Virgin Galactic Begins Commercial Suborbital Flight Service

 From Irene Klotz at Aviation Week.

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Nearly 20 years in the making, Richard Branson-founded Virgin Galactic’s inaugural commercial flight took place June 29, sending a trio of researchers and experiments from the Italian Air Force and Italy’s National Research Council on a short trip into suborbital space.

Mounted between the twin fuselages of the VMS Eve carrier aircraft, Virgin Space Ship (VSS) Unity took off from Spaceport America near Las Cruces, New Mexico, at about 10:30 a.m. EDT/8:30 a.m. local time to begin the Galactic 01 mission.

Commanded by Virgin Galactic’s Mike Masucci, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, and pilot Nicola Pecile, a former Italian Air Force lieutenant colonel, Unity separated from Eve at an altitude of 45,000 ft. With its 65,000 lb.-thrust hybrid rocket motor firing, the pilots steered the spaceship into what is known as the “gamma turn” maneuver to reach the edge of space.

The rocket motor shut down as planned after about 60 sec., leaving Unity to coast to an altitude of some 279,000 ft. At apogee, Unity’s four passengers began working on a series of microgravity research experiments and enjoyed a view of Earth set against the black backdrop of space.

Riding aboard the spaceship on its first commercial flight were Col. Walter Villadei, the mission commander, and Lt. Col. Angelo Landolfi, a physician, both with the Italian Air Force; Pantaleone Carlucci, an engineer with the National Research Council of Italy; and Virgin Galactic astronaut trainer Colin Bennett, who flew along with Branson on the company’s first crewed flight test in July 2021.

Thirteen min. 50 sec. after its release from VMS Eve, Unity glided to a landing at Spaceport America to complete Virgin Galactic’s inaugural commercial mission. “Che volo fantastico! An historic moment,” Branson wrote on Twitter.

Galactic 01 included 13 human-tended and autonomous experiments covering a range of scientific fields from biomedicine to thermo-fluid dynamics.

“We congratulate Virgin Galactic on its successful flight today,” Dan Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said in a statement. “We are eager to witness the start of its commercial spaceflight service in the coming months.”

Virgin Galactic is targeting its next commercial flight, Galactic 02, in August.

Penn State Sued Over Alleged Racist Attacks on White Professor

 From Jonathan Turley.

There is a logical flaw in concluding that racial differentials in grades implies racism. For example, suppose a school trying to "do good" admits minorities with less preparation than whites. Then performance based grading  leads to minorities having lower average grades than whites. How could the academics responsible for this policy miss this? Hmm, maybe they didn't - which is the message.

Here is JT's article.

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Pennsylvania State University is being sued by former professor Zack De Piero, who previously taught English at Penn State Abington. He is alleging an extensive array of racist and retaliatory actions by the university. One of the allegations concerns grading students based on race.

The complaint is blunt to the point of badgering. The rhetoric may be problematic for some judges, but the real question is whether these allegations can be proven. If so, Penn State could find itself in a difficult position with statements and policies linked to administrators.

There are roughly 40 defendant trustees, professors, and administrators named in the complaint below. This includes Professor Liliana Naydan who was an Associate Professor of English and served as De Piero’s Supervisor and Chair of the English Department and Writing Program Coordinator.

De Piero alleges that he was “individually singled out for ridicule and humiliation” due to his race. He also alleges that he was expected to follow and support the view that “White supremacy exists in the language itself, and therefore, that the English language itself is ‘racist.”

De Piero also alleges that faculty were encouraged to participate in anti-racist workshops and trainings, including one titled “White Teachers are the Problem.”

What is most interesting about the complaint is that it alleges policies that would violate core academic freedom principles from the content of his classes to grading. He alleges that he was told to adopt a race-based grading system. Specifically, he alleges that the failure to grade minorities on par or better than whites would be treated as de facto racist:

“Defendants instructed De Piero that outcomes alone — regardless of the legitimacy of methods of evaluation, mastery of subject matter, or intentions — demonstrate whether a faculty member’s actions are racist or not. Defendants call this “social justice” and “antiracism.” At the core of their ideology, Defendants discriminate twofold on the basis of race. First, Defendants’ bigotry manifests itself in low expectations. They do not expect black or Hispanic students to achieve the same mastery of academic subject matters as other students and therefore insist that deficient performance must be excused. Accurate assessment of abilities, if it happens to show disparate performance among different racial groups, is therefore condemned as “racist.” econd[sic], Defendants’ bigotry manifests itself in overt discrimination against students and faculty who do apply consistent standards, especially white faculty.”

What was most notable is this added alleged statement:

Defendant Naydan expressed this corrosive race-based ideology on March 29, 2019, when she emailed Plaintiff and two other white faculty members that “racist structures are quite real in assessment and elsewhere regardless of the good intentions that teachers and scholars bring to the set-up of those structures. For me, the racism is in the results if the results draw a color line.”

If true, Penn State was stating that a racial differentiation in grading result would be treated as de facto discrimination. If such a differentiation existed for a faculty member, it would require elevating or lowering scores based on race. Some of the other allegations could be matters of interpretation and personality conflicts. However, the attributed comment on assuming discrimination from race-based results suggests a cognizable policy.

The threshold motion to dismiss will be key. If this case goes to discovery, Penn State could face potentially embarrassing inquiries, including emails and depositions.

De Piero is currently an assistant professor of English at Northampton Community College.

Here is the complaint.

Anyone need math tutoring?

 I am a retired professor who likes to tutor math and some topics in physics and microeconomics. I tutor grade levels from middle school through college - depending on the topic.

I tutor online using Zoom.

If you know of anyone who would benefit from tutoring, please have them contact me at:

Email: Ln2.6931@gmail.com

Phone: 786-897-4573

Here is my CV.

Education:

2/87: Ph.D. in Finance and Economics, New York University.

6/83: M.Ph. in Finance and Economics, New York University.

9/59 - 6/60: Ph.D. program in Physics at Cornell University. General Electric Fellowship.

6/59: B.A. in Physics and Mathematics, Columbia College. Woodrow Wilson National Foundation Fellowship Nominee.

Experience:

9/98 – Pres: Tutor.

Subjects include mathematics (grades 5 to college), statistics (high school and college), physics (high school and college), finance, and economics. Schools students attend include Ransom Everglades Preparatory, Gulliver Academy, Gulliver Preparatory, Mast Academy, Country Day School, St. Luis Covenant School, Pinecrest Elementary, Cushman Academy, University of Miami, Columbia University, and Fordham University.

12/04 – 12/13: INTECH, Senior Managing Director.

Senior executive and Principal.

Research in Stochastic Portfolio Theory and Finance and its applications to portfolio management. Marketing and support for institutional portfolio management clients and investment consultants. Messaging and design of materials to convey it. Instrumental in gaining over $2 billion in new assets and retaining clients during intervals of below target performance. In house consulting and education of client interface team. Participation in top level management committees.

9/00 – 9/01.: Barry University, Adjunct Lecturer in Finance.

9/99 – 6/00: Polytechnic University, Adjunct Associate Professor of Financial Engineering.

12/98 – 5/99: Saint Peter’s College, Professor of Economics and Finance.

3/86 – Pres: ATG Enterprises and Axiomatic Systems, Managing Partner.

Various consulting projects in finance, investments, marketing, corporate strategy and policy. Expert witness in Federal Court (damages estimate stipulated to by opposing counsel). Clients included Bankers Trust, The Teamsters, Leland O’Brien Rubinstein Associates, SuperShare Services Corp., Nomura, Templeton Quantitative Advisors, SEI, Inc., State Street Analytics, and INTECH (Prudential).

9/91 – 8/98: Fordham University Graduate School Of Business, Associate Professor of Finance.

9/87 - 6/90: Columbia University School of Business, Adjunct Associate Professor of Finance.

10/88 - 2/91: SuperShare Services Corporation, Vice Chairman, Director.

Played a major role in all phases of creating SSC's SuperTrust. This included product design, obtaining SEC exemptions and approvals, organizing the selling group, arranging for listing of SuperUnits and SuperShares on the American Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board Options Exchange, and developing marketing strategies and materials.

11/82 - 6/90: Leland O'Brien Rubinstein Associates, Executive Vice President.

Active participant in setting firm policy, product development, marketing, marketing support, client support, and general trouble shooting.

Instrumental in obtaining over $5.0 billion of accounts. Key advocate of LOR's licensee approach to marketing. Developed several perpetual type portfolio insurance strategies, various formulae for analyzing the characteristics of option based dynamic hedging programs, and currency protection techniques.

4/78 - 11/82: College Retirement Equities Fund, Vice President.

Supervised a professional team responsible for designing and implementing better investment procedures and educating the CREF staff in their use. Developed and implemented an improved dividend discount model and market plane system. Created a theory of active and passive investing for tax-free institutions and implemented it using the Rosenberg FRMS system. Designed an improved risk model and showed how to use it to estimate betas and extra-market covariance. Managed a $140 million equity portfolio. Helped frame investment policy and procedures and construct trading programs as an unofficial member of CREF's three person investment committee. One of four CREF investment people meeting regularly with the Finance Committee of the Board of Trustees to discuss investment strategy, new and existing investment procedures, and portfolio performance.

2/77 - 4/78: Bradford Trust Company, Vice President.

Responsible for designing and implementing investment performance measurement systems and related products. Supervised project teams and acted as liaison with clients and in-house staff. Exercised strong leadership and technical ability to bring an abortive performance measurement project under control and to produce a superior, workable product. As an active member of the Operating Committee, helped frame future marketing strategy and systems requirements, provided guidelines for integrated decision making across the company's divisions, recommended improvements for a cost accounting system and helped introduce and evaluate acquisition candidates.

1/76 - 2/77: Merrill Lynch, Senior Consultant, Product Development.

Designed, implemented, and marketed an advanced Index Fund Management system that reduced the transaction cost of a typical index fund by more than 50%. Developed the mathematical foundation for a Pension Planning Model. Performed internal and external consulting on investment performance measurement, active portfolio management, and option strategies.

11/68 - 12/75: Baker Weeks & Co., Director of Computer Applications.

Responsible for applying mathematical and computer techniques to investing. Advised top management on business and investment strategy. Forecasted the decline of the institutional research business in conjunction with Mayday. Designed, implemented, and produced a control report for reviewing the recommendations of security analysts. This work resulted in a 50% improvement in investment performance. Initiated the use of econometric models by the investment research department. Designed a computer based portfolio management system that provided investment managers with the current characteristics of portfolios, changes in these characteristics resulting from hypothetical transactions, and suggested transactions for improving these characteristics.

8/65 - 11/68: Citibank, Assistant Vice President.

Developed mathematical investment techniques and made formal presentations to management, security analysts, and portfolio managers explaining how to use computers to improve judgment and forecasting ability. Implemented a package of computer programs that improved the effectiveness of the Bank's security analysts by providing them with better analytical methods. These tools were used to forecast successfully the end of the color TV boom. Directed the work of many of the Bank's security analysts on a project by project basis.

6/59 - 8/65: Model, Roland & Company, Security Analyst/ Portfolio Manager.

Analyzed the securities of technology based companies. Managed individual portfolios with assets of approximately $8.0 million. Developed, and marketed to institutions, an econometric service presented in the form of easily interpreted graphs. Developed the Growth Stock Nomograph as an aid to analyzing growth stocks.

Memberships, awards, etc.:

1998 - 2010: Advisory Board, Journal of Performance Measurement.

1979 - 1990: Associate Editor, Financial Analysts Journal.

1993 - 1996: Advisory Board, SUNY, New Paltz.

1974 - 1975: Chairman of the Board, Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance.

1975: Chairman, Computer Applications committee of the New York Society of Security Analysts.

1998: Best Paper in Applied Investment Management, Southern Finance Association, November 1998.

Various: Three time winner of a Graham and Dodd Scroll for excellence in financial writing.

Beta Gamma Sigma, National Honor Society in Business and Management.

Papers.

“An Example of Early Quantitative Fundamental Analysis: Forecasting Insured Losses Due to Catastrophes”, The Journal of Business and Social Science Review, 2022v3(8), 1-26.

“An Easier Derivation of the Curvature Formula From First Principles”, The Australian Senior Mathematics Journal, 2018, v32(2), 30-36.

“Stochastic Portfolio Theory and the Low Beta Anomaly”, with Anna Agapova and Dean Leistikow, The European Journal of Finance, 2018, v25(5) and online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1351847X.2018.1531901.

“Chasing Performance and Identifying Talented Investment Managers”, The Journal of Investing, 2018, v27(1), 52-64

“Transforming Functions by Rescaling Axes”, The Australian Senior Mathematics Journal, 2017, v31(1), 19-28.

“A Continuous Return Model for the Low Volatility and Low Beta Anomalies”, with Anna Agapova and Dean Leistikow, The Journal of Investing, Fall 2017, v31(1), ?-?.

“What’s the big deal about Risk Parity?”, with Anna Agapova and Dean Leistikow, The Journal of Asset Management, September 2017, v(18)5, 341-346.

“Chasing Performance and Identifying Talented Investment Managers”, with Anna Agapova and Dean Leistikow, The Journal of Investing, Fall 2017, v26(3), 107-120.

“Turbulent Air Penetration”, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324525027_Turbulent_Air_Penetration, January, 2016.

“Emergency Escape: Flying a Minimum-Radius Turn”, American Bonanza Society Magazine, March 2015, v15(3), 30-32.

“The Dependence of Upside Capture Ratios and Downside Capture Ratios on the Length of the Measurement Interval, Beta, and Alpha”, with Danny Meidan and Joel Rentzler, The Journal of Investment Management, 2014, v12(2), 105-116.

“Carry Costs and Futures Hedge Calculations”, with Dean Leistikow and Steven Raymar, Advances in Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management, 2014, v6, 1-34.

“Chicken Little Gets It Wrong Again”, with Anna Agapova and Dean Leistikow, The Journal of Portfolio Management, Spring 2014, v40(3), 77-86.

“Market Diversity and the Performance of Actively Managed Portfolios”, with Anna Agapova and Jason Greene, The Journal of Portfolio Management, 2011, v38(1), 48-59.

“Arithmetic and Continuous Return Mean-Variance Efficient Frontiers”, with Dean Leistikow, Susana Yu, The Journal of Investing, Fall 2009, V18(3), 62-69.

“The Effect of Value Estimation Errors On Portfolio Growth Rates”, with Dean Leistikow, Joel Rentzler, Susana Yu, The Journal of Investing, Summer 2009, v18(2), 69-75.

“Trading Strategy on EVA and MVA: Are They Reliable Indicators of Future Stock Performance”, with Joel Rentzler, Susana Yu, The Journal of Investing, Winter, 2006, v3(4), 2-8.

“Does Economic Value Added (EVA) Improve Stock Performance Profitability?”, with Joel Rentzler, Susana Yu, The Journal of Applied Finance, Fall/Winter, 2005, 101-113.

“Looking Back: Quantitative Analysis Before Computers”, with Lawrence Ferguson, Joel Rentzler, and Susana Yu, The Journal of Applied Finance, 2004, Spring/Summer.

“Closed-End Fund Discounts and Expected Investment Performance” , with Dean Leistikow, The Financial Review, 2004, v39, 179-202.

“Long-Run Investment Management Fee Incentives and Discriminating Between Talented and Untalented Managers”, with Dean Leistikow, Journal of Investment Management, 2003, v1(4), 1-26.

“Is the Insurance Business Viable?”, with Dean Leistikow and John Powers, The Financial Analysts Journal, 2003, v59(3), 30-41.

“Valuing Active Managers, Fees, and Fund Discounts”, with Dean Leistikow, Financial Analysts Journal, 2001, May/June, v57(3), 52-62.

“Problems With Health Insurance with Dean Leistikow, Financial Analysts Journal, 2000 November/December, v56(6), 14-29.

“Futures Hedge Profit Measurement, Error-Correction Model vs. Regression Approach Hedge Ratios, and Data Error Effects”, with Dean Leistikow, Financial Management, Winter 1999, v28(4), 118-125.

“A New Kind Of Index Fund That Beats Its Index”, with Robert Fernholz, The Journal of Performance Measurement, 1998/1999, v3(2), 35-49.

“Winning the Performance Game Without Really Trying”, with Joel Rentzler, Journal of Performance Measurement, 1999 Summer, v3(4), 59-66.

“Estimating Beta When the CAPM Is True” , with Yusif Simaan, The Journal of Performance Measurement, Summer 1998, v2(4).

“Are Regression Approach Futures Hedge Ratios Stationary?” , with Dean Leistikow,, The Journal of Futures Markets, 1998, v18(7), 851-866.

“A Comparative Analysis of Several Popular Term Structure Models”, with Steve Raymar, Journal of Fixed Income, 1998, v7(4), 17-33.

“The Search for the Best Financial Performance Measure: Basics Are Better”, with Dean Leistikow, The Financial Analysts Journal, 1998, v54(1), 81-85.

"Where Investment Performance Comes From", The Journal of Performance Measurement, 1997, V1 (4), 44-56.

"Investment Management Fees: Long-Run Incentives", with Dean Leistikow, The Journal of Financial Engineering, 1997, V6, 1-30.

“Making the Dividend Discount Model Relevant for Financial Analysts”, Journal of Investing, 1997, V6(2), 53-64.

“Unearned Performance Fees”, with Dean Leistikow, Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, 1996, v23(7), 1033-1042.

“Assured Active Management”, with Dale Berman, Journal of Investing, 1996, v5(3), 42-50.

“Portfolio Composition and the Investment Horizon Revisited”, with Yusif Simaan, The Journal of Portfolio Management, 1996, v22(4), 62-67.

“On the Risk of Stocks in the Long Run: A Comment”, with Dean Leistikow, Financial Analysts Journal, 1996, v52(2), 67-68.

“An Intuitive Procedure to Approximate Convertible Bond Hedge Ratios and Durations”, with Robert Butman, Hans Erickson, and Steven Rossiello, Journal of Portfolio Management, 1995, v22(1), 103-111.

“Myth and Reality in the World of Factors”, with John Moffatt, Journal of Investing, 1995, v4(2), 52-55.

"The Danger of Leverage and Volatility," Journal of Investing, 1994, v3(4), 52-56.

"Some Formulae For Evaluating Two Popular Option Strategies," Financial Analysts Journal, 1993,v49(5), 71-76.

"How To Get Rich Quick Using GAAP," with Neal Hitzig, Financial Analysts Journal, 1993, v49(3), 30-34.

"On Crashes," Financial Analysts Journal, 1989, v45(2), 42-52.

"How to Get Rich Quick Without Losing Sleep," with Roken Ahmed, Financial Analysts Journal, 1988, v44(4), 68-75.

"What To Do, Or Not Do, About The Markets," Journal of Portfolio Management, 1988, v14(4), 14-19.

"A Comparison of the Mean-Variance and Long Term Return Characteristics of Three Investment Strategies," Financial Analysts Journal, 1987, v43(4), 55-66.

"The Trouble With Performance Measurement," Journal of Portfolio Management, 1986, v12(3), 4-9.

"How To Beat The S&P500 Without Losing Sleep," Financial Analysts Journal, 1986, v42(2), 37-46.

"In Defense of Technical Analysis," with Jack Treynor, The Journal of Finance, 1985, v40(3), 757-773.

"A Security Market Plane Approach to Stock Selection," with Richard Lynn, Financial Analysts Journal, 1984, v40(5), 75-80.

"An Efficient Stock Market? Ridiculous!," Journal of Portfolio Management, 1983, v9(4), 31-38.

"Pulling Rabbits Out of Hats in the Oil Business - and Elsewhere," with Philip Popkin, Financial Analysts Journal, 1982, v38(2), 24-27.

"Performance Measurement Doesn't Make Sense," Financial Analysts Journal, 1980, v36(3), 59-69. This article received the Graham and Dodd award.

"Where are the Customers' Yachts?," Financial Analysts Journal, 1979, v35(2), 56-62.

"Do Market Inventory Funds Really Make Sense?," Financial Analysts Journal, 1978, v34(3), 38-44. This article received the Graham and Dodd award.

"An Investor's Guide to the Index Fund Controversy," with Walter Good and Jack Treynor, Financial Analysts Journal, 1976, v32(6), 27-38.

"Active Portfolio Management - How to Beat the Index Funds," Financial Analysts Journal, 1975, v31(3), 63-72.

"Unbundling: No More Analysts at a Discount.," Journal of Portfolio Management, 1975, v1(3), 44-48.

"A Nomograph for Valuing Growth Stocks," Financial Analysts Journal, 1961, v17(3), 29-34. This article received the Graham and Dodd award.

Short papers, editorials, etc.

“Delusions of Grandeur”, The Journal of Portfolio Management, Fall 2013, V(40)1, pp 6-7.

“Counting Ballots”, The Journal of Performance Measurement, Winter 2000/2001, v5(2), 6-8.

“Saving Social Security”, Financial Analysts Journal, 2000 January/February, v56(1), 13-16.

“Company Cross-Holdings and Investment Analysis: The Finance Version.”, with Neal Hitzig, The Financial Analysts Journal, 1999.

“The Search for the Best Financial Performance Measure: Basics Are Still Better”, with Dean Leistikow, The Financial Analysts Journal, .

“A Challenge to the Performance Measurement Profession”, Journal of Performance Measurement, 1999, Fall.

“Lessons From the Beardstown Ladies”, Journal of Investing, 1998, Winter.

“Performance Fee Incentives: Perception Versus Reality”, with Dean Leistikow, IQRF Proceedings, 1995, Spring.

"How to Find Next Year's Best Performing Stock", Financial Analysts Journal, 1994, March/April, 10.

“Fama and French: The Data Win.”, with Christopher Blake and Sris Chatterjee, IQRF Proceedings, 1993, Fall.

"The Savings and Loan Story," Financial Analysts Journal, 1991, March/April.

"The Plight of the Pension Fund Officer," Financial Analysts Journal, 1989, May/June.

“Stabilizing Forwards: For A More Stable Market”, Journal of Portfolio Management, 1988, v14(4), 4.

“Comparative Returns From Portfolio Insurance: Compound and Multiple Investment Options.”, IQRF Proceedings, 1985, Fall.

"Two Approaches to Asset Allocation," Pensions and Investment Age, September 19, 1983.

"Integrating Quantitative and Judgmental Analysis in the Investment Firm," Financial Analysts Journal, 1981, November/December.

“Why Portfolio Performance Measurement Doesn’t Make Sense”, IQRF Proceedings, 1980, Spring.

“The Pricing of Hakansson Certificates and European Options”, IQRF Proceedings, 1977, Spring.

Books.

“The Trouble With Performance Measurement”, Chapter ?, Streetwise: The Best of The Journal of Portfolio Management, Princeton University Press.

“How to Beat the S&P500 (Without Losing Sleep)”, Chapter 5, Portfolio Insurance: A Guide to Dynamic Hedging, Wiley.

Other papers and manuscripts.

"Graphical Methods of Investment Analysis," January, 1992.

"The Pricing of Hakansson Certificates and Generalized European Options," with Joel Rentzler, January 1977.

"Understanding Seasonal Analysis," December 1972.

"The Sensitivity of Security Returns to Those of the Market," December 1970.

"Early Quantitative Fundamental Analysis Forecasting Insured Losses Due to Catastrophes," December 1969.

"A Note on the Impact of Equity Financing on the Growth Rate of Per Share Earnings," November 1964.

"Some Effects of Depreciation Policy and the Rate of Growth on the Equilibrium Profit Margin of Leasing Operations," June 1963.

Selected presentations.

“Valuing Investment Management Fees, Active Portfolio Management, and Closed-End Fund Discounts”, presented at the November, 1998, Southern Finance Association conference. This paper received the Best Paper award in applied investment Management.

“The Search For the Best Financial Performance Measure”, presented at the April, 1998, New York Society of Security Analysts Economic Value Added Seminar.

“Estimating Beta When the CAPM is True”, presented at the April, 1997, Eastern Finance Association meeting.

“Assured Active Management”, presented at the April, 1996, INQUIRE conference.

“Assured Active Management”, presented at the April, 1996, Eastern Finance Association meeting.

“Investment Performance Fees: Perception vs Reality”, presented at the March, 1995, Institute For Quantitative Research In Finance conference.

“The Growth vs Value Furor”, presented at the March, 1995, Nicholas-Applegate investment conference.

“One-Period and Long-Run Performance Fee Incentives”, presented at the November, 1994, Southern Finance Association meeting.

“An Intuitive Procedure to Approximate Convertible Bond Hedge Ratios and Durations”, presented at the March, 1994, DAIS La Quinta seminar.

"Seminar on Portfolio Management", presented in Warsaw, Poland, November 1993, at the request of the Centre For Privatisation.

"Fama and French: The Data Win.", presented at the October, 1993, Institute For Quantitative Research In Finance Conference.

"Fama and French: The Data Win.", presented at the August, 1993, Columbine Conference.

"Myth and Reality in the World of Factors", presented at the August, 1993, Columbine Conference.

"Seminar on Portfolio Management", presented in Warsaw, Poland, May 1993, at the request of the Centre For Privatisation.

"Unearned Performance Fees", presented at the April, 1993, Eastern Finance Association meeting.

"How To Get Rich Quick Using GAAP", presented at the March, 1993, Institute For Quantitative Research In Finance meeting.

"Accounting Measures And How They Affect Performance Attribution", presented at the 1992, IIR conference "Performance Measurement For Derivatives".

"Some Formulae For Evaluating Two Popular Option Strategies," February, 1992. Presented at the April, 1992, Eastern Finance Association meeting.

"Comparative Returns From Portfolio Insurance And Compound Portfolio Insurance," Presented at the October, 1985 The Institute For Quantitative Research In Finance, meeting.

"Active and Passive Portfolio Management for Taxable and Tax Free Investors," Presented at a seminar sponsored by the Institute for Management Science, at Bowdoin College. July 1979.

"The Role of Simulation in Measuring Investment Performance," Presented at the Seminar on Security Prices, at the University of Chicago, November 1969.

"Tutorial in Basic," Presented at a seminar sponsored by the Associated University Bureaus for Business and Economic Research, at the University of Colorado, August 1969.

Why Wagner shot down Russian aircraft

 From Tony Osborne at aviationweek.com

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The Weekly Debrief: Why Wagner’s Chief Says They Had To Fire On Russian Aircraft

Ending his so-called “march for justice” against two Russian military leaders 200 mi. short of Moscow, Yevgeny Prigozhin had claimed his actions were bloodless.

Far from it, it has emerged. While his Wagner column of heavily armed mercenaries faced no opposition on the ground, imagery published on social media has confirmed that a Russian Air Force Ilyushin Il-22M airborne command post was among several military aircraft shot down inside Russia by Prigozhin’s Wagner Private Military as they advanced north.

Wagner-operated air defenses brought down the four-engine turboprop on June 24 near the city of Voronezh in southwestern Russia. All on board—many likely to be experienced Russian air force personnel—were killed. Those same forces also bought down several Mil-8/17 transport helicopters, including a specialized electronic warfare version, a Kamov Ka-52 attack helicopter, and a Mil Mi-35 attack helicopter that were attempting to stave off Wagner’s advance.

“We regret that we had to strike at aircraft, but they were bombing us and launching missile strikes,” Prigozhin said in a 11-min. video clip explaining his actions published June 26.

Prigozhin, Wagner’s owner, seemingly triggered the rebellion, aiming his ire at the head of the Russian military, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu over concerns that Wagner was being stripped of its combat capability. Prigozhin publicly blamed the two men for the conflict in Ukraine, which has seen thousands of Wagner personnel killed. In an earlier video published online on June 23, he said the justification for the war in Ukraine was a lie, and just an excuse for “a small group of scumbags” to promote themselves and deceive both the public and Putin.

Hours later, Wagner forces seized the city of Rostov-on-Don and then launched what Prigozhin called their march toward Moscow, during which the aircraft and helicopters were engaged. Later that day, he halted the advance 200 mi. short of the Russian capital, agreeing to an undisclosed deal apparently brokered by Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko. The June 26 video does not reveal any details about the deal.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the events of June 25 had been a “direct challenge to [President] Putin’s authority,” and that the episode suggested there were now “real cracks” in Putin’s rule.

Prigozhin himself said his actions had demonstrated shortfalls in Russian military capabilities, saying that Wagner forces had given “a master class on what should have happened on February 24, 2022”—a reference to the difficulties faced by the Russian Army in the first days of the war in Ukraine.

The loss of the Il-22M—a military conversion of the Il-18 airliner—represents a significant blow to the Russian Air Force’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capacity and its valued airborne command post capabilities.

Russia is no stranger to losses of vital platforms, however. In September 2018, an Il-20—an electronic intelligence version of the Il-18—was accidentally shot down by Syrian air defenses as it returned from a patrol flight over the Mediterranean Sea.

Victor Davis Hanson on unequal justice

 Victor Davis Hanson at PJ media.

-----------------------------------------------

Indict Walt Nauta? Why Not the Biggest Liars First?

Walt Nauta is a 10-year veteran of the Navy and served as an aide to former President Donald Trump both in and out of office.

Special Counsel Jack Smith has now indicted him for allegedly “making false statements in interviews with the FBI.” The indictment’s subtext is that Nauta refused to cooperate with, and turn state’s evidence to, the special counsel in its efforts to convict Trump.

But why stop the indictments with a man who loyally served and followed the orders of the former president of the United States, was a Navy veteran, and a hard-working immigrant from Guam?

Are there not far bigger fish to fry to remind Americans that justice is blind?

After all, when Smith announced his indictments of Trump, he lectured America on the rule of law and the cherished notion that no one is above it.

So let us start with the former interim director of the FBI itself, Andrew McCabe.

McCabe admittedly lied four times about his illegally leaking sensitive information to witnesses and mishandling classified information.

Have those crimes suddenly ceased being felonies?

Or is it now the policy of the United States government that an FBI director can lie with impunity, and leak, and mishandle sensitive classified information?

Yet Walt Nauta may be sent to prison while McCabe will continue to earn a fine salary at CNN as a paid “expert” to deplore . . . what exactly?

What McCabe knows best from his own experience with the deed – the “mishandling of classified information”?

Nauta reportedly is being indicted for claiming he “did not know” what he supposedly did know in relation to the movement of the president’s papers.

His denial was proffered with nearly the exact phraseology that another FBI director, James Comey, used under oath when he stonewalled congressional inquisitors on 245 occasions.

Was the FBI director ever indicted for feigning ignorance or amnesia before Congress?

Did Nauta ever record a private, and likely classified, conservation he had with the president of the United States in the White House, and then leak it to the New York Times?

That is precisely what James “Higher Loyalty” Comey bragged about doing.

Most recently, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm admitted that she, too, recently lied while under oath to Congress when she denied owning private stocks.

Was Nauta’s “I don’t know” a greater threat to the rule of law and the security of the republic than the lies of the secretary of Energy? She deliberately misled Congress about potential conflicts of interest involving her stock portfolio.

Then we come to President Joe Biden. He has sworn that he never discussed business with his son, Hunter Biden, currently under suspicion for tax improprieties and leveraging foreign governments by selling them supposed Biden influence.

Yet plenty of witnesses have contradicted Joe Biden’s statement. Photos even reveal him side-by-side with his son’s business associates.

For nearly 20 years, Senator, Vice President, private citizen, and now President Biden has concealed the fact he unlawfully took classified documents home and moved them about in various unsecured locations.

Was Biden’s movement of classified documents for the last 20 years less egregious than what Nauta is accused of having done?

Was Biden’s Corvette garage more secure than the closets and bathrooms inside the Mar-a-Lago gated estate?

Biden’s lawyers, after nearly two decades, only came forward because of the media hype surrounding the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago in search of classified documents.

Is there some law that states that a senator, vice president, and president can improperly remove classified documents, move them about to various unsecured locations, and avoid the sort of felony indictments now facing Nauta and Trump?

Let us end with the greatest exemptions of all – those accorded to Hillary Clinton.

She has variously committed the following likely major felonies.

One, she illegally transmitted classified information involving national security over her own unsecure server while serving as secretary of state.

Two, she destroyed both email records and communication devices that were under government subpoena.

Three, she was untruthful about both the use and destruction of said subpoenaed items.

Four, she illegally hired a foreign national, Christopher Steele, to work on her campaign as an opposition researcher.

Five, she conspired to disseminate false documents among top government intelligence and investigatory agencies as well as the media, for the sole purpose of destroying her presidential opponent Trump and thereby warping the 2016 election process.

And?

Clinton – like self-confessed liars or dissimulators John Brennan, former CIA Director, James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, and former FBI Directors James Comey and Andrew McCabe – was exempted from all legal jeopardy. She, too, continues to monetize her past notorieties and controversies.

The last thing this country needs is another bottled-piety lecture on the rule of law from Special Counsel Smith, Biden, and the array of admitted lying former high government officials.

They, not Walt Nauta, should be ashamed.

Automated Interpretation of Clinical Electroencephalograms Using AI

 From the Journal of the American Medical Association at jamanetwork.com.

Here is a link to the paper.

According to the paper, "In this study, SCORE-AI achieved human expert level performance in fully automated interpretation of routine EEGs."

AI's accuracy was assessed by comparing its assessment with those of a panel of human experts. Doesn't this procedure limit AI's measured accuracy to that of humans? To the extent that human experts are inaccurate, aren't AI training procedures guaranteed to produce flawed results?

The coming cultural collapse of American higher education

 Peter Wood at quillette.com.

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Why does anyone go to college? The most popular answer given by American college freshmen from 1991 to 2019 was, “To be able to get a better job.” The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, which conducted an annual survey of full-time students at some 200 four-year colleges, routinely found 75 to 85 percent gave that answer, though many also said, “To make more money.” The next most popular answer during those decades was, “To learn more about things that interest me.” Trailing these answers but still widely endorsed was the ambition, “To gain a general education and appreciation of ideas.”

I don’t have access to more recent results but I suspect the students are still saying much the same. Those answers, however, merely scratch the surface. The real reasons, then and now, that students go to college are hidden in a mixture of social expectations, family dynamics, ambitions, emotional longing, and inertia, covered with a veneer of socially acceptable rationalizations.

That mixture is powerful enough to move more than 60 percent of high-school graduates to enroll in college instead of entering the workforce, joining the military, apprenticing for a trade, or dubious options such as idling at home, wandering around, online gaming, or a life of crime.

Going to college still looks to most Americans as a better choice than going to war or a life of dissolution, but recent evidence suggests that students completing high school are beginning to rethink the idea that college is necessarily the best path. “More High-School Grads Forgo College in Hot Labor Market” declares the Wall Street Journal. There’s that, but American higher education—and perhaps education throughout the Anglophone world—is in the midst of a transformation that goes beyond the vagaries of the job market.

By the numbers

Before turning to that transformation, let’s set the scene. In pre-pandemic 2019, 66 percent of American high-school grads (totaling 2.1 million) enrolled in college: 44 percent in four-year colleges and 22 percent in two-year colleges. The pandemic took a chunk out of this. In 2020, 62.7 percent of high-school grads enrolled in college. That decline (66 percent to 62.7 percent) might not seem dramatic but it panicked many colleges and universities.

Then things got worse by not getting better. College enrollment experts expected a quick post-pandemic rebound. Instead, students dropped into a new groove. Only 61.8 percent of 2021 and 62 percent of 2022 high-school grads enrolled in college. The national press registered the tremor. The New York Times reported, “College Enrollment Drops, Even as the Pandemic’s Effects Ebb.” The biggest drop in college enrollment was concentrated in two-year colleges.

Higher Ed Dive, which just released the spring 2023 numbers, offers the supposedly consoling news that “enrollment losses are stabilizing.” That’s the soft way of saying the fire is growing hotter but not as fast as yesterday. In one area, however, enrollments are rising: “shorter-term undergraduate credential” programs, where 2023 enrollments increased by 4.8 percent. That means certificate programs narrowly focused on niche job skills.

Slow fade or quick exit?

The job market, of course, is not the only explanation on offer for higher education’s troubles. Another thread is demography. The 2008 recession prompted a sharp dive in the birth rate, which has only worsened in the years since. One observer emphasized this in a November 2022 essay for Vox titled, “The Incredible Shrinking Future of College.” Others point to the steady rise of online education, which eats away at the foundations of the liberal-arts college. Still others see artificial intelligence as wreaking havoc with the traditional forms of instruction and obliterating the need for college-educated workers in numerous fields. And still others see American higher education tipping into political zealotry and thus losing the confidence of much of the American public.

I draw from my fellow gloom-sayers as need be, all of whom have valuable points. The far-flung empire of some 3,000 US colleges and universities surely faces a severe trial. But what follows is less data analysis than it is cultural observation. I am an anthropologist most interested in the ways that people shape and are shaped by primary institutions, such as the family and education.

We are witnessing the transition from “college is for everybody” to “college is unnecessary and often useless.” Going to college “to be able to get a better job” is likely to fade away as the primary reason students attend. And the institutions themselves—universities and colleges of various types—will have to accept a much less prominent role in our social and economic systems. They are in danger of becoming cultural relics.

To be sure, a large majority of American parents still believe that their children must attain a college degree for their welfare and happiness. Almost always, those parents are applying both their understanding of how the world works and their recollection of their own time in college. College as they knew it was the on-ramp to prosperous adulthood. But that outcome is steadily becoming less likely.

The experience

Regardless of what they tell opinion surveys, most students who go to college seek “the experience.” That’s what they will tell you if you actually listen. The experience of college is that careless whole of meeting new people, attending football games, drinking to excess, falling under the spell of a charismatic professor, protesting injustices, meeting still more new people, having deep and meaningful late-night conversations, more parties, feeling you are part of something bigger than your high-school class, discovering life beyond your hometown, meeting yet more new people and forming what will be lasting friendships, falling in love, breaking up, reading some books, pursuing some internships, taking a semester abroad, feeling depressed, getting angry at oppressive structures, feeling smarter than the folks you went to school with, and thinking seriously about what you will do next, and refusing to think seriously about what you will do next.

Of course, that bundle is rife with contradictions, and some students want nothing to do with some of the items. Some won’t drink. Some focus on study rather than sports or parties. Some will pass through college like an arrow aimed directly at a target such as medical school. And all of this will be part of “the experience,” because those who don’t play are stage props for those who do.

My list sounds dismissive because we aren’t used to talking about college as a passage through unstructured late adolescence and early adulthood. It is a time when most of the students will become (more) sexually experienced, and more psychologically friable. Contemporary college is a place that demands students take seriously their supposed quest for “identity” and their responsibilities to those of different “identities.”

It is a place where certain ideologies are so far in ascendency that they cannot be discussed let alone criticized: America’s endemic racism, climate-change catastrophism, and patriarchy lead the list. These should be understood not as systems of belief so much as symptoms of cultural confusion. Contemporary college is so lacking in a coherent intellectual core that anything that students run into that rings of passionate advocacy wins admiration. Black Lives Matter zealotry, transgender raving, antisemitic bloodlust, and postcolonial or indigenous fabulism each attract cultic worshippers who mistake their idols for “critical thinking.” Why not? They have been brought up to believe that “critical thinking” means attacking whatever stands in the way of today’s version of “social justice.”

But this is not to say that contemporary college is best understood as radical indoctrination. Radicalism is definitely present, but it is really just the helium that inflates the balloon of contemporary education. If it weren’t one vapid ideology, it would be another. The balloon itself is the emptiness of a college education.

My portrait of the mainstream is not to be taken as a sketch of just one type of college. Flagship state universities, small public colleges, Ivy League principalities, elite liberal arts colleges, ordinary private colleges, and to some extent even two-year colleges are all part of the great empty balloon of contemporary higher education.

But to say that contemporary higher education is empty of worthy civilizational content and susceptible to ideological substitutes is not to say that it is unappealing. Millions of students still want that “college experience.” But it is losing its luster.

Disincentives

The appetite for the “college experience” may not be about to vanish, but it is running into some unappetizing realities. The first is cost. The price of college, even after “tuition discounting,” has accelerated far beyond the rate of inflation for more than 30 years. My colleague, Neetu Arnold, synthesized the picture in her study, Priced Out. Many students now weigh the prospect of decades of debt against the increasingly specious claim that, in the long run, college will pay for itself. There are too many debt-ridden, underemployed, depressed, and regretful adults around for that sales pitch to work.

Into this picture drops ChatGPT and the spreading realization that many of the jobs that have required the skills supposedly developed in an undergraduate college education will soon be obsolete. Will college teach some other set of equally valuable skills? What will happen when white-collar work is mostly done by artificial intelligence? Even if there is some room left for human intelligence, won’t the entry-level jobs be the first to disappear?

No college has yet come up with convincing answers to these questions. ChatGPT and the other forms of AI that are coming along are not going to replace well-paying jobs in the construction trades nor even not-so-well-paying jobs in the health and beauty industries. Why not get a four-year head start, making a decent wage and building seniority in a field that you can trust will still need you in a few years?

Students also hear from their peers and elder siblings who have gone to college. One thing they learn is that college is increasingly a hostile environment for men. Well, maybe not for men who believe they are women, or men who want to explore their “gender identities” or try on “queerness.” But the percentages of men who actually fit into these categories is pretty small. Women now also have to reckon with a college environment where the percentage of heterosexual males has fallen significantly below the percentage of heterosexual females.

College used to be a place where relationships not infrequently led to marriages. That has been in sharp decline for about 20 years. Schools can propagandize all they want about gender fluidity, but most humans will still feel attracted to one sex or the other, and most will be attracted to the opposite sex. To the extent that colleges and universities confront that reality with an attempt to foster openness and experimentation, they will further undermine the allure of the “college experience.”

Too pricey? Too strange? What else stands in the way of recruiting the next generation of college students? Animus against white and Asian students. A college that demeans students by teaching them they are unfairly “privileged” or deserving of shame for the supposed actions of their ancestors may win today’s social-justice points but rapidly loses its credibility as an institution of higher learning.

Institutional peril

The consulting firm Bain & Company’s new report, “The Financially Resilient University,” builds on its 2012 report, “The Financially Sustainable University.” The 2012 study warned that many colleges and universities were on a financially “unsustainable” path as “spending continued to outpace revenue.” This proved accurate. Higher Ed Dive maintains a list by year of colleges that closed for good. But during the pandemic, the federal government intervened and deluged colleges and universities with new money.

The National Association of Scholars argued that any federal bailout should depend on colleges and universities retrenching their over-extended bureaucracies. Exactly the opposite happened. In the early days of the shutdown, the federal government awarded $12.5 billion in emergency payments to colleges and universities as part of the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund. The higher-education lobby screamed, “Not enough!” In 2021, the Stimulus Bill awarded another $40 billion to higher education. The Chronicle of Higher Education adds in some other bailout funding to come up with a total of $76 billion. How did higher education respond to this taxpayer largess?

Colleges and universities went on a spree of hiring thousands of new diversity-equity-inclusion administrators. Now the COVID money is gone, and much of it was spent on these frivolous hires. But the expanded payroll remains. Colleges and universities, of course, claim the COVID funds were put to better purposes but these claims are mere window dressing.

Bain’s new report finds that “less than 40 percent of large public universities have strong financial resilience, a share expected to decline in the next three years.” Moreover, in the next three years, colleges in a “precarious financial position” will nearly double. There simply won’t be enough students to go around.

Institutional perplexity

I am not sure if the economic catastrophe of 2008 fully explains the failure of Americans to reproduce. Fertility rates also reflect cultural confidence, which has been in sharp decline as well.

Colleges have responded to the dearth of domestic students by trying to recruit more international students and by trying to enroll students from American minorities who are “underrepresented.” International students, nearly half of whom are from China, are arriving in fewer numbers and are rightly encountering increased skepticism on the part of American authorities, since the discovery that a significant number have ties to the CCP or People’s Liberation Army-affiliated institutions. In 2020, President Trump signed a ban on Chinese graduate students with military ties, which one expert said would cut short the studies of 3,000 to 4,000 students. China’s record of infiltrating Western universities, including Australian institutions, has long worried government officials, but there are no reliable estimates of what portion of Chinese international students are in fact intelligence operatives.

As for recruiting students from underrepresented groups, all too often this has come at expense of academic standards as the case histories in the current Supreme Court cases involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina attest. Many of us predict that if the Supreme Court strikes down or severely limits the “diversity” doctrine, colleges and universities will quickly switch to subterfuges to maintain their regimes of racial preference. Further deterioration of academic standards is plausible, and it is another obstacle to higher education retaining its status as the best path to prosperity.

Perhaps academic standards have little to do with the success of a college in placing students on good career paths. The “college experience” may be just as valuable a filter to workplace success. But that leads to other perplexities.

The progressive workforce

We have seen conspicuous examples of well-educated, “college-experienced” individuals who have brought their college views to the corporate workplace with less than happy results. Anheuser-Busch’s vice president of marketing for Bud Light, Alissa Heinerscheid, is a graduate of Harvard, where she received a BA in English, and the Wharton School where she earned her MBA. Explaining her decision to use transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney to promote Bud Light, she sounded like a diversity dean intoning the latest riffs on identity. She hoped, she said, “to evolve and elevate” the beer to mean “inclusivity,” true to the principle that “representation is at the heart of evolution.”

Disney, Target, Apple, Ford, and myriad other companies have their counterparts of Heinerscheid; graduates of “good” colleges who speak fluent “inclusivity” and yet have a tenuous grasp of their own society. The fabled aloofness of the university as an ivory tower cut off from the concerns of ordinary people has gone by the boards. We now have an institution dedicated to turning its students into missionaries of its vision of how ordinary people should live, and using American commerce as the tool to impose this vision on an unwilling populace.

Americans increasingly understand that the font of this new misery is the university, which has become an institution that regards their habits, preferences, and ideas—their culture—with disdain. There is a “status rebellion” brewing in which higher education will be the loser. An institution disdainful of the nation and even of the ideal of nationhood is not well-positioned to thrive. Much as it may emphasize that its students are “citizens of the world,” it depends on the support of actual citizens who are not amused by the idea that their country is just a construct, and one that oppresses some and privileges others.

Breaking points

This estrangement between higher education and the American people isn’t going to fade away merely because many colleges and universities face financial stringency. The colleges may be forced to relent a little on hiring DEI staff, but most college presidents are determined to stick with their progressive priorities, no matter that this commitment has opened up a chasm between campus culture and American culture. As the college presidents see it, the chasm signifies the moral and intellectual superiority of the campus. What looks to the public like insularity, looks to higher education’s leadership class like well-earned status.

The members of the public on the other side of this chasm are still willing to consider college as the surest path to a career, but they are growing skeptical. That skepticism, however, turns into outright disaffection when they ponder how our colleges and universities often foster what is worst in young people: ingratitude to their families and their nation, self-centeredness, and aimless alienation. Colleges ignite group resentment, unwarranted pride, or equally unwarranted shame. And the education that colleges provide has been hollowed to near pointlessness. Students graduate with a veneer of knowledge rather than a core. An increasingly obsolescent institution has wedded itself to an increasingly noisome cultural stance.

The braver students are already finding viable alternatives to college. More and more will follow. A substantial number of Americans now look at college as something that menaces the psychological wellbeing of their children. If they send their sons and daughters to college, it is with well-warranted apprehension, and because they cannot yet think of what else to do.

And so it begins – the lawyers’ pot of gold

 Zachary Stieber at the Epoch Times.

Camp Le Jeune has nothing on what this may become.

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Girl Sues Hospital for Removing Her Breasts at Age 13

A hospital and doctors in California are facing a new lawsuit for removing the breasts of a 13-year-old girl after she claimed she was a boy.
The defendants carried out “ideological and profit-driven medical abuse” when they prescribed her puberty blockers and hormones and, later, performed a double mastectomy, Charles LiMandri, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiff, Layla Jane, said in a statement.

Jane, now 18, was influenced by people online when she was just 11 and told her parents that she was a boy, prompting them to ask for guidance from doctors.


While three doctors said Jane was too young for cross-sex hormones, she was eventually referred to several other doctors who prescribed her puberty blockers and hormones. Within six months, they removed her breasts.

The hormones and puberty blockers were given based on a single, 75-minute session with Susanne Watson, a psychologist, according to the suit. Dr. Winnie Tong, a plastic surgeon, concluded after a 30-minute session that Jane could have her breasts removed.

“Defendants did not question, elicit, or attempt to understand the psychological events that led Kayla to the mistaken belief that she was transgender, nor did they evaluate, appreciate, or treat her multi-faceted presentation of co-morbid symptoms,” the suit reads.

“Instead, Defendants assumed that Kayla, a twelve-year-old emotionally troubled girl, knew best what she needed to improve her mental health and figuratively handed her the prescription pad. There is no other area of medicine where doctors will surgically remove a perfectly healthy body part and intentionally induce a diseased state of the pituitary gland misfunction based simply on the young adolescent patient’s wishes.”

Doreen Samelson, a psychologist not named as a defendant, by contrast, told Jane and her parents that she couldn’t receive puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones due to factors such as her age.

Jane, whose given name is Kayla Lovdahl, has since “detransitioned,” or resumed identifying as a girl.

She’s currently receiving psychotherapy for mental health issues such as social anxiety disorder. That kind of treatment should have been offered instead of the drastic steps the defendants took, the suit states, noting that, per a number of studies, youth who experience gender dysphoria often ultimately become comfortable with their birth sex.

Other papers have found that people who underwent chemical or surgical procedures to “transition” experience mental health issues and higher suicide rates. And some countries have restricted the usage of puberty blockers to certain settings due to a dearth of clinical research on using them on youth wanting to transition.

The lack of therapy and outlining of possible side effects from the surgery means the doctors didn’t provide Jane with informed consent, according to the suit. Instead, the defendants claimed that the dysphoria wouldn’t resolve unless she underwent the procedure.

At one point, one allegedly told her parents, “Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?”

“Nobody—none of my doctors—tried anything to make me comfortable in my body, or meaningfully pushed back or asked questions; they only affirmed,” Jane told The Epoch Times.

Jane said she didn’t feel better after her surgery. She suffered nerve damage and other issues. She says she’s happier since she detransitioned.

“The law says children aren’t mature enough to make serious decisions that could have long lasting consequences like getting a tattoo, driving with friends, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, or even voting,” Jane said in a statement. “So why is it acceptable for 13-year-olds to decide to mutilate their body?”

The defendants are Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and the Permanente Medical groups, both part of the nonprofit Kaiser Permanente; Watson; and doctors who work for or are affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Kaiser Permanente and Watson didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The suit was filed in the Superior Court of the state of California.

Jane is seeking damages for her pain and suffering, additional money for medical expenses, and costs of the suit covered.

“Kaiser continues to engage in the quackery of subjecting innocent children to irreversible sex mimicry treatment, including drugs and surgery, without informed consent,” Harmeet Dhillon, CEO of the Center for American Liberty, which is also representing Jane, said in a statement.

“The medical providers responsible for Layla’s case, along with countless others, have substituted woke ideology for medically accepted standards of care, including lying to and manipulating vulnerable patients and families.

“We are committed to holding them accountable for the harm inflicted upon Layla, and together we intend to strongly deter Kaiser’s factory-line approach that permanently mutilates an unknown number of American children, subjecting them to a lifetime of harm, regret, and medical consequences.”

A similar lawsuit was filed by Chloe Cole, whose breasts were removed when she was 15, earlier this year.

Spend an hour learning how to think

 Here is a link to an interview with Steven Landsburg.

SL is a professor of economics at Rochester University. He has a Ph.D in mathematics.

He will blow your mind.

Charter Schools’ students outperform

 Here is a link to some reports on Charter Schools performance.

The source is Stanford University's CREDO.

It appears that charter schools provide a better learning environment. So why is there so much opposition from teachers unions and some polititicians? Hmmm, could it be self interest?

Commercial suborbital space flights begin

 From aviationweek.com

Virgin Galactic Sets First Commercial Flight For June 27-30

Virgin Galactic is aiming to begin commercial suborbital spaceflight services between June 27 and 30, the company said on June 15.

Virgin Galactic will be flying three researchers and experiments from the Italian Air Force and the National Research Center of Italy, which are paying an undisclosed sum for the mission aboard the VSS Unity.

Unity will be carried to an altitude of about 40,000 ft. by the White Knight Two carrier aircraft, which will take off from Spaceport America near Las Cruces, New Mexico. Upon release, Unity’s hybrid rocket motor will ignite to catapult the spaceship some 54 mi. above Earth. A Virgin Galactic employee and two Virgin Galaxy pilots will also be aboard.

The mission, known as Galactic 01, will be followed by Galactic 02 in early August , the company said. Monthly flights will begin after that.

How cities can self-destruct

 Here is a link to a short paper about how cities can self-destruct.

How Ideology Corrupts Science on ‘Gender-Affirming Care’

 Sapir and Wright in the Wall Street Journal

It's really about how ideology combined with intolerance and a disrespect for freedom is destroying our civilization.

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A federal court on Tuesday temporarily blocked enforcement of a Florida law that prohibits the administration of sex-change procedures on children under 18. The opinion, by Judge Robert L. Hinkle, leans heavily on medical and scientific rationales to argue that it is unconstitutional to ban the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery on teenagers who feel alienated from their bodies.

Twenty states maintain age restrictions on sex-change procedures, and the problem they face is explaining to judges that American medical associations aren’t following the best available evidence. This is known to European health authorities and has been reported in such prestigious publications as the British Medical Journal. But American judges need some way to evaluate conflicting scientific authorities—especially as institutions responsible for ensuring that medical professionals have access to high-quality research aren’t functioning as they should.

A case in point: Springer, an academic publishing giant, has decided to retract an article that appeared last month in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. The retraction is expected to take effect June 12.

The article’s authors are listed as Michael Bailey and Suzanna Diaz. Mr. Bailey is a well-respected scientist, with dozens of publications to his name. The other author writes under a pseudonym to protect the privacy of her daughter, who suffers from gender dysphoria.

Their new paper is based on survey responses from more than 1,600 parents who reported that their children, who were previously comfortable in their bodies, suddenly declared a transgender identity after extensive exposure to social media and peer influence. Mr. Bailey’s and Ms. Diaz’s sin was to analyze rapid onset gender dysphoria, or ROGD. Gender activists hate any suggestion that transgender identities are anything but innate and immutable. Even mentioning the possibility that trans identity is socially influenced or a phase threatens their claims that children can know early in life they have a permanent transgender identity and therefore that they should have broad access to permanent body-modifying and sterilizing procedures.

Within days of publication, a group of activists wrote a public letter condemning the article and calling for the termination of the journal’s editor. Among the letter’s signatories is Marci Bowers, a prominent genital surgeon and president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, an advocacy organization that promotes sex changes for minors.

Nearly 2,000 researchers and academics signed a counter letter in support of the article. Springer nonetheless decided to retract the paper without disciplining its editor. Springer initially asserted that the study needed approval from an institutional review board. But it quickly abandoned that rationale, which was false.

The publisher now maintains that the retraction is due to improper participant consent. While the respondents consented to the publication of the survey’s results, Springer insists they didn’t specifically agree to publication in a scholarly or peer-reviewed journal. That’s a strange and retrospective requirement, especially considering that Springer and other major publishers have published thousands of survey papers without this type of consent.

Anyone familiar with the controversy over transgender medicine knows what is going on. Activists put pressure on Springer to retract an article with conclusions they didn’t like, and Springer caved in. We’ve become accustomed to seeing these capitulations in academia, media and the corporate world, but it is especially disturbing to see in a respected medical journal.

Rather than appreciate the long-term risk to itself and the scientific community from doing the bidding of activists, Springer has instead agreed to evaluate and retract all survey papers that lack the newly required consent. If Springer follows through on its promise, hundreds of authors who chose to publish in Springer’s journals may have their research retracted.

The publications that support what they call “gender-affirming care” rely heavily on surveys. The U.S. Transgender Survey of 2015, for instance, has generated several influential papers. As it happens, the USTS didn’t inform participants that their answers would be published in peer-reviewed journals.

This kind of double standard runs through gender-medicine research. Papers advocating “gender transition” are readily accepted by leading scientific journals despite having grave methodological flaws and biases. Work that questions gender-transition orthodoxy stands almost no chance of being published in the best-known journals. Every now and then, an errant research paper slips past the censors, but should it prove significant enough to threaten the settled science narrative, retribution is swift and merciless. The researcher Lisa Littman learned this lesson in 2018, when she was widely attacked after publishing on the topic. Mr. Bailey and Ms. Diaz are learning it now.

The idea is to manufacture the appearance of scientific consensus where there is none. The pseudo-consensus then allows such American medical associations as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society to recommend body-altering procedures for children.

While many Americans have heard news about the wave of states passing legislation that curbs sex changes for the young, few realize that an equally fierce, and arguably far more important, battle is raging: the battle for the integrity of the scientific process. It is a fight for the ability to have censorship-free scientific debate as a means to advance human knowledge.

Walking naturally after spinal cord injury using a brain-spine interface

 From nature.com.

Here is the abstract.

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A spinal cord injury interrupts the communication between the brain and the region of the spinal cord that produces walking, leading to paralysis1,2. Here, we restored this communication with a digital bridge between the brain and spinal cord that enabled an individual with chronic tetraplegia to stand and walk naturally in community settings. This brain–spine interface (BSI) consists of fully implanted recording and stimulation systems that establish a direct link between cortical signals3 and the analogue modulation of epidural electrical stimulation targeting the spinal cord regions involved in the production of walking4,5,6. A highly reliable BSI is calibrated within a few minutes. This reliability has remained stable over one year, including during independent use at home. The participant reports that the BSI enables natural control over the movements of his legs to stand, walk, climb stairs and even traverse complex terrains. Moreover, neurorehabilitation supported by the BSI improved neurological recovery. The participant regained the ability to walk with crutches overground even when the BSI was switched off. This digital bridge establishes a framework to restore natural control of movement after paralysis.

Inflation Reduction Act tyranny

 An editorial from the Wall Street Journal is on target.

Your Government at work fostering tyranny.

The WSJ is right. If the Government gets away with this, no business is safe, and if no business is safe neither are you.

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Merck Sues to Stop the IRA’s ‘Extortion’

If an assailant points a gun at your head and threatens to shoot if you don’t hand over your wallet, is that a negotiation? This describes the Inflation Reduction Act’s Medicare drug-price scheme, which Merck & Co. claims is “extortion” and unconstitutional in a compelling lawsuit filed Tuesday. Merck v. Becerra may be destined for the Supreme Court.

Congress last year gave the Health and Human Services Department carte blanche authority to fix Medicare drug prices under the guise of a negotiation. But as Merck argues in its lawsuit, the program “involves neither genuine ‘negotiations’ nor real ‘agreements,’” and is all “political Kabuki theater.”

HHS forces companies to provide drugs to the government at its dictated prices. The agency selects drugs to negotiate and then compels manufacturers to sign an “agreement” promising to sell their products at whatever “fair” price Medicare decides. The agency could demand Merck sell its drugs at a 90% loss, and the drug maker couldn’t refuse.

The government essentially makes drug makers an offer they can’t refuse. Manufacturers that don’t participate in the negotiations or reject the government’s prices incur a crippling daily excise tax that starts at 186% and eventually climbs to 1,900% of the drug’s daily revenues. Companies can’t walk away from the table as they would in a real negotiation.

Merck would have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars a day in penalties on a single drug after a few months of resisting the government’s demands. Non-compliance would be so ruinous that Congress projected the excise tax would raise no revenue. The excise tax isn’t a real tax. It’s a sword hanging over drug makers to guarantee compliance.

Even in Europe, drug makers can refuse to sell products to national health systems if the price is too low. But as Merck explains, Democrats in Congress wanted “to allow the Government to pretend, as it already has done, that HHS’s prices are not top-down mandates but the product of voluntary ‘agreements’ with companies who concede they are ‘fair.’”

Congress also wanted to avoid an “enormous political backlash if certain medications became unavailable through Medicare,” as Merck puts it. “The Act’s structure is instead driven entirely by perception and avoiding accountability.”

Merck says the Medicare price controls are an unjust taking of property under the Fifth Amendment and violate its speech rights. The government confiscates patented products by requiring drug makers to provide them at steep discounts that are far below their market value or what it costs to develop and produce them.

The lawsuit cites the Supreme Court’s Horne (2015) decision, which held that a Department of Agriculture program requiring raisin farmers to turn over a portion of their crop to the government was a per se taking. So is the IRA’s regime, which similarly compels manufacturers to surrender their drugs without just compensation.

Adding constitutional insult to injury, the IRA launders “its mandates through performative ‘negotiations’ and ‘agreements’” that require “manufacturers to endorse and express the view that they ‘agree’ to HHS-dictated forced prices, and that those prices are ‘fair,’” the lawsuit explains.

“But while the Government can mislead about its machinations, it cannot force those it governs to do the same. Our Constitution does not countenance compelled speech in service of state propaganda,” Merck argues. Touché. The government is also restricting Merck’s speech by prohibiting drug makers from informing the public about what goes on in the sham negotiations.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services this year barred manufacturers from disclosing “to the public any information in the initial offer or any subsequent offer by CMS, the ceiling price contained in any offer [or] . . . any information exchanged verbally during the negotiation period.” The government has no compelling justification for this gag order.

The legal implications of this case extend beyond the pharmaceutical market. If Congress can leverage the threat of ruinous penalties to reduce Medicare drug prices, what’s to stop it from doing the same for healthcare provider payments or defense equipment that politicians believe are too costly? At this Hotel California, businesses don’t even get a choice of whether to check in or leave.

Twitter files: FBI assisted Ukraine in targeting Journalists and others for censor-ship

 From Jonathan Turley.

Our Government and much of the Media are untrustworthy.

Both political parties distort (I'm being diplomatic) the truth for their own benefit. But the Democrats appear to be much "better" at it, currently, and have a compliant media supporting them - hence are far more dangerous for now.

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Twitter continues to reveal the extensive censorship system created by government and corporate officials despite continued efforts from the left to drain the company of revenue. (The latest company to cancel Twitter is Ben & Jerry’s which objected to the company’s greater protections for free speech as allowing harmful views to be heard on social media). However, Elon Musk is undeterred and has continued to reduce censorship on the platform while letting the public see what the government has been doing behind the scenes on social media. The latest disclosure is astonishing. The FBI not only targeted individuals that it wanted banned for dissenting views, but it also was enlisted by Ukraine to target its own critics.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has long been criticized for arresting opponents, shutting down opposing parties, and extensive censorship. It was not previously known that the FBI assisted it in the censorship effort, including targeting a number of journalists in America and abroad.

Journalist Aaron Maté reported that the FBI served as an intermediary on these efforts to censor critics.

In March 2022, an FBI Special Agent sent Twitter a list of accounts on behalf of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Ukraine’s main intelligence agency. The accounts, the FBI wrote, “are suspected by the SBU in spreading fear and disinformation.” In an attached memo, the SBU asked Twitter to remove the accounts and hand over their user data.

The Ukrainian government’s FBI-enabled targets extend to members of the media. The SBU list that the FBI provided to Twitter included my name and Twitter profile. In its response to the FBI, Twitter agreed to review the accounts for “inauthenticity” but raised concerns about the inclusion of me and other “American and Canadian journalists.”

Previous disclosures have shown an extensive censorship and blacklisting effort. Despite such evidence of direct government censorship efforts, Democratic members continue to oppose attempts to expose the full scope of such government programs and grants. Witnesses who testified about the dangers of such censorship efforts were even denounced as “Putin lovers” and apologists for insurrectionists and racists by leading Democrats.

Even with the targeting of journalists on behalf of a foreign government, most reporters have shrugged and declined to cover this story. It is another example of a de facto state media where journalists support a government by consent rather than coercion.

This would seem a major story on how U.S. citizens are sending tens of billions to Ukraine as Ukraine seeks the censorship of U.S. citizens and others for their criticism or viewpoints.

Twitter has itself been criticized for censorship material under pressure from China. Those are deeply concerning allegations, though it is clear that the level of censorship on the platform has been dramatically reduced with Musk’s removal of much of the corporate censorship infrastructure.

Democrats in Congress are even more open in opposing any investigation into the censorship, particularly after past releases implicated figures like Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Cal.) in targeting critics. The Democratic leadership has opposed any investigations for years. They have even refused to accept the email evidence. When I testified on the Twitter Files, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) criticized me for offering “legal opinions” without actually working at Twitter. As I have noted, it is like saying that a witness should not discuss the contents of the Pentagon Papers unless he worked at the Pentagon. It was particularly bizarre because I was asked about the content of the Twitter Files. The content — like the content of the Pentagon Papers — are “facts.” The implication of those facts are opinions.

Members like Wasserman Schultz will likely continue to refuse to acknowledge these new emails. However, the public has repeatedly shown in polls that they want transparency on the censorship efforts.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that companies like Facebook have steadfastly refused to be as transparent as Twitter, which is smaller than other social media companies. These other companies likely have equally, if not greater, systems of coordination with the federal government. However, those executives are not allowing the public to know how their companies engaged in censorship by surrogate.

Internet usage and the prospective risk of dementia

 From the Journal of American Geriatrics Society

I suspect that there are flaws in this study - but since I use the internet a lot ....... :-)

Here is a link to the paper.

Here is a summary.

BACKGROUND

Little is known about the long-term cognitive impact of internet usage among older adults. This research characterized the association between various measures of internet usage and dementia.

METHODS

We followed dementia-free adults aged 50-64.9 for a maximum of 17.1 (median = 7.9) years using the Health and Retirement Study. The association between time-to-dementia and baseline internet usage was examined using cause-specific Cox models, adjusting for delayed entry and covariates. We also examined the interaction between internet usage and education, race-ethnicity, sex, and generation. Furthermore, we examined whether the risk of dementia varies by the cumulative period of regular internet usage to see if starting or continuing usage in old age modulates subsequent risk. Finally, we examined the association between the risk of dementia and daily hours of usage. Analyses were conducted from September 2021 to November 2022.

RESULTS

In 18,154 adults, regular internet usage was associated with approximately half the risk of dementia compared to non-regular usage, CHR (cause-specific hazard ratio) = 0.57, 95% CI = 0.46-0.71. The association was maintained after adjustments for self-selection into baseline usage (CHR = 0.54, 95% CI = 0.41-0.72) and signs of cognitive decline at the baseline (CHR = 0.62, 95% CI = 0.46-0.85). The difference in risk between regular and non-regular users did not vary by educational attainment, race-ethnicity, sex, and generation. In addition, additional periods of regular usage were associated with significantly reduced dementia risk, CHR = 0.80, 95% CI = 0.68-0.95. However, estimates for daily hours of usage suggested a U-shaped relationship with dementia incidence. The lowest risk was observed among adults with 0.1-2 h of usage, though estimates were non-significant due to small sample sizes.

CONCLUSIONS

Regular internet users experienced approximately half the risk of dementia than non-regular users. Being a regular internet user for longer periods in late adulthood was associated with delayed cognitive impairment, although further evidence is needed on potential adverse effects of excessive usage.

Why are insurers leaving California?

 Several insurers have decided to stop insuring property in California. The reason given is fire risk. Is this plausible?

 Roughly, insurance replaces an uncertain and potentially large loss with an insurance premium that approximates the expected loss. That makes sense for risk averse people, for whom losses hurt more than gains feel good – no matter the magnitude of the risk. It also makes sense for an insurer if it can charge a little more than the expected loss and sell enough insurance so that its losses approximate the expected loss.

 So, why would insurers want to leave California? Here are some possible reasons and perspectives.

 1.      There are not enough independent risks to insure for the insurer to be confident that its average loss will approximate the expected loss.

 There are probably enough risks to insure in California, even though fires can cover large areas – after all, not much of California burns every year. Moreover, California fires can be lumped in with, for example, nationwide fires, making possible more accurate risk computations.

 2.      The insurer does not know the expected loss.

 The true expected loss is unknown. It can be approximated if there are enough past events of the same nature so that their frequency distribution can be taken as a good indication of their true probability distribution. This may not be true.

Changes in government regulations and policy, and where property is developed can muddy the future in relation to the past.

 The expected loss is computed from a sample of relevant events.

relevant” may not be “relevant” if the properties actually insured are not a random sample from the same population of events. Consider what might happen once the insurer sets its premium. Property owners who have a reason to think that their expected loss materially exceeds (is materially less than) the insurer’s estimate will buy (not buy) insurance. This gaming of insurers by buyers can cause insurers to lose money.

 3.      The insurer is not able to charge the expected loss plus a premium.

 Governments often regulate insurers in a way that prevents them from setting premiums high enough to be profitable.

Woman shoots crowbar wielding attacker in Philadelphia

Rob Morse at ammoland.com

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Violent crime happens in all kinds of circumstances. It was about 5:30 on a Wednesday afternoon when a 27-year-old woman was stopped in traffic. Traffic in downtown Philadelphia is never much fun, but things were about to take a turn from bad to worse. A stranger ran up to her car and smashed her back passenger side window with a crowbar. Fortunately, this driver was armed.

Without the side window in the car, the attacker now had a means to quickly enter the back seat and attack the driver from behind. The crowbar was a dangerous impact weapon, particularly for a victim sitting in the front seat and unable to raise her arms to protect herself or to escape the seatbelt and flee easily.

This driver had a weapon of her own. She owned a gun. She had her permit to carry a loaded and concealed firearm in public. She was carrying her firearm with her, and it was in a location where she could grab it quickly. The driver shot her attacker one time. Before she could shoot again, the attacker turned and ran. The armed defender stopped shooting. She saw that the attacker ran back to a waiting car and then drove off. The armed defender decided that she wasn’t safe in the middle of traffic, so she drove away as well.

Our defender stopped at her relative’s house nearby. She called 911 and asked for help. When the police arrived, she showed them her ID and her carry permit. She also showed the officers the shattered glass inside her car and the crowbar sitting on the back seat. The police found one shell casing from the defender’s firearm inside the car. The driver gave the police a brief statement that described what happened to her.

Officers found the attacker with his car at a nearby intersection. The female accomplice who was driving with him ran from the scene. EMTs took the attacker to a nearby hospital with a single gunshot wound to the groin.

The female defender was not charged with a crime.

As usual, there are additional things we want to know that isn’t included in the news reports or the police statements. How was the defender carrying her firearm in the car, and how did she turn to defend herself?

What many new gun owners don’t know, and many concealed carriers forget, is that your car is considered an occupied dwelling. If you’re where you have a right to drive, then a stranger entering your car is legally considered as if the stranger entered your home. In this case, it was a forceful entry. The driver had every right to defend herself until the attacker was no longer a threat. Know your state laws, so you know when and where you can defend yourself.

The police called this a “road rage” incident, but the second occupant in the attacker’s car ran from the scene. The police didn’t name the attacker, so we can’t search to see if he had a criminal record. This incident could have been a foiled carjacking. The attacker was a 22-year-old male.

Defending yourself while seated in your car is an advanced skill. It is hard to get your hand on your firearm while you’re wearing a seatbelt. From the seated position, it is hard to present the firearm from a hip or appendix holster without pointing the gun at your own legs. It is hard to swing the muzzle onto a target behind you without sweeping a passenger sitting next to you. Try this in your garage with a blue gun to see how well this works for you.

What should you do if you saw this attack on the car next to you? Would you stay and be an armed defender, stay and be a witness, or drive away and call 911 to report what you saw? There is no one right answer. I’d drive away if I had young passengers in the car with me. I have more options if I had armed friends riding next to me.
This defender was armed so that she could defend herself in seconds. Take the time now to see what you might do.

This story is one of many that go under-reported by the mainstream media because it shows a positive image of a law-abiding gun owner defending their life and their family. It is our responsibility at AmmoLand to report these stories to you. While we will continue to report these stories, groups like the Crime Prevention Research Center, led by Dr. John Lott, are fastidious in studying the use of firearms for self-defense. Stay up to date with all news on self-defense by following CPRC and AmmoLand News.