 40 percent of students at liberal arts colleges identify as LGBTQ.

The data used to compile the report show that overall 23 percent of U.S. college students identify as LGBTQ

At three of the 159 campuses surveyed, a majority of students identified as LGBTQ. This was true of 51 percent of students at Oberlin, 61 percent at Wellesley, and an incredible 70 percent at Smith College. The latter two are women-only schools.

What could this mean? We are strong enough to forge ourselves in any identity? We are shallow and rootless enough that any soil is nourishing? Identity is as thin as a chameleon's color? Are identities a simple matter of belief? Or declaration? And, if so, what about other doctrines?

Testimony

 Testimony

From a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Berkeley Law School Professor Khiara Bridges and Sen. Josh Hawley, Tuesday:

Hawley: "Professor Bridges, you said several times, you've used a phrase I want to make sure I understand what you mean by it," Hawley told Berkeley Law School Professor Khiara Bridges. You referred to people with 'a capacity for pregnancy.' Would that be women?"

Bridges: "Many women, cis women have the capacity for pregnancy, many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy as well as non-binary people who are capable of pregnancy."

Hawley: "So this isn't really a women rights issue it's a -- what?"

Bridges: "We can recognize that this impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups. Those things are not mutually exclusive, Senator Hawley."

Hawley: "Oh, so your view is that the core of this right, then, is about what?"

Bridges: "So I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic, and it opens up trans people to violence by not recognizing them."

Hawley: "Wow, you're saying that I'm opening up people to violence by asking whether or not women are the folks that can have pregnancies?"

Bridges: "So I want to note that one out of five transgender persons has attempted suicide. So I think it's important--"

Hawley: "Because of my line of questioning? We can't talk about it?"

Bridges: "Because denying that trans people exist and pretending not to know that they exist --"

Hawley: "I'm denying that trans people exist by asking you if you're talking about women?"

Bridges: "Are you? Are you? Are you? Do you believe that men can get pregnant?!"

Hawley: "No, I don't think men can get pregnant."

Bridges: "So you're denying that trans people exist."

Hawley: "And that leads to violence? Is this how you run your classroom, are students allowed to question you, or are they also treated like this? Or are they opening up people to violence?

Bridges: "We have a good time in my class, you should join. You might learn a lot."

Hawley: "Well, I would learn a lot. I've learned a lot from this exchange. Extraordinary."

Something Else in 'Transition'

 

Something Else in 'Transition'

In much of the developed world, referrals to gender clinics and diagnoses of gender dysphoria have been on a steep incline in a short period of time.

The graph (above) by Trans Youth CAN!, a study of youth referred for puberty blockers and hormones in Canada, shows a tiny number of young people—the majority male—sought care until 2007 at a gender clinic in British Columbia. Since then, the number of referrals has grown more than tenfold, and the majority are now female. The Netherlands saw a similar trend. The UK’s Gender Identity Development Service reports an almost 4,000 percent increase in ten years, also shifting from majority males to females, the great bulk of them teenagers. In the past, the majority of referrals were young children or adult males.--eSkeptic 

Bill Maher says that, if you extend the curve out, everyone in the country will be gay by 2050.

Truth in Variables

 

                 Truth in Variables

Here is part of a weird article from JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, about the racial background and sexual behavior of medical journal editors, things you probably weren't thinking about. The concept must be important, though, because they wrote about it. Maybe height is the next variable.

"At 25 leading medical and scientific journals, our survey found nearly equal numbers of men and women editors, more than 75% White editors, about 15% Asian editors, very few Black, Hispanic, Latinx, or of Spanish origin editors, and no editors that identified as American Indian or Native American. For the US-based journals, the percentage of editors who identified as Black (1.1%) can be compared with 3.6% of US medical school faculty, 5.0% of practicing physicians in the US,³ and 13.0% of US adults⁴ who are Black; the editors who identified as Hispanic, Latinx, or of Spanish origin (3.8%) can be compared with 5.5% of medical school faculty, 5.8% of practicing physicians,³ and 16.4% of adults⁴ with these ethnicities. Data about sexual orientation and gender minority individuals (ie, nonbinary, transgender) in comparable populations are limited. About 11% to 12% of US medical school students identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer⁵; this can be compared with approximately 9% of editors, although none identified as transgender.

Our findings, although limited to a sample of 25 journals, provide novel data on multiple aspects of editor diversity via self-report, not assumptions about an editor’s identity based on a name or photograph. We could not, however, determine if the 368 editors who responded have similar characteristics to the 286 (43.7%) who did not. "

There was one brave comment, supportive of what the writer felt was an important article. No one commented on the curious rate of homosexuality that is almost 10x the reported national average. And neither the article nor a commentator suggested what, if anything, made these demographics important.

Disparities

Is Critical Theory an example of Begging the Question?

                                         Disparities

In 2018, women earned 62% or more of the bachelor’s degrees in 9 out of the 16 academic fields: Health Professions (84.5% and the greatest gender disparity for either sex for the 16 majors), Public Administration (82.8% and the field with the second-highest gender imbalance), Education (81.6% and the field with the third-highest gender disparity), Psychology (78.9%), English (70.8%), Foreign Languages (68.8%), Communication and Journalism (65.5%), Biology (62.2%) Visual and Performing Arts (61.4%).

Women have earned a majority of degrees in Biology in every year since 1988, and have earned more than 60% of those degrees in 8 of the last 17 years, including a peak 62.2% share in both 2004 and 2018.

Women have never earned fewer than 60% of bachelor’s degrees in any year of the following since 1971: Health Professions, Public Administration, Education, English, Foreign Languages, and Visual/Performing Arts. For Psychology, women have earned a majority share every year since 1974, a 60% share or greater starting in 1979, a 70% share or greater starting in 1988 and a 75% share or greater starting in 1999.

For the four academic fields of Business, Architecture, Math and Statistics, and Physical Sciences, women earned a slight minority of those degrees in 2018 ranging between 40.0% for Physics and 47.1% for Architecture. For the other two of the four fields, women earned 42.4% of Math/Statistics degrees, 47.0% of Business degrees. For degrees in Business, the female share exceeded 50% in 2002, 2003 and 2004 but then has gradually declined since then to a 47.0% share in 2018, the lowest share since 1990.

Over the 1971 to 2018 period, the three largest increases in the female shares of degrees were in Business (from 9.1% to 47.0% = +37.9 percentage points), Architecture (from 11.9% to 47.1% = +35.2 percentage points) and Psychology (from 44.4% to 78.9% +34.5 percentage points).

In 2018, the female shares of bachelor’s degrees in all of the 16 academic fields except Business increased from the previous year. The biggest annual increase in 2018 by academic field was the 1.8 percentage point increase in the female share of engineering degrees from 20.4% in 2017 to 22.2% in 2018, a new all-time high.

McCarthyism

                                                     McCarthyism

Sometimes, math and science people just don't get nuance.

This is from Professor Abigail Thompson, chair of the math department at the University of California-Davis, and a vice-president of the American Mathematical Society, who writes that today’s required diversity statements for jobs in higher education are dangerously reminiscent of the political litmus tests of the McCarthy era:

Mandating diversity statements for university job candidates is reminiscent of events of seventy years ago. In 1950 the Regents of the University of California required all UC faculty to sign a statement asserting that “I am not a member of, nor do I support any party or organization that believes in, advocates, or teaches the overthrow of the United States Government, by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional means, that I am not a member of the Communist Party.” Eventually 31 faculty members were fired over their refusal to sign. Faculty at universities across the country are facing an echo of the loyalty oath, a mandatory “Diversity Statement” for job applicants.

The professed purpose is to identify candidates who have the skills and experience to advance institutional diversity and equity goals. In reality it’s a political test, and it’s a political test with teeth. What are the teeth? Nearly all UC campuses require that job applicants submit a “contributions to diversity” statement as a part of their application. The campuses evaluate such statements using rubrics, a detailed scoring system. Several UC programs have used these diversity statements to screen out candidates early in the search process.
…..
Why is it a political test? Politics are a reflection of how you believe society should be organized. Classical liberals aspire to treat every person as a unique individual, not as a representative of their gender or their ethnic group. The sample rubric dictates that in order to get a high diversity score, a candidate must have actively engaged in promoting different identity groups as part of their professional life. The candidate should demonstrate “clear knowledge of, experience with, and interest in dimensions of diversity that result from different identities” and describe “multiple activities in depth.” Requiring candidates to believe that people should be treated differently according to their identity is indeed a political test.

The idea of using a political test as a screen for job applicants should send a shiver down our collective spine. Whatever our views on communism, most of us today are in agreement that the UC loyalty oaths of the 1950s were wrong. Whatever our views on diversity and how it can be achieved, mandatory diversity statements are equally misguided.

Imposing a political litmus test is not the way to achieve excellence in mathematics or in the university. Not in 1950, and not today.

STEM, Gender and AP

                            STEM, Gender, and AP

Discrimination in its numerous subtle guises is offered to explain the differences in STEM gender disparities. But here’s another possible explanation for the female shortages in STEM and economics starting in high school: Boys have a greater interest than their female counterparts in STEM and economics and demonstrate a higher level of aptitude in STEM and economics. In all 14 STEM and economics AP subjects as shown in the top two graphs, high school boys out-perform high school girls based on average test scores in 2019. More high school boys than girls received scores of 5 (the highest score) in the 13 subjects, and in some cases (three of the physics subjects) the male-female ratio was more than 4-to-1. In other subjects (Microeconomics, Computer Science and Physics Mechanics), the male-female ratio was greater than 2-to-1.

These graphs are from Perry.

Gender Disparities

                    Gender Disparities



(From Perry)