Tuesday, April 30, 2024

How Noem Killed her Dog

News
Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor and Republican vice-presidential hopeful, may have committed a class two misdemeanor offence when her fated dog Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehair pointer Noem deemed “untrainable” for hunting pheasant, killed a neighbor’s chickens.

Under South Dakota law, “any person owning, keeping, or harboring a dog that chases, worries, injures, or kills any poultry or domestic animal is guilty of a class two misdemeanor and is liable for damages to the owner thereof for any injury caused by the dog to any such poultry or animal.” ...

Section 40-34-1 of the South Dakota codified laws – Killing of dog lawful when disturbing domestic animals – says: “It shall be lawful for any person to kill any dog found chasing, worrying, injuring, or killing poultry or domestic animals except on the premises of the owners of said dog or dogs.”

Noem writes that she killed Cricket on her own property.

So she was legally required to get rid of her dog, but only authorized to kill it on someone else's property? Weird.

Apparently a lot of dog lovers think it is fine to keep a nuisance dog that terrorizes the neighbors.

Monday, April 29, 2024

England to be Dependent on African Immigrants

The London Independent reports:
Falling birth rates in the UK will leave the country reliant on immigration for the next 80 years, new research has suggested.

By 2100, Britain along with 198 countries will have fertility rates below what is necessary to sustain population size over time, according to a study published in The Lancet.

The analysis in the Global Burden of Disease, Injuries, and Risk Factors study predicts that sub-Saharan Africa will account for one in every two children born on the planet by the end of the century.

Meanwhile in Western Europe, the total fertility rate – the average number of children born to women of childbearing age – is predicted to be 1.44 in 2050, dropping to 1.37 in 2100.

In the UK, the total fertility rate was 2.19 in 1950, dropping to 1.85 in 1980 and then 1.49 in 2021. That is well below the rate of 2.1 needed to maintain a steady population without significant immigration.

If that is not clear enough, the article goes on to recite some contradictory propaganda.
“And once nearly every country’s population is shrinking, reliance on open immigration will become necessary to sustain economic growth.
No, if all countries were shrinking, immigration would not help at all. Instead, some countries are expanding, while others are shrinking. Overall, the Earth's population is increasing by 80 million per year.
“Sub-Saharan African countries have a vital resource that ageing societies are losing – a youthful population.”
No, if people thought that babies were a vital resource, then they would have more babies.
She added: “There is very real concern that, in the face of declining populations and no clear solutions, some countries might justify more draconian measures that limit reproductive rights.
No, draconian measures would be to expand reproduction, not limit it. Or maybe it means some countries will force women to have babies. Not sure how that would work.
“It is well established that nations with strong women’s rights are more likely to have better health outcomes and faster economic growth.
GDP counts women in the paid labor force, but not moms taking care of babies. So persuading women to not have babies will increase GDP, but that is just an artifact of how it is calculated.

The US Govt regularly brags about increasing GDP, but it does not keep pace with population increases, so there is no gain in per capita GDP.

“It is imperative women’s rights are promoted and protected and that women are supported in having the number of children they wish and pursuing their careers.”
If increasing the birth rate is really so important, then we would not leave it to the whims and wishes of individual women.

So here is the plan for the 21st century. Use feminism to convince Western women that they have a right to be wage slaves, instead of having babies. Enjoy increased GDP. Import sub-saharan Africans to replace the babies they would have had.

Sunday, April 28, 2024

Musk endorses Great Replacement Theory

Elon Musk retweeted this:
Eva Vlaardingerbroek

Here it is! The full speech I gave at #CPACHungary that the establishment is losing its absolute mind about.

I spoke the forbidden truth: The Great Replacement is no longer a theory - it’s reality. White Europeans are being replaced in their own countries at an ever accelerating rate and it will mean the end of our civilization if we don’t turn things around.

Musk adds that the Replacement is accelerated by low White birth rates.

Some will say that this is a good thing, because it is leading to a more diverse and equitable world. I doubt it, but this is important, and we should have an open and honest debate about it.

Explain to me exactly why it is good that London, Amsterdam, Ireland, Sweden, etc. have had hugh demographic shifts? The result is almost entirely negative.

Saturday, April 27, 2024

Pres. Biden is Losing Support

Donald Trump tweets:
Crooked Joe Biden would say, constantly, that he ran because of Charlottesville. Well, if that’s the case, he’s done a really terrible job because Charlottesville is like a “peanut” compared to the riots and anti-Israel protests that are happening all over our Country, RIGHT NOW….And it’s Crooked’s fault because he sends the wrong message every single time. The fact is that Crooked Joe Biden HATES Israel and Hates the Jewish people. The problem is that he HATES the Palestinians even more, and he just doesn’t know what to do!?!?
Pres. Biden approval rating is the lawest ever, for a President in his 13th quarter.

I think the big issues are immigration, inflation, foreign policy, and LGBTQ issues. He is deeply unpopular on all of these. Plus his family is correct, and he is too denile to do the job.

The Democrats have bet the campaign on trying to convict Trump of the supposed crime of describing a legal expense as a legal expense. Nobody can explain what is criminal about what he did. The NY prosecutor says that there is a loophole in the law where they only have to convince a jury of criminal intent, without actually specifying a crime.

Biden did say several times that he ran for President because several peaceful protesters in Charlottesville chanted "Jews will not replace us." Or maybe it was "You will not replace us." So he has tried his best to replace White Americans.

Friday, April 26, 2024

Harvey Weinstein Conviction Overturned

AP reports:
New York’s highest court on Thursday overturned Harvey Weinstein ’s 2020 rape conviction, finding the judge at the landmark #MeToo trial prejudiced the ex-movie mogul with “egregious” improper rulings, including a decision to let women testify about allegations that weren’t part of the case.

“We conclude that the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes,” the court’s 4-3 decision said. “The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”

The state Court of Appeals ruling reopens a painful chapter in America’s reckoning with sexual misconduct by powerful figures — an era that began in 2017 with a flood of allegations against Weinstein. His accusers could again be forced to retell their stories on the witness stand.

The court’s majority said “it is an abuse of judicial discretion to permit untested allegations of nothing more than bad behavior that destroys a defendant’s character but sheds no light on their credibility as related to the criminal charges lodged against them.”

This was a strange case. The news media was filled with reports of as many as 100 accusers, and yet there was no firm evidence. The main accuser in court was contradicted by a lot of evidence that the affair was consensual.

Weinstein was only convicted by convincing the jury that Weinstein had a pattern of bad behavior, as indicated by uncharged accusations.

Here is the court opinion.

I previously posted that Weinstein is innocent, and did not get a fair NY trial. I did not follow the LA trial.

Another trial disaster is the various charges against the founders of Backpage, an online service similar to Craigslist. Here is the latest:

A federal judge has acquitted Backpage co-founder Michael Lacey of dozens of counts, including a majority of those on which federal prosecutors planned to retry Lacey later this year. U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa also acquitted former Backpage executives Jed Brunst and Scott Spear on multiple counts of which they were convicted by a jury last fall.
This was a big story because of the sex trafficking charges, but they all appear bogus. Lacey was just found guilty of "international concealment of money laundering", whatever that is.

The feds were out to shut down Backpage because some prostitutes liked to advertise on it, but it was really just an ad site, and the company should not have been liable for personal ads. The feds claimed that there were underage girls on the site, but I don't think anyone proved that.

Thursday, April 25, 2024

Three types of anti-science Misinformation

Our scientific publications have been corrupted.

SciAm reports:

Here’s Why Human Sex Is Not Binary

This is bad science. The production of gametes does not sufficiently describe sex biology in animals, nor is it the definition of a woman or a man.

The animal kingdom does not limit itself to only one biological binary regarding how a species makes gametes. Scientifically speaking, animals with the capacity to produce ova are generally called “female” and sperm producers “male.” While most animal species fall into the “two types of gametes produced by two versions of the reproductive tract” model, many don’t. Some worms produce both. Some fish start producing one kind and then switch to the other, and some switch back and forth throughout their lives. There are even lizards that have done away with one type all together.

So sex is binary throughout the animal kingdom, except for some worms. And sex is immutable except for some fish.

Mammal sex is binary.

Another SciAm article:

How Anti-Trans Efforts Misuse and Distort Science

Three types of misinformation are being used against transgender people: oversimplifying scientific knowledge, fabricating and misinterpreting research and promoting false equivalences ...

Many of the arguments against trans rights center on the idea that transness itself is not legitimate—that there are just two sexes, period. You describe this idea as “sex essentialism.” ...

Essentialism is the idea that you can take any phenomenon that is complex and distill it down to a particular set of traits. In the case of sex essentialism, the idea is that you can sufficiently describe sex by a few particular characteristics. In this debate, it used to be chromosomes, now it’s gametes (egg and sperm cells). The target is always moving, because if you want to make something binary, then you need to find the most binary characteristic. Today, sex essentialism boils all of sex down to the gametes that a person produces. Then you draw a line from gametes to all of these other characteristics—to sex roles, even to the personality of an entire individual.

Biologists have used gametes to define sex for about a century. And yes, there are just two sexes, period.
Today dishonest ascriptions of what biology is are being deployed to restrict women’s bodily autonomy, target LGBTQIA+ individuals broadly and, most recently, attack the rights of transexual and transgender people.

Given what we know about biology across animals and in humans, efforts to represent human sex as binary based solely on what gametes one produces are not about biology but are about trying to restrict who counts as a full human in society.

This is crazy stuff. Why the talk about "women’s bodily autonomy", if it denies the difference between men and women? Why "transexual and transgender people" -- do these trans people try to change their sex or their gender? No one is "trying to restrict who counts as a full human in society".

Science is corrupted.

Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Islamized Europe or a European Europe?

NY Times:
“There’s just one question on voting day. Do you want an Islamized Europe or a European Europe?”

This stark choice was posed by Marion MarĂ©chal, a rising star of the French far right, at the launch of her party’s campaign for the European elections in June. In an incendiary speech, she spoke of a Europe under siege from “many foreign powers and Islamist organizations profiting from anarchic immigration in their efforts at destabilization, subverting our youth, organizing something like a Fifth Column in our countries and recruiting deadly jihadist soldiers.” She was joined by a stream of speakers bewailing a European project hijacked by L.G.B.T.Q. activists, environmental fanatics and anti-Western ideologues. ...

While Ms. MarĂ©chal’s Reconquest party sulfurously accuses elites of orchestrating a Great Replacement of Christians by Muslims, it seeks its own place in the corridors of power.

Yesm there is a Great Replacement. Not sure what makes it "sulfurous".

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Biden continues to push Evil Policies

The Biden admministration has been a disaster for migrant inflow, inflation, foreign wars, and DoJ lawfare.

Here are some lesser policies that are also disasters. AP reports:

The Sheetz convenience store chain has been hit with a lawsuit by federal officials who allege the company discriminated against minority job applicants.

Sheetz Inc., which operates more than 700 stores in six states, discriminated against Black, Native American and multiracial job seekers by automatically weeding out applicants whom the company deemed to have failed a criminal background check, according to U.S. officials.

In other words, Blacks are criminals but employers have to hire them anyway.

FIRE reports:

Today the Department of Education released troubling new rules on how colleges investigate campus sexual misconduct allegations. The bottom line: Students who find themselves in a campus hearing are now less likely to receive a fair shake. ...

The rules:

  • Eliminate the right to a live hearing to contest the allegations.
  • Eliminate the right to cross-examine one’s accuser and witnesses.
  • Weaken the right to be represented by lawyers in campus sexual misconduct expulsion proceedings.
  • Require colleges to adopt a definition of sexual harassment which will inevitably be used to censor constitutionally protected speech.
  • Allow for the return of the “single-investigator” model, in which a single administrator serves as prosecutor, judge, and jury.
And Biden is pushing transgender grooming in the schools.

Monday, April 22, 2024

Judge with Vagina Engenders Confusion

Canada news:
The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a recent sexual assault case that it was “problematic” for a lower court judge to refer to the alleged victim as a “woman,” implying that the more appropriate term should have been “person with a vagina.”

In a decision published Friday, Justice Sheilah Martin wrote that a trial judge’s use of the word “a woman” may “have been unfortunate and engendered confusion.”

Martin does not specify why the word “woman” is confusing, but the next passage in her decision refers to the complainant as a “person with a vagina.” Notably, not one person in the entire case is identified as transgender, and the complainant is referred to throughout as a “she.”

The transgender folks are mentally ill, but what is her excuse? How did she get on the Canada supreme court if she cannot call a woman a woman?

Sunday, April 21, 2024

Cut Funding for Public TV and Radio

Here is NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher on the truth.

There has been a lot of press on this, but isn't it obvious? Their editorial board has 87 Democrats and 0 Republicans. In the last year, it has run about 2000 pro-Biden stories, and 0 pro-Trump stories. An NPR listener would have no idea why anyone ever voted for Trump.

PBS TV is just as bad. If Republicans were really ruling as Republicans, they would cut off govt funding for PBS TV and NPR Radio. They never have a balanced treatment of anything.

The current NPR CEO is the symptom, not the cause. Ask yourself: how does such a wacky woman get such a big job?

The Hill reported a year ago:

It was tendentious — and inaccurate — for Elon Musk to identify NPR on his Twitter platform as a “government-affiliated” news organization. NPR may have its biases, notably in its story selection, but to class it in the same category as the New China News Agency or, in their day, Pravda or Tass, is both argumentative and absurd. ...

NPR may receive little direct federal funding, but a good deal of its budget comprises federal funds that flow to it indirectly by federal law. Here’s how it works: Under the terms of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, funds are allocated annually to a non-governmental agency, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, overseen by a board of presidential appointees.

It is like China News or Pravda. It is anti-Trump and woke, all day, every day.

Saturday, April 20, 2024

Cofnas Fired for criticizing Diversity

The London Telegraph reports:
Nathan Cofnas, an early career research fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy, is reported to have had his research affiliation with Emmanuel College terminated.

The lecturer had said that in a meritocracy, “blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” and dismissed racial equality as “based on lies”. ...

“The committee first considered the meaning of the blog and concluded that it amounted to, or could reasonably be construed as amounting to, a rejection of diversity, equality and inclusion policies,” the newspaper quoted the letter as saying.

“The committee concluded that the core mission of the college was to achieve educational excellence and that diversity and inclusion were inseparable from that. The ideas promoted by the blog therefore represented a challenge to the college’s core values and mission.” ...

a 2019 article by Mr Cofnas claiming that there were “gaps” in IQ between different racial groups.

No academic freedom anymore.

If Cofnas were wrong on the facts, someone would write an academic paper proving him wrong. Nope. They fire him because he is right.

I have previously mentioned Cofnas, such as here, on Jewish evolutionary strategy. I do not think he is always right, but he addresses important issues with reason and data.

In a survey of taboo questions, the intersection of race and IQ tops the list.

Friday, April 19, 2024

Leftist Scientists Defend Cannibalism

I am always wondering what the next step Leftists will use to try to bring down civilization.

NewScientist reports:

Is it time for a more subtle view on the ultimate taboo: cannibalism? ...

IT IS the ultimate taboo: in most societies, the idea of one human eating another is morally repugnant. Even in circumstances where it could arguably be justified, such as when a plane crashed in the Andes in 1972 and starving passengers ate the dead to survive, we still have a deep aversion to cannibalism. ...

Ethically, cannibalism poses fewer issues than you might imagine.

No, there was no need for the passengers to eat the dead to survive. All they had to do was to send a couple of players on the soccer team to hike into town to call for help. But they were too lazy, until half of them were dead.

The article does not mention Haiti, but it appears to be written to make us have a more favorable view towards places like that.

Also, Biden Implies His Uncle Bosey Was Eaten by Cannibals.

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

French First Lady to Prove She is a Woman

The NY Post reports:
France’s elegant first lady, Brigitte Macron, is about to take the extraordinary step of going to trial in a Paris court to fight a conspiracy theory — amplified last month by American conservative commentator Candace Owens — that she was born a man.

Brigitte, 70, has long been the subject of fascination because of her marriage to the much younger Emmanuel Macron, 46. The two met in northern France when he was a 15-year-old student and she was his drama teacher, and wed in 2007.

Mme. Macron’s libel trial is set for June, where she will face off against the right-wing accuser and freelance journalist Natacha Rey, who hides behind avatars to push rumors that powerful members of the French establishment are hiding Brigitte’s true identity. ...

“In recent weeks, particularly internationally via the Trumpist influencer Candace Owens, I felt that the harm to my clients was increasing day by day,” Ennochi said.

This is not any more ridiculous than raising questions about Pres. Barack Obama's birth certificate. When our leaders behave strangely, we need proof that they are what they say they are.

Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Democrats depend on Crazy Single Women

Jennifer Galardi writes:
Last month, conservative news host Jesse Kelly told Megyn Kelly on her podcast that “the mentally ill single woman is the beating heart of the Democrat Party.”

He proclaimed over 70 percent of single women vote Democrat. Furthermore, he declared that “studies” show approximately 60 percent of those women had been diagnosed with some sort of mental illness.

Kelly (the man) joked that everyone knows a woman with “her eyes half bugged out of her skull. … She ruins Thanksgiving every time bragging about her 15th abortion!” While Kelly’s exaggerations made me laugh, I simultaneously thought to myself, Oh crap. He’s talking about me. Or at least who I used to be.

Married women and mentally stable women support Trump.

She got some pushback, and followed up:

As much as they whine about “gender” being a social construct, women have inherently feminine traits that predispose them to liberal or progressive values....

The left weaponizes women’s tendency to be more caring and nurturing. They play on emotions all women likely have felt at some point in their lives — the feeling of being taken advantage of, dispossessed, or patronized. Women who have not yet disposed of the victim narrative will continue to empathize with it and stand with their “brothers and sisters.”

Monday, April 15, 2024

Press Tries to Deny that Crime is Up

SciAm reports:
Why We Believe the Myth of High Crime Rates

The crime issue, a focus of the 2024 presidential election, is sometimes rooted in the misplaced fears of people who live in some of the safest places ...

The overwhelming consensus is that crime is only getting worse. According to a Gallup poll, in late 2022, 78 percent of Americans contended that there was more crime than there used to be.

These perceptions would make sense if they were accurate, but they aren’t. Crime, in fact, is down in the U.S., ...

There are many reasons for these attitudes. Partisanship plays a growing role in fueling these perspectives.

The truth is more nearly the opposite. The Wash. Post did a poll to compare US violent crime in 2023 to 2019. 57% correctly answered that crime was higher in 2023, while only 11% of Post readers did.

In other words, crime is up, and the major news and science media are on a propaganda campaign to convince us otherwise.

Sunday, April 14, 2024

Keep Moslems off our Courts

The Pakistani-American lawyer Adeel Abdullah Mangi has been nominated to be a judge.

A Slate column argues:

Democrats—the party that has in recent decades identified themselves with equity and social justice—to recommit to fighting Islamophobia. Instead, they’re allowing Islamophobia to sabotage the judicial nomination of a highly qualified candidate: Adeel Mangi, an attorney from New Jersey, who, if confirmed, would become the first-ever Muslim attorney to sit on a federal appeals court. ...

Confirming Mangi would add some sorely needed diversity to our nation’s courts—the federal bench is currently 66 percent white—and a check on biases. A study by the Center for American Progress found that judges belonging to different racial, ethnic, and religious groups use their unique backgrounds and life experiences to shape their rulings, and that it overall has a net positive impact on our judiciary. “Women judges and judges of color have spoken out about gender and racial bias on the courts and led calls for reforms,”

The article makes two arguments: (1) we should replace White Christian men with more Moslems to promote leftist causes; and (2) anyone who disagrees is a bigot.

No, these arguments are contradictory. If it is bigoted to oppose Moslems on the court, then it is also bigoted to promote Moslems on the court.

This is not a matter of picking the most qualified candidates. He was picked for being a Moslem.

Some say it is wrong to judge someone for a condition he was born into. Maybe Mangi is a Moslem because he was born into it, or maybe he free accepted it as an adult. I am not sure which is worse.

Regardless, Islam is incompatible with Americanism. Appellate judges have a lot of power. and we do not need Moslems.

Saturday, April 13, 2024

The most Pernicious Faith is Islam

Biology prof. Jerry Coyne writes:

But now the most pernicious faith seems to be Islam. Certainly many Muslims (and I know some) practice their faith benignly and even charitably. But many others don’t, and they enable harms throughout the world — harms that were never produced by Christianity or that have been largely abandoned by them. Here are some practices promoted or exacerbated by Islamic doctrine:

  • Islamism: the desire to dominate the world with Islamic doctrine, including sharia law
  • The codified oppression of women. In many places women must be veiled, put into cloth sacks, can’t go out without a male guardian, can’t go to school or get many jobs, must walk behind their husbands, can be beaten (or divorced) by their husbands without sanction, can be stoned to death for adultery (a practice just resumed by the Taliban in Afghanistan), and so on.
  • Honor culture: killing of family members who supposedly sully a family’s “honor”
  • Female genital mutilation, which is encouraged in many places by Islam
  • Sharia law, which is also oppressive. For example, the testimony of women under sharia law counts only half as much as a man’s
  • The oppression of gays, including outright murder in places like Gaza and legal execution in places like Iran.
  • Blasphemy laws, under which you can be killed for insulting Islam or burning the Qur’an
  • The demonization and sometimes the killing of apostates or atheists
  • The issuing of fatwas when Westerners insult Islam, sometimes calling for killing those perceived to insult the religion (Charlie Hebdo, Salman Rushdie, etc.). This is connected with the blasphemy laws mentioned above
  • Divisiveness within the religion that leads to war and death: Sunnis kill Shiites and vice versa, so there are internecine killings as well as cross-cultural killing
  • The propagation of hatred of Jews and propagandizing of the young
  • Favoring religious teaching in madrassas above secular teaching
  • The suppression of freedom of speech in general, particularly that which criticizes the government, often an explicitly Islamic government.  Masih Alinejad, for instance, fears for her life in America because she criticizes Iran, which has tried to both kill and kidnap her in separate incidents. Why? Because she’s against mandatory wearing of the headscarf (hijab) for women.
Islam is worse that this. First, there is no really any difference between Islam and Islamism. All followers of Islam believe in dominating the world with Islamic doctrine, and committing jihad against others.

Islam cannot co-exist with other religions. It cannot even co-exist with secular government.

Islam does not believe in free will, or other freedoms we take for granted. If you are born into Islam, you must stick with Islam or be killed.

There are now Leftists, some of them Atheists, who say it is bigoted to say one religion is better than another. Yes, some religions are better, and Islam is the worst.

Thursday, April 11, 2024

Getting Visas for Staging Robberies

Instead of deporting criminals, we are giving them visas to stay! Example:
HOUSTON – In January, FOX 26 reported on what police thought was a robbery turned homicide when a bystander shot the robber, but an investigation now shows that the robbery was fake.

22-year-old Rasshauud Scott was staging a robbery that two victims were in on when Jesus Vargas, a bystander, shot and killed him.

Court records say that Scott was working with William X Winfrey, who instructed Scott to stage the robbery in exchange for money.

The documents say the two victims were in on the robbery, so they could file for U-Visas. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a U-Visa is granted to victims of certain crimes to aid law enforcement in solving cases. It grants the victim temporary immigration status, including work authorization; temporary immigration status for qualifying family members of the victim; and the possibility of lawful permanent resident status.

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

Sex is not Assigned at Birth

Richard Dawkins writes:
The American Medical Association says that the word “sex” — as in male or female — is problematic and outdated; we should all now use the “more precise” phrase “sex assigned at birth.” The American Psychological Association concurs: Terms like “birth sex” and “natal sex” are “disparaging” and misleadingly “imply that sex is an immutable characteristic.” The American Academy of Pediatrics is on board too: “sex,” it declares, is “an assignment that is made at birth.” And now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urge us to say “assigned male/female at birth” or “designated male/female at birth” instead of “biologically male/female” or “genetically male/female.” ...

Even so, the sexual divide is an exceedingly clear binary, as binary as any distinction you can find in biology.

So where does this leave the medical associations’ claims about “sex assigned at birth”?

A baby’s name is assigned at birth; no one doubts that. But a baby’s sex is not “assigned”; it is determined at conception and is then observed at birth, first by examination of the external genital organs and then, in cases of doubt, by chromosomal analysis.

Or from a NY Times op-ed:
This matters because sex matters. Sex is a fundamental biological feature with significant consequences for our species, so there are costs to encouraging misconceptions about it.

Sex matters for health, safety and social policy and interacts in complicated ways with culture. ...

More generally, the interaction between sex and human culture is crucial to understanding psychological and physical differences between boys and girls, men and women. We cannot have such understanding unless we know what sex is, which means having the linguistic tools necessary to discuss it. ...

The problem is that “sex assigned at birth”— unlike “larger-bodied”— is very misleading. Saying that someone was “assigned female at birth” suggests that the person’s sex is at best a matter of educated guesswork. “Assigned” can connote arbitrariness — as in “assigned classroom seating” — and so “sex assigned at birth” can also suggest that there is no objective reality behind “male” and “female,” no biological categories to which the words refer.

Contrary to what we might assume, avoiding “sex” doesn’t serve the cause of inclusivity: not speaking plainly about males and females is patronizing. ...

A more radical proponent of “assigned sex” will object that the very idea of sex as a biological fact is suspect. According to this view — associated with the French philosopher Michel Foucault and, more recently, the American philosopher Judith Butler — sex is somehow a cultural production, the result of labeling babies male or female. “Sex assigned at birth” should therefore be preferred over “sex,” not because it is more polite, but because it is more accurate.

This position tacitly assumes that humans are exempt from the natural order. If only! Alas, we are animals. Sexed organisms were present on Earth at least a billion years ago, and males and females would have been around even if humans had never evolved.

Tuesday, April 09, 2024

Expert Witness Justifies Baby-stealing

ProPublica reports:
Was Baird’s method for evaluating these foster and birth families empirically tested? No, Baird answered: Her method is unpublished and unstandardized, and has remained “pretty much unchanged” since the 1980s. It doesn’t have those “standard validity and reliability things,” she admitted. “It’s not a scientific instrument.” ...

Who hired and was paying her in the case that she was being deposed about? The foster parents, she answered. They wanted to adopt, she said, and had heard about her from other foster parents.

Had she considered or was she even aware of the cultural background of the birth family and child whom she was recommending permanently separating? (The case involved a baby girl of multiracial heritage.) Baird answered that babies have “never possessed” a cultural identity, and therefore are “not losing anything,” at their age, by being adopted. ...

But a ProPublica investigation co-published with The New Yorker in October revealed that there is a growing national trend of foster parents undermining the foster system’s premise by “intervening” in family court cases as a way to adopt children.

Of course there are no scientific instruments to justify this child-stealing. The judges claim to act in the best interests of the child, but they rely on hired kooks and do not look at any scientific evidence.

Monday, April 08, 2024

Biden is Outspending Trump


The Biden-Harris campaign posted this.

Yes, Pres. Biden has the support of wealthy donors, and has the power to prosecute his political opponents on bogus charges. Biden is using his money to organize unverifiable mail-in votes.

The Trump-haters mostly give ridiculous arguments like: Trumpp lies a lot; he wants to be a dictator; he hires based on personal loyalty; he might prosecute his enemies; he might make peace with Russia; etc.

This is all risdiculous. Trump was President for four years. He did not prosecute his enemies. He did not use covid to seize dictatorial powers. He left office when his teerm expired. He did not staret any wars. He made hundreds of disloayal appointments, as many of them turned on him.

Sunday, April 07, 2024

Judaism is the Most Favored Religion

The Wash. Post reported last year:
Researchers Michael Wallace, Bradley R.E. Wright and Allan Hyde of the University of Connecticut sent 3,200 fake applications to 800 jobs within 150 miles of two major Southern cities through a popular employment Web site. Each employer got four rĂ©sumĂ©s with comparable job qualifications. The only thing that set the fake job candidates apart was whether their rĂ©sumĂ©s mentioned involvement with a religious group — such as membership in the Muslim Student Association or Hillel House, a Jewish organization.

RĂ©sumĂ©s for the control group indicated no religious affiliation. The others indicated the applicant was atheist, Catholic, evangelical Christian, Jewish, pagan, Muslim or a made-up religion called “Wallonian.”

Employers preferred the control group. This confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis that employers would be put off by overt statements of religious identity.

“Only Jews escaped totally unscathed,” researchers said, reporting “no statistically significant evidence of discrimination against this group across all eight indicators in the study.” In fact, researchers found that some employers seemed to favor Jewish applicants, as they were more likely than any other religious group to get an early or exclusive response from an employer.

Not surprising. Anti-semitism is a big hoax. Jews are favored over other groups.

I just saw a JewBelong billboard, saying you don't have to be Jewish to support Jews. No kidding. Jews get a lot of support from non-Jews. Here is an example:

BRUSSELS, April 4 (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that Ukraine will eventually join NATO as support for the country remains "rock solid" among member states.

"Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership," Blinken told reporters in Brussels.

The Ukraine War was mostly caused by Jews wanting to absorb Ukraine into NATO. And Jews have persuaded a lot of non-Jews o go along with the war.

Saturday, April 06, 2024

AAAS uses Neanderthals for Racism Lesson

AAAS Science, the leading USA science journal, reports:
Anthropologists take up arms against ‘race science’

At their annual meeting, biological anthropologists began to build a playbook to thwart racist misuse of research

Anthropologists are fighting the erroneous notion that humans are divided into a few separate races. They emphasize that human genes and populations show complex patterns of variation and mixing.

LOS ANGELES—Calling someone a Neanderthal was once an insult, meaning you thought of them as a knuckle-dragging brute. “[Neanderthals] have always been used as a mirror for thinking about ourselves … projecting things we don’t like about ourselves onto another group of humans,” said Fernando Villanea, a population geneticist at the University of Colorado Boulder, last week at the annual meeting of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists (AABA) here.

As scientists have learned more about Neanderthals’ cultural sophistication and abilities, though, their public image has gotten a glow-up. For some people, their status was elevated still further by the widely publicized discovery in 2007 that some Neanderthals carried genes suggesting they had red hair and light skin. These ancient inhabitants of Europe and Asia became coded as white, and on social media some people began to claim Neanderthal ancestry as a mark of racial superiority.

Such misuse of science spurred researchers to organize an AABA symposium devoted to combating race science, or the idea that genes and other biological variation can be used to sort humans into races—some superior to others.

They sure picked a funny example, because nearly all the Neanderthal science articles show a bias against them. They nearly always refer to Neanderthal as archaic and extinct, and the African hominins as modern humans. In fact, according to the latest research, the Neanderthals were at aleast as modern and human as the Africans.

The Wikipedia article on History of the chair used to say:

"In Sub-Saharan Africa, chairs were not in use before introduction by Europeans."
The editors removed this for being racist.

So the descendants of Neanderthals were the only ones to ever invent chairs.

The AAAS article goes on to aruge for retracting and censoring scinentific that shows group differences in intelligence.

Friday, April 05, 2024

New Laws to Pay Pregnant Women

The London Guardian reports:
The Republican-led Kentucky senate voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to grant the right to collect child support for fetuses, advancing a bill that garnered bipartisan support despite nationwide fallout from a controversial Alabama decision also advancing “fetal personhood”.

The measure would allow a parent to seek child support up to a year after giving birth to retroactively cover pregnancy expenses. The legislation – Senate Bill 110 – won senate passage on a 36-2 vote with little discussion to advance to the House. Republicans have supermajorities in both chambers. ...

Kentucky is among at least six states where lawmakers have proposed measures similar to a Georgia law that allows child support to be sought back to conception.

A federal Unborn Child Support Act has also been proposed, with support from Speaker Mike Johnson. The proposal pretty extreme:
“(35) provide that the State will establish and enforce child support obligations of the biological father of an unborn child (and subsequent to the birth of the child) to the mother of such child provided that—

“(A) the mother has requested payment of such child support obligations;

“(B) the start date for such obligations may begin with the first month in which the child was conceived, as determined by a physician (and shall begin with that month if the mother so requests);

“(C) payments for such obligations may be retroactively collected or awarded, including in the case where paternity is established subsequent to the birth of the child;

“(D) the payment amount for such obligations shall be determined by a court, in consultation with the mother, taking into account the best interests of the mother and child;

“(E) any measure to establish the paternity of a child (born or unborn) shall not be required without the consent of the mother;

So payments will be required based on the mom's demands, on her best interests, based on consulting her, and not even having a paternity test if che objects to it.

Under existing abortion law, the pregnant women can kill the fetus without consulting or notifying the dad. Maybe he will be paying child support, up to the date of termination.

Most people think child support laws are to support the child. Not really. There is no requirement that the money be spent on the child. The law is a feminist plot to obsolete marriage, and force men to split their incomes with women, outside of marriage law.

Thursday, April 04, 2024

Law Tests are Racist, says Court

News:
The Washington State Supreme Court decided the bar exam is no longer required to become a lawyer in the state. Their reason? The bar exam is racist, which they say “disproportionately and unnecessarily blocks historically marginalized groups from entering the practice of law.”

At the height of the extremist Black Lives Matter movement, the court-appointed the Bar Licensure Task Force to provide alternative ways to earn a law license. As they were trained to do, they found the Washington State bar exam “disproportionally and unnecessarily blocks” marginalized groups from becoming attorneys. ...

Task force members declared the bar exam racist and classist because of how it’s written and the impact they think it has on who becomes a lawyer. ...

Indeed, the task force complains that the Washington State Bar Association is 83% white and 56% male. This is proof, they believe, of racism and bias in the licensing process and “specifically the character and fitness inquiry.”

The Washington state supreme court has nine judges, and only one White male.

Wednesday, April 03, 2024

TV Show promotes Vegan Diets

A current Netflix series turned this medical study into a reality tv show:
Question What are the cardiometabolic effects of a healthy plant-based (vegan) vs a healthy omnivorous diet among identical twins during an 8-week intervention?

Findings In this randomized clinical trial of 22 healthy, adult, identical twin pairs, those consuming a healthy vegan diet showed significantly improved low-density lipoprotein cholesterol concentration, fasting insulin level, and weight loss compared with twins consuming a healthy omnivorous diet.

Meaning The findings from this trial suggest that a healthy plant-based diet offers a significant protective cardiometabolic advantage compared with a healthy omnivorous diet.

It says that the twins were chosen randomly, but the ones chosen for vegan diets had lower blood pressure, lower LDL cholesterol, and lower triglycerides. After the 8-week study, these measurements were lower still. The study brags that the vegan diets lowered these numbers. Okay, but why did they start with lower numbers?

The vegan diet also lowered HDL cholesterol, but higher HDL is considered good for the heart.

The test subjects were healthy, with figures in the normal ranges. There is reason to believe that someone with high LDL will be healthier if he lowers his LDL, but no so clear about someone with LDL in the normal range.

Plant-based diets have gained recent popularity not only for their lower environmental impact compared with an omnivorous dietary pattern but also for their health benefits.1,2 ...

Clinicians may consider recommending plant-based diets to reduce cardiometabolic risk factors, as well as aligning with environmental benefits.

So your clinician might be making a dietary recommendation based on speculative effects on climate change.

Tuesday, April 02, 2024

America's Foremost Gender Lunatic

Feminist Katha Pollitt writes in The Atlantic magazine:
udith Butler, for many years a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at UC Berkeley, might be among the most influential intellectuals alive today. Even if you have never heard of them (Butler identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns), you are living in their world, in which babies are “assigned” male or female at birth, and performativity is, at least on campus, an ordinary English word. Butler’s breakout 1990 book, Gender Trouble, argued that biological sex, like gender, is socially constructed, with its physical manifestations mattering only to the degree society assigns them meaning. The book is required reading in just about every women’s-, gender-, or sexuality-studies department. Butler has won a raft of international honors and been burned in effigy as a witch in Brazil. How many thinkers can say as much? ... A few decades ago, Butler was probably as famous outside academia for their impenetrable jargon-ridden prose as for anything they were trying to say. In 1998, they won first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest run by Philosophy and Literature, an academic journal.
A couple of years ago, Butler was using she/her.

How could such a crackpot be such a widely-cited scholar?

Maybe she has gone too far. The feminists hate her for saying men can be women, and now the Jews hate her for siding with Gaza/Hamas in the current Israel/Gaza war.

Monday, April 01, 2024

College tries to stop Microaggressions

News:
Russell Group universities have told staff and students that saying “the most qualified person should get the job” is a “microaggression”.

At least five universities have issued guidance or training courses on how to eliminate “microaggression”, which are defined as subtle or indirect forms of discrimination.

Guidance from the University of Glasgow and the engineering department of Imperial College London states that saying “the most qualified person should get the job” is an example of a microaggression.

Take away free speech, and here is what can happen:
A pregnant woman is facing seven years behind bars for slamming tomato puree on Facebook.

Chioma Okoli, 39, a businesswoman from Lagos, is facing criminal prosecution and being sued after she said a renowned brand of canned tomato puree was too sweet.

There will always be microaggressions.

These stories are not jokes.