PATRIARCHY through the back door:
Back when Lawrence H. Summers was president of Harvard and suggested that they did, the reaction was swift and merciless. Pundits branded him sexist. Faculty members deemed him a troglodyte. Alumni withheld donations.
But when Bruce Jenner said much the same thing in an April interview with Diane Sawyer, he was lionized for his bravery, even for his progressivism.
GO WHERE THE MONEY IS: Alaska Air Offers Exciting Airfare Discounts For Gay People. Sort of:
Being gay is not a requirement for purchasing airfare to these exciting gay pride parade and gay cruise destinations on the weekends when the events occur.
“[W]e have put together this section of our site to highlight destinations that support marriage equality, Pride celebrations, and other things of interest to the LGBT community,” the website explains.
There’s money to be had from childless people. But that’s not the only thing going on. After all, surely there are other conventions and festivals that attract rich people, and there aren’t special discounts for them.
Enter identity politics. The discounts are about roping in all of the homosexuals who unthinkingly align themselves with supposedly “pro-gay” people, causes, and companies. Take a financial hit with them traveling one weekend, but rack up more money when they become repeat customers.
ZERO HEDGE: The “Illegal Immigrant” Recovery? The Real Stunner In The Jobs Report.
Since the start of the Second Great Depression, the US has added 2.3 million “foreign-born” workers, offset by just 727K “native-born”. . . .
It may well be, that the surprise answer why America’s labor productivity (which recently posted its worst 6 month stretch in 22 years) has plummeted in recent years and certainly months, confounding economists who are unable to explain why “solid” labor growth does not translate into just as solid GDP growth . . . and why wage growth has gone precisely nowhere, is because the vast majority of all jobs since December 2007, or 75% to be specific, have gone to foreign-born workers, a verifiable fact. What is unknown is how many of these millions of “foreign-born” jobs have gone to illegal immigrant[s] who are perfectly willing to work hard, and yet whose wage bargaining power is absolutely nil (after all they are happy just to have a job) thereby leading to depressed wages for native-born workers in comparable jobs, resulting in wage growth which over the past 8 years has been non-existant.
CURIOUS: Japanese scientists reverse aging in human cell lines.
The researchers then looked for genes that might be controlled epigenetically resulting in these age-associated mitochondrial defects. Two genes that regulate glycine production in mitochondria, CGAT and SHMT2, were found. The researchers showed that by changing the regulation of these genes, they could induce defects or restore mitochondrial function in the fibroblast cell lines. In a compelling finding, the addition of glycine for 10 days to the culture medium of the 97 year old fibroblast cell line restored its respiratory function. This suggests that glycine treatment can reverse the age-associated respiration defects in the elderly human fibroblasts.
These findings reveal that, contrary to the mitochondrial theory of aging, epigenetic regulation controls age-associated respiration defects in human fibroblast cell lines. Can epigenetic regulation also control aging in humans? That theory remains to be tested, and if proven, could result in glycine supplements giving our older population a new lease of life.
Related: Dietary glycine increases lifespan (in rats).
REVERSE REVERSE RACISM: Black teacher slams ‘white privilege’ training: ‘They are hurting black kids’.
Benner said the problem can be traced to the school district’s three-year-old contractual relationship with the Pacific Educational Group, a radical San Francisco-based organization that makes millions of dollars in consulting fees every year from public schools throughout the nation. . . .
The organization teaches that black kids frequently lag behind academically because lessons are taught in white cultural terms they don’t understand. PEG also teaches that black kids get into a disproportionate amount of trouble because school officials don’t understand their cultural norms.
PEG’s answer is for educators to adjust their academic and behavioral expectations of black students, stop suspending or expelling them for bad behavior, and literally roll with the punches, according to Benner. . . .
“It’s so comical. PEG says shouting out in class is a black cultural norm, and being on time is a white cultural thing. It’s so demeaning, so condescending to black kids. If a white person were making claims like this, black people would be in an uproar.” . . .
“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.’”
WE’VE GOT IT COVERED: 1963 Congressional Record: ‘Communist Goals’ Include Promoting of Homosexuality as ‘Natural, Healthy’.
The list of 42 goals, entered into the record by Rep. A. S. Herlong Jr., a Democrat from Florida, is credited to the book “The Naked Communist” by Cleon Skousen. . . .
Also on the list are:
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a “religious crutch.”
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
YOU DON’T SAY? Investigation: Undercover agents snuck fake explosives, banned weapons past TSA.
Homeland Security officials confirmed to Fox News that TSA screeners failed 67 out of 70 tests — or 96 percent — carried out by special investigators known as “red teams.”
In one case, an undercover agent with a fake bomb strapped to his back set off a magnetometer — but the screener still failed to find it.
USEFUL: Longer Fasting Regimens. This is the seventh part of an ongoing series on fasting.
We covered fasting regimens using periods less than 24 hours in our last post. This post will cover those schedules that use fasts longer than 24 hours. . . .
For longer duration fasts, we often try NOT to calorie restrict during that eating period. Often, as people get used to fasting, we hear very often that their appetite starts to seriously go down. Not up. Down. They should eat to satiation on their eating day.
There’s a very good reason for this decrease in appetite. As you start to break the insulin resistance cycle, insulin levels start to decrease. Since insulin is the major regulator of the body set weight (BSW) your body now ‘wants’ to go lower. In response, hunger is suppressed and total energy expenditure is maintained. So – appetite goes down and TEE [total energy expenditure] stays same or goes up. Remember that standard Caloric Reduction as Primary (CRaP) strategies produce the opposite. Appetite goes up and TEE goes down. Which do you think will work in the long run?
Related: How Caloric Reduction Wrecks your Metabolism.
One of the key assumptions of the CRaP theory is that in response to caloric change, TEE does not change. This is clearly NOT TRUE. . . .
The body seems to have a certain Body Set Weight (BSW). Any attempts to increase above this BSW will result in our body trying to return the body to its original weight by increasing TEE (increasing metabolism to burn off the excess calories).
Any attempts to decrease below this BSW will result in our body trying to return the body to its original weight by decreasing TEE (decreasing metabolism to regain lost calories). No wonder it is so hard to keep the weight off! As we slow our metabolism, we must further and further reduce our caloric intake to maintain weight loss.
An important thing to keep in mind is that fasting is not an extreme version of mere caloric reduction. The two activities have very different effects on the body.
Earlier: Misconceptions about fasting.
UK: Calls to refer to God as a woman as female bishops take up posts.
Hilary Cotton, chair of Women And The Church (Watch), the group which led the campaign for female bishops, . . . said that while congregations were already experimenting with new terminology, it was time for the issue to be considered by the Liturgical Commission, the body which drafts official service books, as well as those drawing behind a planned new catechism.
“Until we shift considerably towards a more gender-full expression in our worship about God then we are failing God and we are missing something,” she said.
“We are [also] going to miss some of the opportunities that otherwise particularly women might feel themselves called to.”
THE FREDDIE GRAY FIASCO And The Coming End of Policing.
Why are the white officers who originally detained him being charged? Because the black State’s Attorney appears intent on conducting a jihad against white police officers who proactively enforce the law against black criminals. And her allies in the legal profession are celebrating the implications . . .
And police officers around the country will take the hint. As they say in the INS, “no cases, no problems, few cases, few problems, and many cases, many problems.” White officers will stay in their cruisers instead of putting the “habeas grabus” on blacks.
Of course, crime will increase and we will go back to the bad old of days of unsafe cities Broken Windows policing was designed to prevent. Ironically, African-Americans will be the biggest victims of this.
This was posted on May 11. Here’s a news item from today, twenty days later:
Baltimore’s Murder Total For May Climbs To 43:
Police began tallying these records in 1970, and May is apparently the second deadliest month in that 45 year period.
The deadliest month in that period was in December, 1971, when 44 people were killed in the city.
There have been more than 100 non-fatal shootings this month.
Some clergy in Baltimore have asked Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to declare a state of emergency to address the problem.
CUI BONO? Prof Who Faced Down Title IX Inquisition Unmasks Money-Making Scheme for Lawyers, Bureaucrats. “The Title IX inquisition must be a cash-cow for the people tasked with handling such broad and outlandish claims.”
USEFUL: The Most Ketogenic Diet Foods.
Although insulin is loosely correlated with the carbohydrate content of a food, low carbohydrate, low fat, high protein foods such as steak, tuna and white fish still require a significant amount of insulin.
This makes sense when you understand that the majority of the amino acids in protein containing foods are glucogenic meaning that they can be converted to glucose if not used for growth and repair (see glucogenic amino acids and ketogenic amino acids). Once the glucogenic amino acids are converted to glucose it can be stored in the liver or spill over into the blood stream and require insulin, just like if it came from a carbohydrate food.
I played with the data and found that protein generates about half as much insulin as carbohydrate on a gram for gram basis. I also found that indigestible fibre does not raise insulin.
I’ll spare you the detail of statistical analysis (it can be found here, if you’re into that sort of thing), however it appears that the insulin load of a food is related to it’s carbohydrate content, minus the indigestible fibre, plus about half the protein. . . .
Using this formula I analysed the 8000 foods in the USDA food database to identify the most ketogenic foods (or the foods that require the least insulin). . . .
The foods with the lowest insulinogenic percentage are fats and oils that don’t contain any carbohydrate or protein such as butter, coconut oil, olive oil, butter, flax seed oil and lard.
If we drop out the foods that are primarily fats and oils and sort by the percentage of insulinogenic calories we end up with this list of decadent, delicious, full fat foods.
ANN COULTER: With amnesty, elites conspire against the middle class.
I don’t mean to be obtuse, but why is it a crisis that illegal aliens are “living in the shadows”? I forget. We need to bring in more people who will drive down the wages of our fellow Americans because — why again?
It is not a crisis for Americans that other people have come into their country illegally and now find it uncomfortable to be living here breaking the law. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable to break the law. Perhaps illegal aliens should have considered that before coming.
HERE WE GO: EU Plans To Bribe Countries With Their Own Money To Take Boat Migrants. “Germany, which backs the proposals, is set to take the largest number of people, relocating 8,763 from Italy and Greece, and a further 3,086 from outside of the EU.”
GERMANY now has the lowest birthrate among nations, according to a study. So then, obviously, more women should work. Wait, what?
Germany has dropped below Japan to have not just the lowest birth rate across Europe but also globally, according to the report by Germany-based analysts.
Its authors warned of the effects of a shrinking working-age population.
They said women’s participation in the workforce would be key to the country’s economic future.
In Germany, an average of 8.2 children were born per 1,000 inhabitants over the past five years, according to the study by German auditing firm BDO with the Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI). . . .
Arno Probst, a BDO board member, . . . said the country would need young immigrant workers to fill the significant skills gap. And more women were needed in the workforce to avoid economic problems.
ANN COULTER’S sensible immigration policy:
Pacheco persisted . . .: “This undocumented immigrant who has lived in this nation for almost 22 years wants to as a sign of my humanity and yours recognize you and say ‘Can I give you a hug?’”
“No. Let’s get on with the question,” Coulter replied again. . . .
Asked about the “hug” question by Breitbart News, Coulter noted that she won’t admit people like Pacheco to the United States.
“When I’m in charge of immigration (after our 10 year moratorium), I will not admit overweight girls,” Coulter said in the email.
HERE WE GO: Cops Arrest Subway Riders For “Manspreading”.
A university spokesperson told St. Louis Magazine the statue will be placed within the “historical context of a collection that’s on permanent display in our SLU Museum of Art.” The statue is set for the museum’s “Collection of the Western Jesuit Missions.”
“In more recent years, there have been some faculty and staff who have raised questions about whether the sculpture is culturally sensitive,” SLU spokesman Clayton Berry said.
Better not tell them that the university is named after a French king who twice crusaded in Africa.
HOW THE FEDS respond to opposition against refugee resettlement.
Titled “Resettlement at Risk: Meeting Emerging Challenges to Refugee Resettlement in Local Communities,” [PDF] the report by [the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society] admits that communities “across the country” are pushing back . . .
The report blames the backlash not on any failure of the government to properly vet refugees but on “anti-Muslim views” held by native-born Americans. The report also points a finger at refugee watchdog Ann Corcoran, who started the Refugee Resettlement Watch blog in 2007 after she learned that Muslim refugees were arriving in her rural farm community in western Maryland. . . .
The report also calls for Congress to increase funding of the refugee program, which currently costs taxpayers nearly $1.5 billion per year, not including the social welfare benefits handed out to refugees. Unlike most other categories of immigrants, refugees immediately qualify for food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, Social Security disability and TANF, a monthly cash assistance program for poor families with children.
The resettlement agencies claim that most refugees are “self-sufficient” within three to six months. But, Corcoran says, that does not mean they are earning their own living and paying their own way.
“That only means that they have been set up on government welfare and the resettlement agencies are no longer helping them,” she said.
THE NEW TOLERANCE: UK: Christian preacher arrested and held in a cell for 11 HOURS after lesbian falsely accused him of homophobia.
Rob Hughes, 38, was speaking in Basildon, Essex, when the woman said she was ‘gay and proud’ and he should ‘get down off your pedestal, you judgmental **** – homophobia is not in this town’.
However Mr Hughes – who had a voice recording of all he had said while preaching for 20 minutes that day – had not referenced homosexuality.
NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY: Why powerful men now hide behind open doors.
Surely there are plenty of male bosses guilty of boorish behavior. But there are also plenty of women who believe that a sexist joke or even a compliment on one’s outfit is enough to create a “hostile work environment.”
And so rather than engaging in a “he-said, she-said” deposition, many bosses would rather make sure they have witnesses to every interaction.
Of course, the notion that female staffers are being prevented from certain kinds of interactions with their bosses has provoked outrage from predictable quarters.Not only do staffers report that these policies make their jobs “significantly harder to do,” but it also makes it harder for these women to climb the professional ladder.
WHAT’S SAUCE FOR THE GANDER: “Germaine Greer has criticised gay parents Elton John and David Furnish for listing a man as the mother on the birth certificates of their two sons.”
‘Sir Elton John and his “wife” David Furnish have entered on the birth certificate of their two sons that David Furnish is the mother. I’m sorry. That will give you an idea of how the concept of motherhood has emptied out. It’s gone. It’s been deconstructed. . . .
‘We now have a “genetic” mother, who supplies eggs. It depends entirely on where she is if she is going to be allowed to know what happens to the eggs. . . .
‘The whole discourse has been distorted from the beginning by the fertility industry. I’ve been thinking about this lately, and I’ve got a suspicion, which I need to investigate properly, that we got legalised abortion precisely because the fertility industry needed it.
‘It wasn’t us. It certainly wasn’t us. We could have marched until our feet fell off and they wouldn’t have bothered to give us access to abortion. They were the ones who wanted to be able to terminate pregnancies and manipulate the products of conception at will.’
Earlier, related to this last point: Theorizing About the Modern Birth Control Scam.
NARRATIO SUPER FACTIS: Duke U Or Dupe U? Noose Hate Hoax Perp Probably Asian, But Administration Won’t Say.
All MSM coverage stopped dead.
Why?
On April 2, Duke had announced that it had determined the identity of the nooser. But it refused to release his identity . . .
On May 1, Duke announced that the noose hanging was motivated by a “lack of cultural awareness and was not a statement related to racism.” The student would be able to return the next fall (after losing $30,000 in costs for the spring semester). Duke released a letter of apology from the student:
My purpose in hanging the noose was merely to take some pictures with my friends together with the noose, and then texting it to some others inviting them to come and ‘hang out’ with us—because it was such a nice day outside….
Updated: Duke says noose incident caused by bad judgment, not racism, by Amrith Rankumar, Duke Chronicle, May 1, 2015.
Even so,
On April 7—after they knew the identity of the student—Duke professors and President Richard Brodhead held a teach-in, reportedly attended by app. 1,000 SJW students, against “hate.” This was clearly designed to further the Narrative that black students (and faculty and staffers too!) are somehow in danger from violent white supremacists on Duke’s campus—in other words, it was a tissue of lies.
STEVE SAILER: Those Darn Nerds!
You can do a reality check on the notion that the contributions of women to computer programming were covered up in the past simply by looking up the Pentagon’s massive attempt to impose its Ada language on the programmers of the world. Back in the 1970s’s the Department of Defense wanted to radically reduce the number of programming languages in use by contractors, so it sponsored a new language, which it named after Lord Byron’s daughter. . . .
You may recall Ada as another costly Pentagon boondoggle, but obviously your memories are poisoned by sexism.
Similarly, if you are of a certain age, you may recall how 1940s programmer Admiral Grace Hopper of COBOL fame was constantly feted in her old age with honors and promotions. Wikipedia lists 29 different honors bestowed upon her from 1969 onward, but that’s lumping together the more than 40 honorary degrees she received.
HENRY HARPENDING: When Public Policy Meets Elementary Biology.
Males can devote most of their effort to mating effort, usually involving competition with other males. Male commitment to parenting effort is not common in mammals but there are familiar examples like beavers, coyotes, gibbons, and some humans. In the jargon the polar strategies of male mammals are called “cad” and “dad” strategies. . . .
At one extreme a human female can seek a dadly male who provides resources like food and protection to their joint offspring. At the other extreme, a human female can pay little or no attention to her mate choice, instead letting the guys work things out. In the jargon these female alternatives are called “coy” and “fast”. . . .
We are likely to find dad males/coy females in ecological situations where male labor and resources are critical for successful reproduction. Think of labor-intensive agriculture . . .
Social organization with cad males and fast females is found prominently among tropical gardeners where women provide most of the food . . .
In cad/fast social systems neither a coy female nor a dad male does very well while in dad/coy systems neither a fast female nor a cad male does very well. The two polar social types are deeply rooted in contemporary politics. The zany feminism of the 1980s (“a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”) precisely advocated the cad/fast setup. Our religious right with its chatter about “the natural family” and “stable marriages” and the like pushes hard for a dad/coy world.
Back to our our social engineers who know biology. They share a goal of a society in which dad males mate with coy females because children enjoy the care and security of a stable home and streets safe from gunfire. The new policy is simple: welfare payments are to be given only to males.
UPDATE: Related: Compassion Creates More Cads. “The result of all this government largesse is the substitution of handouts for husbands. When provider males who are predisposed to marry and support a family are worth less on the market than they used to be they are slowly replaced by playboys taking advantage of the sexual climate. Women who have their security needs met by Big Government (in combination with their own economic empowerment) begin to favor their desire for sexy, noncommital alpha males at the expense of their attraction for men who will foot the bills.”
LET’S SEE WHERE THIS GOES: A Scandal in Political Science.
A UCLA graduate student, Michael LaCour, appears to have faked a data set that was the basis for an article that he published in the highly prestigious journal Science. I have examined a second paper by LaCour. As I’ll explain, I’m convinced that it also is the product of faked results. . . . I do not believe he actually wrote the code that would be necessary to execute his method and, accordingly, I don’t believe that he really computed the estimates that he reports from his method. I do not have proof of my beliefs, only strong evidence. Proof would be simple—we ask LaCour to provide the code he wrote as well as the output from his computer. But until we see that proof—or LaCour’s refusal to provide such proof—I am willing to speculate.
Read the post for the full argument. (more…)
JOHN ZMIRAK: For the Left, Libertarians are Like a ‘Cheap Date’. A better term, I think, is “useful idiot.” “Most libertarians argue for the free movement of peoples, and favor open borders. They say that absent a welfare state, people would spontaneously seek out opportunities, then when jobs dried up they would pick up and leave. Maybe this is true. But we will never find out because the welfare state isn’t going anywhere — in part because recent immigrants are heavy users of public benefits, so they almost universally vote for Democrats who will extend them. And impose onerous regulations on employers, nullifying their freedom of contract. And raise taxes. Low-skill immigrants serve the left as captive voters, undermining almost everything libertarians say they stand for. The left uses libertarians as human shears to cut holes in the border fence, then drops them and moves along.”
NARRATIO SUPER FACTIS: Fun With Charts – Paul Krugman Edition. “See what was done there? The period in the early 1960’s was removed, and so was the period from 2000 on. In other words, out of a 55-year time period, Dr. Krugman decided to remove 20 years’ worth of data. For those keeping track, that’s removing almost 40% of an entire data set just because the data didn’t fit the narrative. And when you add those years back you get a result that shows a very weak correlation.”
THE NEW TOLERANCE: Court Rules Pro-Life Views Are “Patently Offensive,” Bans Choose Life License Plates in New York. “Judge Rosemary Pooler, a Clinton appointee, agreed with New York’s position in her majority opinion. She took this view even though she also ruled that license plates are private speech subject to First Amendment protections. Despite these protections, however, she said that so many New Yorkers could find a plate advocating an anti-abortion position ‘patently offensive’ that the DMV was justified in suppressing the speech.”
VOX DAY: Sex disparity explained.
DALROCK: For contemporary Christians, “feminism doesn’t feel like rebellion because it feels normal.”
We live in an age where feminist rebellion is considered the highest virtue. Modern Christians have bought into feminism but deny this by denying the very rebellion. . . .
Men who are part of the current rationalize feminist rebellion without a second thought. There is no malice or calculation here; this is what you do when you are part of the current. Commenter Creative Dude explains that when the Bible tells wives to submit to their husbands even if their husband doesn’t obey the word, this really means his own wife’s submission is contingent upon him obeying the word.
CURIOUS: Female Same-Sex Attraction Revisited.
One idea that we can lay to rest here is the notion that female masculinization and SSA stem from prenatal exposure to male hormones. The way to test this idea is to look at females with a male fraternal twin (Fm) compared to women with female fraternal twins (Ff). If the Fm women were more masculine that Ff women, then it would imply prenatal hormones were at work. A massive review looking at such twin studies (Tapp, Maybery, and Whitehouse, 2011 [PDF]) found little support for this notion, particularly from the larger studies examined. Another recent twin study out of Denmark (Ahrenfeldt et al, 2015 [PDF]) found no such effect on women’s academic performance (Fm twins didn’t exhibit a more male-typical cognitive profile). . . .
Manly men beget manly daughters. Some of these alleles may serve to increase “gynephilia” (attraction to women), and they may have this effect in both sexes. This may be where SSA comes from in women. Unlike male SSA, female SSA appears to be continuously distributed – consistent with what we’d expect if it arose from the general load of various gynephilic alleles (resulting in pure lesbianism in the most extreme cases). The female SSA itself, being near selectively neutral, could reach high frequencies in women, just as masculinity in general has. However, the general suite of masculinized traits (e.g., sociosexuality, facial masculinity) was likely maladaptive in women, and was selected against, counteracting the positive selection in men. In other words, sexual antagonistic selection.
HMM: Did SJWs Sean Powell And Jocelyn Galvano-Pickett Help Get A Vermont State Trooper Fired?
Update (5/22/2015)
The commenter “Brian Ritchason” leaving angry remarks on this article is in fact Sean Powell himself. . . .“Ritchason” has repeatedly argued that it was a “fellow trooper” who reported Graham, but the revelation that “Ritchason” is actually Powell is as good an admission of guilt as we’re going to get.
I can see the usefulness of calling out such people, but it can be difficult to establish whether they are actually the ones responsible.
UK: The scandal of foreign nurses with bogus papers. “Thousands of foreign nurses could be working in Britain with bogus qualifications it has emerged, after police warned that the medic who killed two patients at Stockport’s Stepping Hill hospital used forged photocopies to secure his job.”
From 2012: “The vast majority of doctors who have been struck off in the past five years were trained abroad, new figures from the General Medical Council show.”
NEW YORK: Model’s rape claim falls apart after bogus pregnancy charge.
Prosecutors soon downgraded the charge to sexual misconduct because they found holes in her story and her rape kit tested inconclusive, [the accused man’s lawyer Tom] Kenniff said.
Then, in January 2015, Riabenkova made a shocking claim — telling prosecutors she was impregnated during the alleged rape and wanted an abortion.
The DA’s Office told the clinic to preserve the biological material, and Kenniff immediately asked for a DNA test.
The results proved his client was not the father, and on May 15 the case was thrown out and sealed. . . .
Riabenkova . . . will not face false-report charges.
ROBERT STACY MCCAIN: Humanist Counter-Theory in the Age of Misandry.
Those who would attempt to separate “mainstream” feminism from the more radical aspects of its ideology cannot avoid the problem that the faculty and curricula of university Women’s Studies programs — where feminism wields the authority of an official philosophy — are disproportionately dominated by radical lesbians.
This hegemonic influence is not merely manifested in the fact that outspoken lesbian activists are employed as directors and professors in Women’s Studies programs everywhere, but also plainly evident in the textbooks and readings assigned in their classrooms. Even if a moderate heterosexual feminist were to become a Women’s Studies professor, she would find it nearly impossible to assign a textbook that was not crammed with radical anti-male/anti-heterosexual readings from lesbian feminists like Charlotte Bunch, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Janice Raymond, Judith Butler and others.
THE NEW TOLERANCE: A Warning from Canada: Same-Sex Marriage Erodes Fundamental Rights.
Anyone who is offended by something you have said or written can make a complaint to the Human Rights Commissions and Tribunals. In Canada, these organizations police speech, penalizing citizens for any expression deemed in opposition to particular sexual behaviors or protected groups identified under “sexual orientation.” It takes only one complaint against a person to be brought before the tribunal, costing the defendant tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. The commissions have the power to enter private residences and remove all items pertinent to their investigations, checking for hate speech.
The plaintiff making the complaint has his legal fees completely paid for by the government. Not so the defendant. Even if the defendant is found innocent, he cannot recover his legal costs. If he is found guilty, he must pay fines to the person(s) who brought forth the complaint. . . .
An example of legally curtailed speech regarding homosexuality in Canada involves the case of Bill Whatcott, who was arrested for hate speech in April 2014 after distributing pamphlets that were critical of homosexuality. Whether or not you agree with what he says, you should be aghast at this state-sanctioned gagging. Books, DVDs, and other materials can also be confiscated at the Canadian border if the materials are deemed “hateful.”
Americans need to prepare for the same sort of surveillance-society in America if the Supreme Court rules to ban marriage as a male-female institution.
“ALL HUMAN TRAITS contain a substantial heritable element. The blank slate is totally false.”
[The authors] have ploughed through fifty years of twin studies to assemble 14,558,903 partly dependent twin pairs drawn from 2,748 publications. . . .
By all standards of academic debate, this is the mother of “F*** Off” samples, which should lay low five decades of quibbling about the twin method.
WHOOPS: Author retracts study of changing minds on same-sex marriage after colleague admits data were faked. “The survey firm claimed they had no familiarity with the project and that they had never had an employee with the name of the staffer we were asking for. The firm also denied having the capabilities to perform many aspects of the recruitment procedures described in LaCour and Green (2014).”
CURIOUS: Omega-3: Intervention for childhood behavioral problems?
“Omega-3 regulates neurotransmitters, enhances the life of a neuron and increases dendritic branching, but our bodies do not produce it. We can only get it from the environment,” Raine said.
Research on the neuroanatomy of violent criminals suggested this might be a place to intervene. . . .
Raine’s new study featured a randomized controlled trial where children would receive regular omega-3 supplements in the form of a juice drink. . . .
“Compared to the baseline at zero months,” Raine said, “both groups show improvement in both the externalizing and internalizing behavior problems after six months. That’s the placebo effect.
“But what was particularly interesting was what was happening at 12 months. The control group returned to the baseline while the omega-3 group continued to go down. In the end, we saw a 42 percent reduction in scores on externalizing behavior and 62 percent reduction in internalizing behavior.” . . .
The researchers caution that this is still preliminary work in uncovering the role nutrition plays in the link between brain development and antisocial behavior. The changes seen in the one-year period of the experiment may not last, and the results may not be generalizable outside the unique context of Mauritius.
STEVE SAILER: Matthew Weiner Explains “Mad Men” Is About “White Power”. Weiner says, “These men don’t take no for an answer, they build these big businesses, these empires, but really it’s all based on failure, insecurity, and an identity modeled on some abstract ideal of white power. I’ve always said this is a show about becoming white. That’s the definition of success in America—becoming a WASP. A WASP male.”
See also Sailer’s earlier post, “Matthew Weiner on How ‘Mad Men’ Is Driven by His Resentment of WASP Country Clubs.”
What is suggested by the fact that Weiner can so openly declare his show to be an expression of animus toward a particular group of people characterized largely by race? Note that Weiner is not attacking “his own,” so to speak, but rather people he regards as outsiders — white gentiles — and apparently this is totally unremarkable to people. Is it unremarkable because it is to be expected? And if it is to be expected, then wouldn’t it be normal to see the phenomenon elsewhere?
Take, for example, the observation that the author of the Rolling Stone gang-rape sex fantasy, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, is a Jew who has built a career on trashing white gentiles: A Left-Wing Jew With A History Of Christian-Bashing Wrote That Bogus Rolling Stone Article About Rape At UVA.
(See also, for a less prominent example, “A letter to an organizer of the White Privilege Conference.”)
Better yet, why not look to an even more prominent form of pop culture, say, the movies? See “Anti-White themes in Hollywood movies” (paragraph breaks added for readability): (more…)
IN THE JESUIT TRADITION: Marquette’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center: Glorifying a Black Militant Cop Killer.
HERETIC: Duke professor put on leave for a “racist” comment online. “In writing me, no one has said I was wrong, just racist.” That’s good enough. To the guillotine!
Anyway, here is most of what he wrote. For the rest, click the link above and scroll past the propaganda:
In 1965 the Asians were discriminated against as least as badly as blacks. That was reflected in the word “colored.” The racism against what even Eleanor Roosevelt called the yellow races was at least as bad.
So where are the editorials that say racism doomed the Asian-Americans. They didn’t feel sorry for themselves, but worked doubly hard.
I am a professor at Duke University. Every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration. The amount of Asian-white dating is enormous and so surely will be the intermarriage. Black-white dating is almost non-existent because of the ostracism by blacks of anyone who dates a white.
It was appropriate that a Chinese design won the competition for the Martin Luther King stat[u]e. King helped them overcome. The blacks followed Malcolm X.
“I am a professor at Duke University.” Yeah, probably shouldn’t mention that in an online comment.
HMM: First results from psychology’s largest reproducibility test.
An ambitious effort to replicate 100 research findings in psychology ended last week — and the data look worrying. Results posted online on 24 April, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, suggest that key findings from only 39 of the published studies could be reproduced. . . .
The results should convince everyone that psychology has a replicability problem, says Hal Pashler, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, and an author of one of the papers whose findings were successfully repeated. “A lot of working scientists assume that if it’s published, it’s right,” he says. “This makes it hard to dismiss that there are still a lot of false positives in the literature.”
But Daniele Fanelli, who studies bias and scientific misconduct at Stanford University in California, says the results suggest that the reproducibility of findings in psychology does not necessarily lag behind that in other sciences. There is plenty of room for improvement, he adds, but earlier studies have suggested that reproducibility rates in cancer biology and drug discovery could be even lower. “From my expectations, these are not bad at all,” Fanelli says. “Though I have spoken to psychologists who are quite disappointed.”
Isn’t it odd that there has to be a big reproducibility initiative in fields that we are all told are governed by reproducibility as a basic principle?
REFORM: Is official discouragement of consuming saturated fat on the way out? One can hope:
On May 8, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Association) made its official comments on the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and recommend dropping saturated fat from nutrients of concern due to the lack of evidence connecting it with cardiovascular disease.
However, because past advice from the Academy and others has caused issues with ALL of our body systems, I would also argue that this is actually earth-shattering news . . .
In the last couple of years, there have been a number of articles in the medical literature removing the “villain” label from dietary fat. Now we need to take the next step, and take a harder look at what has likely been the real culprit at work with obesity and diabetes. Remember the bottom of the food pyramid? All those grains we were supposed to eat so we could avoid consuming fat? Well, we need to now turn our attention to those, too.
At the bottom of the post there is a list of links to relevant articles (the first of which is covered in the link above). I reproduce it here: (more…)
MISCONCEPTIONS about fasting. This is the fifth part of an ongoing series.
Studies of alternate daily fasting . . . show that the concern over muscle loss is largely misplaced. Alternate daily fasting over 70 days decreased body weight by 6%, but fat mass decreased by 11.4%. Lean mass (including muscle and bone) did not change at all. Significant improvements were seen in LDL cholesterol and triglyceride levels. Growth hormone increases to maintain muscle mass. Studies of eating a single meal per day found significantly more fat loss despite the same caloric intake. Importantly, no evidence of muscle loss was found.
The other persistent myth of ‘starvation mode’ is that basal metabolism decreases severely and our bodies ‘shut down’. This too is highly disadvantageous to survival of the human species. If, after a single day of fasting, metabolism decreased, then we would have less energy to hunt or gather food. With less energy, we are less likely to get food. So, another day passes, and we are even weaker, making us even less likely to get food. This is a vicious cycle that the human species would not have survived. It’s stupid. Why would we assume the human body is so stupid? There are, in fact, no species of animals, humans included that are evolved to require three meals a day, everyday. We have already seen in a previous post that resting energy expenditure (REE) goes UP, not down during fasting. Metabolism revs up; it does not shut down.
TODD STARNES: Fairfax County, Virginia schools to teach kids there’s no such thing as boys or girls. “Individual identity will also be described as having four parts – biological gender, gender identity (includes transgender), gender role, and sexual orientation (includes heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual).”
I asked the school district to provide me with the textbooks and scientific data they will be using to instruct the children that there are dozens and dozens of possible genders.
Here’s the reply I received from Torre:
“Lessons have not been developed for the proposed lesson objectives,” he stated. “Because of the need to develop lessons, the proposed objectives would not be implemented until fall 2016.”
In other words – they don’t have a clue.
“The big picture here is, women do earn less in America because they choose to,” McInnes said. “They would rather go to their daughter’s piano recital than stay all night at work, working on a proposal, so they end up earning less.”
Still, he continued: “They’re less ambitious, and I think this is sort of God’s way, this is nature’s way of saying women should be at home with the kids — they’re happier there.”