[A]bout 75% of all PhDs in psychology now go to women (a trend that began in the late 1980s).The second one is from Esquire. I won't excerpt it. It is wrong to try to extrapolate very far from a single example, which is the premise of the piece. But the piece is nevertheless interesting on many levels.
Since 2009, women have outnumbered men overall in doctoral degrees earned, and the gender imbalance in psychology is particularly marked. Moreover, in fields such as developmental and child psychology, women Ph.D. recipients outnumber men by more than five to one. According to the APA’s own documents, this has for years caused concern about the “feminization” of the field of psychology.
In a 2011 report, the APA affirmed that gender diversity is important, as is a diversity of viewpoints. But if the APA just redefines what desirable human characteristics are, perhaps they won’t have to bother with this problem or the fact that women are the vast majority of therapists in practice.
This past weekend, thousands of protesters from the ‘Nice Guy Socialist Coalition’ marched on the Capitol to demand Congress pass a bill “guaranteeing men’s basic human right to access to women.”
“It really isn’t fair,” says Gunther Doogan, leader of the coalition. “Women want guys who are strong, ambitious, reliable, well-groomed…they only seem to care about profiting off of the virtues of good men...."
Criticisms by counter-protesters railed against the clear infringement on women’s rights by the legislation. Coalition members fired back, stating that women inherited their good looks and virtues from their parents. “Why should they have a right to their bodies?” asked Jacob Werner, a gaming streamer from Boston. “They didn’t earn them! I’d be a stud if I had parents who provided me with good genetics, basic understanding of social cues, and grooming habits!”
“I can’t believe in 2019 there are people who still don’t believe in a man’s right to be loved,” said Doogan. “While they selfishly preen over their precious ‘individual rights’, men across the country are literally starving for affection. No man should be denied access to women simply because he has no redeeming qualities.”
It is alternatively described as the last frontier of science, and as a kind of immaterial magic beyond science’s reckoning. David Chalmers, one of the world’s most respected philosophers on the subject, once told me that consciousness could be a fundamental feature of the universe, like space-time or energy. He said it might be tied to the diaphanous, indeterminate workings of the quantum world, or something nonphysical.If Chalmers is right, the evolutionary picture the author takes as "likely" is wrong. There is no 'first mind,' because consciousness is a feature of reality itself. The thing to explore is how consciousness is experienced by different forms of organization of this basic reality.
These metaphysical accounts are in play because scientists have yet to furnish a satisfactory explanation of consciousness. We know the body’s sensory systems beam information about the external world into our brain, where it’s processed, sequentially, by increasingly sophisticated neural layers. But we don’t know how those signals are integrated into a smooth, continuous world picture, a flow of moments experienced by a roving locus of attention—a “witness,” as Hindu philosophers call it....
It was likely more than half a billion years ago that some sea-floor arms race between predator and prey roused Earth’s first conscious animal. That moment, when the first mind winked into being, was a cosmic event, opening up possibilities not previously contained in nature.
One 1998 report focused on Africa observed that “sexual harassment and even rape of sisters by priests and bishops is allegedly common.”That leaves me with a set of questions for those who understand all of this better than I do myself. If a priest like this remains a frocked member of the priesthood, what is the status of his capacity to perform the rites? What becomes of the faithful who trust that his rites are efficacious?
“When a sister becomes pregnant, the priest insists that she have an abortion,” the report added. ‘‘The sister is usually dismissed from her congregation while the priest is often only moved to another parish — or sent for studies.”
When you ask a question at a lecture, is it secretly just your opinion ending with the phrase “do you agree?” If so, your name is something like Jake, or Chad, or Alex, and you were taught that your voice is the most important in every room. Somewhere along your academic journey, you decided your search for intellectual validation was more important than the actual exchange of information. Now how do you expect to actually learn anything?Four years? Students at these elite colleges must be a little slow. I didn't even need two paragraphs to come to doubt the merit of her voice.
American society tells men, but especially white men, that their opinions have merit and that their voice is valuable, but after four years of listening to white boys in college, I am not so convinced.
What our survey found about the American dream came as a surprise to me. When Americans were asked what makes the American dream a reality, they did not select as essential factors becoming wealthy, owning a home or having a successful career. Instead, 85 percent indicated that “to have freedom of choice in how to live” was essential to achieving the American dream. In addition, 83 percent indicated that “a good family life” was essential.Contra the NYT's summation, they didn't say "community," they said "family." There's a crucial, biological difference there. The nation grows out of its families, and whether or not it sustains and supports healthy families is an important measure of its success. Blood ties remain important. People care less about whether they are 'living a better life than their parents' than about whether their children and grandchildren will still have prospects for a good life, even if they happen to define that life in terms of less-marketable choices.
The “traditional” factors (at least as I had understood them) were seen as less important. Only 16 percent said that to achieve the American dream, they believed it was essential to “become wealthy,” only 45 percent said it was essential “to have a better quality of life than your parents,” and just 49 percent said that “having a successful career” was key.
This pattern — seeing the American dream as more about community and individuality than material success and social mobility — appeared across demographic and political categories. In the case of political party affiliation, for example, 84 percent of Republicans and independents said having freedom was essential to the American dream, as did 88 percent of Democrats; less than 20 percent of those in either party held that becoming wealthy was essential.
As well as calling for the dramatic expansion of the country’s renewable energy resources, the plan proposes:Converting America to a centrally planned economy might lower our emissions just by depressing economic output, although even that isn't certain. China's Communist economy worsened pollution.
*“Upgrading all existing buildings" in the United States to make them energy efficient, and developing a smart grid.
*A radical overhaul of the country’s transport infrastructure to eliminate emissions “as much as technologically feasible.” This would involve expanding electric car manufacturing, installing charging stations “everywhere” and developing high-speed rail links to “a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.”
*Restoring threatened lands and hazardous waste sites.
*Working with farmers to build a more sustainable food system that “ensures universal access to healthy food” and clean water.
*The plan also includes social justice objectives such as "high-quality health care" for all Americans, a guaranteed job "with a family-sustaining benefit provisions.” Another goal is “to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, de-industrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.”
Determining the legislative intent of Congress regarding the role of the individual mandate as it related to the rest of the law is at the heart of the severability component of the Texas v. Azar litigation. The plaintiffs contend that the Findings of Fact included in the ACA statute by the 111th Congress that passed it should be determinative on this point. That Congress essentially said that the individual mandate was essential to the functioning of several other ACA provisions, including protections against exclusions of coverage or higher premium charges for individuals with pre-existing health conditions (hereinafter more commonly referred to as “guaranteed issue” and “adjusted community rating”). Whether or not those “findings” have been borne out in practice or the economic and policy connection was quite as tight as that Congress officially assumed, the plaintiffs are not out of bounds in holding Congress to its past word, and in building on the similar reasoning used by other Supreme Court majorities to strike ACA legal challenges in NFIB v Sebelius and in King v. Burwell.
In other words, if that’s the “story” for ACA defenders, they should have to stick to it, at least until a subsequent Congress actually votes to eliminate or revise those past Findings of Fact already embedded in permanent law.
Whatever the 111th Congress “may” have really intended is far more complex. At best, one might conclude that, in the final analysis, it really aimed to pass whatever surviving, though problematic version of the ACA it could, by whatever legislative and political means would work, and then try to implement it and fix it up later, as needed, as it went along. However, this gap between what was officially said with a “wink” and what actually was the political calculation is far harder to recognize in the courts as official legislative intent.
To be blunt, one of the primary ways that the Obama administration “sold” its proposals for health policy overhaul was to exaggerate the size, scope, and nature of the potential population facing coverage problems due to pre-existing health conditions ACA advocates then argued that the only way to address those problems was with a heavy dose of (adjusted) community rated premiums and income-related tax subsidies, complemented by an individual mandate. Unfortunately, this combination also made the coverage offered in ACA exchanges less attractive to younger and healthier individuals, who were asked to pay more for insurance that they valued less. We ended up with the worst of both worlds, a mandate despised by many (low-risk) individuals that largely failed to accomplish its intended goals. To the extent that net insurance coverage gains still were achieved under the ACA, they were due overwhelmingly to the combination of generous insurance subsidies for lower income ACA exchange enrollees, plus an aggressive expansion of relatively less-expensive (but even more generously taxpayer-subsidized) Medicaid coverage in many states.
* * *
It’s important to remember that the problem of pre-existing condition coverage, before the ACA was enacted and implemented, was limited almost entirely to the individual market. A host of semi-specialized risk pools and other pre-ACA legal provisions already offered various types of such insurance protection to many otherwise vulnerable Americans. Of course, public policy to address remaining problems could and should be improved in other less prescriptive and more transparent ways than the ACA’s tangled web of less-visible regulatory cross-subsidies and income-related premium tax credits (for example, extending HIPAA’s continuous-coverage provisions and risk protections to the individual market).
* * *
Hence, if the ACA’s current, overbroad regulatory provisions involving guaranteed issue, adjusted community rating, and prohibition of coverage exclusions for pre-existing conditions were stricken down in court in the near future as inextricably tied to an unconstitutional individual mandate, there are better policy alternatives available to lawmakers.
* * *
I don’t want to neglect pointing out the disappointing results and collateral damage caused by the ACA’s execution of its stated objectives. Yes, U.S. taxpayers spent more money, or we borrowed it, and millions more Americans were covered with insurance than before while others had their coverage upgraded and subsidized more generously. At the same time, less-visible victims of the ACA lost the coverage they had preferred to keep or had to pay much more for it if they fell outside of the law’s more generously subsidized cohorts. Insurance and health care markets were substantially destabilized for years, although, with enough premium hikes and Silver-loaded subsidy alchemy in the last two years, that’s begun to change. Nevertheless, the overall size of the individual market actually have grown smaller than its pre-ACA levels.
Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar recommended Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison investigate USA Powerlifting for barring biological males from women’s events, according to a Jan. 31 letter she sent USA Powerlifting.Lest you think she's out in left field here, it turns out that another American powerlifting organization -- USPA -- has no relevant rules at all. They just say they welcome everyone, compete however you like. USPA, however, also doesn't test for performance enhancing drugs of any kind -- so if you're pumped up on steroids, and can inject as much testosterone as you like, what's the big deal about some natural testosterone?
Omar called it a “myth” that men who identify as transgender women have a “direct competitive advantage” and copied Ellison on the letter, “with a recommendation that he investigate this discriminatory behavior.”
“I can’t find it in the Bible, but I quote it all the time,” Pelosi said as she introduced the quote. “I keep reading and reading the Bible—I know it’s there someplace. It’s supposed to be in Isaiah. I heard a bishop say, ‘To minister to the needs of God’s creation … ’ ”In fairness, the bishop may well have said something like that. Some priests sometimes feel very free in their translations from the Latin, especially if they have prayed about it and feel like this is the version of the message that their flock needs to hear right now. Pelosi's version of Catholicism strikes me as very likely to be led by priests of that spirit.
The runner, whose name has not been released, fought off the cougar-- killing it in the process-- and hiked out of the area and drove himself to a hospital. The Denver Post reported that the runner suffered serious injuries that included facial bite wounds and lacerations to his body. He is expected to recover.Still, an impressive feat! Colorado's government has confirmed that he did not use a weapon, but suffocated the animal while it was trying to kill him.
Wildlife officers searching the trail found the juvenile mountain lion's body near several of the runner's possessions. They estimated that the animal weighed about 80 pounds.
Scientists found that healthy women have a “metabolic brain age” that is persistently younger than men’s of the same chronological age. The difference is apparent from early adulthood and remains into old age.The fact of the difference is important enough on its own.
The finding suggests that changes in how the brain uses energy over a person’s lifetime proceed more gradually in women than they do in men. While researchers are unsure of the medical consequences, it may help explain why women tend to stay mentally sharp for longer.
“Brain metabolism changes with age but what we noticed is that a good deal of the variation we see is down to sex differences,” said Marcus Raichle, a neurobiologist at Washington University school of medicine in St Louis.... “The great mystery is why,” said Raichle. The researchers suspect something other than hormonal differences are at work because the difference in metabolism stays the same when women enter the menopause.
“I refer to things like this as the curve balls of Mother Nature,” said Raichle. “Maybe women start off with this difference and it’s perpetuated throughout life.”
It is not clear what the difference means.
...polling suggests that when it comes to soaking the rich, the American public is increasingly on board.You'd think that tax cuts followed by the most robust economy in decades would suggest that this is the opposite of wisdom.
Surveys are showing overwhelming support for raising taxes on top earners, including a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll released Monday that found 76 percent of registered voters believe the wealthiest Americans should pay more in taxes. A recent Fox News survey showed that 70 percent of Americans favor raising taxes on those earning over $10 million — including 54 percent of Republicans.
“I am talking about the radical conservatives in the Democratic Party,” said Saikat Chakrabarti. “That’s who we need to counter. It’s the same across any number of issues—pay-as-you-go, free college, “Medicare for all.” These are all enormously popular in the party, but they don’t pass because of the radical conservatives who are holding the party hostage.”So far their ambitions have mostly failed, even compared to the TEA Party's initial moments. However, in the young Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, they have an extraordinary platform to draw attention to their movement.
Not long ago, this would have been an outlier position even among American liberals. Today, it’s the organizing principle of a newly empowered segment of the Democratic Party, one with a foothold in the new Congress.
Chakrabarti is chief of staff to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez... Although it’s Ocasio-Cortez who gets all the headlines, she arguably wouldn’t be in Congress in the first place without the group Chakrabarti founded: Justice Democrats, a new, central player in the ongoing war for the soul of the Democratic Party. It was the Justice Democrats who recruited her in a quixotic campaign early on, providing a neophyte candidate with enough infrastructure to take down a party leader. And it is the Justice Democrats who see Ocasio-Cortez as just the opening act in an astonishingly ambitious plan to do nothing less than re-imagine liberal politics in America—and do it by whatever means necessary.
If that requires knocking out well-known elected officials and replacing them with more radical newcomers, so be it. And if it ends up ripping apart the Democratic Party in the process—well, that might be the idea.
“There is going to be a war within the party. We are going to lean into it,” said Waleed Shahid, the group’s spokesman.
Well, he was indeed a doctor during Desert Storm, according to the NPRC... He was a child neurologist working at the Army’s Landstuhl Hospital in Germany. The way I understand neurologists, they treat brain diseases not gunshot wounds. It looks like he specialized in child neurology before, during and after the time he was at Landstuhl.... Now, he didn’t exactly lie about his service, he was a Major, he was a doctor, he served during Desert Storm, but I’m pretty sure a child neurologist wouldn’t be treating wounded soldiers, except in emergency circumstances – extreme emergencies.
The old paradigm presented effeminate men as homosexuals who could be cured of their sexual desires. The new paradigm presents effeminate boys as children who can be cured by declaring them girls. And since we have (falsely) decided that their sexuality is irrelevant because they are children and because gender has no relationship to sexuality, proponents can make their case without discussing the off-putting issue of sexual urges. Each child must be raised according to what the child perceives to be their “true gender.”I would say this focuses too much on the pleasure aspect of sexuality, and ignores the greater question of fertility: what if a child takes drugs that render him or her sterile, and then learns as an adult of a longing for children? What if the child were a girl, who destroys her body's ability to create life and then comes to regret it? The therapist who talked her into that will have murdered her children, all of them, and a part of her soul that she cannot get back.
In some cases, the phenomenon described as gender dysphoria is real and permanent, of course. But giving children the power to decide their true gender—or allowing them to decide that they have no gender whatsoever—makes little sense to me. Children who haven’t gone through puberty lack perspective on the ultimate consequences—both psychological and physical—of their choices. ... [W]hat if, as a child, I had decided to take hormones in order to stave off puberty? What if my penis shrank into my body? Imagine how that would affect me as an adult, when my sexual pleasure—an unknown impulse at the time I was knitting those Barbie-doll clothes—became connected with that penis. It turned out my erotic stimulus came in the form of being a man with other men, something I could never have completely understood as a child. As with legions of other gay men and women, the whole arc of my life only makes sense if one acknowledges the connection between gender and sexual attraction.
If I had self-declared as trans, hormones would have stopped the development of my penis, and there would not be enough sensitive phallic flesh to create a sensitive vagina. This would have been problematic even if I turned out not to be gay, or trans, but simply a straight man whose body now was marked by surgeries and powerful drugs. What if, as an adult, I were only turned on by being a man when I was having sex with a woman—but I now had a female body? How would I feel then?...
When I was 12 years old, I was terrified of being gay. I knew the sexual implications of my gendered behaviour. I also knew—even at a time before I experienced real sexual desire—that it was “bad” to be gay, and that being gay meant ending up alone and lonely. My mother took me aside, and quietly reassured me: “You might be gay, you might not be, but I think you’ll have to wait until you are older to think about it, because you’re just too young to think about it now.” I’m wondering if, had all this happened in 2019, she would have instead been persuaded to raise me as a girl.
I have issues with my mother. Don’t we all? I have called her names—to her face and in print. I will not repeat them here. But I want to publicly forgive her, now, for whatever I have accused her of, because she had the kindness and grace to respect my budding sexuality as I then perceived it. And she had enough respect for me to say, “You’re just too young” when I wondered what lay in store for my future. If only we all had the courage to say these same words to our own children.
“I’m also one that really looks at the defense budget that we have, Rep. Omar said. “That has increased nearly 50% since 9/11. And so, most of the money that we have in there is much more than with we spend on education, on healthcare.”That's not remotely true. Medicare alone consumes more money than the DOD. Medicare spending was north of $750B in 2017; the DOD's budget for this year is $686B.
Later abortion recipients experienced logistical delays (e.g., difficulty finding a provider and raising funds for the procedure and travel costs), which compounded other delays in receiving care. Most women seeking later abortion fit at least one of five profiles: They were raising children alone, were depressed or using illicit substances, were in conflict with a male partner or experiencing domestic violence, had trouble deciding and then had access problems, or were young and nulliparous."Nulliparous," if you don't want to look it up, means that they've never delivered a baby before.
Since the beginning of my graduate education, I have been someone who other academics feel that they can come to in order to voice their shock and dismay at just how toxic the culture within academia has become. They tell stories about petty witch hunts and show trials within their departments. They share their fear about objecting to arguments they find unfair or unsupported. They say they feel compelled to follow current academic fads for fear of being labeled. They are convinced that stepping out of line with the constant search for offense will render them permanently unemployable, even though they are themselves progressive people. You’ve heard the litany before. They share it with me.I've had similar experiences. Not everyone in the academic world is completely sure of gun control; not everyone is committed to abortion rights. Some -- maybe most -- of the women doggedly pursuing academic careers would rather be home with their children.
Because they know that they can trust that I won’t ever betray their confidence, and because of my (self-aggrandizing, I admit) indifference to my professional reputation, they email me. They find me at conferences. And they always say the same thing: I could never say this publicly, but…. The Tuvel situation is just one example of a pervasive culture of fear, a feeling that even when one has the strong sense that an injustice is being done, academia is not a place where such reservations can be freely voiced.
Some will insist that this is just the secretly conservative saying what they truly believe, that this is all white men decrying a changing academic world. I suppose on balance the backchannel to me is paler and maler than the academy writ large. But the truth is that all kinds of people discuss this stuff with me: white and black, male and female, trans and cis. And the people who approach me aren’t mostly those rare academic conservatives, who barely exist these days, but rather liberals and leftists who believe in the movement for equality but find that the way that movement operates in the contemporary university has become toxic and unjust.
Listen, it wouldn’t be fair to accuse presidential hopeful Kamala Harris of supporting state control over the means of all production. To this point she’s only focused on the energy, health care, auto-manufacturing and education sectors. Good candidates prioritize....
Ocasio-Cortez is basically stating a premise that most Christians would hear in church — that the gross hoarding of wealth violates the self-sacrificing love that should exist among God’s children in terms of overall distribution of Creation’s bounty intended for all. Calling the system “immoral” might be a bit hyperbolic, but many people would at least agree that recent outcomes of our economic system have become imbalanced, if not warped. The problem isn’t capitalism itself but in our lack of effort to enforce anti-trust laws to keep wealth — and therefore political power — accruing into fewer and fewer hands. That trend has accelerated the rise of populism on both sides of the ideological divide and corroded confidence in our public institutions....
“I uncanonical!” answered the hermit; “I scorn the charge—I scorn it with my heels!—I serve the duty of my chapel duly and truly—Two masses daily, morning and evening, primes, noons, and vespers, 'aves, credos, paters'—-”
“Excepting moonlight nights, when the venison is in season,” said his guest.
“'Exceptis excipiendis'” replied the hermit, “as our old abbot taught me to say, when impertinent laymen should ask me if I kept every punctilio of mine order.”
“True, holy father,” said the knight; “but the devil is apt to keep an eye on such exceptions; he goes about, thou knowest, like a roaring lion.”
“Let him roar here if he dares,” said the friar; “a touch of my cord will make him roar as loud as the tongs of St Dunstan himself did. I never feared man, and I as little fear the devil and his imps. Saint Dunstan, Saint Dubric, Saint Winibald, Saint Winifred, Saint Swibert, Saint Willick, not forgetting Saint Thomas a Kent, and my own poor merits to speed, I defy every devil of them, come cut and long tail.—But to let you into a secret, I never speak upon such subjects, my friend, until after morning vespers.”
A Belarusian model, who said she had proof that President Trump’s campaign colluded with the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential election, has now backtracked and says she made up the claims....[T]he model now claims her story was just an effort to attract media attention and save her life while she was detained in Thailand.Can't blame her much for that. It's an old story.
“I think it saved my life, how can I regret it? If journalists had not come at that time and that story had not come to the newspapers, maybe I would die [be dead by] now,” she told CNN.
Harris was also a big booster of familial DNA searches, a controversial technique whereby investigators compare a DNA sample to other samples in a DNA database to find possible relatives, then use additional genetic testing and analysis to confirm the match, all in order to solve crimes. Due to privacy concerns, the technique hasn’t been adopted in Canada, and was outlawed in both Maryland and DC. Among the concerns are the not-infrequent cases of human error in DNA evidence, the fact that familial testing would disproportionately impact communities of color, the potential revelation of family secrets, and the already existing instances of mistakes being made with the technique....She also supports civil asset forfeiture, in which the state can take your property without proving you guilty of anything, and you have to prove your innocence to get it back. She made it a practice to withhold exculpatory evidence from defense lawyers in criminal cases.
In fact, California’s use of familial DNA testing is particularly invasive, as the state allows the collection and preservation of DNA samples from anyone who is arrested, even if they’re not charged with a crime. The ACLU originally sued to block California’s DNA collection when an Oakland woman had been arrested during a San Francisco protest against the Iraq War and forced to give a DNA sample despite not being charged with any crime.
But the queen of the ban was just getting starting. Along with banning private health insurance, Harris also wants to ban for-profit colleges, assault weapons, fossil fuels, personal cars, and presumably members of the Knights of Columbus serving as federal judges. It’s quite a list, and a sign of the times in the party of Jefferson and Jackson.Speaking of health insurance, did you ever get any you only kind of hate after Obama's promise that you could keep the stuff you liked? Too bad, it's gone again.
