Tyranny advances in the US

 Jonathan Turley points out the decline of freedom in the United States.

The Left has adopted all the tools of the Communist Dictatorships.  The Intelligentsia, through the Universities and the rest of the educational system is responsible.

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“Silence is violence” has everything that you want in a slogan: Alliteration. Brevity. Simplicity. It also can be chilling for some in the academic and free-speech communities.

On one level, it conveys a powerful message that people of good faith should not remain silent about great injustices. However, it can have a more menacing meaning to “prove the negative” – demanding that people prove they are not racist.

In a prior column, I warned of the thin line between speech codes and speech commands, as people move from compelling silence to compelling speech: “Once all the offending statues are down, and all the offending professors are culled, the appetite for collective suppression will become a demand for collective expression.”

The line between punishing speech and compelling speech is easily crossed when free speech itself is viewed as a threat. It is not just the many cases of journalists, academics and others fired for expressing dissenting views. Even expressing support in the wrong way can be a terminal offense, like declaring “all lives matter” rather than “Black Lives Matter,” as in the firing of University of Massachusetts-Lowell Dean of Nursing Leslie Neal-Boylan or Vermont principal Tiffany Riley. While most of us support Black Lives Matter, it has become an official position of many schools — and variations are not tolerated. The concern is not only the establishment of orthodox values but the forced recitation of those values.

We are now seeing that fear realized.

This week, a mob surrounded diners outside several Washington restaurants, shouting “White silence is violence!” and demanding that diners raise a fist to support Black Lives Matter. Various diners dutifully complied as protesters screamed inches from their faces. One did not — Lauren Victor, who later said she has marched in protests for weeks but refused to be bullied. The mob surrounded her, and Washington Post reporter Fredrick Kunkle identified a freelance journalist as one of the people yelling at Victor and demanding: “What was in you, you couldn’t do this?”

It is the very mantra of orthodoxy: Failing to utter certain words, prayers or pledges is deemed a confession of complicity or guilt.

That demand for public affirmation was on display again Thursday when Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and his wife were threatened by a mob after leaving the final event of the Republican National Convention. The couple was ordered to “Say Her Name,” referring to Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician shot by police in Louisville, Ky. Notably, some media suggested the mob did not know who Paul was; they just demanded that he say the name if he wanted to pass.

Forced speech can occur in a variety of direct and indirect ways. The University of Southern Maine’s president, Glenn Cummings, proclaimed “we must never tire of declaring that Black Lives Matter” and asked students and faculty to add their names to a public anti-racism pledge. After objections, the school said it would keep the list non-public. The concern was that some faculty and students may not support Black Lives Matters as an organization, or have other disagreements with the pledge — yet, failure to be on the list would indicate they are racist, or at least not sufficiently anti-racist.

The University of California issued a “guidance document” requiring students to reject racism, sexism, xenophobia and all hateful or intolerant speech, including a mandate that students stop others from referring to the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus.” While the use of those terms is controversial, it also is heavily laden with political meaning for people on both sides of the debate over the pandemic.

Syracuse University moved more directly not just to bar but to require some forms of speech. Professor Keith Alford, the university’s diversity and inclusion officer, declared students would be punished for simply witnessing “bias-motivated” incidents and “acts of hate.” That was a response to a student group’s demand for expulsion of “individuals who witnessed the event or were present, but did not take part.”

The transition from speech codes to commands is based on the same notion of “speech as harm.” Just as speech is deemed harmful (and thus subject to regulation), silence is now deemed harmful. UC Berkeley Law Professor Savala Trepczynski, executive director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, wrote that “White silence is incredibly powerful … It’s not neutral. It acts like a weapon.” It is certainly not unreasonable to call out others for not supporting important causes. Indeed, I have criticized faculty for remaining silent as colleagues were attacked or fired for voicing dissent about systemic racism, police abuse or other subjects. However, once both speech and silence are deemed as equally harmful, individuals are subject to public demonstrations of faith and fealty.

Even being insufficiently alert can result in demands for termination. Nearly 2,000 people signed a petition to fire Marymount Manhattan theater arts associate professor Patricia Simon after she appeared to fall asleep briefly during an anti-racist meeting held on Zoom. Student Caitlin Gagnon started a petition which accused Simon of “ignoring … racist and sizeist actions and words of the vocal coaches under her jurisdiction.” The message seems clear: You cannot be woke if you are not awake.

The concern over speech codes becoming speech commands would have been viewed as utterly absurd just a few years ago. Now, even calls for civility in dialogue have been denounced as racist dog whistles. Trinity College professor Johnny Williams condemned those who call for civility as “uphold[ing] white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalist power.” When MSNBC host Joe Scarborough criticized those confronting people at restaurants and called for civility, University of Mississippi Professor James Thomas denounced civility and declared: “Don’t just interrupt a senator’s meal, y’all. Put your whole damn fingers in their salads.”

It is the ultimate expression of entitlement: People either must conform to your values or face public condemnation and threats. Your salad is no more inviolate than your speech. In a world where silence is violence and civility is complicity, there is little room for true free speech.

What the usual COVID-19 models leave out

Models of COVID-19 spread reflect a division of the population into groups such as: susceptible, exposed, infected, contagious, recovered, and deceased. An example are the various SEIR models, where S, E, I, and R stand for Susceptible, Exposed, Infected, and Recovered, respectively. These SEIR models and similar ones are widely used and quoted by the media, politicians, and representatives of institutions such as the CDC and WHO.

SEIR models typically incorporate relationships such as the following.

1. The rate of increase in Infected persons is proportional to the number of Exposed persons, less the decline in the number of Infected persons, due to recovery or death.

2. The rate of increase in Exposed persons is proportional to the product of the number of Susceptible persons and the number of Infected persons divided by the current population size, less the decline in Exposed persons who become Infected.

3. The rate of decrease in Susceptible persons is the negative of the rate of increase of Exposed persons.

4. The rate of increase in Recovered persons is proportional to the number of Infected persons.

These kinds of relationships imply that the rate at which a disease spreads can be reduced by:

1. Reducing the likelihood that a Susceptible person meets an Infected person.

2. Reducing the likelihood that transmission occurs if a Susceptible person meets an Infected person.

3. Reducing the number of Susceptible people.

4. Reducing the number of Infected people.

For example, lockdowns and social distancing work by reducing the likelihood that a Susceptible person will meet an Infected person, and wearing masks works by reducing the likelihood that transmission occurs if a Susceptible person meets an Infected person.

In these SEIR models, the number of Susceptible people is reduced to the extent that they become exposed and either infected or prove to be immune.

What is left out of all these models is allowance for the fact that Recovered persons can become Susceptible persons if their immunity lapses. If this happens before the disease runs its course, the rate of increase in Infected persons is increased and the pandemic worsens compared to if there is long-term immunity.

Here are two extreme examples that illustrate the impact of immunity.

Case 1: Immunity lasts forever.

Since a Recovered person cannot become a Susceptible person, the number of Susceptible persons is lower than it might otherwise be. Other things equal, this reduces the rate of increase in Exposed persons from what it would otherwise be, which reduces the rate of increase in Infected persons from what it would otherwise be. The disease runs its course with minimum loss of life and dies out over a reasonable time.

Case 2: Immunity lasts one day.

Since a Recovered person becomes a Susceptible person almost immediately, the number of Susceptible people never declines much (unless everyone gets the disease at once and recovers at once). Other things equal, this increases the rate of increase of Exposed persons from what it might otherwise be, which raises the rate of increase of Infected persons from what it would otherwise be. The disease may never die out and the loss of life is maximized.

Cases 1 and 2 suggest that policies that do not reflect the nature of immunity are unlikely to be efficient. COVID-19 models that fail to address immunity should not be trusted to provide good guidance to decision makers who set policy – but that is exactly what is happening.

For the techies, an example of an SEIR model is:

Analysis of Kenosha shooting

 Here is a link to an analysis of the Kenosha shooting.

Another lesson on the foolishness of rushing to judgment.

Two new papers show that climate models' warming forecasts are biased upward substantially

Ross McKitrick summarizes a new paper that confirms that climate models overstate atmospheric warming.

Yes Virginia, pretty much everything Al Gore and his ilk have told you is false.

Here is the summary.  Don't miss the concluding remarks at the end.

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Two new peer-reviewed papers from independent teams confirm that climate models overstate atmospheric warming and the problem has gotten worse over time, not better.

The papers are Mitchell et al. (2020) “The vertical profile of recent tropical temperature trends: Persistent model biases in the context of internal variability” Environmental Research Letters, and McKitrick and Christy (2020) “Pervasive warming bias in CMIP6 tropospheric layers” Earth and Space Science. John and I didn’t know about the Mitchell team’s work until after their paper came out, and they likewise didn’t know about ours.

Mitchell et al. look at the surface, troposphere and stratosphere over the tropics (20N to 20S). John and I look at the tropical and global lower- and mid- troposphere. Both papers test large samples of the latest generation (“Coupled Model Intercomparison Project version 6” or CMIP6) climate models, i.e. the ones being used for the next IPCC report, and compare model outputs to post-1979 observations. John and I were able to examine 38 models while Mitchell et al. looked at 48 models. The sheer number makes one wonder why so many are needed, if the science is settled. Both papers looked at “hindcasts,” which are reconstructions of recent historical temperatures in response to observed greenhouse gas emissions and other changes (e.g. aerosols and solar forcing). Across the two papers it emerges that the models overshoot historical warming from the near-surface through the upper troposphere, in the tropics and globally.

Mitchell et al. 2020

Mitchell et al. had, in an earlier study, examined whether the problem is that the models amplify surface warming too much as you go up in altitude, or whether they get the vertical amplification right but start with too much surface warming. The short answer is both.

In this Figure the box/whiskers are model-predicted warming trends in the tropics (20S to 20N) (horizontal axis) versus altitude (vertical axis). Where the trend magnitudes cross the zero line is about where the stratosphere begins. Red= models that internally simulate both ocean and atmosphere. Blue: models that take observed sea surface warming as given and only simulate the air temperature trends. Black lines: observed trends. The blue boxes are still high compared to the observations, especially in the 100-200hPa level (upper-mid troposphere).

Overall their findings are:

“we find considerable warming biases in the CMIP6 modeled trends, and we show that these biases are linked to biases in surface temperature (these models simulate an unrealistically large global warming).”

“we note here for the record that from 1998 to 2014, the CMIP5 models warm, on average 4 to 5 times faster than the observations, and in one model the warming is 10 times larger than the observations.”

“Throughout the depth of the troposphere, not a single model realization overlaps all the observational estimates. However, there is some overlap between the RICH observations and the lowermost modelled trend, which corresponds to the NorCPM1 model.”

“Focusing on the CMIP6 models, we have confirmed the original findings of Mitchell et al. (2013): first, the modeled tropospheric trends are biased warm throughout the troposphere (and notably in the upper troposphere, around 200 hPa) and, second, that these biases can be linked to biases in surface warming. As such, we see no improvement between the CMIP5 and the CMIP6 models.” (Mitchell et al. 2020)

A special prize goes to the Canadian model! “We draw attention to the CanESM5 model: it simulates the greatest warming in the troposphere, roughly 7 times larger than the observed trends.” The Canadian government relies on the CanESM models “to provide science-based quantitative information to inform climate change adaptation and mitigation in Canada and internationally.” I would be very surprised if the modelers at UVic ever put warning labels on their briefings to policy makers. The sticker should read: “WARNING! This model predicts atmospheric warming roughly 7 times larger than observed trends. Use of this model for anything other than entertainment purposes is not recommended.”

Although the above diagram looks encouraging in the stratosphere, Mitchell et al. found the models get it wrong too. They predict too little cooling before 1998 and too much after, and the effects cancel in a linear trend. The vertical “fingerprint” of GHG in models is warming in the troposphere and cooling in the stratosphere. Models predict steady stratospheric cooling should have continued after late 1990s but observations show no such cooling this century. The authors suggest the problem is models are not handling ozone depletion effects correctly.

The above diagram focuses on the 1998-2014 span. Compare the red box/whiskers to the black lines. The red lines are climate model outputs after feeding in observed GHG and other forcings over this interval. The predicted trends don’t match the observed trend profile (black line) – there’s basically no overlap at all. They warm too much in the troposphere and cool too much in the stratosphere. Forcing models to use prescribed sea surface temperatures (blue), which in effect hands the “right” answer to the model for most of the surface area, mitigates the problem in the troposphere but not the stratosphere.

McKitrick and Christy 2020

John Christy and I had earlier compared models to observations in the tropical mid-troposphere, finding evidence of a warming bias in all models. This is one of several papers I’ve done on tropical tropospheric warm biases. The IPCC cites my work (and others’) and accepts the findings. Our new paper shows that, rather than the problem being diminished in the newest models, it is getting worse. The bias is observable in the lower- and mid-troposphere in the tropics but also globally.

We examined the first 38 models in the CMIP6 ensemble. Like Mitchell et al. we used the first archived run from each model. Here are the 1979-2014 warming trend coefficients (vertical axis, degrees per decade) and 95% error bars comparing models (red) to observations (blue). LT=lower troposphere, MT=mid-troposphere. Every model overshoots the observed trend (horizontal dashed blue line) in every sample.

Most of the differences are significant at <5%, and the model mean (thick red) versus observed mean difference is very significant, meaning it’s not just noise or randomness. The models as a group warm too much throughout the global atmosphere, even over an interval where modelers can observe both forcings and temperatures.

We used 1979-2014 (as did Mitchell et al. ) because that’s the maximum interval for which all models were run with historically-observed forcings and all observation systems are available. Our results would be the same if we use 1979-2018, which includes scenario forcings in final years. (Mitchell et al. report the same thing.)

John and I found that models with higher Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (>3.4K) warm faster (not surprisingly), but even the low-ECS group (<3.4K) exhibits warming bias. In the low group the mean ECS is 2.7K, the combined LT/MT model warming trend average is 0.21K/decade and the observed counterpart is 0.15K/decade. This figure (green circle added; see below) shows a more detailed comparison.

The horizontal axis shows the model warming trend and the vertical axis shows the corresponding model ECS. The red squares are in the high ECS group and the blue circles are in the low ECS group. Filled shapes are from the LT layer and open shapes are from the MT layer. The crosses indicate the means of the four groups and the lines connect LT (solid) and MT (dashed) layers. The arrows point to the mean observed MT (open arrow, 0.09C/decade) and LT (closed arrow, 0.15 C/decade) trends.

While the models in the blue cluster (low ECS) do a better job, they still have warming rates in excess of observations. If we were to picture a third cluster of models with mean global tropospheric warming rates overlapping observations it would have to be positioned roughly in the area I’ve outlined in green. The associated ECS would be between 1.0 and 2.0K.

Concluding remarks

I get it that modeling the climate is incredibly difficult, and no one faults the scientific community for finding it a tough problem to solve. But we are all living with the consequences of climate modelers stubbornly using generation after generation of models that exhibit too much surface and tropospheric warming, in addition to running grossly exaggerated forcing scenarios (e.g. RCP8.5). Back in 2005 in the first report of the then-new US Climate Change Science Program, Karl et al. pointed to the exaggerated warming in the tropical troposphere as a “potentially serious inconsistency.” But rather than fixing it since then, modelers have made it worse. Mitchell et al. note that in addition to the wrong warming trends themselves, the biases have broader implications because “atmospheric circulation trends depend on latitudinal temperature gradients.” In other words when the models get the tropical troposphere wrong, it drives potential errors in many other features of the model atmosphere. Even if the original problem was confined to excess warming in the tropical mid-troposphere, it has now expanded into a more pervasive warm bias throughout the global troposphere.

If the discrepancies in the troposphere were evenly split across models between excess warming and cooling we could chalk it up to noise and uncertainty. But that is not the case: it’s all excess warming. CMIP5 models warmed too much over the sea surface and too much in the tropical troposphere. Now the CMIP6 models warm too much throughout the global lower- and mid-troposphere. That’s bias, not uncertainty, and until the modeling community finds a way to fix it, the economics and policy making communities are justified in assuming future warming projections are overstated, potentially by a great deal depending on the model.

A Rogue Justice Department Is Likely Under Biden-Harris

 Here is Jonathan Turley on what the Justice Department might look like under Biden-Harris.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University.

There is a substantial danger of the Justice Department going rogue, as it was under the Obama administration.  This follows from the statements and actions taken by the principal actors, many of the former being lies that expose the untrustworthy nature of the actors.

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National conventions have long served as what magicians call the turn. As explained in the movie “The Prestige,” every magic trick has three stages. First comes the pledge, when the magician “shows you something ordinary.” Then comes the turn, when he “makes it do something extraordinary” like vanish. Finally, he has “to bring it back in the hardest part” known as the prestige.

In American politics, candidates make the pledge to voters on the extremes of their parties during primaries. Then comes the turn, when the more extreme nominee disappears at the convention. The turn was not as tough for Joe Biden, who was fairly moderate as a senator, as it was for Kamala Harris, who was ranked by GovTrack as the most liberal senator to the left of even Bernie Sanders.

Nonetheless, in perhaps the neatest trick of all, the Washington Post’s David Byler recently described Harris as a “small ‘c’ conservative.” The concern for some of us is that the prestige, when earlier objects might reappear after the election, particularly regarding the Justice Department and the legal system. There is reason to worry about what might be revealed, post-election.

One of the Democratic convention speakers was former deputy attorney general Sally Yates, widely viewed as the leading candidate for attorney general in a Biden administration. She was presented as the personification of a new Justice Department’s commitment to the rule of law. Yates declared: “I was fired for refusing to defend President Trump’s shameful and unlawful Muslim travel ban.” The problem is, she wasn’t. She was fired for telling an entire department not to defend a travel ban that ultimately was upheld as lawful.

I was highly critical of the travel ban, particularly in the failure to exempt lawful residents. However, I also said Trump’s underlying authority likely would be found constitutional. Despite revisions tweaking its scope and affected countries, opponents insisted it remained unlawful and discriminatory. They continued to litigate on those same grounds all the way to the Supreme Court, where they lost two years ago.

The Supreme Court ruled in Donald Trump versus Hawaii that the president had the authority to suspend entry of noncitizens into the country based on nationality and had a “sufficient national security justification” for his order. It also held that, despite most of the banned countries being Muslim-majority, the ban “does not support an inference of religious hostility.”

That is why Yates deserved to be fired. Yates issued her order shortly after learning of the travel ban and despite being told by Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel it was a lawful order. She never actually said it was unlawful, only that she was not sure and was not convinced it was “wise or just.” Rather than working to address clear errors in the original ban, she issued her categorical order as she prepared to leave the department in a matter of days. Yates maintained afterward that she believed the ban might still be discriminatory, even with revisions. Four years later, Trump is still banning travel from many of these same countries under the same underlying authority.

Yates was due to retire from Justice within days when she engineered her own firing. It made her an instant heroine and allowed her to denounce Trump at this week’s convention for “trampl[ing] the rule of law, trying to weaponize our Justice Department.” But that’s precisely what she did when she ordered an entire department not to assist the recently elected president – a move which, at the time, even Trump critics described as troubling. She could have resigned but chose to “go rogue,” months before (as Yates recently declared) then-FBI director James Comey went rogue in the Michael Flynn matter. (Comey actually may have learned a lesson from Yates: A good firing can be better than completing a term in office.)

The person who likely would have the greatest influence in recommending the next attorney general is Harris. The Biden campaign lauds Harris as a former prosecutor and California attorney general. However, Harris has a disturbing view of the separation of law and politics. While Trump has been legitimately criticized for demanding prosecutions and improperly commenting on pending cases, Harris has long been accused of the same disregard for legal process.

She campaigned on a pledge to prosecute Trump upon taking office, inspiring “lock him up!” chants at rallies. She publicly called Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson a “murderer” after he was cleared of that charge by state and federal investigators, including a lengthy investigation by the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder. This followed the recantation of eyewitness accounts and the disproving of claims that Michael Brown was shot with his hands up.

Harris has a history of such sentencings before verdicts. In Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, she declared him guilty of rape without hearing from witnesses — then called for his impeachment after his confirmation as a Supreme Court justice. She also campaigned on a promise to vote to remove Trump from office, roughly seven months before his impeachment by the House, and nine months before she sat in judgment in the Senate trial, after swearing to be an unbiased juror.

Harris has shown a willingness to “weaponize” legal issues, including reversing her positions when polls shifted. During the campaign, Harris was confronted with clips where she once laughed about the controversy over her jailing of parents for the truancy of their schoolchildren and mocking calls to “build more schools, less jails!” She was equally strong on jailing nonviolent offenders. With those positions now anathema to Democrats, Harris has assumed diametrically opposite positions with indignant passion.

This month, however, came the magic turn for the Biden campaign. Asked if he could foresee his administration prosecuting Trump, Biden correctly said, “The Justice Department is not the president’s private law firm. The attorney general is not the president’s private lawyer. I will not interfere with the Justice Department’s judgment.” That is the correct answer and, to his credit, Biden has tended to emphasize legal process over politics.

The concern, however, is whether his administration’s Justice Department would be shaped by Harris or led by Yates. The thing about magic and politics is that both require the audience’s cooperation. With Yates’ self-promoting sleight of hand, few in the media wanted to cry out that she palmed the facts. As one character in “The Prestige” explained, “You’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because, of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.”

The truth about mass public shootings in the US vs. Elsewhere

 Here is a link to a paper by John Lott, "Comparing the Global Rate of Mass Public Shootings to the U.S.'s Rate and Comparing Changes Over Time".

The paper shows that what you have heard from the media, most politicians, and various anti-gun groups are mostly lies.

Here are examples of those lies.

“I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings: This just doesn’t happen in other countries.” –Obama, news conference at COP21 climate conference in Paris, Dec. 1, 2015.

“The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world.” –President Obama, interview that aired on CBS Evening News, Dec. 2, 2015

“You don’t see murder on this kind of scale, with this kind of frequency, in any other advanced nation on Earth.” – President Obama, speech at U.S. Conference of Mayors, June 19, 2015

“This doesn’t happen anywhere else on the planet.” -- California’s Governor-elect Gavin Newson, referring to 12 people killed at the Borderline Bar and Grill, Thousand Oaks, California, November 8, 2018

“We stand alone in the world in the number of mass shootings," Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), November 5, 2018

Here is the paper's Executive Summary.

The U.S. is well below the world average in terms of the number of mass public shootings, and the global increase over time has been much bigger than for the United States.

Over the 20 years from 1998 to 2017, our list contains 2,772 attacks and at least 5,764 shooters outside the United States and 62 attacks and 66 shooters within our country. By our count, the US makes up less than 1.13% of the mass public shooters, 1.77% of their murders, and 2.19% of their attacks. All these are much less than the US’s 4.6% share of the world population. Attacks in the US are not only less frequent than other countries, they are also much less deadly on average.

Out of the 101 countries where we have identified mass public shootings occurring, the United States ranks 66th in the per capita frequency of these attacks and 56th in the murder rate.

Not only have these attacks been much more common outside the US, the US’s share of these attacks has declined over time. There has been a much bigger increase over time in the number of mass shootings in the rest of the world compared to the US.

Academics are brainwashing our children

 Here is Walter Williams on Academic Brainwashing.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

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Parents, legislators, taxpayers and others footing the bill for college education might be interested in just what is in store for the upcoming academic year. Since many college classes will be online, there is a chance to witness professors indoctrinating their students in real-time. So, there’s a chance that some college faculty might change their behavior. To see recent examples of campus nonsense and indoctrination, visit the Campus Reform and College Fix websites.

George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley warned congressional lawmakers that antifa is “winning” and that much of academia, whether wittingly or unwittingly, is complicit in its success.” In his testimony before Congress Turley said: “To Antifa, people like me are the personification of the classical liberal view of free speech that perpetuates a system of oppression and abuse. I wish I could say that my view remains strongly implanted in our higher educational institutions. However, you are more likely to find public supporters for restricting free speech than you are to find defenders of free speech principles on many campuses.”

The leftist bias at our colleges and universities has many harmful effects. A University of California, Davis, mathematics professor faced considerable backlash over her opposition to the requirement for “diversity statements” from potential faculty. Those seeking employment at the University of California, San Diego, are required to admit that “barriers” prevent women and minorities from full participation in campus life. At American University, a history professor wrote a book calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment. A Rutgers University professor said, “Watching the Iowa Caucus is a sickening display of the over-representation of whiteness.” A Williams College professor has advocated for the inclusion of social justice in math textbooks. Students at Wayne State University are no longer required to take a single math course to graduate; however, they may soon be required to take a diversity course.

Maybe some students will be forced into sharing the vision of Professor Laurie Rubel, a math education professor at Brooklyn College. She says the idea of cultural neutrality in math is a “myth,” and that asking whether 2 plus 2 equals 4 “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy.” She tweeted, “Y’all must know that the idea that math is objective or neutral IS A MYTH.” Math professors and academics at other universities, including Harvard and the University of Illinois, discussed the “Eurocentric” roots of American mathematics. As for me, I would like to see the proof, in any culture, that 2 + 2 is something other than 4.

Rutgers University’s English department chairwoman, Rebecca Walkowitz, announced changes to the Department’s graduate writing program emphasizing “social justice” and “critical grammar.” Leonydus Johnson, a speech-language pathologist and libertarian activist, says Walkowitz’s changes make the assumption that minorities cannot understand traditional and grammatically correct English speech and writing, which is “insulting, patronizing, and in itself, extremely racist.”

Then there is the nonsense taught on college campuses about white privilege. The idea of white privilege doesn’t explain why several historically marginalized groups outperform whites today. For example, Japanese Americans suffered under the Alien Land Law of 1913 and other racist, exclusionary laws legally preventing them from owning land and property in more than a dozen American states until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. During World War II, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned. However, by 1959, the income disparity between Japanese Americans and white Americans had almost disappeared. Today, Japanese Americans outperform white Americans by large margins in income statistics, education outcomes and test scores, and have much lower incarceration rates.

According to Rav Arora, writing for the New York Post, several black immigrant groups such as Nigerians, Trinidadians and Tobagonians, Barbadians and Ghanaians all “have a median household income well above the American average.” We are left with the question whether the people handing out “white privilege” made a mistake. The other alternative is that Japanese Americans, Nigerians, Barbadians, Ghanaians and Trinidadians and Tobagonians are really white Americans.

The bottom line is that more Americans need to pay attention to the miseducation of our youth and that miseducation is not limited to higher education.

Fact Checking Sen. Kamala Harris

 From FactCheck.org.

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As a former 2020 presidential candidate, Sen. Kamala Harris — now presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate — was on our fact-checking radar this election cycle. Here’s a rundown of the claims we addressed.

No ‘Middle-Class Tax Hike’

This claim made our list of the 2019 whoppers of the year: In a tweet, Harris cited preliminary IRS tax refund data to criticize the Republican tax law as “a middle-class tax hike.” But that’s not what the data showed.

A day after the Washington Post reported in February 2019 that the average tax refund check was down $170 for 2019 compared with 2018, based on preliminary IRS data, Harris used that figure, and added: “Let’s call the President’s tax cut what it is: a middle-class tax hike to line the pockets of already wealthy corporations and the 1%.”

But, as Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, told us: “Refunds are not the same as taxes that you owe. Refunds tell you nothing about whether a person’s tax liability has changed.” In fact, the vast majority of “middle-class” taxpayers were expected to get a tax cut in 2018 under the new law, he said.

Special Prosecutor Law Unnecessary

In a CNN town hall on Jan. 28, 2019, host Jake Tapper asked Harris about “criticism we’re hearing of you from the left” during her time as the state attorney general. He asked why as attorney general she opposed state “legislation that would have required your office to investigate fatal shootings involving police officers.”

Harris misleadingly claimed she “did not oppose” the 2015 bill. “I had a process when I was attorney general of not weighing in on bills and initiatives, because as attorney general, I had a responsibility for writing the title and summary,” she told Tapper. In fact, she said such a law would not be “good public policy.”

As we wrote, Harris at the time did not take an official position on the bill. But she made clear that “she does not support the idea of taking prosecutorial discretion away from locally elected district attorneys,” the Capitol Weekly wrote in a May 18, 2015, story, citing an interview she had with the San Francisco Chronicle in December 2014.

Capitol Weekly, May 18, 2015: [Harris] has said the current process of investigating civilian deaths by local law enforcement is effective enough. She also has said that the local district attorneys should have the authority to investigate officer-involved shootings, in part because they are elected by — and held accountable to — local constituents.

“I don’t think there’s an inherent conflict,” Harris said in an interview with The Chronicle back in December. “Where there are abuses, we have designed the system to address them.”

During that interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Harris said, “I don’t think it would be good public policy to take the discretion from elected district attorneys.”

Spinning Statewide Truancy Law

In a May 12, 2019, interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Harris acknowledged that a 2010 state truancy law she sponsored resulted in some parents being jailed. But she misleadingly claimed that jailing parents was an “unintended consequence” of the state law.

In fact, the law added Section 270.1 to the California Penal Code to allow prosecutors to fine and/or jail a parent “who has failed to reasonably supervise and encourage the pupil’s school attendance.” Under the law, which took effect in 2011, a parent could face up to a year in jail and $2,000 fine.

As the San Francisco District Attorney, Harris sponsored a state Senate bill — SB 1317 — that was introduced by state Sen. Mark Leno, who is also from San Francisco. The state bill was modeled on her truancy initiative in San Francisco. She was San Francisco District Attorney from 2004 to 2011.

When Tapper asked about parents being jailed under the law, Harris said: “What ended up happening is, by changing the education code, it also changed — it, by reference then, was in the penal code. And then that was an unintended consequence.”

The possibility of jailing parents was not an “unintended consequence,” and the bill did not just change the education code. It also created a new section to the California Penal Code, as we have already noted.

Harris must have been aware of the new penalties, because she referenced them after taking the oath of office as the California attorney general in January 2011. In her inaugural address, Harris said that she was “putting parents on notice” that they could face “the full force and consequences of the law” if their kids miss too many days of school.

Paychecks

In launching her presidential campaign in California in January 2019, Harris said that “paychecks aren’t keeping up” with the cost of living. But as we reported, Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed inflation-adjusted weekly earnings had gone up in the previous year and since President Donald Trump took office.

According to BLS, real (meaning, inflation-adjusted) average weekly earnings for rank-and-file production and nonsupervisory workers, at the time, had gone up 2.5% since Trump took office. Those earnings rose 4.7% during Barack Obama’s last four years as president.

The average real weekly earnings of all private-sector workers had increased by 2.4% during Trump’s tenure; they went up 3.9% in Obama’s last four years.

So, paychecks, on average, had been keeping up with rising inflation.

Military Pay

Back in March 2019, Harris was one of several Democrats who claimed Trump was “raiding money from [military] pensions” to fund construction of his promised border wall. But as we wrote, the basis for their claims — a news story — said the Pentagon could use “leftover” funds in those accounts due to lower-than-expected recruits and fewer early retirements.

An Associated Press story said the Army missed a recruiting goal by 6,500 enlistees, and there were fewer take-ups of an early retirement incentive. The Pentagon wanted to move $1 billion from those funds to provide some of the money for the wall under Trump’s national emergency declaration.

Todd Harrison, director for defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told us it was not true that what the Pentagon had proposed would cut military pay or pensions. “It’s leftover money,” Harrison said. “The Army is going to have leftover money in its personnel account because it didn’t meet its recruiting goals.”

As for the pension money, Harrison said the Defense Department sets aside money every year to contribute to pension accounts. But when there are fewer service members than expected, because the Army didn’t meet its goal, the department doesn’t need to contribute as much to pension funds. “It absolutely would not affect anyone’s current pension,” he said. “When money gets paid out of the pension fund, it’s set by a formula in law.” That money has to be paid.

Biden vs. Harris on Release of ‘Prisoners’

Biden and Harris butted heads several times during early Democratic primary debates. One such confrontation occurred during the second of two Democratic debates in July 2019 in Detroit when Biden attacked Harris’ past record in California, describing police department abuse that occurred under her watch that led to the release of 1,000 “prisoners.” Biden’s account — which Harris said was “simply not true” — was broadly accurate, though he got a few important details wrong.

Here’s how Biden related things during the debate:

Biden, July 31, 2019: Secondly, she also was in a situation where she had a police department when she was there that in fact was abusing people’s rights. And the fact was that she in fact was told by her own people that her own staff that she should do something about and disclose to defense attorneys like me that you in fact have been — the police officer did something that did not give you information [that would exculpate] your — your client. She didn’t do that. She never did it. And so what happened.

Along came a federal judge and said enough, enough. And he freed 1,000 of these people. If you doubt me, Google 1,000 prisoners freed, Kamala Harris.

As we wrote in our coverage of the debate, Biden was referring to events when Harris was district attorney of San Francisco. In June 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that in 2005, against the advice of her staff, Harris did not institute a so-called “Brady policy” that would have required prosecutors to inform defendants of any past misconduct by law enforcement. In 2010, a crime lab tech was found to be stealing drug evidence from the lab, which led to a scandal in which 1,000 drug cases were dismissed.

A Superior Court judge reprimanded Harris, saying in a court order that the “District Attorney failed to disclose information that clearly should have been disclosed.” After the scandal, Harris did institute a Brady policy.

Biden’s version of events mostly hewed to what happened. But he erred in saying Harris never implemented a Brady policy and when referencing 1,000 “prisoners” being freed, when that was the number of cases that were dropped.

Workers with Multiple Jobs

In a June 2019 Democratic debate, Harris, pushing back against Trump’s claims that the economy was doing great, said, “Well yeah, people in America are working — they’re working two and three jobs.”

But according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of American workers who held multiple jobs at the time (5%) was virtually unchanged from the percentage (4.9%) when Trump was inaugurated in January 2017.

As of February 2020 — prior to the declaration of the coronavirus pandemic in March — 5.1% of employed individuals held multiple jobs.

Wrong on Autoworker Jobs

In an August 2019 CNN interview, Harris wrongly claimed that “as many as 300,000 autoworkers may be out of a job before the end of the year.” That was a high-end estimate for total job losses — not solely among autoworkers — due to the potential impact of the Trump administration’s trade policies, including actions not yet taken.

Harris was referring to a study by the Center for Automotive Research on the potential impact of Trump’s automotive trade policies. But the CAR study said as many as 366,900 total jobs “economy-wide” would be lost in its “worst-case scenario.”

Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor & economics at CAR, told us in an email: “300,000 auto workers out of a job before the end of the year is NOT what CAR is projecting,” confirming that the figure was an estimate for “job loss across the economy” from the impact of several proposed and implemented trade policies on the auto industry.

Pay Gap

In both the November and July 2019 debates, Harris wrongly suggested that figures representing the pay gap between full-time, year-round male and female workers were for men and women doing “equal work.”

“Since 1963, when we passed the Equal Pay Act, we have been talking about the fact women are not paid equally for equal work. Fast forward to the year of our lord 2019, and women are paid 80 cents on the dollar, black women 61 cents, Native American woman 58 cents, Latinas 53 cents,” Harris said in round two of the July debates.

Harris appeared to be citing figures the National Partnership for Women & Families published in May 2019. But the statistics are not representative of men and women doing the same work.

“Nationally, the median annual pay for a woman who holds a full-time, year-round job is $45,097 while the median annual pay for a man who holds a full-time, year-round job is $55,291,” the NPWF fact sheet says.

And for women of color, the comparison wasn’t to all men, but to non-Hispanic white males working full-time, year-round.

An April 2019 report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research analyzed the gap in median weekly earnings for male and female full-time workers doing the same job. It concluded that “[w]omen’s median earnings are lower than men’s in nearly all occupations,” but the gaps varied widely depending on the occupation.

False Amazon/Oxygen Claim

After news of a significant increase in the number of wildfires in the Amazon rainforest over the previous year, Harris repeated a popular, but false, factoid. “The Amazon creates over 20% of the world’s oxygen,” she said in an August 2019 tweet.

Scientists estimate the percentage is closer to 6 to 9%, and the Amazon ultimately consumes nearly all of that oxygen itself.

Harris was hardly alone in using this talking point, which we found had been spread by journalists, politicians and others.

Gordon Bonan, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, told us he’s been hearing the 20% factoid for at least a decade. It’s so pervasive, he’s even overheard it being said to schoolkids on tours at his workplace.

“People want to talk about the impact of deforestation,” he said. “Somehow they’ve latched on to this idea that forests create oxygen. That’s not what deforestation is doing.”

The Amazon isn’t critical because it makes oxygen for humans to breathe — that was largely done by phytoplankton in the sea over millions of years. Instead, it’s because of the area’s rich biodiversity, its vast stores of carbon and the way the forest influences the local and global climate.

Corporate Tax Cut Exaggeration

In her campaign announcement in Oakland last year, Harris exaggerated when she claimed that the Trump administration had given “a trillion dollars to the biggest corporations in this country,” a reference to the 10-year impact of the corporate tax rate reduction in the 2017 tax law. She didn’t account for tax increases that were part of that law.

According to a 2017 analysis by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provided a tax reduction over 10 years of a net $653.8 billion for businesses.

As we wrote at the time, Harris’ campaign confirmed to us that she was referring only to the law’s reduction of the top corporate tax rate, from 35% to 21%, which JCT estimates will reduce corporate taxes by $1.35 trillion over a decade. But other provisions in the law that raised business taxes, such as changes in allowable deductions for net operating losses and interest, caused the net benefit for corporations to be hundreds of billions lower than that.

Military Operations in South Korea

In the November Democratic presidential primary debate, Harris accused President Trump of “shutting down the [military] operations with South Korea for the last year and a half.” In fact, those operations were scaled back significantly, but not eliminated.

It’s true that on June 12, 2018, Trump said he would stop “provocative” military exercises with South Korea. But in November 2018, about 500 U.S. and South Korean Marines took part in a joint drill. And in July 2019, the two countries said regular springtime drills would continue.

The new drills are reported to be mainly “computer simulated” training, but Harris was wrong to say that operations had shut down entirely.

Michael Brown’s Death

On Aug. 9, 2019, the fifth anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man, Harris tweeted: “Michael Brown’s murder forever changed Ferguson and America. His tragic death sparked a desperately needed conversation and a nationwide movement.”

But the Department of Justice under then-President Obama found that Brown was shot and killed by a white police officer in “self-defense,” not murdered.

The shots officer Darren Wilson fired “were in self-defense and thus were not objectively unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment,” which prohibits unreasonable seizures and use of force, the 86-page Justice Department report said. It concluded that Wilson’s “actions do not constitute prosecutable violations under the applicable federal criminal civil rights statute, 18 U.S.C. § 242, which prohibits uses of deadly force that are ‘objectively unreasonable,’ as defined by the United States Supreme Court.”

Thomas Sowell exposes how politicians and the teachers unions abuse Black and Hispanic children

 Here is a link to a video interview of Thomas Sowell discussing Charter Schools and Their Enemies.

TS is on target.

Those opposed to Charter Schools are out for themselves, not our children.

Walter Williams Suffers No Fools

 Here is a link to a video interview of Walter Williams.

WW is on target.  Watch it and learn something.

Walter Williams on our declining freedom - the enemy is us

 Here is a link to Walter Williams' discussion on Life, Liberty, and Levin.

WW is on target.  See if you spot yourself among the enemy troops.

The Enemies of Freedom

 Here is Sergiu Klainerman at quillette.com.

Sergiu Klainerman is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton.

SK is on target.  If we don't stand up for our freedoms, they will succumb to the woke mob.

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According to a 2019 Cato Institute study, 75 percent of immigrants who are American citizens are very proud to be American compared to only 69 percent of native-born Americans. Based on my own experience, I expect the discrepancy to be much greater if you compare the sentiments of all immigrants to those of American-born elites, especially the young.

I escaped communist Romania in 1975 and came to the US to pursue my dream—attracted to the United States, as millions of other immigrants have been, by its reputation as a country that values freedom and rewards hard work and talent. I came with nothing but a strong desire to become a research mathematician, yet have been able to succeed far beyond my expectations. This is the result partly of my own efforts and whatever talent I may have, but a larger part of the credit is due to the sheer good fortune of being able to pursue my career in the US within an academic system which has been, at least until today, the freest, most competitive, and fairest in the world. By “fair” I mean the remarkable ability of this system to reward talent and hard work, with absolutely no regard for ethnicity, religion, race, sex, age, or any other considerations.

All this, however, is now in question. American colleges and universities, as well as many other institutions, are under attack by an ideology that I cannot but describe as insidious. This ideology is built on a combination of “critical theory” (an offspring of Marxism); a weird type of moral-cultural relativism that generates its own opposite, namely, fierce moralistic dogmatism; deconstructionism; and intersectionality. The net result of this stew is to view people as irredeemably divided by race, sex, sexual preferences, etc. into grievance groups, all suffering under various forms of oppression. Having evolved from this noxious mixture of implausible but influential academic theories, the ideology has succeeded in taking over many departments in the humanities and social sciences and is now making inroads into the sciences. By an extraordinary stealth quality, it has continued to move, largely undetected until now, into society at large, producing the “Woke” phenomenon.

In the worldview of the Woke, America has never been that paragon of freedom, justice, and opportunities for all that attracted us immigrants, but rather a terribly unjust, racist, and corrupt society. Its foundation does not begin with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that we proud and patriotic immigrants venerate, but rather, as the New York Times tells us in its 1619 Project, with the date when the first slaves were brought to these shores. American history is no longer taught dialectically, as a constant struggle for improvements made possible by the magnificent founding principles and institutions of the republic, but, rather, statically as a mindless sequence of acts of oppression against various groups. In fact, the founding documents are themselves often deemed to be racist and sexist, as are the historic figures who wrote them. Woke ideology is thus destroying the very foundations on which the American democratic republic was built. By manipulating historical data and misinterpreting current events, it is sowing resentment and self-doubt. Worst of all, it divides us into groups (“oppressors” and “oppressed”) who are at war with each other, thus grievously undermining the national motto “e pluribus unum” and the very concept of American citizenship based on a shared commitment to universal values.

I see this confusion at work in my own university, Princeton. Although there are faculty members and students who resolutely resist Woke ideology, the leaders of our university have been confronted with “demands” for quotas, a core distribution requirement focused on the history and legacy of racism in the country and on the campus, and even a faculty committee to “investigat[e] and discipline racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty.” All this, despite the absence of any visible institutional form of racial discrimination on campus (though there are persistent claims of barely concealed discrimination against “overrepresented minorities,” especially Asian Americans) and with no regard for the potentially destructive effect of such measures. Princeton, as well as most similar US academic institutions, are constantly on the defensive, making great efforts to correct a racism that they themselves know does not exist, as a way of covering themselves against ever expanding accusations of racism. Paradoxically, these institutions are thus fighting the ghost of racism in their middle by abetting the racialist agenda of their accusers.

Nothing I say here is new, and merely lamenting what is going on is no longer appropriate to the gravity of the situation. We are facing something we did not seek and by no means welcome, namely, the moral equivalent of war. This has been clear to the aggressors in the struggle from the beginning. They embraced it in a revolutionary spirit and as a quest for power. Those of us who want nothing more than to preserve traditional ideals of academic freedom, integrity, and civility have been reluctant—and therefore slow—to acknowledge it. Here is a call to action. It should sound familiar except maybe to those who have recently defaced a certain statue in London’s Parliament Square.

Even though large tracts of our cultural landscape and many old and famous American institutions have fallen or may fall into the grip of this hostile ideology and all the odious apparatus of cancel culture rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in our universities, we shall fight in our schools, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the old media as well as in the social media, we shall defend our culture, reforming what is in need of reform, but preserving our core principles and institutions, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight in the world of ideas, we shall fight in the low-lands of politics and Hollywood, we shall fight in our religious institutions; we shall never surrender.

We shall have to fight even more fiercely than the British in the last World War because, while they could hope that America would come to their aid, we have no such hope of reinforcements being sent from abroad. Our weapons in this war of ideas are simply the belief in the old ideals of the American revolution: equality under the law, our freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, the power of reason and reasoned debate, the scientific method. We academics and educators are facing an uphill battle to reverse the decay of our most badly compromised institutions, schools and universities. We should utterly reject the centerpiece of our adversary’s ideology—the notion that our society is irredeemably racist. This accusation is no longer defined “in terms of recognizable discriminatory actions (which could be identified, measured, and cured) but rather as any manifestation of disparate or unequal outcomes. Differences of any kind—whether in income, education, or life expectancy—are all defined as manifestations of systemic racial animus.”

Woke ideologues are using this notion of structural racism and the justifiable American sense of guilt for the past treatment of our African American citizens as a club to demolish our institutions. By contrast, our banner should be the simple and powerful anti-racist and anti-racialist message of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Judge all humans not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

We should reject any attempts from the Right or the Left to politicize our fight, even as we should attempt to form a broad coalition of conservatives, traditional liberals, and civil libertarian progressives supported by our immigrant citizens. Furthermore, we must strive to have members of our most disadvantaged minority groups join us by unmasking the fake promises of the Woke, which may seem well intended but are ultimately destructive to the very groups they claim to champion. We must insist on education as the key to success, and stress that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “promissory note” will continue to be honored within the framework of our constitutional system.

Above all, though, we have to stop being frightened, intimidated, and afraid to fight back. No matter how dangerous the present cancel culture is, it offers no match to the reign of terror of Nazism or of Soviet and Chinese Communism. If truly courageous dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov could oppose the Soviet system, it behooves every one of us to take on this weaker but insidious form of oppression—before it becomes still worse. As a first step we can start by defending each other based on the principle that a woke attack on one is an attack on all.

Walter Williams tells it like it is about Marx and Marxism

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.  Here is his column at townhall.com.

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Most people who call themselves Marxists know very little of Karl Marx's life and have never read his three-volume "Das Kapital." Volume I was published in 1867, the only volume published before Marx's death in 1883. Volumes II and III were later edited and published in his name by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. Most people who call themselves Marxists have only read his 1848 pamphlet "The Communist Manifesto," which was written with Engels.

Marx is a hero to many labor union leaders and civil rights organizations, including leftist groups like Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and some Democratic Party leaders. It is easy to be a Marxist if you know little of his life. Marx's predictions about capitalism and the "withering away of the state" turned out to be grossly wrong. What most people do not know is that Marx was a racist and an anti-Semite.

When the U.S. annexed California after the Mexican-American War, Marx wrote: "Without violence nothing is ever accomplished in history." Then he asked, "Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?" Friedrich Engels added: "In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States." Many of Marx's racist ideas were reported in "Karl Marx, Racist," a book written by Nathaniel Weyl, a former member of the U.S. Communist Party.

In a July 1862 letter to Engels, in reference to his socialist political competitor Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx wrote: "It is now completely clear to me that he, as is proved by his cranial formation and his hair, descends from the Negroes from Egypt, assuming that his mother or grandmother had not interbred with a nigger. Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic Negro substance must produce a peculiar product. The obtrusiveness of the fellow is also nigger-like."

In 1887, Paul Lafargue, who was Marx's son-in-law, was a candidate for a council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo. Engels claimed that Paul had "one eighth or one twelfth nigger blood." In an April 1887 letter to Paul's wife, Engels wrote, "Being in his quality as a nigger, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district."

Marx's anti-Semitic views were no secret. In 1844, he published an essay titled "On the Jewish Question." He wrote that the worldly religion of Jews was "huckstering" and that the Jews' god was "money." Marx's view of Jews was that they could only become an emancipated ethnicity or culture when they no longer exist. Just one step short of calling for genocide, Marx said, "The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way."

Marx's philosophical successors shared ugly thoughts on blacks and other minorities. Che Guevara, a hero of the left, was a horrific racist. In his 1952 memoir, "The Motorcycle Diaries," Guevara wrote, "The Negro is indolent and lazy and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent."

British socialist Beatrice Webb griped in The New Statesmen about declining birthrates among so-called higher races, which would lead to "a new social order" that would be created "by one or other of the colored races, the Negro, the Kaffir or the Chinese." The Soviets espoused the same "Jewish world conspiracy" as the Nazis. Joseph Stalin embarked upon a campaign that led to the deaths of Jewish intellectuals for their apparent lack of patriotism. By the way, the Soviet public was not told that Karl Marx was Jewish. Academics who preach Marxism to their classes fail to tell their students that his ideology has led to the slaughter of tens of millions of people. What's worse, they fail to even feign concern over this fact.

White liberals are useful idiots. BLM, Antifa, and other progressive groups use the plight of poor blacks to organize left-leaning, middle-class, college-educated, guilt-ridden suburbanite whites. These people who topple statues and destroy public and private property care about minorities as much as their racist predecessors. Their goal is the acquisition and concentration of power and Americans have fallen hook, line, and sinker for their phony virtue signaling.

The NY Attorney General’s Effort To Dissolve The NRA For Self-Dealing Is A Self-Indictment

 From Jonathan Turley.

JT is on target.

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Below is my column in the Hill newspaper on the effort of New York Attorney General Letitia James to forced the dissolution of the National Rifle Association (NRA). The decision of James to seek the clearly unwarranted dissolution of the nation’s largest gun rights organization is consistent with her past politicalization of office. The case itself is important and raises serious questions of excessive spending by officers of the NRA. While there are other organizations that have not received this level of attention over spending, the record of the NRA is worthy of scrutiny and possible injunctive relief. However, James undermined the credibility of the case by demanding dissolution to pander to Democratic voters. It is all too familiar to those of us who have criticized James in the past for her use of the office for political grandstanding.

Here is the column:

It is for the best that Ambrose Burnside is not alive, as New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed a complaint seeking, among other things, the dissolution of the National Rifle Association. For the hapless Burnside, it is one final indignity. Widely ridiculed as an unimaginative Union Army commander in the Civil War, Burnside has only two lasting legacies. First, his facial hair was so prominent that others would sport what would later be called sideburns. Second, he was the first president of the NRA in the 19th century. Now James wants to leave him with only his whiskers.

Her complaint alleges lavish spending by officers, most notably executive vice president Wayne LaPierre. The list includes hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on himself, his wife, family, and friends. It runs from petty to gross, such as gifts from Neiman Marcus, golf memberships, and private jets. When figures like former president Oliver North decided to side with NRA whistleblowers, they were forced out. The NRA has reportedly spent an obscene $100 million on legal fees and the related costs alone.

If there is any hope for the legacy of Burnside, it comes from James. While she claims the NRA has been smeared with self dealing by its leaders, the same complaint could be leveled against her record as attorney general. I previously criticized her for inserting politics into her state office. She ran on the pledge to prosecute Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for Donald Trump. James had not only used the prosecution of an unpopular individual for her own gain but sought to gut the New York constitutional protection against double jeopardy. The case was then dismissed.

James would later call the NRA a “terrorist organization,” a claim which is common among internet trolls, but this was the top New York prosecutor engaging in legal trolling. That is what makes the NRA complaint a tragic irony. If taking power to benefit yourself rather than your organization is the measure, the complaint is a self-indictment. James’ demand to dissolve the NRA in order to pander to voters undermines the case presented by her office. While dissolution is simply absurd, James shows us absurdity and popularity can often move hand in hand in New York politics.

Many organizations have suffered dubious spending by officers, ranging from political parties to nonprofits to universities. None were disbanded. Union and religious leaders are often accused of lavish spending on their travel or other job perks. Few have been prosecuted. The National Action Network of Al Sharpton paid him more than $1 million in compensation in 2018 and another $500,000 for rights to his life story. While it is based in New York, James has not tried to dissolve it or other organizations.

Other cases seeking dissolution undermine the case against the NRA. Five years ago, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman tried to dissolve the National Children Leukemia Foundation after finding that 1 percent of around $10 million in donations went to cancer victims, including almost no money spent on its “Make a Dream Come True” program. Its president turned out to be a felon who ran the organization out of his basement. A settlement was reached and the charity was voluntarily shut down.

The NRA is not run out of a basement, and it spends sums of money on its firearms lobbying and training programs. It is, by any measure, one of the most successful advocacy groups in our history. It has more than 5 million members and is the largest and most influential gun rights organization in the world. Whatever complaints can be raised over the spending habits of its officers, the NRA is undoubtedly a successful enterprise. Indeed, many lawmakers have denounced its influence in Washington, since low scores from the NRA can mean defeat for politicians who face close races.

James is not disregarding the implications of a Democratic official seeking to destroy one of the most powerful conservative groups in the country in an election year. By contrast, she seems to revel in that image. She knows liberals are thrilled by the idea of disbanding the NRA. She is now revered as a hero by those who view no problem in her past declaring the group a terrorist organization and now trying to dissolve the group as a fraudulent organization. It has been a political campaign in search of lawful rationale for years, however, the allegation is not as important as the target.

Those same political supporters, of course, would be justifiably outraged by any clear action of the administration to dissolve liberal organizations such as Planned Parenthood. Misconduct or crimes by its officers would not leave it as a criminal enterprise. Like the NRA, Planned Parenthood is one of the most effective groups defending a constitutional right.

Trying to dissolve an organization engaged in political speech should not occur absent overwhelming proof that it is a criminal enterprise, which is why this has never happened with a group like the NRA. James may point to the voluntary dissolution of the Donald Trump Foundation, a small and mostly inactive nonprofit, or the dissolution of Ku Klux Klan groups in the 1940s, but there is little comparison with the NRA in these cases.

Many liberals celebrating the lawsuit against the NRA condemned Trump for trying to declare the radical movement antifa a terrorist organization. They were as right then as they are wrong now. I recently testified for the Senate to oppose such a designation for antifa. While I have been a vocal critic of antifa and its tactics, it is a dangerous power for the government to openly wield against organizations engaged in political speech.

Burnside will always have facial hair as his lasting legacy. James is turning hers into something much more menacing. It is not that she will succeed in such raw political demands that is the concern. It is that so many want her to succeed in dissolving a real advocacy group in this country.

Coleman Hughs puts Race and Black Lives Matter in perspective

 Here is a link to a video of an interview of Coleman Hughs.

Well worth watching.

CH is on target.

The Downfall of America

 Here is a link to a video interview of Victor Davis Hanson.

VDH provides a variety of insights that should alarm you about current trends in the US.

A lesson on inequality

 Here is a link to a video of an interview with Thomas Sowell on his book "Discrimination and Disparity".

TS is on target - you might learn something.

The dishonest energy debate

 Here is Michael Shellenberger exposing the dishonesty in the energy debate and how the rich and political favorites benefit at your expense.

Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and president of Environmental Progress, an independent research and policy organization.

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Today, shortly after giving expert testimony to Congress about energy policy, I had the startling experience of being smeared by sitting members of the United States House of Representatives.

The context was a special House Committee hearing to evaluate a Democratic proposal similar to the one proposed by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, which would spend $2 trillion over four years on renewables and other climate programs.

Congressional interest in my testimony stems in part from the fact that I advocated for a Democratic energy proposal very similar to Biden’s between 2002 and 2009. Back then, the Obama administration justified the $90 billion it was spending on renewables as an economic stimulus, just as Biden’s campaign is doing today.

But then, late in the hearing, Representatives Sean Casten of Illinois and Jared Huffman of California, both Democrats, used the whole of their allotted time to claim that I am not a real environmentalist, that I am not a qualified expert, and that I am motivated by money.

Had I been given a chance to respond, I would have noted that: I have been a climate activist for 20 years; my new book, Apocalypse Never, has received strong praise from leading environmental scientists and scholars; the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently invited me to serve as an expert reviewer; and that I have always been financially independent of industry interests.

But I wasn’t given the chance to say any of that. After Casten and Huffman lied about me, Rep. Garret Graves asked the committee’s chairperson, Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida, to let me respond. She refused and abruptly ended the hearing.

What, exactly, had I said that was so dangerous as to lead Democrats to engage in character assassination and undermine liberal democratic norms? Nothing I hadn’t already said last January when I testified before Congress about climate change and energy.

Back then, I testified that climate change is real but isn’t the end of the world nor even our most important environmental problem. I pointed to the inherent physical reasons renewables can’t power a high energy industrial civilization. And I noted that cheap and abundant natural gas and nuclear, not industrial solar and wind, have been the big drivers of emissions reductions.

I further made the case that climate change was distracting us from a far greater and more urgent threat, which is the global domination of nuclear energy by China and Russia, which could be disastrous for US interests and the future of liberalism and democracy around the world.

Nations that partner with Russia or China to build nuclear plants are effectively absorbed into their sphere of influence. The line between soft power and hard power runs through nuclear energy. On the one side is cheap and clean electricity. On the other, a stepping stone to a weapons program.

During today’s hearing, several Democratic members claimed that renewables today are cheaper than existing grid electricity. But if that were true, I replied, why do solar and wind developers require hundreds of billions of dollars from American taxpayers in the form of subsidies?

The Democrats are basing their climate agenda on what California did. But California’s electricity rates since 2011 rose six times more than they did in the rest of the US, thanks mainly to the deployment of renewables and the infrastructure they require, such as transmission lines.

Instead of answering that question, Democrats claimed that solar and wind projects were somehow part of the battle for environmental justice. In reality, I noted, solar and wind projects are imposed on poorer communities and successfully resisted by wealthier ones.

In fact, a major new report found nearly 200 cases of human rights violations when renewable energy projects were imposed on poor communities. In Hawaii and Nebraska, indigenous leaders are resisting wind energy projects that threaten native bird species, including the nene and whooping crane, whose number one cause of mortality is transmission lines.

Renewables also hurt working people by raising the cost of electricity for industries that offer good jobs with high pay. From 2011 to 2018, California’s industrial electricity prices rose 32 percent, while the average price in the other 49 states fell one percent. The good manufacturing jobs in renewables are mostly in China, which makes most of the world’s solar panels, including America’s, while the US is stuck with temporary low-wage service jobs installing solar panels and wind turbines, and doing energy efficiency retrofits. By contrast, nuclear power plants, which can operate for 80 years or longer, require high-wage, high-skilled, and permanent jobs for multiple generations.

What’s going on? Why do Democrats, who imagine themselves to be on the side of working people and the poor, advocate for renewables and against nuclear? It’s hard not to notice that some of the Democrats’ largest donors, including Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg, are renewable energy and natural gas investors. Even one of my main antagonists, Rep. Casten, was a renewable energy investor before joining Congress.

Democratic interest in subsidizing renewables comes at a time when industrial renewable energy projects are being blocked around the world, as even their boosters now admit. “Biden plots $2tn green revolution but faces wind and solar backlash,” read a Guardian headline a few days ago. And just yesterday, a new coalition of community and environmental activists formed the Energy and Wildlife Coalition to block industrial renewable energy projects around the world.

The last time Democrats spent big on renewables, during the 2009 green stimulus, 10 members of former President Barack Obama’s finance committee, and more than 12 of his “bundlers,” benefited from $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in stimulus loans, as I note in my new book.

Steyer, Bloomberg, and many other renewable energy investors also donate hundreds of millions of dollars to groups like the Sierra Club, which turn around and lobby for more spending on renewables, and for the closure of nuclear power plants. Killing nuclear plants is a lucrative business for competitor fossil fuel and renewable energy companies. That’s because nuclear plants generate such large amounts of electricity.

In 2016, two top former aides to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo worked with a major Cuomo campaign contributor, the natural gas company Competitive Power Ventures, to close Indian Point nuclear plant. A federal indictment on influence peddling filed by Preet Bharara in 2016 alleged that Competitive Power Ventures and the Cuomo administration both recognized that if Indian Point were taken offline, it would be replaced by natural gas, not imported hydro and wind, as Democrats had claimed.

Democrats have worked to shut down nuclear plants and replace them with fossil fuels and a smattering of renewables, since the 1970s, as I note in my new book, Apocalypse Never. They created detailed reports for policymakers purporting to show that neither nuclear plants nor fossil fuels are needed to meet electricity demand, thanks to energy efficiency and renewables. And yet, almost everywhere nuclear plants are closed, or not built, fossil fuels are burned instead.

Now, if the Democrats’ $2 trillion climate proposal passes into law, a lot of very powerful people stand to make a lot of money, from winning tender for industrial projects such as building wind turbines and transmission lines all the way to the outright cash payments that we saw during Obama’s green stimulus.

In the end, the war on nuclear energy threatens more than political corruption and higher emissions. At a time when China is committing a potential genocide against its Muslim citizens, and Russia’s president is expanding his domestic and international powers, the US should not allow these two nations to dominate nuclear power plant construction.

If the US keeps closing nuclear plants and fails to build new ones, we will cede our ability to compete with the Russians and Chinese in building new nuclear plants abroad, which will undermine national security, and good industrial jobs at home. The threat posed by America’s illiberal, nuclear-building rivals will, like the crisis facing renewables, continue to grow, regardless of whether Democrats succeed in shutting me up.

The New Evolution Deniers

 Here is Colin Wright at quillette.com.

Colin Wright has a PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara.

CW is on target.

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Evolutionary biology has always been controversial. Not controversial among biologists, but controversial among the general public. This is largely because Darwin’s theory directly contradicted the supernatural accounts of human origins rooted in religious tradition and replaced them with fully natural ones. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has described evolution as a sort of “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.” Fearing this corrosive idea, opposition in the US to evolution mainly came from Right-wing evangelical Christians who believed God created life in its present form, as described in Genesis.

In the 1990s and 2000s there were repeated attempts by evangelicals to ban evolution in public schools or teach the so-called “controversy” by including Intelligent Design—the belief that life is too complex to have evolved without the aid of some “Intelligent Designer” (i.e. God)—in the biology curriculum alongside evolution. But these attempts failed when scientists demonstrated in court that Intelligent Design was nothing more than Biblical Creationism gussied up in scientific-sounding prose. Since then, however, Creationism and Intelligent Design have lost a tremendous amount of momentum and influence. But while these right-wing anti-evolution movements withered to irrelevancy, a much more cryptic form of left-wing evolution denialism has been slowly growing.

At first, left-wing pushback to evolution appeared largely in response to the field of human evolutionary psychology. Since Darwin, scientists have successfully applied evolutionary principles to understand the behavior of animals, often with regard to sex differences. However, when scientists began applying their knowledge of the evolutionary underpinnings of animal behavior to humans, the advancing universal acid began to threaten beliefs held sacrosanct by the Left. The group that most fervently opposed, and still opposes, evolutionary explanations for behavioral sex differences in humans were/are social justice activists. Evolutionary explanations for human behavior challenge their a priori commitment to “Blank Slate” psychology—the belief that male and female brains in humans start out identical and that all behavior, sex-linked or otherwise, is entirely the result of differences in socialization.

This stance is maintained by the belief that evolutionary explanations for sex-linked behavioral differences are biologically essentialist, which is the fatalistic notion that biology alone directly determines our behavior. Blank Slate psychology, however, is universally rejected by experts, as the evidence for innate sex-linked personality differences in humans is overwhelmingly strong. But experts also universally reject that this view demands we embrace biological essentialism, because the environment does play a role, and observed sex differences are simply averages and overlap tremendously between the sexes. Sex no more determines one’s personality than it determines one’s height. Sex certainly influences these traits, but it does not determine them. For instance, most of us know females who are taller than most males, and males who are shorter than most females, though we are all aware that males are, on average, taller than females. In humans, the same is true for behavioral traits.

I am an evolutionary behavioral ecologist, and most of my work is concerned with how individual differences in behavior (i.e. personality) influence individual fitness, and the collective behavior and success of animal societies. Most are probably not aware, but animal personality research is a vibrant field within behavioral ecology due to the ubiquity of personality as a phenomenon in nature, and its ability to explain interactions both within and between species. In nearly every species tested to date for the presence of personality, we’ve found it, and sex-linked personality differences are frequently the most striking. Sex-linked personality differences are very well documented in our closest primate relatives, too, and the presence of sexual dimorphism (i.e. size differences between males and females) in primates, and mammals generally, dramatically intensifies these differences, especially in traits like aggression, female choosiness, territoriality, grooming behavior, and parental care.

Given that humans are sexually dimorphic and exhibit many of the typical sex-linked behavioral traits that any objective observer would predict, based on the mammalian trends, the claim that our behavioral differences have arisen purely via socialization is dubious at best. For that to be true, we would have to posit that the selective forces for these traits inexplicably and uniquely vanished in just our lineage, leading to the elimination of these traits without any vestiges of their past, only to have these traits fully recapitulated in the present due to socialization. Of course, the more evidenced and straightforward explanation is that we exhibit these classic sex-linked behavioral traits because we inherited them from our closest primate ancestors.

Counterintuitively, the social justice stance on human evolution closely resembles that of the Catholic Church. The Catholic view of evolution generally accepts biological evolution for all organisms, yet holds that the human soul (however defined) had been specially created and thus has no evolutionary precursor. Similarly, the social justice view has no problem with evolutionary explanations for shaping the bodies and minds of all organisms both between and within a species regarding sex, yet insists that humans are special in that evolution has played no role in shaping observed sex-linked behavioral differences. Why the biological forces that shape all of life should be uniquely suspended for humans is unclear. What is clear is that both the Catholic Church and well-intentioned social justice activists are guilty of gerrymandering evolutionary biology to make humans special, and keep the universal acid at bay.

Despite there being zero evidence in favor of Blank Slate psychology, and a mountain of evidence to the contrary, this belief has entrenched itself within the walls of many university humanities departments where it is often taught as fact. Now, armed with what they perceive to be an indisputable truth questioned only by sexist bigots, they respond with well-practiced outrage to alternative views. This has resulted in a chilling effect that causes scientists to self-censor, lest these activists accuse them of bigotry and petition their departments for their dismissal. I’ve been privately contacted by close, like-minded colleagues warning me that my public feuds with social justice activists on social media could be occupational suicide, and that I should disengage and delete my comments immediately. My experience is anything but unique, and the problem is intensifying. Having successfully cultivated power over administrations and silenced faculty by inflicting reputational terrorism on their critics and weaponizing their own fragility and outrage, social justice activists now justifiably think there is no belief or claim too dubious that administrations won’t cater to it. Recently, this fear has been realized as social justice activists attempt to jump the epistemological shark by claiming that the very notion of biological sex, too, is a social construct.

As a biologist, it is hard to understand how anyone could believe something so outlandish. It’s a belief on a par with the belief in a flat Earth. I first saw this claim being made this year by anthropology graduate students on Facebook. At first I thought they mistyped and were simply referring to gender. But as I began to pay closer attention, it was clear that they were indeed talking about biological sex. Over the next several months it became apparent that this view was not isolated to this small friend circle, as it began cropping up all over the Internet. In support of this view, recent editorials from Scientific American—an ostensibly trustworthy, scientific, and apolitical online magazine—are often referenced. The titles read, “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic,” and “Visualizing Sex as a Spectrum.”

Even more recently, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, Nature, published an editorial claiming that classifying people’s sex “on the basis of anatomy or genetics should be abandoned” and “has no basis in science” and that “the research and medical community now sees sex as more complex than male and female.” In the Nature article, the motive is stated clearly enough: acknowledging the reality of biological sex will “undermine efforts to reduce discrimination against transgender people and those who do not fall into the binary categories of male or female.” But while there is evidence for the fluidity of sex in many organisms, this is simply not the case in humans. We can acknowledge the existence of very rare cases in humans where sex is ambiguous, but this does not negate the reality that sex in humans is functionally binary. These editorials are nothing more than a form of politically motivated, scientific sophistry.

The formula for each of these articles is straightforward. First, they list a multitude of intersex conditions. Second, they detail the genes, hormones, and complex developmental processes leading to these conditions. And, third and finally, they throw their hands up and insist this complexity means scientists have no clue what sex really is. This is all highly misleading and deceiving (self-deceiving?), since the developmental processes involved in creating any organ are enormously complex, yet almost always produce fully functional end products. Making a hand is complicated too, but the vast majority of us end up with the functional, five-fingered variety.

What these articles leave out is the fact that the final result of sex development in humans are unambiguously male or female over 99.98 percent of the time. Thus, the claim that “2 sexes is overly simplistic” is misleading, because intersex conditions correspond to less than 0.02 percent of all births, and intersex people are not a third sex. Intersex is simply a catch-all category for sex ambiguity and/or a mismatch between sex genotype and phenotype, regardless of its etiology. Furthermore, the claim that “sex is a spectrum” is also misleading, as a spectrum implies a continuous distribution, and maybe even an amodal one (one in which no specific outcome is more likely than others). Biological sex in humans, however, is clear-cut over 99.98 percent of the time. Lastly, the claim that classifying people’s sex based on anatomy and genetics “has no basis in science” has itself no basis in reality, as any method exhibiting a predictive accuracy of over 99.98 percent would place it among the most precise methods in all the life sciences. We revise medical care practices and change world economic plans on far lower confidence than that.

Despite the unquestionable reality of biological sex in humans, social justice and trans activists continue to push this belief, and respond with outrage when challenged. Pointing out any of the above facts is now considered synonymous with transphobia. The massive social media website Twitter—the central hub for cultural discourse and debate—is now actively banning users for stating true facts about basic human biology. And biologists like myself often sit quietly, afraid to defend our own field out of fear that our decade of education followed by continued research, job searches, and the quest for tenure might be made obsolete overnight if the mob decides to target one of us for speaking up. Because of this, our objections take place almost entirely between one another in private whisper networks, despite the fact that a majority of biologists are extremely troubled by these attacks to our field by social justice activists. This is an untenable situation.

It is undoubtedly true that trans people lead very difficult lives, which are only made more difficult by the bigotry of others. But social justice activists appear completely unwilling or unable to distinguish between people who criticize their ideology and people who criticize their humanity. Their social immune system appears so sensitive that it consumes itself. We need to acknowledge that trans issues and ideology are complex, and concern one of the most marginalized communities in the world. Because of this, we must give these issues the respect they deserve by approaching them with nuance and compassion instead of crudeness and cruelty. But we must not jettison truth in this process. If social justice activists require scientists to reject evolution and the reality of biological sex to be considered good allies, then we can never be good allies.

Back when evolution was under attack from proponents of Biblical Creation and Intelligent Design, academic scientists were under no pressure to hold back criticism. This is because these anti-evolution movements were almost exclusively a product of right-wing evangelicals who held no power in academia. Now we have a much bigger problem, because evolution denialism is back, but this time it’s coming from left-wing activists who do hold power in academia. This makes the issue both harder to ignore and harder to remove. Social justice and hyper-militant trans activism now seems to act as a kind of anti-universal acid, and not merely a strong buffer solution. While the universal acid of evolution eats through old cherished beliefs and replaces them with deeper understanding and a clearer picture of reality, the anti-universal acid of social justice ideology is a recklessly destructive force, aiming to abolish scientific truth and replace it with relativistic postmodern nonsense.

I did not train to be a scientist for over a decade just to sit quietly while science in general, and my field in particular, comes under attack from activists who subvert truth to ideology and narrative. When I reflect on my initial reasons over a decade ago for choosing a career as an academic scientist, it was largely due to the inspiration I felt from outspoken public intellectuals like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Stephen Fry, and the late Christopher Hitchens, who led by example and followed reason wherever it took them. At the time, it seemed to me that a career as an academic scientist would be the most intellectually satisfying profession imaginable. It would allow me to dive deep into questions at the frontier of human knowledge, teach and train students to think critically, and pass on the virtues of boldly engaging with unreason in the search for truth to a new generation.

But it seems clear to me that academia now is not as it was advertised a decade ago when I started down this path. It is no longer a refuge for outspoken, free-thinking intellectuals. Instead, it seems one must now choose between living a zipper-lipped life as an academic scientist, or living a life as a fulfilled intellectual. Currently, one cannot do both.