GUN-RELATED homicides and gun ownership:
Mother Jones analysis includes gun suicides and makes no attempt to correct for even course-grain racial/ethnic confounds….
I downloaded the 2009-2013 data for gun-related homicides by race/ethnicity from the CDC’s WONDER database and compared it to the gun ownership rate data via wikipedia. . . .
Once you remove suicides and race/ethnicity from the equation the case gets much weaker.
HMM: Low male fertility caused by sunscreen, everyday plastics – scientist.
While throwing away a particular coat or upgrading to a different frying pan may not seem too drastic, Jorgensen did have a more controversial suggestion – abandoning the use of sunscreen.
“We are advised to protect ourselves with these sunblocks but it seems when you go to the laboratory and test some of these chemicals they can interfere with the sperm function,” Jorgensen said.
“If I was to advise my own family, I would say don’t use it,” he added.
But it’s not just grown men that are at risk from the allegedly dangerous substances – unborn boys are thought to be particularly in danger.
This has led Jorgensen to also advise against the use of sunscreen and make-up for pregnant women, as those substances could negatively impact the future sperm production of male fetuses.
See more of Jorgensen’s work on male fertility here.
Related: Possible fetal determinants of male infertility. “Interestingly, maternal smoking during pregnancy has a stronger effect on spermatogenesis than a man’s own smoking. Other lifestyle factors such as alcohol consumption and obesity might also have a role. However, increasing indirect evidence exists that exposure to ubiquitous endocrine disrupting chemicals, present at measurable concentrations in individuals, might affect development of human fetal testis.”
WARREN MEYER: Obama Thinks The Free Market Killed Neighborhood Diversity. In Fact, It Was the New Deal.
Here is a very telling paragraph from the HUD’s new proposed fair housing rule[:]
Despite the existing obligation to AFFH, in too many communities, the Fair Housing Act has not had the impact it intended — housing choices continue to be constrained through housing discrimination, the operation of housing markets, investment choices by holders of capital, the history and geography of regions, and patterns of development and the built environment.
So, they list “discrimination” as a problem, but then look at the other four items they list as problems. These can all be summarized as “the normal operation of free markets, property rights, and individual choice.”
Oddly missing from this list of causes is what many historians consider to be the #1 cause of lack of neighborhood diversity and ghetto-ization: The Federal Government and the New Deal. New Deal rules essentially forced the concentration of blacks into just a few neighborhoods. The biggest unmixing of races in New York can be seen between 1930 and 1950. Blacks in Brooklyn went from fairly evenly mixed to concentrated in Bed-Stuy, all directly attributable to New Deal rules.
WORTH LOOKING INTO: Birth Control in Drinking Water: A Fertility Catastrophe in the Making?
While the exposed fish and their immediate offspring appeared unaffected, the second generation of fish struggled to fertilize eggs — with a 30% reduction in fertilization rates — and their embryos were less likely to survive. Even the third generation of fish had 20% impaired fertility and survival rates, though they were never directly exposed to the hormone.
“This study shows that even though endocrine disruptors may not affect the life of the exposed fish, it may negatively affect future generations,” said lead author of the study Ramji Bhandari, a USGS visiting scientist and University of Missouri assistant research professor. “If similar trends were observed in subsequent generations, a severe decline in overall population numbers might be expected by the F4 generation.”
HMM: Saudi embassy wanted to hire Swedish PR agency. “The previously classified documents were published by the organisation Wikileaks on Friday, and contained a two-year-old letter from the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Stockholm to the Foreign Ministry in Riyadh saying that the embassy wanted to hire a Swedish PR agency to improve the strained relationship between the two countries. The embassy wanted the agency to ‘win over the people and gain political support and support from the media’.”
CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: Sweden: Another Shooting In Rosengård. Was Fox News Right About Malmö 12 Years Ago? “Why it is so difficult to understand that if tens of thousands of 3rd world immigrants come to Sweden each year then Sweden will gradually start resembling the countries they came from?”
The archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Rainer Woelki who has organised the action, said in a statement that “the death bells demand a change in policy that provides a way for refugees to enter Europe legally.” . . .
Explaining the form of the demonstration, the spokesperson said “in the Catholic Church we have a tradition of ringing church bells when one of our community has died – these are the ‘death bells.’”
I do not recall this archbishop calling for death bells for the Christians who were thrown overboard in the Mediterranean by Muslims. I suppose they’re included in the total number, which encompasses all of the antichristian Muslims who like killing Christians, whether on or off boats. These are the true members of the archdiocese of Cologne’s community.
Woelki was appointed archbishop of Cologne last year by Pope Francis. He had earlier been appointed archbishop of the smaller Berlin archdiocese by Pope Benedict XVI, when people supposed that he was more or less a conservative. He quickly proved this supposition false:
The 57-year-old’s appointment in Berlin was met with heavy skepticism at the time. Woelki was seen as a charge of the former archbishop of Cologne, Joachim Meisner, an outspoken and rather conservative theologian. . . .
But Woelki caught the German capital off guard, seemingly changing his stance on issues including homosexuality. Having previously written that same-sex relationships were against “the order of creation,” Woelki changed his tune in 2012: “If two homosexuals take responsibility for each other, if they are loyal to each other over the long term, then one should see this in the same way as heterosexual relations.”
MOVIES in the public domain:
The requirement that copyright renewal must occur during the 28th year of the original term – and only during the 28th year of the original term — has caused quite a wealth of copyrighted matter to enter the public domain accidentally or unexpectedly. Although the Copyright Act of 1976 did away with the renewal system, it did not apply retroactively.
For those with an interest in this arcane topic, here is a non-comprehensive list of movies that appear to have entered the public domain.
LET’S HOPE: Gamers And Developers The Big Winners As SJWs Jump The Shark At E3 2015.
They were on their way out anyway, but the events of E3 have exposed the isolation of social justice warriors in gaming. Once upon a time, they dominated social media, naming and shaming “problematic” game developers at will. Now, their efforts are faced with little more than ridicule and disdain.
The games industry never really liked them in the first place, of course. If big developers want to know what female or minority gamers want, they ask market research firms, not grandstanding culture critics. Moral crusaders are useless to the industry, and developers are well aware of it.
NOT OVER YET: The Vatican’s Sex-Abuse Tribunal and the Cover-Up that Went Unpunished.
St. Gregory’s Academy was a tiny, experimental school run by Catholics devoted to the traditional Latin Mass . . .
But according to whistleblowers and sworn testimonies, this “experiment in tradition” went horribly wrong: Heavy underage drinking, bed-sharing, and group nudity were standard occurrences among students, and the Academy’s close, unwholesome atmosphere provided an easy playing field for Urrutigoity’s methods of manipulation and seduction, which included plying students with alcohol and tobacco, and convincing them to sleep in his bed as part of their “spiritual direction.”
A federal lawsuit forced the priest, his Diocese, and the Academy’s owners to make a joint settlement of over $400,000 . . .
The new Academy shows every sign of carrying on under the same style of leadership that reportedly paved the way for Urrutigoity’s abuses. Clark hired as its headmaster an alumnus whom a whistleblower once described as a “devoted cult follower” of Urrutigoity’s. When Urrutigoity was accused in 2002, this future headmaster [PDF] helped to form “Friends of the Society of St. John,” [PDF] a small group devoted solely to asserting the innocence of Urrutigoity and other accused members of his Society. . . .
Other veterans of St. Gregory’s Academy, including two members of “Friends,” continued their careers as staff and faculty at the traditionalist Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (TMC).
GOOD: FEMA denies disaster aid for Baltimore riot costs.
In the letter [PDF], FEMA administrator Craig Fugate writes, “Based on our review of all the information available, it has been determined that supplemental federal assistance under the Stafford Act is not appropriate for this event. Therefore, I must inform you that your request for a major disaster declaration is denied.”
The Stafford Act is the government’s response to natural disasters.
JOHN DERBYSHIRE: Why Are Africans Immigrating To “White Supremacy”?
Back in Cold War days the British opinion journalist Bernard Levin found himself watching a BBC-TV program about Germany—one of those moral-equivalency pieces the media used to put out, arguing that both West and East Germany were militarized societies under foreign domination.
Levin wrote a fine angry piece pointing out that to the best of his knowledge, the many brave souls who had risked—and in many cases, lost—their lives crossing the Berlin Wall were all headed in the same direction.
Just so with the boat people.
THIS NEEDED A STUDY? Study shows American dads portrayed as ‘bumbling’ morons not ‘patriotic’ or ‘heroic’. “Troilo found heterosexual dads were much more likely to say hurtful things to their children than the one gay father in the study, whose parenting skills were depicted as nearly perfect.”
BURIED LEDE: Encryption “would not have helped” at OPM, says DHS official: Attackers had valid user credentials and run of network, bypassing security. “Attackers”? They were given the key to the front door, as we find out at the end of the article:
Some of the contractors that have helped OPM with managing internal data have had security issues of their own—including potentially giving foreign governments direct access to data long before the recent reported breaches.
A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he found the Unix systems administrator for the project “was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People’s Republic of China]. Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root. Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with PRC passports. I know that because I challenged them personally and revoked their privileges. From my perspective, OPM compromised this information more than three years ago and my take on the current breach is ‘so what’s new?'”
WHAT’S IN A NAME? Liberal guilt, apparently, when the name is Hispanic.
When . . . it was time to hand out diplomas, the task went to two of the school’s multiple vice principles, both women with Anglo names. The women began reciting the students’ names — Anglo, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, etc. — all in flat, totally American accents. That is, they did this until they got to students with Hispanic names. Every time that happened, the women suddenly sounded as if they were applying for a job on one of Rosetta Stone’s newest “Learn Spanish” video. Every “R” was rolled, every guttural consonant was coughed out. And then, after the student with the Hispanic name accepted his or her diploma, that flat, American accent returned.
I’ve commented before . . . about the exact same phenomenon on NPR . . . The NPR talking heads make no effort with German names (it’s “Munich,” not “Munchen”), or Russian names, or French names (it’s “Paris,” not “Paree”), or Chinese names, or American-black names, but when it comes to Hispanic names, they all sound as if they’re trying to outdo Mel Blanc’s over-the-top Speedy Gonzalez accent.
A commenter links to a 1990 Saturday Night Live sketch mocking this phenomenon (transcript here).
STEVE SAILER: “Perhaps June 2015 will go down in history as the month the reigning pieties jumped the shark.”
Shortly after Jenner’s transubstantiation, we learned that a social-justice warriorette named Rachel Dolezal had moved to the big city of Spokane, Wash., tanned her skin, permed her hair, and built herself a nice little career as a black activist witch-hunting white racists. And when there weren’t enough white witches to be found, she would (apparently) gin up a few of the usual Hate Crime Hoaxes. Life was good, until her mother and father pointed out to the press that they were white.
Many media outlets were baffled that anybody in 21st-century America would find it advantageous to give up all that White Privilege to be perceived as black. After all, we know that vicious white racists lie in wait to victimize black bodies by murdering them, raping them, and not letting them use the swimming pool.
But that raised the uncomfortable (or amusing) question: Weren’t the liberals denouncing Dolezal being transphobic?
It’s then that the viewer see[s] the other naked person in the bed is not a man, like one would expect, but a woman. She smiles and the camera reveals she’s wearing a wedding ring. . . .
The short ad might not seem like much but showing two naked — albeit covered — women in bed together in a national commercial is certainly making a statement. Especially since this ad is being shown during primetime television on channels like Nickelodeon. Other companies like Wells Fargo and Tylenol, among others, have received widespread attention for their ads portraying same-sex couples and families as the same as traditional families.
THE DANGER of overtraining syndrome for professional long-distance runners:
The earliest known scientific reference to OTS was made by a researcher and athlete named Robert Tait McKenzie, who noted in his 1909 book, Exercise in Education and Medicine, an acute exhaustion and “slow poisoning of the nervous system which could last weeks or even months.” Decades later, renowned South African exercise-science professor Timothy Noakes wrote in detail about the condition in The Lore of Running. Published in 1985, it’s one of the few books athletes with OTS have as a reference. The runners Noakes examined had pushed themselves to a point at which their bodies—and, more perplexingly, their minds—had simply stopped responding. As a result, they suffered everything from “generalized fatigue” and “recurrent headaches” to “an inability to relax, listlessness,” and “the swelling of lymph glands.” . . .
Through some combination of excessive exercise and inadequate recovery, athletes experience a severe shock to the parasympathetic nervous system, which controls the body’s inflammatory pathways. Under normal circumstances, when your body is stressed, your sympathetic nervous system kicks in to help you respond. Your heart races. Your pupils dilate. The blood rushes from your digestive system to organs needed for immediate survival. The parasympathetic system is the counterbalance, bringing the body back to a state of equilibrium. After a hard outing, your heart rate calms and blood returns to your extremities, restoring your body’s normal functions. For athletes with OTS, those balancing responses no longer occur. The parasympathetic system effectively goes haywire.
Howell digs deeper, questioning how the UK government even knows which files Snowden took — and questioning if the UK government has been able to decipher that as well. Harper, again, pushes it aside, saying he has no idea and they avoided such tricky questions altogether:
Again, that’s not something we’re clear on. So, we don’t go into that level of detail in the story.
It’s then that he makes the “we just publish what we believe to be the position of the British government” claim. Howell then points to one of the many contradictions in the story: the idea that Russia/China hacked into the Snowden files… and the claim that they were just handed over. And again, Harper pleads ignorance. He’s just the stenographer.
EUGENE VOLOKH: UC teaching faculty members not to criticize race-based affirmative action, call America ‘melting pot,’ and more.
Let’s see if I understand it. “Microaggressions” are defined as “send[ing] denigrating messages” based (in relevant part) on race. Unsurprisingly, they are labeled as potentially leading to “hostile learning environments,” which the university and the federal government views as legally actionable. The university as an employer is telling its employees, including many employees who don’t have tenure, that expressing certain views is a “microaggression.”
But then the university insists that it’s “preserving academic freedom and the free flow of ideas.” Because, you know, lecturers, adjuncts, not-yet-tenured faculty members, and so on, will read this and say, “sure, I can express my ideas condemning affirmative action, and be labeled by UC as engaging in ‘microaggressions’ — of course UC isn’t going to retaliate against me for that.” Doesn’t seem to reflect how actual employees behave in the face of such statements from the employer’s Office of the President, Academic and Personnel Programs department.
DELICATE FLOWERS: Family Says Graduation Dress Code Letter Referenced ‘Sausage Rolls’.
She and her mother are furious at a letter sent home with students urging them to choose modest attire for commencement.
They were particularly offended by two sentences.
“They also said that they don’t want to be looking at our sausage rolls. And as you get dressed you should remember you can’t put ten pounds of mud into a five pound bag,” Burtop said.
WHOOPS: Upper East Side housewife’s tell-all book is full of lies.
Although the book . . . is advertised as a “memoir,” Martin told The Post she “telescoped certain parts of the narrative in order to protect the privacy of friends, neighbors, associates and family.”
That “telescoping” seems to have moved events that happened in different neighborhoods and put them on the Upper East Side. . . .
She says she attended grueling exercise classes at Physique 57 . . . but the upscale gym did not exist when she claims to have exercised there.
She also describes a posh party where the guests bring the hostess gifts from an upscale macaroon shop. But Ladurée didn’t open in New York until 2011, four years after she had moved.
While at a lunch date . . . her friend refers to Uber, even though the car service didn’t debut in the city until 2011.
Of course, the entire thing is driven by the author’s feminist agenda. Here’s a snippet from her New York Times article from last month promoting her book:
Sex segregation, I was told, was a “choice.” But like “choosing” not to work, or a Dogon woman in Mali’s “choosing” to go into a menstrual hut, it struck me as a state of affairs possibly giving clue to some deeper, meaningful reality while masquerading, like a reveler at the Save Venice ball the women attended every spring, as a simple preference.
TOM WOLFE’S female characters:
William Crooke and Sir Herbert Risley, two 19th-century English social scientists, coined the term “hypergamy” to describe their observations of inter-caste marriage in India. Women, they found, married up but never down. Crooke and Risley concluded (or assumed) that hypergamy’s root (in India, at least) is the male insistence on preserving the status of the patrimonial line. A decade ago, political theorist F. Roger Devlin revived the term and gave it a new twist. Far from being unique to India, hypergamy is in Devlin’s account universal and, what’s more, driven by female, not male, desires. “[W]omen,” he wrote, “have simple tastes in the manner of Oscar Wilde: They are always satisfied with the best.”
When properly channeled, hypergamy can be individually and socially beneficial. It encourages young ladies to become worthy of a worthy man, and vice versa. Yet off the leash, it spurs women in unhappy and self-indulgent directions.
This truth our culture cannot abide. That there are vices characteristic of men and not widely shared by women (violence, crudeness, skirt-chasing) is not merely acknowledged but rubbed in our faces. But any assertion of the converse is met with incomprehension, denial, and sometimes persecution. The writings of Tom Wolfe—who figured all this out on his own—are just about the only mainstream cultural product of the last 50 years to present an alternative view. Everyone missed it because Wolfe has consistently declined to be explicit, partly out of the good storyteller’s dictum to show rather than tell, perhaps also to protect himself from undue blowback. But it’s there, between the lines, and has been almost from the beginning of Wolfe’s career.
A BRIEF INTRODUCTION To The Country Formally Known As Sweden.
Violence is rising as a whole in Sweden, and recent statements from law enforcement agencies indicate 55 no-go zones. This means areas where the police say that they no longer control the situation. Police patrols, fire brigade, and ambulances are routinely attacked in these areas with stones and fire bombs.
“Fascists” are routinely targeted with violence. The Swedish Democrats that according to the latest polls have between 15 and 20% of the votes are one example. Issa Issa was an active member of that party but left politics after being attacked in his home by a mob that stabbed him 18 times and left him to die. Despite the fact that Issa Issa is of Assyrian origin, this was not labeled a hate crime and despite the fact that the attackers yelled “f*cking Christian,” it was not considered religiously motivated.
Organized violence against “fascists” includes being targeted by the organized lefties. A research group that calls itself “the Swedish Stasi” have created lists of people with “fascist views” and recently hacked Disqus, giving them access to anonymous commentators on sites deemed as “hate sites.”
FACEPALM: NY Times Clown David Brooks: “Obama has run an amazingly scandal-free administration”. “Well, except for the Fast a Furious gun-running, the ObamaCare scam, the VA scandal, spying on reporters, the ongoing IRS scandal, The Bowe Bergdahl swap for Taliban monsters, Benghazi and numerous others, this twit is right. Hard to believe a guy who gushed over the crease in Obama’s pants would be protective of him, huh?”
JAMES THOMPSON: Is it worth giving children pre-school education?
Sabisky has gathered a lot of data for his presentation, so you should look at the slides first, and then at his comments which go with the slides, and then at the review paper.
My impression is that he has made a good case for abandoning the view that early childhood is a special period for learning (which the Danes have known for ages) and that you might be better of letting kids enjoy family life and the usual experiences of childhood until their brains are capable of beginning academic learning, in the age range 5 to 7 according to ability and interest.
DAMNED IF YOU DO, DAMNED IF YOU DON’T: Hollywood on Alert: Actors’ Ethnicities Under Scrutiny Amid Heightened Sensitivities.
When Warner Bros. set out to make a live-action Peter Pan, it wanted to avoid the racial insensitivities of J.M. Barrie’s play and Disney’s 1953 animated film, which infamously featured the song “What Made the Red Man Red?” So the filmmakers reimagined Tiger Lily not as Native American but as a character of no particular ethnicity to steer clear of Barrie’s portrayal of the island’s tribe, now considered rife with offensive stereotypes.
But choosing Rooney Mara — an actress of Irish, German and French-Canadian ancestry — to play Pan‘s Tiger Lily prompted an outcry, with 90,000 people signing a Care2 petition in protest. Now, as Pan heads for an Oct. 9 release, it enters a cultural landscape of increased racial sensitivities around film and television casting and a social media environment that amplifies those concerns. Warners, ironically, has been branded as insensitive for attempting to offer a color-blind, modern Pan.
Half of the patients killed without giving their consent were over the age of 80, the study found, and two thirds of them were in hospital and were not suffering from a terminal disease such as cancer.
In about four out of five of the cases, the death was not discussed with patients subjected to ‘involuntary euthanasia’ because they were either in a coma, they were diagnosed with dementia, or because doctors decided it would not be in their best interests to discuss the matter with them.
Very often doctors would not inform the families of plans to lethally inject a relation because they considered it a medical decision to be made by themselves alone, the report published by the Journal of Medical Ethics said.
WASHINGTON: SPD [Spokane Police Department] suspends all cases involving Rachel Dolezal. (For background, see the earlier post, Local NAACP leader accused of “falsely portraying herself as black for years.”)
Spokane NAACP President Rachel Dolezal claimed she found an envelope with pictures of lynchings and references to local cases concerning race in March. . . .
It was delivered to a post office box. But it did not have a date stamp or barcode according to an on-going police report by SPD.
Postal officials told SPD officers that a letter or package would never be put in a mail box purposefully without those things even if it was hand delivered to the post office.
TIP OF THE ICEBERG: Environmental history errors in a high school textbook.
The other night I took a look at a few pages in my daughter’s U.S. History textbook (Pearson Prentice-Hall, U.S. History: Reconstruction to the Present (Ohio Edition, 2008)) concerning the growth of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s, as I was curious what my daughter was learning about it. . . .
It is important to stress that these are all basic factual errors, not questions of interpretation. . . .
I have not gone through the rest of the book to see whether the sloppiness chronicled above is endemic. It’s possible that the book’s errors are largely confined to its brief discussion of environmental history.
WARREN MEYER: Name An Activity The Government is Better At Than the Private Actors It Purports to Regulate. “The government is trying to tighten regulations on private company cyber security practices at the same time its own network security practices have been shown to be a joke. In finance, it can never balance a budget and uses accounting techniques that would get most companies thrown in jail. It almost never fully funds its pensions. Anything it does is generally done more expensively than would be the same task undertaken privately. Its various sites are among the worst superfund environmental messes. Almost all the current threats to water quality in rivers and oceans comes from municipal sewage plants. The government’s Philadelphia naval yard single-handedly accounts for a huge number of the worst asbestos exposure cases to date.”
STUDY: Family structure and multiple domains of child well-being in the United States: a cross-sectional study. “Compared to children living with married couples, children in single mother, extended single mother, and cohabiting couple families average poorer outcomes, but children in single father families sometimes average better health outcomes.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Overgeneralized Accusations that Red Meat Consumption Triggers Cancer Overlooks Influence of Processing & Other Confounding Factors.
As the authors of the meta-analysis rightly point out “the state of the epidemiologic science on red meat consumption and CRC is best described in terms of weak associations, heterogeneity, an inability to disentangle effects from other dietary and lifestyle factors, lack of a clear dose-response effect, and weakening evidence over time” (Alexander. 2015). Accoringly, instead of condemning all read meats, scientists would be well-advised to conduct proper epidemiologic studies investigating diet and health outcomes in which they accurately measure food intake, dietary pattern differences across populations, food definitions, outcome classifications, bias and confounding, multicollinearity, biological mechanisms, genetic variation in metabolizing enzymes, and differences in analytical metrics and statistical testing parameters.
Needless to say that the anti-meat lobby is not interested in doing studies like this.
ANN COULTER: “Whatever issue you think is more important than immigration, you’re wrong.”
Without our post-1965 immigration policy, Obama would never have been elected president. That means no Obamacare, no withdrawal of every last troop from Iraq, no playing footsie with the Iranians, no Eric Holder, no Fast and Furious, no IRS harassment of tea party groups, no Benghazi massacre — and on and on and on.
Democrats haven’t been able to persuade a majority of white people to vote for them in any presidential election since 1948, except the aberrational Democratic landslide in 1964. That’s why they had to bring in ringers. . . .
The media don’t need to run this scam forever. Democrats only need to keep it going until they have California-style majorities in every state, and then they’ll say, “Screw you, America. We did this deliberately, and now there’s nothing you can do about it.”
That’s exactly what the Labour government of Tony Blair did — as we found out in 2009. In public, Blair’s government claimed that the mass immigration of the Third World to Britain was absolutely crucial to the economy!
Once they were out of office, Blair adviser Andrew Neather admitted that their real objective had been “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date,” as the London Telegraph reported in 2009.
DELICATE FLOWERS: Student with dark tan accused of wearing ‘blackface’ in high school yearbook.
Officials apologized for the yearbook image, and stopped handing out the yearbooks. They ultimately decided to put some sort of sticker of the image in the remaining yearbooks, and announced that students offended by the picture can pick up a sticker to put over it, King 5 reports.
“It’s clearly hurtful,” Shoreline schools spokesman Craig Degginger told the news site. “That image should not have been included in the Shorewood High School yearbook.”
WASHINGTON: Local NAACP leader accused of “falsely portraying herself as black for years.”
Dolezal, 37, avoided answering questions directly about her race and ethnicity . . .
“That question is not as easy as it seems,” she said after being contacted at Eastern Washington University, where she’s a part-time professor in the Africana Studies Program. “There’s a lot of complexities … and I don’t know that everyone would understand that.”
Later, in an apparent reference to studies tracing the scientific origins of human life to Africa, Dolezal added: “We’re all from the African continent.” . . .
Members of her family are challenging her very identity, saying she has misrepresented major portions of her life.
Dolezal’s mother, Ruthanne Dolezal, said Thursday by phone from her home in Northwest Montana that she has had no contact with her daughter in years. She said her daughter began to “disguise herself” in 2006 or 2007, after the family had adopted four African-American children.
INSTITUTIONALIZED IDIOCY: More school districts report chaos after ‘white privilege’ theory influences discipline rules.
Several other large school districts around the nation are in the same situation as St. Paul.
They’ve all instituted radical disciplinary policies to reduce the number of black student suspensions, they’ve all experienced serious behavioral problems as a result, and they’re all included on a recent list of PEG client school districts. . . .
New York Post reporter Paul Sperry . . . has no doubt that PEG has played a significant role in convincing officials in many districts to tolerate a lot of behavior that would have been unthinkable in the past.
“I know that PEG has had an outsized role in reshaping not only discipline policy in these districts but also curriculum — including lesson plans, activities and materials — as well as even hiring,” Sperry told EAGnews. “They emphasize the recruitment of minority faculty and even recommend ‘racial equity’ and ‘restorative justice’ coordinators.
“What’s more, they do the racial-sensitivity training of teachers as part of professional teacher training workshops, reprogramming them to think that THEY are the problem, not the misbehaving kids, that their ‘whiteness’ and ‘cultural insensitivity’ is the reason African-American students tend to be, on average, more disruptive and violent than other students and tend to underperform academically.
“Some of the teachers come out of the workshops sobbing. It’s classic brainwashing. As we’ve seen in St. Paul and Baltimore and Portland and Los Angeles and Philly and other school districts, PEG’s race-based programs are backfiring.”
Earlier: Black teacher slams ‘white privilege’ training: ‘They are hurting black kids’.
“I remember two black boys humping on a second grade girl,” Benner said. “The teacher wrote up a referral for inappropriate sexual behavior, but the principal and vice principal dismissed it by calling it ‘cultural dancing.’”
FOR YOUR INFORMATION: Winters not Summers Increase Mortality and Stress the Economy.
Global warming alarmists continue to over-emphasize the danger of heat and ignore cold in their papers and in stories for the media. The danger associated with this misdirection is that cold weather kills many more people that hot weather.
This conclusion is clearly supported by many studies of populations in a wide range of climates. Examples are provided below from a study of thirteen countries, as well as national studies from the United Kingdom, the USA, Canada and Australia.
Furthermore, this conclusion is not new, but has been known for many decades.
CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: France: Anti-Islamophobia Group Had List of Jewish Targets, Plans for Nuclear Bomb.
The group was dismantled amid a crackdown on radicals shortly after a 2012 killing spree in southern France by Mohamed Merah, who attacked a Jewish school and soldiers, killing seven people before being gunned down by police.
In a web chat, its leader went on to praise the Mohamed Merah killings as “a blessing from Allah” and to pledge inflicting more “scars on France”.
CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: 16 arrested in Belgium in terror-related probes involving Chechen extremists. “The prosecutor’s office said some of those arrested had participated in combat in Syria, where thousands of Europeans have gone to fight alongside the Islamic State group and other extremist organizations.”
STEVE SAILER: I’m Not Making This Up.
The more interviews Weiner gives, the more it turns out that Mad Men is driven by Weiner’s objectively bizarre but highly useful feelings of self-pity and ethnic animus. . . .
This is a subtle argument Weiner is making: Weiner wants to express his feelings that Jews are marginalized because they are overrepresented in formulating American culture. It’s a little bit like saying Bill Gates and Warren Buffett need to express their feelings of being a minority, marginalized on some level because of overrepresentation in plutocratic aspects of the United States in general and thus have to salve their emotions by playing golf together at Augusta National.
Related: “Mad Men” Trolls HBD Chick: Clan War in Connecticut.
You could also read this scene as Weiner self-parodying his own roiling but ridiculous ethnic resentments that provide him with the ethnocentric anger that fuels the admirable energy he brought to putting together Mad Men.
Earlier: Matthew Weiner Explains “Mad Men” Is About “White Power”.
GOOD TO KNOW: 60%+ Reduced Absorption of EGCG if You Consume [Green Tea Extract] W/ Food – Better Take Your Green Tea Caps On Empty.
To determine the effect of the different food items on the absorption of EGCG, the scientists used blood samples that were taken before the ingestion of the capsules / sorbet, 30min, 1h, 2h, 3h, 5h, and 8h afterwards by the means of a previously installed intravenous catheter . . .
The amount of EGCG that actually made it into the blood of the study participants was significantly (and practically relevantly) reduced when the capsulse were ingested with food or the EGCG was incorporated into the sorbet.
Related: More muscle, less fat with chocolate and green tea polyphenols.
Both resveratrol and curcumin also have anti-obesity effects, again in cell culture, animals, and humans, although the results don’t appear to be quite as strong as for green tea polyphenols.
Green tea constituents appear to be quite safe: “We conclude that it is safe for healthy individuals to take green tea polyphenol products in amounts equivalent to the EGCG content in 8–16 cups of green tea once a day or in divided doses twice a day for 4 weeks.”
USEFUL: Branched-chain amino acids for fat loss, lean mass, and greater lifespan.
Researchers used to talk a lot about all of the BCAAs, but it’s now understood that only one of them is truly critical: leucine.
Leucine is the most important nutritional signal for muscle protein synthesis. It does this by activating the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR). . . .
As leucine rises, mTOR is stimulated, and muscle protein synthesis increases. The area under the curve for blood leucine after whey ingestion was ∼73% greater than soy and ∼200% greater than casein. . . .
Leucine can actually cause greater burning of fat and hence fat loss. A nutraceutical containing 2.25 grams leucine, along with 30 mg vitamin B6, taken twice daily, caused the loss of nearly two kilograms of fat on a caloric maintenance diet, and on a hypocaloric diet (500 calorie a day deficit), subjects on leucine and B6 lost twice as much fat, 5 vs 2.3 kilograms, as the placebo group.
STATINS and cancer: “People with higher cholesterol levels are far less likely to die of cancer. Add this to the fact that people with higher cholesterol levels are far more likely be prescribed statins, and you start off with the most gigantic built in bias that it is possible to find.”
UK: Are divorced dads really treated fairly by the family courts?
According to the University of Warwick, the lead researcher on the project, Dr Maebh Harding, looked at this data and “concluded that contact applications by fathers were in fact overwhelmingly successful”.
The basis for this claim is that 88 per cent of dads who applied to court for contact with their kids were awarded some kind of access. For example, 10 per cent were restricted to “indirect contact” with their children via phone, post or Skype; a further five per cent were only allowed to see their children in the company of a supervisor and 23 per cent were permitted to spend a few daytime hours with their children. . . .
Our expectation of the role a separated father should play in his children’s lives is so low, that when half of dads who win “access” to their kids can’t even sleep under the same roof as their offspring, academics declare this to be an overwhelming success.
Perhaps it is relevant that at least one of the two co-authors of the report is a feminist.
WHOOPS: IG report: TSA failed to identify 73 workers ‘linked to terrorism’. “The TSA did not identify these individuals through its vetting operations because it is not authorized to receive all terrorism-related categories under current interagency watch-listing policy.”
THE PROBLEMS OF FABRICATING HISTORY: “A New York Times reporter contacted Caitlyn Jenner about her [sic] cross-dressing habits in the mid-1980s.” If we say that Bruce Jenner has always been a woman, then to refer to his early cross-dressing must be to refer to his dressing as a man.