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Saturday, September 25, 2021

Links - 25th September 2021 (2)

What Happens When We Randomly Assign Children to Families? - "I use a new data set of Korean-American adoptees who, as infants, were randomly assigned to families in the U.S. I examine the treatment effects from being assigned to a high income family, a high education family or a family with four or more children. I calculate the transmission of income, education and health characteristics from adoptive parents to adoptees. I then compare these coefficients of transmission to the analogous coefficients for biological children in the same families, and to children raised by their biological parents in other data sets. Having a college educated mother increases an adoptee's probability of graduating from college by 7 percentage points, but raises a biological child's probability of graduating from college by 26 percentage points. In contrast, transmission of drinking and smoking behavior from parents to children is as strong for adoptees as for non-adoptees. For height, obesity, and income, transmission coefficients are significantly higher for non-adoptees than for adoptees. In this sample, sibling gender composition does not appear to affect adoptee outcomes nor does the mix of adoptee siblings versus biological siblings"

Baltimore Chefs Drove 6 Hours To Cook a Dying Customer Her Favorite Dish - "Maryland resident Brandon Jones, 37, knew it would be a long shot, but he had to try.His mother-in-law, who is in the final stages of lung cancer and has stopped treatment, had fallen in love with the tempura broccoli dish from Ekiben in Baltimore, so he emailed one of the owners, Steve Chu, requesting the recipe... The chef, who specializes in Asian fusion cuisine, offered to meet Jones and his wife, Rina, in Vermont to make it fresh... For as long as Jones’ mother-in-law has been visiting Baltimore, she has made it a priority to go to Ekiben in Fells Point, where she orders the same dish — tempura broccoli topped with fresh herbs, red onion and rice vinegar... Chu, Ekiben co-owner Ephrem Abebe, and their colleague Joe Añonuevo, loaded up their pickup and drove the six hours to Vermont.The next day, the chefs set up a makeshift kitchen in the bed of their truck at Rina’s mom’s house, working against freezing temperatures to get their fryer to the correct temperature.When the tempura broccoli, alongside tofu nuggets with spicy peanut sauce and roasted garlic, was ready, the team boxed up the food and rang the doorbell."

nome on Twitter - "I forget who said it, but it's stuck in my head - Half the reason folks romanticize college is because it's the last time most folks lived in dense, walkable neighborhoods focused on providing community during plentiful off-hours. Like, that could just be how we build cities."
I don't know how urban design can give you more free time - if you drive somewhere it's much faster than walking even a relatively short distance

Thomas Jones · See you in hell, punk: Kai su, Brutus - " When Caesar saw Brutus among his attackers, Plutarch writes, ‘he covered his head with his toga and let himself fall.’ Suetonius adds that, according to some reports, he said in Greek: ‘Kai su, teknon’ (which Shakespeare turned into the Latin ‘Et tu, Brute?’). It literally means ‘You too, child,’ but what Caesar may have intended by the words isn’t clear. Tempest cites ‘an important article’ by James Russell (1980) ‘that has often been overlooked’. Russell points out that the words kai su often appear on curse tablets, and suggests that Caesar’s putative last words were not ‘the emotional parting declaration of a betrayed man to one he had treated like a son’ but more along the lines of ‘See you in hell, punk.’"

Youth and Democratic Citizenshipin East and South-East Asia - "The issue of women’s lesser psychological involvement in politics merits further exploration. This pattern of lesser interest is likely related to the fact that women, including young women, are less actively engaged politically than men, a phenomenon that also extends across generations. The fact that most societies included in this survey have relatively few women represented in parliament may be another indicator of this state of affairs"
Just as in the US and UK, across East and Southeast Asia, in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Mongolia, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and China, women are also less interested in politics than men

Singapore Sling cocktail allowed women to secretly drink in public - "Proper English ladies didn't drink alcohol (at least not in public), so they were relegated to sipping tea or punch and watching their husbands get hammered. Ngiam Tong Boon, the savvy bartender at Raffles, saw a market and seized on it. In 1915, he created the first Singapore Sling – a gin-heavy drink made with pineapple juice, lime juice, cherry liqueur, Cointreau, Benedictine, grenadine and bitters.The pleasantly pink mix of juice and clear gin meant that the ladies could hit the punch bowl as often as they liked without fear of committing social suicide – just as long as no one got close enough to smell their breath"

Is poverty the mother of crime? Evidence from homicide rates in China - "Income inequality is blamed for being the main driver of violent crime by the majority of the literature. However, earlier work on the topic largely neglects the role of poverty and income levels as opposed to income inequality. The current paper uses all court verdicts for homicide cases in China between 2014 and 2016, as well as various inequality measures calculated from 2005 mini census data together with a host of control variables to shed light on the relationship at the detailed Chinese prefecture-level. The results suggest that it is the poverty and low income level, rather than income inequality, that is positively related to homicide rates. We show that the internal rural-urban migration from more violent localities contributes to the destination cities’ homicide rates. The poverty-homicide association implies that instead of “relative deprivation”, “absolute deprivation” is mainly responsible for violent crime. Poverty is the mother of crime. —Marcus Aurelius (121-180AD), Emperor of the Roman Empire."

Meme - "miss independent @prettyamaka59 l just want a boyfriend that will be giving me 70% out of his daily income"
"Spongebabe @lyndakaloki But your twitter name is Miss independent?"

You Must Not ‘Do Your Own Research’ When It Comes To Science
Opinion | Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole - The New York Times
Counter lies with emotions, not facts.
Don’t be that guy: A guide to asking nonstupid questions during scientific talks
Dissidents of Clownworld - Posts | Facebook - "- Facts are no longer relevant
- Stop fact checking science
- Stop thinking for yourself
- Your questions are stupid"

Facebook - "I don’t want to hear a single thing about eChO ChAmBeRs that we netizens supposedly live in, or open and respectful discussion, or freedom of speech, when the powers that be actively hide dissenting comments on Facebook and block dissenting accounts on Twitter, and you ain’t got nothing to say about it."
SJW logic: whataboutism is good when they do it

Texas girl wakes up to find 'gentle, gigantic' raccoon in bed with her - "A raccoon slipped past two sleeping dogs and into the bunk bed of a 10-year-old Texas girl"

Florida man with machete tattoo accused of machete attack - "Justin Couch, 25, is accused of slicing the victim’s forearm with the blade, leaving him unable to move his left hand"

Meme - "Ankita \ Why does the human body need water only to pee it out bitch just keep it in"
"oh venkatesh, stop @bankelO!: That's why we have balls to keep it in longer"
"Ankita @SankiAnkita-1m Sir pee isn't stored in balls"
"oh venkatesh, stop Replying to @SankiAnkita No balls no opinion."
Womansplaining!

Meme - "Young male virginity on the rise. Share of men under age 30 who report zero female sex partners since they turned 18."
"2008: 8% - Start of the MCU
2018 - 27%"

If I cover my erect penis in gorilla glue and let it harden on my hard-on, what will happen when my dick becomes flaccid? : shittyaskscience
"I really hope someone answers this, because I want to know the answer but I don't want to have to try it."

Meme - "So sick of WalMart employees having the worst attitude towards customers. It's not my fault WalMart is the only place that would hire you"
"Started New Job at Walmart"

Claire Holt 'annoyed' with new mom Emily Ratajkowski's flat stomach photo
Her woke posturing didn't save her

Steven Spielberg's Daughter Finds Her Calling - "The mentally ill adopted daughter of billionaire Steven Spielberg wants to be financially independent. So, what does any strong empowered independent female do in 2020? Make an onlyfans account"

Meme - "Cadbury ad shows gay couple enjoying a creamy surprise
*breathes heavily* hey there kids! Want to eat some chocolates while watching two gay men passionately kiss and swab saliva and cream between their mouths?
Get the hell away from my family"

We will never fix universities until we admit that too many people go to them - "Tony Blair. Out of the blue he suddenly announced a target that 50 per cent of school leavers should go to university. In my time the percentage was in single figures, which was far too low and had already been substantially increased. But to achieve this new target entry, standards were relaxed and the polytechnics and some of colleges were transformed from excellent institutions into second-rate, or worse, universities. To achieve this target, student loans, a misnomer if there ever was one, were introduced and while they enabled many to go to university, what they learnt there often did little to improve their employability in later life.About a quarter of university degrees are vocational in one way or another. If you want to become a doctor, a dentist, a lawyer or a vet, a university degree is a good foundation and essential for a scientist. Now far more degree subjects are needed to cater for the enormous expansion in student numbers. The universities both reduced the entry qualifications and so widened the range of degrees subjects that many came to be named after a well-known cartoon figure... At one time, I was running Cable & Wireless and I visited Singapore to sign a new mobile contract. Lee Kuan Yew, the Senior Minister, asked to see me and, instead of asking me about the mobile contract, asked me why standards had fallen so much in British universities. He used, he said, to award civil service jobs on the basis of UK degrees. Today, the holder of a first-class degree from, and he named a university out of the Russell Group, is simply unemployable. To make matters worse, many young people leave university without employable skills but burdened with a debt of up to £50,000. Although this only becomes repayable when earnings rise, it is a discouraging burden with which to start your adult life. We are entering an era in which technology is going to play an ever-increasing role in our lives. It is quite likely that Artificial Intelligence will take over many, if not all, the professions. Of course, we need the liberal arts, which play an essential part in the life of the nation, but we also need the employable skills that the polytechnics used to provide"
"Capitalism has failed" - the people who claim everyone should go to university, since they imagine that university is a magical talisman that buffs everyone

The Problem - "Their study took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all... One thing that does have an influence? Money. While the opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America have a “statistically non-significant impact,” economic elites, business interests, and people who can afford lobbyists still carry major influence."

I,Hypocrite - Posts | Facebook - "A man who is 5 feet 6 inches tall needs to earn an additional $175,000 per year to be as desirable as a man who is about 6 feet tall
A 6'2" man can earn $30,000 less than a 6' man and will be viewed as equally desirable."
Source: What Makes You Click? — Mate Preferences and MatchingOutcomes in Online Dating

The Intercept: Internal Amazon Documents Show Company Knows Employees Are Forced to Pee in Bottles - "A recent report from the Intercept reveals that internal documents show that Amazon is aware that many of its workers have been forced to urinate in bottles despite recent public denials by the company that such events ever took place... Amazon does prohibit the practice and refers to it as a “Tier 1″ infraction, which employees have stated can lead to termination but delivery drivers state that this is disingenuous as they are unable to meet their quotes otherwise. One Amazon delivery employee based in Massachusetts stated: “They give us 30 minutes of paid breaks, but you will not finish your work if you take it, no matter how fast you are.”When asked if managed had been more lenient on quotas after discovering that employees were being forced to urinate and defecate in their delivery vans, Brown responded: “Not at all. In fact, over the course of my time there, our package and stop counts actually increased substantially.”"

I'm regularly told I’m not welcome in Cornwall - "When we lived in Wales, my mum would joke that you could live there a decade and still not be local. Now in Cornwall, I understand what she meant. As I write about falling in love with this place, some people (the minority) seem to delight in telling me I am not welcome here... On another Facebook page called ‘Stop The Destruction of Cornwall Now’, locals protest about outsiders moving in. Complaining about ugly new developments in their villages that no locals can afford to live in. On the streets of Cornwall, food banks struggle to serve more people than ever and homelessness grows while in Mousehole holiday lets sit empty – waiting for £2,000-a-week summer renters to arrive.Yet the cleft between locals and outsiders is not simple economics. The people I see dreaming of moving here are not billionaires but teachers, plumbers, nurses. Meanwhile, as some locals struggle for work, others make good money renting holiday lets, running tourist businesses or WFH on London wages.In truth, economic divisions have become a distraction from the real issue: identity. A fear that as more incomers arrive, Cornish culture is eroded – a concern reignited when ‘Cornish’ was no longer recognised on the census (Cornish people were encouraged to write it anyway). Fears that are echoed, but better protected, in Wales (where in my school the first language was Welsh)... Other ex-Londoners write rudely that: ‘There aren’t many people down here that have a brain and vava-voom. Either they are 102 years old, benefits mums and dads, manual laborours looking after second homes, hospitality industry folks or alternative lifestylers.’ I reply, ‘That sounds like most of my friends.’"
Too bad she's white, so she can't complain about "racism".

Swan terrorizes homeowners by constantly knocking on front doors: 'Extremely irritating' - "The residents of a town in England have been dealing with a confusing nuisance involving a swan that seemingly likes to knock on doors. Unfortunately for homeowners, it apparently will knock on a single door for up to three hours. The phenomenon has been going on for five years in Northampton, East Midlands... no one is sure why the bird is behaving this way."

Meme - "FIRST WAS LIKE *clad in black with rifle and antifa & YPG flags*
BUT THEN... *man in dress striking a feminine pose* - midwest_mangler666"

Meme - "Men only wants One thing. And it's disgusting"
"Then wash it"

What Is The Kermit Sipping Tea Meme? A History Of This Muppet's Shade - "In the olden days, passive-aggression was a craft that had to be practiced and honed through years of precisely arched eyebrows, significant glances, and the occasional, lethal “Bless your heart.” But over time, as etiquette classes and generational vendettas fell out of fashion, and the internet and conflict-based reality TV came to occupy most of our time, we, as a society, needed a new way to brutally undercut someone while still maintaining an air of detached superiority. Enter the Kermit Sipping Tea meme."

Multi-Generational Drinking of Bottled Low Mineral Water Impairs Bone Quality in Female Rats - "Long-term drinking of low mineral water may disturb bone metabolism and biochemical properties and therefore weaken biomechanical bone properties in females. Drinking tap water, which contains adequate minerals, was found to be better for bone health."
Even bottled mineral water wasn't great. Hypochrondria affects your health

Angel Alvarez on Twitter - "One of my twitch subs bought me the PS5 and THREE 3090s Loudly crying faceLoudly crying faceLoudly crying face"
"Mf did all that to be called “One of my twitch subs”"

Meme - "The way she looks at you after you smash and shes waiting for a towel"

Meme - "Guys really live in apartments like this and don’t see any issue"
"Sorry we understand this economy and don't waste our money on dumb shit like three wooden arrows that say "live, laugh, love""

Meme - "Men really think it's okay to live like this"
"Women hate how little it takes for us to be happy. Stay up, kingz."

Meme - "It's degrading to ruin your body for a man's children."
"MyFreeCams: Niceguy69 tipped 10,000 tokens: "Please tick a dozen eggs in your anus. Thanks princess :)""

Test card - Wikipedia - "A test card, also known as a test pattern or start-up/closedown test, is a television test signal, typically broadcast at times when the transmitter is active but no program is being broadcast (often at sign-on and sign-off). Used since the earliest TV broadcasts, test cards were originally physical cards at which a television camera was pointed, and such cards are still often used for calibration, alignment, and matching of cameras and camcorders."

ELIJAH SCHAFFER on Twitter - "Woke up and found out a rapper had sex with the devil in a music video and is now selling human blood shoes in a partnership with Nike But it’s still controversial to publicly follow the teachings of Jesus Christ & believe there are only 2 genders Did I miss anything else?"

Jeonse - Wikipedia - "Jeonse (Korean: 전세; Hanja: 傳貰), also known as Chonsei, Key Money Deposit[1] or Key Money,[2] is type of a lease or deposit common in the South Korean real estate market. Instead of paying monthly rent, a renter will make a lump-sum deposit on a rental space, at anywhere from 50% to 80% of the market value. The owners make profit from reinvesting the jeonse deposit, instead of receiving the monthly rent... The landlord makes a return by taking the deposit money and investing it and keeping all interest earned on the deposit. The tenant's deposit is protected by having a lien issued against the property for the amount given. The entire deposit is then returned to the tenant at the end of the lease."

charlotte (or whatever) on Twitter - "which way, western man"
"Gay St. Church St"

Why does the economy do better when Democrats are in the White House? - "developments from abroad seemed to do the most to help explain the growth gap: oil price shocks, and war (through its effect on defense spending). Oil prices cooperated during the early years of the period under study, including the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson presidencies. But rising prices held the economy back during the mid 1970s, early 1990s, and mid 2000s when Republicans were in power.Wartime mobilization may be an even bigger factor in explaining the gap, especially given the differential timing for Democrats and Republicans. Truman and Johnson oversaw increases in defense spending during the wars in Korea and Vietnam, while Eisenhower and Nixon oversaw the drawdowns. The authors show that if they eliminate just the Truman and first Eisenhower terms from the analysis, the GDP gap shrinks by about 20%.Greater productivity growth (possibly reflecting a quicker pace of technological change), more consumer confidence, and faster economic growth in Europe during Democratic terms also contributed to the gap to varying degrees over this period"

Scientism's ignorance of science

Quote that is currently being shared a lot:

"If you are not a scientist, and you disagree with scientists about science, it’s actually not a disagreement. You're just wrong. Science is not truth. Science is finding the truth. When science changes its opinion, it didn't lie to you. It learned more."

While posted by many, it first seems to have been tweeted by mohamad safa.

Ironically, this is a curious mix of 2 forms of scientism, and is self contradictory post.

If science is not truth and science can change its opinion, how can one assert that disagreeing with scientists about science means one is wrong?

The quote is also ignorant of how science works. Anyone who approves of it should read some Kuhn, or about the effects of ideology on science (eg Lysenko or the 19th century version of race science)

Also, those who approve of this quote had better not be one of those people trying to bludgeon others into silence with "the science", who claims "the science" is "settled" and calls everyone who disagrees a "denier" - since science is not truth, can learn more and change its opinion, all that is patent nonsense.

Related:

If You Say 'Science Is Right,' You're Wrong

"Even a modest familiarity with the history of science offers many examples of matters that scientists thought they had resolved, only to discover that they needed to be reconsidered. Some familiar examples are Earth as the center of the universe, the absolute nature of time and space, the stability of continents, and the cause of infectious disease...

Some conclusions are so well established we may feel confident we won't be revisiting them. I can't think of anyone I know who thinks we will be questioning the laws of thermodynamics any time soon. But physicists at the start of the 20th century, just before the discovery of quantum mechanics and relativity, didn't think they were about to rethink their field's foundations, either...

History and philosophy have shown that the idea of a singular scientific method is, well, unscientific. In point of fact, the methods of science have varied between disciplines and across time. Many scientific practices, particularly statistical tests of significance, have been developed with the idea of avoiding wishful thinking and self-deception, but that hardly constitutes “the scientific method.” Scientists have bitterly argued about which methods are the best, and, as we all know, bitter arguments rarely get resolved.

In my view, the biggest mistake scientists make is to claim that this is all somehow simple and therefore to imply that anyone who doesn't get it is a dunce. Science is not simple, and neither is the natural world; therein lies the challenge of science communication."

Ironically, most of the people who believe wholeheartedly in the quote at the start of this post will likely disagree with the article I quoted, but they should take their own advice, since the author is "Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. A world-renowned geologist" - so they must accept that they are wrong about science.

Links - 25th September 2021 (1) (US Afghanistan pullout)

CNN reporter describes Taliban chanting ‘Death to America’ on Kabul streets as ‘friendly’ - " CNN’s Chief International Correspondent Clarissa Ward described a group of Taliban fighters as “friendly” whilst they chanted “Death to America” on the streets of Kabul."

Facebook - "Afghanistan: Desperate women throw babies over razor wire at compound, asking British soldiers to take them"
"I wonder how do the people that normally use the term "oppressive patriarchy" on everything explain it to themselves that they must now remain silent so that differences by orders of magnitude are not obvious."

Michael Graham: Biden stops the buck, but passes the blame - "During a White House speech amid the Afghanistan evacuation fiasco, President Joe Biden looked into the camera with a cold, steely eye and said, “I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me.”  It’s a powerful line. Or rather, it would have been, if not for the 16 minutes and 39 seconds of buck-passing that preceded it... Despite his “buck stops here” talk, Biden was shameless in his attempts to shift blame to others. Even his declarations of culpability were dishonest. When he pledged not to “shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today,” he was falsely suggesting there is someone else who needed to be cut in on the blame. Who? Maybe invading Afghanistan was a George W. Bush mistake. Maybe not pulling out back in 2014 was an Obama flub. Was Donald Trump wrong to negotiate with the Taliban, increase their stature and outlandishly claim those murderous thugs might become our terrorist-fighting sidekicks? Absolutely.But what does any of that have to do with turning an orderly withdrawal into a panicked evacuation? It’s like a doctor blaming a cancer patient’s smoking for the fact that he removed the wrong lung. Biden’s bizarre, off-putting speech even lacked internal consistency. On the one hand, Biden insisted his administration had it all under control. “We planned for every contingency,” he said again and again.  On the other, Biden admitted the whole thing was a mess and tried to say it was Trump’s fault... Biden could have done nothing and kept the status quo. Or he could have withdrawn, but done so competently.  Instead, we have a humiliation of America on the world stage, gloating Taliban press conferences celebrating our defeat — and Joe Biden claiming the fact that he fouled it up so badly is actually proof that he was right all along... It’s now being widely reported that Biden had to override his military advisors and top Pentagon counterterrorism experts to execute his “bug out now” plan. As pollster David Paleologos of Suffolk University told InsideSources, by going it alone, Joe Biden’s most important political partner is now a group of Islamist terrorists."

Afghanistan: Biden Planned for Taliban Takeover - "I t is becoming increasingly difficult to draw any conclusion other than that President Biden knowingly and willfully surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban.  To be clear, this is different from concluding that Biden committed to a recklessly premature date for withdrawing all U.S. forces (which, practically speaking, would necessitate NATO’s departure, too) while being aware that the Taliban were capturing territory and that the Afghan security forces might be unable to hold them off over the ensuing months. That would be bad, but not as damning as what I am deducing.  I now believe Biden long ago reasoned that the Taliban were going to take over the country inevitably and decided to treat them as the de facto government. Consistent with this — and with the progressive Democratic orientation that American military power is needlessly provocative, and that concessions are the preferred way to inspire rogues into good behavior — Biden determined back in the spring that he would set a firm deadline to pull our forces out, and then demonstrate to the Taliban that the deadline was real... Biden was also effectively administering the coup de grâce to the Afghan government, and not only by elevating the Taliban to the sole Afghan party with which his administration would negotiate the terms of the U.S. departure. Biden would also pull out in a manner that undermined the Afghan security forces’ capacity to fight the Taliban. After all, if U.S. troops and contractors continued providing technical and logistical support to the Afghan ground and air forces, the Taliban might interpret that as an American commitment to continue the war. Biden would make sure the jihadists had no cause for doubt...
5. “In the wake of President Biden’s withdrawal decision, the U.S. pulled its air support, intelligence and contractors servicing Afghanistan’s planes and helicopters. That meant the Afghan military simply couldn’t operate anymore.” With the Biden administration having assured the Taliban that the U.S. was vacating the country by September 11, and with the Taliban actively executing an offensive in which they captured district after district, Biden had to have known that depriving the Afghan armed forces of the basics they needed to operate would mean the Taliban would rapidly roll over the Afghan government — just as the U.S. commanders had warned Biden the Taliban would do...
8. OIn July 13, in a secret State Department cable, 23 American diplomats in Afghanistan warned Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Biden policy-planning director Salman Ahmed that the Afghan government could not hold Kabul, and it would fall to the Taliban. The diplomats exhorted the Biden administration to accelerate the process of registering Afghans who qualified for U.S. visas due to the assistance they’d provided our government. Many of these Afghans were trapped, or in imminent danger of being trapped, in districts that the Taliban were seizing. The Journal adds that diplomats “also called for the State Department to use tougher language in describing the atrocities being committed by the Taliban.”
9. This highlights the sheer mendacity of claims by the president and his top advisers that no one could have anticipated that the Afghan government would collapse as rapidly as it did. The administration was repeatedly advised by knowledgeable officials that this was the likelihood unless Biden changed course. The president did not just ignore these admonitions; he affirmatively cut the legs out from under the Afghan government and armed forces. Furthermore, the calls for condemnation of the Taliban fell on deaf ears, as the Biden administration continued negotiations with their representatives in Doha. And the administration dragged its feet on evacuating our Afghan allies out of the country — an initiative to which the Taliban would have objected strenuously at a time when the administration had so reduced U.S. force levels that it was clearly going to be difficult, if not impossible, to get the thousands of Americans out...
10. President Biden has steadfastly refrained from criticizing the Taliban, even as he hammers American detractors of the catastrophe he has made of Afghanistan. Biden unabashedly touts his administration’s close and constant contacts with Taliban leadership in Kabul and Doha. And he makes blatantly false representations about the Taliban’s good faith. Astoundingly, the president seems to believe the public will be mollified by his confidence in his “agreement with the — with the Taliban” to allow Americans throughout the country to get to the airport in Kabul — notwithstanding that a) his assurances have been contradicted by U.S. officials and media reporting on the ground, and b) well, we’re talking about the Taliban."

Afghan Interpreter Who Helped Rescue Biden in 2008 Left Behind After U.S. Exit - WSJ - "Thirteen years ago, Afghan interpreter Mohammed helped rescue then- Sen. Joe Biden and two other senators stranded in a remote Afghanistan valley after their helicopter was forced to land in a snowstorm. Now, Mohammed is asking President Biden to save him.   “Hello Mr. President: Save me and my family,” Mohammed, who asked not to use his full name while in hiding, told The Wall Street Journal as the last Americans flew out of Kabul on Monday. “Don’t forget me here.”...   During the 2008 presidential campaign, Mr. Biden, who was then running for vice president, often spoke of the helicopter incident and the trip as a way of burnishing his foreign-policy credentials."

U.S. officials provided Taliban with names of Americans, Afghan allies to evacuate - "U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that's prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials... the decision to provide specific names to the Taliban, which has a history of brutally murdering Afghans who collaborated with the U.S. and other coalition forces during the conflict, has angered lawmakers and military officials.  “Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”... that U.S. officials handed over a list of Afghan allies and American citizens and residents shows the extent to which they outsourced security of the airport’s outer perimeter to the Taliban. The Taliban has gone door-to-door in search of Afghan interpreters and others who helped U.S. and Western forces.  In written and verbal communications, Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, and Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, head of U.S. forces on the ground in Afghanistan, have referred to the Taliban as “our Afghan partners”... Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) appeared to criticize the Biden administration’s strategy of coordinating with the Taliban, writing in a statement: “As we wait for more details to come in, one thing is clear: We can’t trust the Taliban with Americans’ security.”"
Maybe all of them will "go missing"

Taliban appear to fly US Black Hawk helicopters over Kandahar - "The Taliban, by some estimates, has more Black Hawk helicopters than 85 per cent of the world after the US abandoned $85bn worth of military equipment... As the Biden administration assesses the amount of equipment left in Afghanistan, the Taliban has been trolling the US by posing in American uniforms and high-tech gear like night vision goggles while driving around in armoured Humvees.

Taliban Made Biden an Offer He Refused Which Could Have Avoided Debacle in Kabul - "One of the things that certainly has been surprising about the Afghanistan debacle has been that some in media seem to have woken up and become journalists again. They are now questioning Joe Biden and his team, and raising very pointed and good questions, even being honest about the mess that he has caused... Biden was offered control of the Kabul by the Taliban and he/his people turned it down. And they then agreed to an impossible date to get everyone out by, shortening from his own date of 9/11...   Why are we only hearing this now from the Washington Post and not from the Biden administration before this? Did they not want us to know another absolutely horrific choice they made in all this mess? Remember White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday, Biden didn’t think anyone needed to resign, basically implying there were no mistakes. This finishes any question of this being on President Donald Trump, if the prior facts haven’t already foreclosed that. He now wants to blame Trump for Trump making a deal, acting as though he couldn’t change it even when it was a conditioned deal where the Taliban weren’t holding up their end. But he changed everything on the dictates of the Taliban. It’s all on Biden."
I still see people with TDS blaming Trump

Afghanistan Withdrawal: Bagram Air Base Abandonment -- Biden Passes the Buck - "President Biden was either confused or — worse — actively misleading the American people when he said at Thursday’s press conference that senior military officers advised him to abandon the Bagram air base because there “was not much value added” in holding it... You need not be a military genius on the level of Napoleon or Frederick the Great to realize that the international airport in Kabul — with a single runway, surrounded by mountains, and in the middle of a city of 4 million souls — is not an ideal base of operations from which to conduct this evacuation. In fact, the airport is dangerously exposed. As we’ve so painfully discovered, basic security for the airport is a problem and flight operations can be threatened and even shut down due to the security situation.  So why exactly did we give up our air base at Bagram? The operational situation would suggest that a second, more-defensible air base equipped with modern facilities would be an asset during a crisis such as this.  Well, according to what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, said just last week, we did it because of an arbitrary cap on troop numbers in Afghanistan."

Who Abandoned Bagram Air Base? - WSJ - "Biden says the military, but the military says he gave them little choice... The way U.S. forces quietly slipped out of Bagram was also demoralizing for the Afghan army and probably contributed to its collapse. The Associated Press spoke to soldiers wandering the base the next day. “They lost all the goodwill of 20 years,” one said, “by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area.” The word must have spread: If the U.S. is abandoning its prized air base, then it really was bugging out altogether.   After the collapse of the Afghan government, Mr. Biden could have sent in enough U.S. troops to retake Bagram and provide for a safer evacuation. He declined that option in favor of getting to the exits as fast as possible, hoping to avoid a confrontation with the Taliban that could result in American casualties. On Thursday he got casualties anyway.  The wreck of Mr. Biden’s Afghan withdrawal is damaging enough. But he compounds the harm to his credibility, and America’s, when he refuses to acknowledge mistakes and spins defeat as a victory for realism. Mr. Biden should take responsibility for his own bad decisions, instead of trying to hide behind the military brass."

Facebook - PSAKI: "This is now on track to be the largest airlift in U.S. history...so no, I would not say that is anything but a success."
"This is like bragging about how many lifeboats were filled after the sinking of the Titanic"

RAMZPAUL on Twitter - "First US service member who died in Kabul identified as Navy medic Max Soviak"
"This is the type of person the Biden Administration hates. They would claim he had “White privilege” and “toxic masculinity.” This man would be last in line to get employment, loans and scholarships due to his race. He died defending a regime that hated him."

BrooklynDad_Defiant! on Twitter - "The trump admin has been one rolling disaster after another. But the disaster in Syria comes with a steep price. Civilian #Kurds are DYING, and all because trump needs distractions from impeachment. DO SOMETHING, CONGRESS. #KurdsBetrayedByTrump"
BrooklynDad_Defiant! on Twitter - "If you are using the terrorist attacks on American and Afghan citizens to blame President Biden, stop it. It's disgusting. Shame on you. Whose side are you on anyway?"
This guy is the king of hypocrites. He also had a lot of great flip flops on covid

Did ‘gender studies’ lose Afghanistan? - The Spectator World - "America hoped that with enough half-baked social engineering in the half of Afghanistan it controlled, it would eventually be rewarded with victory, and Afghanistan would become the Holland of the Hindu Kush. On Ivy League campuses, students are taught to decry ‘colonialism’, but the Ivy League diplomats who sought to remake Afghanistan in Harvard’s image were among the most ambitious practitioners of it in world history.  So, alongside the billions for bombs went hundreds of millions for gender studies in Afghanistan. According to US government reports, $787 million was spent on gender programs in Afghanistan, but that substantially understates the actual total, since gender goals were folded into practically every undertaking America made in the country.  A recent report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) broke down the difficulties of the project. For starters, in both Dari and Pastho there are no words for ‘gender’. That makes sense, since the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ was only invented by a sexually-abusive child psychiatrist in the 1960s, but evidently Americans were caught off-guard. Things didn’t improve from there. Under the US’s guidance, Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 percent quota for women in the lower house — higher than the actual figure in America! A strategy that sometimes required having women represent provinces they had never actually been to. Remarkably, this experiment in ‘democracy’ created a government few were willing to fight for, let alone die for.   The initiatives piled up one after another. Do-gooders established a ‘National Masculinity Alliance’, so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their ‘gender roles’ and ‘examine male attitudes that are harmful to women’. Police facilities included childcare facilities for working mothers, as though Afghanistan’s medieval culture had the same needs as 1980s Minneapolis. The army set a goal of 10 percent female participation, which might make sense in a Marvel movie, but didn’t to devout Muslims. Even as America built an Afghan army that ended up collapsing in days, and a police force whose members frequently became highwaymen, it always made sure to execute its gender goals.   But all this wasn’t just a stupid waste of money. It routinely actively undermined the ‘nation-building’ that America was supposed to be doing. According to an USAID observer, the gender ideology included in American aid routinely caused rebellions out in the provinces, directly causing the instability America was supposedly fighting. To get Afghanistan’s parliament to endorse the women’s rights measures it wanted, America resorted to bribing them. Soon, bribery became the norm for getting anything done in the parliament.   Instead of rattling off anecdotes, perhaps a single video clip will do the job. Dadaism and conceptual art are of dubious value even in the West, but at some point some person who is not in prison for fraud decided that Afghan women would be uplifted by teaching them about Marcel Duchamp"

Rashida Tlaib Says U.S. Supported Taliban Before Taliban Even Existed - "Far-left AOC sidekick Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) says the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan is the result of a failed U.S. policy “going back to the 1980s when we backed the Taliban against the Soviets.”  That’s quite the statement. It’s also wrong. All of it.  See, the Taliban did not exist in the 1980s. It did not fight the Soviet Union. In other words, the United States didn’t back the Taliban in the 1980s against the Soviet Union. Instead, the Taliban emerged as a major faction in 1994."

Taliban Militants Have Burnt Down An Amusement Park A Day After They Were Enjoying Rides - "The Taliban militants, some of them with weapons in hand, were seen enjoying a ride on the electric bumper cars in the videos. In another video, Taliban militants can be seen riding small merry-go-round horses... the reason cited by Taliban for burning down the amusement park was that there were statues and idols inside which are against Islam."

U.S. Embassy Kabul on Twitter - "The month of June is recognized as (LGBTI) Pride Month. The United States respects the dignity & equality of LGBTI people & celebrates their contributions to the society. We remain committed to supporting civil rights of minorities, including LGBTI persons. #Pride2021 #PrideMonth"
So much for that

Biden Gave Allies Security Assurance on Kabul, Afghanistan in June - Bloomberg - "Biden promised U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other leaders at the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall, England, that “critical U.S. enablers” would remain in place to keep Kabul safe following the drawdown of NATO forces, the note said. British officials determined the U.S. would provide enough personnel to ensure that the U.K. embassy in Kabul could continue operating... The circumstances surrounding the U.S. withdrawal have served as a harsh wake-up call to European leaders struggling to adjust to the reluctance in Washington to operate as a global policeman. They had discussed with Biden at the G-7 summit the need to continue supporting the government in Kabul in order to prevent the country once again becoming a haven for terrorist operations"
"America is back"

Biden’s credibility crisis spreads far past Afghanistan - "Biden claimed during a White House press conference that al Qaeda had been completely driven out of Afghanistan. Hours later, Defense Department press secretary John Kirby could do nothing but admit that this was false. Al Qaeda is not only operating throughout Afghanistan, but according to a Pentagon inspector general report released earlier in the week, the Taliban continue to maintain their “relationship with Al Qaeda, providing safe haven for the terrorist group in Afghanistan.”  Biden also claimed during that same press conference that there was “no indication” that Americans stuck in Kabul “haven’t been able to get” to the airport. The press conference hadn’t been over for more than half an hour before CNN’s Clarrisa Ward made clear the exact opposite. “It is extremely difficult, and it is dangerous,” she reported on American efforts to reach the airport in Kabul. Biden even claimed that he had “seen no question of our credibility from our allies around the world.” Either Biden is forgetting what he reads or else his briefers left out the leader of Germany's conservative party calling Biden’s handling of Afghanistan “the greatest debacle that NATO has seen.” Biden also must have missed British Member of Parliament Tom Tugendhat saying it was “the biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez.”...   Biden's false statements and empty promises are undermining him on every other issue. A recent CBS poll found Biden’s overall approval rating had fallen 8 points since April to an even 50%-50% split. But the percentage of respondents who described Biden as “competent” fell from 56% to 49%, the percentage who described him as “focused” fell from 56% to 48%, and the percentage who described their leader as “effective” fell from 55% to 47%.  An Echelon Insights poll found that Biden’s approval rating had also fallen on every issue tested, including COVID, the economy, foreign policy, and immigration. Worse for Biden, the latest Reuters poll found he had the first negative overall approval rating (46% approve/49% disapprove) of his presidency. Meanwhile, the share who believe the country is heading in the wrong direction rose to 59%."
Of course, liberals just blame Trump

EXC: Joe Biden's State Dept Halted a Trump-Era 'Crisis Response' Plan Aimed at Avoiding Benghazi-Style Evacuations Just MONTHS Before Taliban Takeover. - "career officials inside the State Department objected to the Trump-era aim of creating a Contingency and Crisis Response bureau with the express purpose of avoiding a future Benghazi-style situation for Americans overseas.  Instead, Biden’s team revoked the funding and the approval for the plan, even as the COVID-19 crisis reasserted itself, and and Afghanistan withdrawal loomed... The news flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claims that his government planned for “every contingency” in the war-torn country... no Congressional notification was sent to the United States Congress, as is required, upon the pause"

Facebook - "Gen. Mark Milley: "There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.""
"But I thought Biden said that they had planned for “every contingency?” Either they did plan for every possible scenario or it was impossible to plan since it was entirely unforeseeable.  It cannot be both. Either Biden or Miley is wrong, or flat-out lying.  If I were China, my calculus on making a move on Taiwan right now just drastically changed."
Guess he needs to spend more time trying to understand "white rage"

Biden's Afghanistan Decision Is the Latest Entry in a Ledger of Mistakes - The Atlantic - "In 1975, Biden opposed giving aid to the South Vietnamese government during its war against the North, ensuring the victory of a brutal regime and causing a mass exodus of refugees.
In 1991, Biden opposed the Gulf War, one of the most successful military campaigns in American history. Not only did he later regret his congressional vote, but in 1998, he criticized George H. W. Bush for not deposing Saddam Hussein, calling that decision a “fundamental mistake.”
In 2003, Biden supported the Iraq War—another congressional vote he later regretted.
In 2007, he opposed President George W. Bush’s new counterinsurgency strategy and surge in troops in Iraq, calling it a “tragic mistake.” In fact, the surge led to stunning progress, including dramatic drops in civilian deaths and sectarian violence.
In December 2011, President Barack Obama and Vice President Biden withdrew America’s much-scaled-down troop presence in Iraq; the former had declared Iraq to be “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant,” and the latter had predicted that Iraq “could be one of the great achievements of this administration.” Their decision sent Iraq spiraling into sectarian violence and civil war, allowing Iran to expand its influence and opening the way for the rise of the jihadist group ISIS.
According to Obama’s memoir A Promised Land, Biden had advised the former president to take more time before launching the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Ten years ago, Biden said in an interview that “the Taliban per se is not our enemy.” He added, “If, in fact, the Taliban is able to collapse the existing government, which is cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us, then that becomes a problem for us.” Indeed. In his 2014 memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, Robert Gates, who served as the secretary of defense under George W. Bush and Obama, said that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”... Biden has never been an impressive strategic thinker. When talking about his strengths, those close to Biden stress his people skills: his ability to read foreign leaders, to know when to push and when to yield, when to socialize and when to turn to business. But that’s very different from having a strategic vision and a sophisticated understanding of historical events and forces. What the Biden foreign-policy record shows, I think, is a man who behaves as if he knows much more than he does, who has far too much confidence in his own judgment in the face of contrary advice from experts. (My hunch is he’s overcompensating for an intellectual inferiority complex, which has manifested itself in his history of plagiarism, lying about his academic achievements, and other embellishments.) On national-security matters, President Biden lacks some of the most important qualities needed in those who govern—discernment, wisdom, and prudence; the ability to anticipate unfolding events; the capacity to make the right decision based on incomplete information; and the willingness to adjust one’s analysis in light of changing circumstances.  To put it in simple terms, Joe Biden has bad judgment.   William Inboden of the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas, who worked on George W. Bush’s National Security Council, told me that the key thing to understand about Biden is he is first and foremost a politician, consistently aligned with the Democratic Party’s center of gravity on any foreign-policy issue, a follower more than a leader, and certainly not an independent or creative thinker. But Biden’s foreign-policy record has one other through line: the betrayal of people who have sided with the United States against its enemies and who, in the aftermath of American withdrawal, face a future of oppression, brutality, and death. And these betrayals of people in foreign lands seem to leave Biden unmoved. There is a troubling callousness to it all, a callousness that is at odds with empathy that Biden has clearly shown in other areas of his life. According to my colleague George Packer’s biography of Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Biden has argued that the United States does not have an obligation to Afghans who trusted the United States."

Feckless Biden Administration Refuses to Guarantee the Safety of Americans in Afghanistan

Biden’s Betrayal of Afghans Will Live in Infamy - The Atlantic - "For months, members of Congress and advocates in refugee, veteran, and human-rights organizations have been urging the Biden administration to evacuate America’s Afghan allies on an emergency basis. For months, dire warnings have appeared in the press. The administration’s answers were never adequate: We’re waiting for Congress to streamline the application process. Half the interpreters we’ve given visas don’t want to leave. We don’t want to panic the Afghan people and cause the government in Kabul to collapse. Evacuation to a U.S. territory like Guam could lead to legal problems, so we’re looking for third-country hosts in the region. Most of the interpreters are in Kabul, and Kabul won’t fall for at least six months.  Some of these answers might have been sincere. All of them were irrelevant, self-deceiving, or flat-out false. While some officials in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House itself pushed quietly for more urgent measures that might have averted catastrophe, Biden resisted—as if he wouldn’t allow Afghanistan to interfere with his priorities, as if he were done with Afghanistan the minute he announced the withdrawal of all remaining U.S. forces. This hardness is perplexing in a president who spent years in the Senate working on behalf of genocide victims and war refugees; who once promised an Afghan schoolgirl that he would make sure the U.S. didn’t abandon her; who cares intensely about the welfare of American troops."

Dozens of California students, parents stranded in Afghanistan after summer trip abroad - "Dozens of California students and parents are stranded in Afghanistan after taking a summer trip to the country.  More than 20 students and 16 parents from the Cajon Valley Union School District in El Cajon, Calif., visited Afghanistan on summer vacation"

Afghanistan Didn’t Have to End This Way - "As Afghanistan collapses, there is no shortage of explanations, justifications, and outright myths taking root, some encouraged by the Biden administration. Among the most common: This was inevitable. The U.S. presence was unsustainable, critics say. The administration was boxed in by the 2020 peace deal with the Taliban. If the U.S. had repudiated the deal, the Taliban would have gone on the offensive and resumed killing U.S. troops... The U.S. presence in Afghanistan the last few years was tiny—just 2,500 troops before the start of the final withdrawal. It was indefinitely sustainable. There is no significant antiwar movement to speak of, there is no domestic political pressure to withdraw, and no election will hinge on U.S. policy toward Afghanistan.   U.S. troops faced low risks in Afghanistan, and the low casualty rate is not a function of the 2020 peace deal. Just 66 U.S. personnel have been killed in action since 2014, less than one per month for nearly seven years. That is not to make light of the loss of individual soldiers, but it is to recognize, in historical perspective, that the conflict in Afghanistan is very small and U.S. ground troops have not been involved in direct combat in large numbers for years.  The US mission in Afghanistan accomplished some important successes. There have been no large-scale international terrorist attacks emanating from Afghanistan or Pakistan since 2001. The Afghan people broadly support the country’s new constitution. The Afghan economy showed consistent growth. By virtually every metric of human development, Afghans are better off today than they were 20 years ago. The intervention was not an unmitigated failure—except that many of these successes are likely to unravel with the Afghan army’s collapse. The rapid collapse of the Afghan army in recent weeks was not inevitable and is not a sign that the mission was always doomed, nor that we never would have succeeded. We had been making slow, fitful progress building a new Afghan security force from scratch. In 2021, it was better than it had been in 2001—because in 2001 it did not exist. It was better than it had been in 2006—because the Germans, British, and the U.N., which had assumed responsibility for training the new army and police, wasted five years doing essentially nothing. The U.S. took over and cobbled together a fighting force by 2010, one that has lost tens of thousands of soldiers keeping the Taliban at bay for the past decade. The Afghan army was again better this year than previously, but the Department of Defense truthfully reported year after year that it was not ready for fully independent operations yet.   The Afghan army’s collapse this summer is demoralizing for anyone who has watched or participated in the war. Historians will give us the full story decades from now, but surely President Biden’s announcement of a full withdrawal—when everyone, including the U.S. Department of Defense, knew the Afghan army wasn’t yet ready to stand independent of international assistance—had a crippling effect on the morale of Afghan troops... While bin Laden is dead, al-Qaeda is not and, along with the Islamic State and a murderer’s row of copycat jihadists, is almost certain to regain safe haven in Afghanistan and Pakistan following the collapse of our allies. Our presence for the past 20 years kept jihadists on the run, in hiding, and focused on avoiding our air strikes and special forces. They now will have room to breathe, which means room to plan, recruit, train, and fundraise."

U.S. official: 'Majority' of Afghan allies who applied for special visas left behind in Afghanistan

US vows evacuation flights WILL continue after ISIS attack in Kabul - "The 13 troops include 11 Marines, one Navy medic and at least 90 Afghans were killed on Thursday when the two bombs went off as the remaining Westerners in Kabul tried to get out."

Trump’s Pledge to Exit Afghanistan Was a Ruse, His Final SecDef Says - "President Donald Trump’s top national security officials never intended to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, according to new statements by Chris Miller, Trump’s last acting defense secretary.   Miller said the president’s public promise to finish withdrawing U.S. forces by May 1, as negotiated with the Taliban, was actually a “play” that masked the Trump administration’s true intentions: to convince Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to quit or accept a bitter power-sharing agreement with the Taliban, and to keep some U.S. troops in Afghanistan for counterrorism missions... “We did plenty of wargames on this and we knew what the minimal force structure was,” he said this week. “The number was 800. If this all goes bad, what is the minimal force structure needed to maintain [counterterrorism] strike and reconnaissance capability? We can do it for 800, 850.”"

Taliban acquires US military biometric devices that can identify Afghans who assisted coalition efforts – reports - "The Taliban has reportedly seized US military biometrics equipment that could expose Afghans who helped coalition forces – since they contain identifying data like iris scans and fingerprints as well as biographical information.  An unidentified Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) official told The Intercept that the Islamist group confiscated the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE) devices during its offensive push last week. The report was backed up by three former US military personnel...  Besides tracking insurgents, the Pentagon was also reportedly keen to use the devices to gather unique data on 80% of the Afghan population to check for terrorist and criminal activity. Unnamed sources said biometric details of locals who helped the US were also collected and used in identification cards... An unidentified US Army Special Operations source told The Intercept that the Taliban “does not have the gear to use the data” but warned that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency had the additional equipment required to process the data from HIIDE devices... As the Taliban advanced into Kabul, Afghan civilians who worked with the US were reportedly caught in a potentially life-or-death predicament over whether to save documents proving their assistance – considered crucial to acquiring a visa out of the country – or destroy them. According to a Wired magazine report, the Taliban is apparently conducting door-to-door searches to find those who have worked with foreign governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).   In 2016, the group reportedly killed 12 passengers on a bus they intercepted after fingerprint scans on a biometric machine identified them as security force workers. An Afghan forces commander confirmed the use of the device – which could “identify security force members from amongst civilians”"

Afghan army says Taliban infiltration very sophisticated - "The Taliban have a sophisticated system in place to infiltrate Afghanistan’s security forces and vetting of recruits must be severely tightened, an Afghan army general said... Infiltration has come under sharper focus because of a string of fatal attacks by Afghan security forces on U.S. soldiers since the burning of copies of the Muslim holy book at a NATO base last month ignited widespread protests... The killings at a base in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan came less than a week after two senior U.S. officers were gunned down in the Afghan Interior Ministry by what Afghan security officials say was a police intelligence officer.  About 70 members of the NATO-led force were killed in 42 insider attacks from May 2007 through the end of January this year."
From 2012. I saw people slamming the US for abandoning Bagram air base without telling the Afghans

Pentagon Spokesman: ‘I Don’t Know’ How Many Americans Remain in Afghanistan - "John Kirby, the press secretary for the Defense Department and a retired rear admiral in the Navy, said the U.S. military does not know how many Americans remain in Afghanistan... Just prior to that exchange, Kirby also professed not to have a breakdown of how many of the approximately 7,000 people evacuated on U.S. government flight since August 14 are American citizens. “It’s not the only way out of Kabul,” he noted, “the commercial side is open, it’s limited… but people are still getting out that way.”   The U.S. military is running the evacuation effort out of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, but is not venturing outside of the complex. The State Department has sent notices to U.S. citizens in Afghanistan encouraging them to “make your way” to the airport, but also making it plain that “THE UNITED STATES CANNOT GUARANTEE YOUR SECURITY AS YOU MAKE THIS TRIP.”"

Biden said in July Taliban 'overrunning everything' was 'highly unlikely' - "President Biden last month dismissed the possibility that the Taliban would swarm through Afghanistan, which just weeks later they are in the process of doing."

Facebook - "One of the most admirable characteristics of a leader is admitting failure or mistake... This brings me to president Biden.  The actions and the speech that the president gave were great examples of what NOT TO be as a leader and what is worse is that he is doubling down. which is as Trumpian as it can get.  It is in fact what he used to criticize Donald Trump about and he called it "disgusting". It's been more than 72 hours and president Biden hasn't issued an apology and hasn't fired anyone. The way you planned and handled the withdrawal was not courageous Mr. president, it was catastrophic.  The sooner you admit that the more lives can be saved."

AOC Goes To Afghanistan To Warn Refugees Not To Come To Oppressive Racist America | The Babylon Bee
Comment: "Actually saw people comparing the fear and oppression afghan women are facing from taliban, like being forced to marry fighters, stopped from working or education, with French senate ban on hijabs in public for minors under 18 and saying support for the latter and critising the former is islamophobic. These two are not even remotely the same. Such people are so brainwashed that in retrospect I find myself silly for even having tried to engage such "hijab is female empowerment symbol and totally their choice, any criticism of Islamic societies or practices is automatically islamophobic" crowd."

Facebook - "Imagine taking yourself this seriously while going plaid in clownlife. The Regime knows its weakness is memes, especially satirical memes. That says so much."
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube face content challenges as Afghanistan falls - "A CNN reporter stands in front of a photo of a helicopter flying over the US embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, a city that has fallen into chaos. Underneath the image, a caption states: "Violent but mostly peaceful transfer of power."   The image, supposedly a screengrab of the network, circulated widely on Facebook, Twitter and other social media, prompting questions about its authenticity. How could the transfer be considered peaceful, some wondered. Was the language meant to be satire?  Turns out the image was fake."
Authoritarians don't deal well with humour

Global Times on Twitter - "After playing bumper cars, the #Taliban were seen having ice creams in #Kabul on Thu, which some netizens said reminded them of US President Joe Biden, who also likes ice cream."

Arthur Schwartz on Twitter - "Tucker Carlson hosts Sean Parnell to smear Afghan interpreters and those seeking refugee status: "just because an Afghan works with us and is friends with us does not actually mean they are safe to bring here.""
"Media Matters hack leaves out the part where Parnell, a decorated war hero told the story of an Afghan interpreter who betrayed his platoon, murdered one of his troops & injured four."

Friday, September 24, 2021

Links - 24th September 2021 (2) (Woke purging in academia)

Editor of JAMA Leaves After Outcry Over Colleague’s Remarks on Racism - The New York Times - "Dr. Edward Livingston, another editor at JAMA, had claimed that socioeconomic factors, not structural racism, held back communities of color... “I remain profoundly disappointed in myself for the lapses that led to the publishing of the tweet and podcast,” Dr. Bauchner said in a statement. “Although I did not write or even see the tweet, or create the podcast, as editor in chief, I am ultimately responsible for them.”... the A.M.A.’s leaders admitted to serious missteps and proposed a three-year plan to “dismantle structural racism” within the organization and in medicine"
The woke purge of academia steadily moves on

Tackling systemic racism requires the system of science to change
In Nature, no less. Let's ignore all the lessons from history about what happens when science is politicised

Controversy at Philosophical Psychology Leads to Editor’s Resignation - "the journal Philosophical Psychology published an article calling for scholars to take more seriously genetics-based approaches to research on race and intelligence. Yesterday, an editor of the journal announced his resignation. The article in question is “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry,” by Nathan Cofnas, a graduate student at the University of Oxford"
So much for academic freedom

Nathan Cofnas on Twitter - "Here's philosophy professor Mark Alfano (who started the petition to retract my paper last year) wishing death on his political opponents. Academia is very hospitable to psychos as long as they focus their violent hate on the right people

Nathan Cofnas on Twitter - "In almost all cases, "This paper needs to be retracted because it causes serious harm" really means "This paper needs to be retracted because it doesn't jibe with my political opinions, and I'd rather deny the science than change my opinions.""

Philosophy journal refuses to retract paper defending research on race and intelligence - "Nearly two years ago, a feminist philosophy journal faced demands to retract a paper that compared “transracialism” to transgenderism. Some of its editors quickly apologized, but were then overruled by the journal’s top editors.Another philosophy journal is facing similar retraction demands for publishing a paper on “group differences in intelligence,” but its editors preemptively said that’s not going to happen... the default approach in philosophy and social science – “ignoring or rejecting” research on what causes differences in intelligence – can lead to “unintended negative consequences.”Cofnas contends that attributing IQ solely to environmental factors may have “enormous opportunity costs” regarding social policy.He cited the apparent failure of the low-income early education program Head Start, designed around environmental interventions, to deliver “its intended effects.” University of California-Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen predicted decades earlier that Head Start would fail by not tailoring programs “to the strengths of different groups” – and was “vilified” for it, Cofnas argued.While admitting that “the environmentalist explanation for the IQ gap” has some evidence in the narrowing of the gap in the 20th century, the “so-called ‘X factor’” in the environment “remains elusive,” he said.The “stubbornly constant” IQ gap between adult black and white people, for example, has remained “impervious to early education,” socioeconomic gains and the “(apparent) waning of overt racism and discrimination.”... Alfanos did not limit his criticisms to a blog post and petition. He went after Cofnas on Twitter, calling him a climate denier and comparing him to British fascist Oswald Mosley.Cofnas responded in kind, telling Alfano to “get a life.” That barb got under Alfano’s skin. He retorted: “You’re about to learn why people generally avoid fucking with me.” The student called the professor “a sad, pathetic man,” to which Alfano said he wants to ruin Cofnas’ “reputation permanently and deservedly.”... Cofnas seized on Stanley’s claim that he read the paper in “two minutes,” and another Yale faculty member joined the criticism against Stanley.Nicholas Christakis, himself the target of a student mob four years ago, said he got the “impression” that Stanley had called for retractions “more than once” when he disagreed with papers. Stanley emphatically denied that, accusing “the single most powerful faculty member at Yale” of “falsely suggesting” he had."

Peer-reviewed journal publishes a peer-reviewed paper some people don't like... - "famed Twitter tough guy Mark Alfano (Macquarie), seen here threatening the paper's author, graduate student Nathan Cofnas (Oxford) (says Mafia Mark to Mr. Cofnas:   "You're about to learn why people generally avoid fucking with me").   Good to get confirmation that not only is there no norm against criticizing graduate students for their public acts and statements (which no one, other than graduate students on Twitter, believed of course), but there apparently isn't even a norm against launching a petition against the "vulnerable" and threatening them Mafia-style!...
'In the first place, the petition’s description of the paper doesn’t look factually accurate... But over and above this (of course) it’s just unserious to suppose that, because another philosopher spots something in a paper that they regard as a “glaring error” that the paper was incompetently refereed – far less that it should be retracted, or that the journal has anything to apologize for. “There is a major flaw in this argument” or “Something really important is being left out” is one of the most common forms of a reply article, and one of the most common reactions that I, at least, have on reading papers! It’s in the nature of philosophy. Sure, there’s some threshold of straightforwardly factual (or mathematical) error that might count as just a failure of refereeing, but that threshold is ridiculously higher than anything the petition discusses (either normatively or be the descriptive standards of contemporary philosophy of science). As became clear in the discussions of the Tuvel incident, there’s something particularly troubling about a call for retraction here. In the sciences, where a paper is a report of (usually empirical, sometimes statistical) work done, acceptance of the paper indicates that the journal accepts the paper’s reports of the work as fact, and retraction indicates that the journal has changed its mind. But philosophy papers (normally) don’t describe work done elsewhere: the paper itself is the research. And retraction doesn’t normally prevent the paper being read. Its only concrete consequence is to cause harm to the author. That’s a worrying way for the scholarly community to resolve its disagreements at the best of time, doubly so if the author is a junior academic (Tuvel), triply so if, as in this case, the author is a graduate student. However, in my eternal optimism I’m hoping that we’ve learned some lessons from the Tuvel incident. The statement from the editors of the journal – noting that the paper is controversial, but defending its publication anyway – is reassuring. (For all that in an ideal world we wouldn’t need these statements because they would go without saying.) One of the bright spots in the mostly-dismal Tuvel affair was the statement by Hypatia’s (then) editor, Sally Scholz:
“I firmly believe, and this belief will not waver, that it is utterly inappropriate for editors to repudiate an article they have accepted for publication (barring issues of plagiarism or falsification of data). In this respect, editors must stand behind the authors of accepted papers. That is where I stand.”
It looks as if it’s where the editors of Philosophical Psychology stand, too. Good for them.'"

Philosophy Is Being Hijacked by Woke Twitter Mobs - "A group of six philosophers and three anthropologists—including Mark Alfano and City University of New York philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci—submitted a comment on my paper to Philosophical Psychology, pedaling some familiar fallacies and strawmen. First, they proclaim that I think racial groupings are “discrete”—wrongly suggesting that my argument requires that there should be no overlap of any kind among races, or that mixed-race people don’t exist.Then they throw out the old canard that race can’t be real because humans share 99.9 percent of their DNA. They don’t mention that there are three billion base pairs in the human genome, and therefore three million base pairs where we are not identical, which could be the basis of race differences. (The average person’s genome actually differs from a reference genome at 4.1 to 5.0 million sites, and has structural variants affecting approximately 20 million bases.) In any case, crude comparisons of genetic similarity provide little information about the magnitude or significance of differences. We are 99.1 percent identical with chimpanzees in terms of functionally important DNA, but if that’s all you told a space alien about the difference between us and chimps it would be pretty misleading. Whether the 0.1–0.2 percent difference among humans generates meaningful race differences is an open question... “Research supporting both hereditarian and environmentalist explanations of race differences is routinely published in major psychology journals, particularly in psychometrics journals like Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences.” But I pointed out that work supporting hereditarianism (the view that genes play a role in race differences) can be much more difficult to publish and disseminate, and is almost never funded. Many prominent scientists have said openly that it is immoral to study this topic. Scholars who are seen as supporting hereditarianism are regularly fired from their jobs. Examples of the last phenomenon from just the past year include Noah Carl (fired from his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge), Bo Winegard (fired from his position as assistant professor at Marietta College), and Stephen Hsu (forced to resign from his position as senior vice president for research and innovation at Michigan State University). Those who aren’t fired still have to deal with an army of Mark Alfanos trying to “destroy [their] reputation.” There is, of course, nothing wrong with my critics writing a reply to me—even a weak one. And the editors of Philosophical Psychology were perfectly willing to publish it. Van Leeuwen and Herschbach just asked the authors to focus their attacks on me (Cofnas) rather than casting aspersions on the competence of the editors themselves, and gently suggested that they address the philosophical literature supporting my position. Van Leeuwen and Herschbach also mentioned that, in accordance with normal scholarly practice, I would be invited to write a rejoinder. This enraged Alfano and company... Apparently Herschbach and members of the editorial board were intimidated by social media pressure, and agreed to publish Alfano et al.’s comment without revision and to deny me the right of reply.The remaining editor-in-chief, Mitchell Herschbach, who previously coauthored two separate statements defending the review process and the decision to publish my paper, published a groveling apology."

Science Journals Are Purging Racist, Sexist Work. Finally | WIRED - "One paper from 2012 linked darker skin to aggression and sexuality in humans. Another from that year claimed to show that women with endometriosis are more attractive. A third, published last December, lamented physicians who posted casual pictures of themselves online—including some in which they’re wearing bikinis—as being unprofessional. All three of these articles have recently been retracted after outraged readers took to social media... It’s playing like a preview for The Purge: Academia... The critics are right: Journals do have a double-standard, and it is political. They move briskly to pull unworthy papers tinged by politics while ignoring hundreds, or likely thousands, of credible allegations of fraud or major error."
The Soviet Union would be proud
I like how they think a "purge" is good and are upfront that it's politically motivated

BLM | Sunny E. | Black Flower Science Co. on Twitter - "One of the saddest things I've learned recently: students deciding against getting a PhD because they can't take the political correctness of academia any more."
"This sounds like these individuals didn't pursue careers in academia because they didn't want to be held accountable for being bigots, then succumbed to a victim complex.The expectation of basic respect toward marginalized demographics in academia does not equate to persecution."
"you are conflating the word "respect" and "courtesy". they are not the same.you can and should expect some level of common courtesy. this is a recognition that you are human too.you CANNOT and SHOULD NOT expect respect. respect must be earned."
"The hilarious part is she is clueless to the irony of her showing absolutely zero respect to people for not adhering to her ideology...while calling them bigots for not giving her the respect she demands.I wonder what that would make her...."
For someone who supports BLM to claim others have a victim complex...

Gad Saad - Posts | Facebook - "I am receiving stories of academics setting up the latest round of witch hunts of other academics whose work they disapprove of as being non-PC.  The inquisitors are also trying to purge editors who publish the "forbidden" works. It is truly a moral panic within academia.  How much longer will fellow professors remain quiet?  How much more are my colleagues willing to tolerate in terms of the destruction of our proud tradition of academic freedom?  What will it take for thousands of professors to rise up and state in unison "ENOUGH"!"

Liberal moral blindness

Michelle Tandler ⚖️ on Twitter

"Recently I have realized that all my progressive friends are unable to articulate the tradeoffs associated with their viewpoints.

They are reading the same things, spending time with other liberals, and generally uninterested in questioning their beliefs.

This is problematic.

When I share learnings around tradeoffs they tend to become morally indignant & emotionally worked up.

They say things like "that is preposterous! how can you think that...?"

I find myself at a loss... It's hard to argue with someone in a religious fervor.

They will spout talking point after talking point...

"the system is broken"

"capitalism doesn't work"

"system racism"

"industrial complex"

They sound almost bot-like.

It is not easy to have a productive conversation.

I have been studying so many differing viewpoints.

I'm not interested in demonizing one side or the other. I'm interested in the truth.

I want to know the tradeoffs, the unintended consequence, the downstream ramifications.

What I have come to realize is that most people aren't actually interested in politics.

They are interested in feeling good about themselves.

It's a hell of a lot easier to say "billionaires shouldn't exist" than to take a look at the % of time & money they spend on charity.

The moral grandstanding I see among my friends on the far left has become increasingly frustrating to me.

Few are grounded in data or facts. Everything is about "values" - not logic.

I would say 90% of my progressive friends don't have a single conservative friend.

I would also say that 90% of my progressive friends don't read anything that challenges their viewpoints - books, magazines, youtube, anything.

There is *so* much out there - how can you only read from one side?

In that dynamic, how can you have confidence in your views...?

Some topics where I'm seeing my friends utterly falter on the ability to speak in a balanced way: welfare/UBI, taxes, income inequality, race, criminal justice, housing, minimum wage, education.

They all have such strong opinions, but when I ask about tradeoffs... Crickets.

Last night a friend told me that I invented the term "purple pilled".

I find that hard to believe, but I'll take it.

I love the color purple - the perfect balance of blue and red. (Also, for @TryLifeSchool
 - masculine & feminine).  

It's a great color.

Recently I've started thinking that we have two enormous looming existential threats - a recession (inevitable) and climate catastrophe.

I think we are heading into a world where smoke and drought (among other things) wreak serious havoc and disrupt society at large.

We need to work together on these issues or we are going to be in big trouble.

I am concerned that all our infighting - between red & blue, black & white... it's a distraction from the train in the distance.

Why aren't we working together to prepare for the future?

I keep trying to quit Twitter because frankly, it stresses me out.

There is so much yelling and finger pointing and name calling here. I get trolled & it can be quite painful.

However - I can't let up.

I think that this is the place to spread a message of coming together.

We need to start a moderate movement.

We need moderates to speak up and challenge radicals.

We need to shine a light on extremism, and not let it take over our nation.

We need to ask people to consider the tradeoffs.

(fin)"

Links - 24th September 2021 (1)

China's latest online skinny fad sparks concern - "In the latest fad to rock Chinese social media, women have been flocking to Uniqlo stores to post pictures of themselves trying on clothes - from the children's section.Platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Weibo - the Chinese equivalent of Instagram and Twitter - have been flooded with selfies of young women in fitting rooms, wearing tiny T-shirts from the popular Japanese retailer... Other trends which have gone viral in the past include the "belly button challenge", where women wound their arms around their back to touch their belly button, and the collarbone challenge, which had girls balancing coins behind their collarbones.There was also the "A4 waist challenge", where women shared photos of waists as wide as the narrow edge of an A4 piece of paper, which measures 21cm (8.2in). In fact, such extreme viral skinny challenges pop up so frequently on Chinese social media that there are even niche categories. The Uniqlo trend is an example of "BM Style", a teen fashion aesthetic involving crop tops, slim jeans and short skirts.It takes its name from the Italian clothing brand Brandy Melville which mostly stocks one-size-fits-all pieces. Its standard size is comparable to the extra-small size from other brands... "There is a popular Chinese saying which means 'a good woman cannot be over 100 jin' which is about 50kg [110lb]""
Of course it's only good to glorify obesity

York Regional Police - Posts | Facebook - "Like pickup trucks through the ice, so are the days of our winter.This F-150 is at the bottom of #LakeSimcoe, where the fish will stay until spring. Ice fishing season is over, guys."

New Yorker’s Steve Coll Suggests Journalists Should Reconsider Value of Free Speech - "Those of us in journalism have to come to terms with the fact that free speech, a principle that we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the principles of journalism, and what do we do about that?"
When journalists realise they can't dictate the narrative anymore

This is not Iran, this is New York - Imam declares women's freedom as a threat to society - "As you can see in the video below in comments translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, an imam in New York promotes and justifies oppression of women... Syracuse, NY Imam Khadar Bin Muhammad"

For Trump, It’s Not the United States, It’s Red and Blue States - The New York Times - "President Trump argued this week that the death toll from the coronavirus was actually not so bad. All you had to do was not count states that voted for Democrats."
Given how much flyover country and "deplorables" are mocked, and the campaign to "deprogram" 73 million Americans, the outrage is rich

Thailand serves up cannabis cuisine to happy customers - "The restaurant at the Chao Phya Abhaibhubejhr Hospital in Prachin Buri started serving its own happy meals this month, after Thailand de-listed cannabis as a narcotic, allowing state-authorised firms to cultivate the plant. “Cannabis leaves, when put in the food or even a small amount ... it will help the patient to recover faster from the illness,” said Pakakrong Kwankao, the project leader at the hospital.“The cannabis leaf can improve appetite and make people sleep well, and also be in a mood, in a good mood.”The hospital is known as a pioneer in Thailand for studying marijuana and its ability to relieve pain and fatigue... The restaurant’s offerings include a happy pork soup, deep-fried bread topped with pork and a marijuana leaf, and a salad of crispy cannabis leaves served with ground pork and chopped vegetables... Thai deputy education minister Kanokwan Vilawan said the next step was to offer famous Thai dishes to reach an international audience.“We plan to add more (cannabis) to Thai dishes that are already well known, such as green curry soup, to boost the popularity of these dishes even more”"

Singaporean women prefer taller and richer men, believe men should make first move: Survey - "39 per cent of Singaporean women said that they would date a man who earns less than them. This percentage was marginally lower than female respondents from Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, where 40 to 41 per cent of women said that they would do so.Women from Hong Kong, on the other hand, were the most willing to date men with lower earning power, with 57 per cent saying that they would.Singaporean men seemed open to date women who earned more, with 87 per cent of respondents saying so. Similarly, more than 80 per cent of male respondents in other countries said that they were willing to do that as well... When it came to physical attributes such as height, only 20 per cent of Singaporean women were willing to date someone shorter than them. While this was the lowest figure across all countries, it was not significantly lower, with the percentages in other places ranging from 21 to 31 per cent.In comparison, more than three times that number of Singaporean men, or 66 per cent, were open to dating taller women... Commenting on the results that Singaporean women prefer to date taller men and higher-earners, Lunch Actually’s co-founder Violet Lim told TODAY that the findings were not shocking. “(Our agency) has been doing this for the last 15 years and at the end of the day, different genders look for different things.”She said that the findings did not mean that Singaporean women are materialistic or shallow. Women may prefer taller men because they feel more secure around them. Likewise for men who may prefer women with long hair as it used to be a sign of fertility, Ms Lim said."
These findings are remarkably stable over time

Did pasta come from China? Absolutely not, historians say - "pasta culture was already flourishing in the Mediterranean region centuries before he travelled east, among the ancient Greeks and later among the Romans... Mr Giorgio Franchetti, a food historian and scholar of ancient Roman history, is the author of a book, Dining With the Ancient Romans, which was recently translated into English. He roundly dismisses the Marco Polo theory about the origins of pasta.“It’s pure nonsense,” he says. “The noodles that Marco Polo maybe brought back with him at the end of the 1200s from China were essentially made with rice and based on a different, oriental culinary tradition that has nothing to do with ours.”His book’s recipes are based on texts, including some from the Roman soldier and historian Cato the Elder, that clearly describe food preparation and the quantities required. The recipes also draw on documents and food culture artefacts recovered in the area around Mount Vesuvius on the Gulf of Naples.Mr Franchetti says his culinary research includes insights derived from relics found under the ashes of Vesuvius’ eruption in AD79 that destroyed Pompeii, including documents and well-preserved food remains."

'Sex addiction’ cited by Atlanta shooting suspect is not an official diagnosis, doubted by some experts - The Washington Post - "while the world of entertainment has in recent years popularized the idea of “sex addiction” through films and TV shows, researchers who study human sexuality and addiction say it is far from an established psychiatric diagnosis. “There’s an idea that when people are too turned on, they cannot control their own behaviors,” David J. Ley, a clinical psychologist and the author of “The Myth of Sex Addiction,” told The Washington Post. “But the research shows that these ‘sex addicts’ don’t demonstrate observable difficulties in self-control.” As HuffPost has reported, the American Psychiatric Association in 2012 removed sex addiction from the DSM-5, the nearly 1,000-page guidebook used by psychiatrists to diagnose mental disorders. Some scientists question if it is merely a mask for or symptom of other behaviors... For researchers like Nicole Prause, there is another reason to be skeptical of his self-described “sexual addiction”: There is no scientific consensus that such a diagnosis exists. “There’s no doubt that people are coming into my office upset about sexual behaviors,” Prause, a neuroscientist at Liberos in Los Angeles, told The Washington Post. But while “sex addiction is one model for understanding those types of problems, it’s also the least likely.” In a peer-reviewed study at the University of California at Los Angeles, Prause found significant differences in the brain’s response to sex when compared to behaviors like smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol or gambling. While people addicted to these things often demonstrate neurological “cues” upon viewing their drug of choice, no such brain waves appeared in people who said they were addicted to sex, her team’s research found. Sex also fails to follow the trajectory marked by other addictive behaviors over time, which start out as pleasurable but become a necessity for avoiding negative emotions, Prause added... Treatment like the kind reportedly received by Long — a devout Christian — may in fact exacerbate the issues at hand. Self-identification as a sex addict is most closely linked to growing up in a conservative or religious environment, he said. One peer-reviewed study, for instance, found that attempting to suppress sexual thoughts and fantasies among religious people only increased the presence of those thoughts. “There is absolutely no scientific evidence that sex addiction treatment works,” Ley said, but judges, juries and others may nonetheless “send people to sex addiction treatment thinking it’s going to reduce their risk.”"

Gad Saad on Twitter - "JUST IN: CNN has lost 47% of its primetime audience in the key 25-54 age demographic since Pres. Trump left office"
"This is due to white supremacy."
Why the media loved Trump so much

she's a lovely contradiction - "My ancestors, watching me dump an entire stick of cinnamon, two cloves, an allspice berry, and a generous grating of nutmeg into my tea, sweetened with white sugar and loaded with cream, while I sit in my clean warm house surrounded by books, 25+ outfits for different occasions, and 6 pairs of shoes, in a building heated so well I have the windows open in mid-autumn:
Our daughter prospers. We are proud of her. She has never labored in a field but knows riches we could not have imagined."
"I like this so much better than the idea that our ancestors would be embarrassed or ashamed of us for being “soft” or some crap like that."
"My ancestors, watching me stuff my face with fried chicken while studying: She eats like an imperial concubine and can afford to study like am imperial scholar. WE MADE IT"

Look at how the Washington Post covered RBG's death vs. Antonin Scalia's in 2016 - "Say it with me now:
DeMoCrAcY DiEs In DaRkNeSs"

NFL cites obscure manual that says players 'should' stand for anthem - "The policy, which is outlined in the league's operations manual and which was only recently made available online, notes that players "should" stand for the anthem and are "judged by the public" for their actions during the ceremony. It also threatens disciplinary action "for violations of the above, including first offenses... According to Nancy Armour of USA Today, the changes were made in 2015, which would even predate the first time Colin Kaepernick did not stand for the anthem."
An apologist first claimed that the NFL didn't have authority over players since it wasn't their employer (ignoring the fact that it has authority over them "if they have violated league bylaws or committed "conduct detrimental to the welfare of the League or professional football"". then claimed that Kaepernick wasn't breaking any rules, ignoring the fact that after the NLF publicly threatened to fine players who knelt, he continued doing so (presumably after a law is passed, this apologist would continue to do what he did before it was passed and claimed the law was passed after the fact and so he didn't have to obey it). But clearly even before Kaepernick's protests there was already a rule in place prohibiting it

NFL viewership down and study suggests it’s over protests
The apologist also claimed that the protests had the opposite effect to being detrimental to the welfare of the league or football, and compared the protests to boycotting the Qatar World Cup

Ivan Tells You How To Lose Weight.pptx - Google Slides

Intermittent fasting doesn't help weight loss: UCSF study - "Weiss suggests that the placebo effect might have caused both groups to lose weight: Many people will pay closer attention to what they eat when enrolled in a nutrition study, meaning they’re more likely to make healthier food choices.So going forward, he says, consumers should be increasingly skeptical about any nutrition study claiming weight loss benefits that doesn’t involve a control group. There may also be a potential downside to intermittent fasting. A smaller percentage of participants were asked by the researchers to come on-site for more advanced testing, including changes in fat mass, lean mass, fasting glucose, fasting insulin and so on. Through those measurements, researchers discovered people who engaged in time-restricted eating seemed to lose more muscle mass than the control group. Weiss says the outcome wasn’t definitive, but he is hoping to conduct further studies down the line." Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease

Japanese Fasting Study Reveals Complex Metabolic Changes in the Human Body - "By analyzing the blood of four young, healthy human participants after they fasted for 34 and 58 hours — whoa! — the team found 42 different substances whose levels increase while a person is fasting (as well as two that go down), only 14 of which scientists had previously detected in fasting humans. That means they discovered 30 substances the human body produces in large quantities during fasting that scientists didn’t know about."

The Damaging Double Standard Behind Intermittent Fasting - " When these prominent women share their regimens, the public and media outlets accuse them of disordered eating, in the process normalizing the kinds of body images that have driven millions of women to develop eating disorders of their own.But in recent years, high-profile men have begun to publicly divulge their eating habits, not as a way to meet a standard, as women feel they must, but to show how they exceed one."
When you need to push a narrative. This is the first article I've ever read that makes a gendered distinction. Most talk about IF doesn't even mention an embodied subject, and when practitioners are mentioned women get treated the same as men

Meme - Being Libertarian @beinlibertarian: "If Biden says Cuomo should step down it could be problematic for Biden. He is someone with a VP that believed the women that accused him of similar events. And she still took the job."

Is Cuomo's Downfall a #MeToo Success Story—or #MeToo Overreach? - "Cuomo's conviction in the court of public opinion was far from a case of due process. The AG's report conflated corroborated accusations with uncorroborated ones, and serious charges of misconduct with trivial offenses against post-#MeToo decorum. And as such, it is just as much an example of #MeToo overreach as it is a success story. Cuomo himself cast many of the allegations against him in the context of changing mores... Commisso's allegation, the most serious of the lot, is also the least corroborated. By her own admission, she never mentioned the alleged assault to anyone until March 2021, nearly three months after the first sexual harassment accusations against Cuomo from former aide Lindsay Boylan. Notably, too, no other accusations come close in severity; while other women have reported unwanted and inappropriate touching on the arms, back, or waist, none of it rises to the level of sexual assault. And Cuomo's attorney, Rita Glavin, asserts that the breast-grabbing story is false and refuted by records from the date Commisso gave.  As opposed to Commisso's allegation, many of the other allegations against Cuomo do, in fact, fall into the category of behavior rendered suspect by cultural and generational shifts, as Cuomo himself has argued. Cuomo is faulted throughout the AG's report for complimenting female staffers and state employees on their looks—for example, telling a female doctor giving him a COVID-19 test on camera, "You make that gown look good." The report treats this as an offensive gender-based remark, and it's true Cuomo would not have said it to a male doctor (unless he was openly and flirtatiously gay or bisexual).  But for much of Cuomo's career, such a comment would have been regarded as harmless—even charming. Ditto for kisses on the cheek and hugs around the waist while posing for photos, which the report also treats as incriminating. Except for during the last few years and for a brief period in the 1990s, when Anita Hill's Senate Judiciary Committee testimony sparked a #MeToo-like conversation on sexual harassment, none of these behaviors would have been considered harassment or misconduct... Many working women, high- or low-status, have genuinely enjoyed flirtation and banter, finding that such interactions make for a more energized and more human work environment. To be sure, giving recourse to workers who are offended by such behavior while allowing some freedom to those who enjoy it is a fine line to walk. But the progressive quest for a sexless workplace is oddly puritanical and paternalistic.  Moreover, as Cuomo's lawyer pointed out, Cuomo, much like President Biden, has a longstanding habit of physical displays of affection with both women and men. Here too, the story may be one of shifting standards: Should equal-opportunity hands-on behavior be regarded as intrusive and creepy, or as warm and friendly?... Will some of the seemingly damning revelations look different on closer investigation, like the charges against Al Franken? Only time will tell."
Feminists love double standards when they benefit women

shoe on Twitter - "Gov. Cuomo: "We want to do with gun violence with what we just did with COVID.""
"everyone hide your grandparents"

Nancy Pelosi on Twitter - "Too many women are sexually assaulted while in college. Joined @NYGovCuomo to discuss why #EnoughIsEnough!"

Cuomo in 2013: There Should Be 'Zero Tolerance' for Sexual Harassment - "There should be a zero tolerance policy when it comes to sexual harassment & must send a clear message that this behavior is not tolerated"
Cuomo again refuses to resign over sexual harassment scandal

How the New York Times A/B tests their headlines - "headlines tend to get more dramatic as time passes. Take this article about Cuomo’s sex scandal... The headlines get even spicier in this article about Trump’s CPAC address... Okay last example: this wildly popular article about Oprah’s interview with Meghan Markle... I actually watched this interview—all two hours of it—and I can tell you that the first two headlines are a much better summary of what went down... The NYT might be more restrained than BuzzFeed, but we should keep in mind that it’s not a neutral observer. As the examples above show, A/B tested headlines paint a picture that’s a lot more dramatic than the reality. Frequent NYT readers will end up thinking the world is scarier and more shocking than it really is."
Of course, liberals who bash "tabloids" and refuse to believe that the earth is round when a "tabloid" says it is see no problem with the NYT using misleading and tabloid-style headlines

Facebook - Laurence Tribe: "@tedcruz took constitutional law from me at Harvard. As did @BarackObama, @RepRaskin, @RepAdamSchiff, Elena Kagan, Merrick Garland, and John Roberts. Cruz knows the junk he’s peddling isn’t really con law but just a con. I can’t plead guilty to making him the POS he’s become."
"Is it proper to refer to one’s former student as a POS? Seems out of bounds from the perspective of minimal decorum no?As a fellow professor, I can’t imagine ever calling a former student a POS.  Shame on you for placing political tribalism ahead of norms of minimal professional etiquette."

Disney Announces New Movie Telling Sympathetic Feminist Origin Story Of Xenomorph Queen | The Babylon Bee

“Lived Experience” is Not Evidence - "When discussing the prevalence of discrimination, those calming that discrimination is rampant sometimes appeal to their “lived experience” as evidence for their view. Moreover, if statistical evidence is marshaled which suggests that discrimination is not prevalent, some people will take offense and claim that you are invalidating their lived experience.Traditionally, this kind of thinking is called “anecdotal reasoning” and people learn that it is problematic sometime in high-school or early college... Zigerell (2018) meta-analyzed 17 such studies and found that white people exhibited a statistically insignificant tendency to favor black people while black people exhibited a pro black bias that was larger and statistically significant. We see similar results from Mitchell et al. (2005). This paper analyzed data from 34 studies in which people acted as jurors and voted on whether a given defendant was guilty and, if so, what their sentence should be. These experiments compared the recommended verdicts and sentences for defendants that were identical in all ways other than their race.For verdict decisions, white participants exhibited no practically significant bias while black participants exhibited an in-group bias equivalent to a .43 standard deviation difference in treatment based on race. With respect to sentencing decisions, we once against see basically no discrimination among white people and a pro-black bias among black participants equal to an absurdly strong .73 standard deviations. Thus, experimental evidence suggests that black people are far more likely than white people to engage in discriminatory behavior. Nonetheless,  when black people treat white people unfairly we usually don’t assume that it is because of our race without specific evidence suggesting that this is so. This different in interpretation arises because we have different theories which we use to interpret and color our experience. Such theories can lead to dramatic errors. Kleck and Strenta (1980) conducted a set of relevant experiments demonstrating this. In them, study participants were assigned a negative physical attribute. Some were given fake scars by make up artists while others had to fill out a biographical saying that they had epilepsy. These subjects then interacted with other people who were given said biography cards. Study participants reported that people liked them less, were patronizing, and tense, because of their assigned physical defects. What the participants didn’t realize was that the people they were interacting with were not actually informed about their supposed epilepsy and a moisturizer that was applied to their scars after they viewed it in a hand mirror was actually a product that erased the whole thing. Thus, they perceived the discrimination they expected, even though none was actually taking place... I want suggest that survey data on personally experienced discrimination attests to their lack of validity because the people who say that they have experienced the most discrimination are not the people who probably actually have, and are instead the people who we might expect to be most influenced by leftist ideologue. The first variable fitting this pattern is age. Society has become less sexist and less racist with time. Because of this, old people should be the most likely to report having experienced significant discrimination. Instead, the data suggests that old people are the least likely to report having experienced discrimination, with middle aged people being the most likely... The second important variable is education. People who are uneducated, and so live in poorer conditions among people who have relatively non-progressive values, should be the most likely to experience discrimination. But what surveys suggest is that those with college degrees are the most likely to report having experienced discrimination.Both these patterns are present in self reported discrimination among women, Hispanics, and blacks, and both patterns are predicted on the basis of exposure to “woke” political ideology. It is also noteworthy that black people are more likely to report having been discriminated against if they live in a black-majority area. This too is easily explainable in terms of the spread of ideology, but not what you would expect if these reports accurately reflected actually discrimination.""
In other words, once again if you expect you are going to be discriminated against, you are going to think you were discriminated against (you're just imagining it). People do imagine discrimination and claim this imaginary discrimination is a real injustice

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