#American University of Integrated science

[arinzeture]

Kwame Ture, aka Stokely Carmichael, one of the most effective and best-known organizers during the Civil Rights movement, was born on June 29, 1941.

Carmichael was born in Trinidad but his family--his parents and four sisters--moved to New York City. His mother, Mabel F. Carmichael, was a stewardess for a steamship line, and his father, Adolphus, was a carpenter who also worked as a taxi driver. The Carmichael family eventually left Harlem to live in Morris Park in the East Bronx, where Carmichael graduated with honors from the Bronx High School of Science, a specialized public high school for gifted students. He went on to attend Howard University, a historically-black school in Washington, D.C.--having rejected scholarship offers from several white universities, and graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1964.

At Howard, Carmichael was the leader of the Non-Violent Action Group (NAG), a militant student protest organization that fought against racism in Washington, D.C. and surrounding areas. Carmichael brought NAG into affiliation with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced "Snick").

Carmichael participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, serving as a regional director for SNCC workers and helping to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). He had become deeply disillusioned with the national Democratic Party when it refused to seat the multi-racial MFDP delegation in place of the official all-white, pro-segregation Mississippi Democratic Party during the 1964 Democratic Party National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. After this, Carmichael started to search for alternative means to politically empower African-Americans. He was increasingly influenced by the ideologies of Malcolm X and Kwame Nkrumah.

Carmichael became chairman of SNCC in 1966, taking over from John Lewis. A few weeks after Carmichael took office, James Meredith was shot by a sniper during his solitary "March Against Fear," and Carmichael continued the march. It was during this march, in June 1966, that Carmichael was arrested for the 27th time in his civil rights career. Upon his release, he gave his first "Black Power" speech, using the phrase to urge black pride and socio-economic independence. Although Black Power was not a new concept, Carmichael brought it into the spotlight and made it a rallying cry for young African Americans. He urged "black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, and to build a sense of community," although some within the movement were alarmed and critical of this change.

SNCC gradually became more radical and focused on Black Power as its core goal and ideology. Carmichael became critical of civil rights leaders who simply called for the integration of African Americans into existing institutions of the middle class mainstream. He believed that to genuinely integrate, Blacks first had to unite in solidarity and become self-reliant.

He began to make his increasingly radical beliefs known, no longer supporting the use of nonviolence. He clashed with Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, on this. Although Carmichael did not want white people on the march, he gave way to the influence of Martin Luther King, Jr., who did.

In 1966, Carmichael journeyed to Lowndes County, AL, where he brought together the county's African-American residents to form the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). The organization was an effort to form a political party that would bring black residents of Lowndes — who were a majority in the county, but held no elected offices and were locked out of local politics — into power. The organization chose a black panther as its emblem, ostensibly in response to the Alabama Democratic Party's use of a White Rooster. While he was in Lowndes, the number of registered black voters rose from 70 to 2,600 — 300 more than the number of registered white voters. He became the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party.

In 1967, Carmichael stepped down as chairman of SNCC, and was replaced by H. Rap Brown. The group was organized to manage by consensus but SNCC members were affronted by Carmichael's celebrity status and his habit of making policy announcements before the group had agreed to them.

Carmichael wrote the book "Black Power" (1967) with Charles V. Hamilton and became a strong critic of the Vietnam War. After his expulsion from the SNCC, Carmichael became more clearly identified with the Black Panther Party as its "Honorary Prime Minister," and becoming more of a speaker than an organizer, traveling throughout the country and internationally advocating for his vision of "black power."

In 1969, he and his then-wife, the South African singer Miriam Makeba, moved to Guinea-Conakry where he became an aide to Guinean prime minister Ahmed Sékou Touré and the student of exiled Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah. Makeba was appointed Guinea's official delegate to the United Nations. Three months after his arrival in Africa, in July of 1969, he published a formal rejection of the Black Panthers, condemning the Panthers for not being separatist enough and their "dogmatic party line favoring alliances with white radicals.”

It was at this stage in his life that Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture to honor the African leaders Nkrumah and Touré who had become his patrons. Carmichael remained in Guinea after he separated from the Black Panther Party. He continued to travel, write, and speak out in support of international leftist movements, and in 1971, published his work in a second book, "Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism." Carmichael and Makeba separated in 1973. After they divorced, he entered a second marriage with Marlyatou Barry, a Guinean doctor whom he also divorced.

Stokely was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1996, and after two years of treatment at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, he died at the age of 57 in Conakry, Guinea. Benefits were held in Denver; New York; Atlanta; and Washington, D.C., to help defray his medical expenses. The government of Trinidad and Tobago, where he was born, awarded him a grant of $1,000 a month for the same purpose. He died on November 15, 1998.

Ture went to his death saying that the CIA had poisoned him with cancer. Ture died of prostate cancer at the age of 57 in 1998. His friend, multi-media artist and activist Wayne “Rafiki” Morris, said Ture said “without equivocation” that the CIA gave him cancer. “I knew Kwame from 1976 and for all the time I knew him he never drank or smoked cigarettes,” Morris said. “He was a very good swimmer and exercised regularly, he didn’t have any medical condition and was very conscious of his health.”

Stokely Carmichael is credited with coining the phrase "institutional racism,” which is defined as a form of racism that occurs in institutions such as public bodies and corporations.

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson gave a speech celebrating Kwame Ture's life, stating: "He was one of our generation who was determined to give his life to transforming America and Africa. He was committed to ending racial apartheid in our country. He helped to bring those walls down.”

Source: African American Registry

[fraudbyvictoriauniversity]

There are various such cases where students got trapped and lured into such malicious traps where they lost their money, and many of them lost their lives as well. Here are such universities: Bridgetown International University, Victoria University, Lincoln American University, and American University of Integrated Science which are consistently working on frauding innocent students.

[nasa]

Black Scientists and Engineers Past and Present Enable NASA Space Telescope

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is NASA’s next flagship astrophysics mission, set to launch by May 2027. We’re currently integrating parts of the spacecraft in the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center clean room.

Once Roman launches, it will allow astronomers to observe the universe like never before. In celebration of Black History Month, let’s get to know some Black scientists and engineers, past and present, whose contributions will allow Roman to make history.

Dr. Beth Brown

The late Dr. Beth Brown worked at NASA Goddard as an astrophysicist. in 1998, Dr. Brown became the first Black American woman to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Michigan. While at Goddard, Dr. Brown used data from two NASA X-ray missions – ROSAT (the ROentgen SATellite) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory – to study elliptical galaxies that she believed contained supermassive black holes.  

With Roman’s wide field of view and fast survey speeds, astronomers will be able to expand the search for black holes that wander the galaxy without anything nearby to clue us into their presence.

Dr. Harvey Washington Banks 

In 1961, Dr. Harvey Washington Banks was the first Black American to graduate with a doctorate in astronomy. His research was on spectroscopy, the study of how light and matter interact, and his research helped advance our knowledge of the field. Roman will use spectroscopy to explore how dark energy is speeding up the universe's expansion.

NOTE - Sensitive technical details have been digitally obscured in this photograph. 

Sheri Thorn 

Aerospace engineer Sheri Thorn is ensuring Roman’s primary mirror will be protected from the Sun so we can capture the best images of deep space. Thorn works on the Deployable Aperture Cover, a large, soft shade known as a space blanket. It will be mounted to the top of the telescope in the stowed position and then deployed after launch. Thorn helped in the design phase and is now working on building the flight hardware before it goes to environmental testing and is integrated to the spacecraft.

Sanetra Bailey 

Roman will be orbiting a million miles away at the second Lagrange point, or L2. Staying updated on the telescope's status and health will be an integral part of keeping the mission running. Electronics engineer Sanetra Bailey is the person who is making sure that will happen. Bailey works on circuits that will act like the brains of the spacecraft, telling it how and where to move and relaying information about its status back down to Earth.  

 Learn more about Sanetra Bailey and her journey to NASA. 

Dr. Gregory Mosby 

Roman’s field of view will be at least 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's, even though the primary mirrors are the same size. What gives Roman the larger field of view are its 18 detectors. Dr. Gregory Mosby is one of the detector scientists on the Roman mission who helped select the flight detectors that will be our “eyes” to the universe.

Dr. Beth Brown, Dr. Harvey Washington Banks, Sheri Thorn, Sanetra Bailey, and Dr. Greg Mosby are just some of the many Black scientists and engineers in astrophysics who have and continue to pave the way for others in the field. The Roman Space Telescope team promises to continue to highlight those who came before us and those who are here now to truly appreciate the amazing science to come. 

To stay up to date on the mission, check out our website and follow Roman on X and Facebook.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Do you have a list of good sex ed books to read?

BOY DO I

please bear in mind that some of these books are a little old (10+ years) by research standards now, and that even the newer ones are all flawed in some way. the thing about research on human beings, and especially research on something as nebulous and huge as sex, is that people are Always going to miss something or fail to account for every possible experience, and that's just something that we have to accept in good faith. I think all of these books have something interesting to say, but that doesn't mean any of them are the only book you'll ever need.

related to that: it's been A While since I've read some of these so sorry if anything in them has aged poorly (I don't THINK SO but like, I was not as discerning a reader when I was 19) but I am still including them as books that have been important to my personal journey as a sex educator.

additionally, a caveat that very few of these books are, like, instructional sex ed books in the sense of like "here's how the penis works, here's where the clit is, etc." those books exist and they're great but they're also not very interesting to me; my studies on sex are much more in the social aspect (shout out to my sociology degree) and the way people learn to think about sex and societal factors that shape those trends. these books reflect that. I would genuinely love to have the time to check out some 101 books to see how they fare, but alas - sex ed is not my day job and I don't have the time to dedicate to that, so it happens slowly when it happens at all. I've been meaning to read Dr. Gunter's Vagina Bible since it came out in 2019, for fucks sake.

and finally an acknowledgement that this is a fairly white list, which has as much to do with biases with academia and publishing as my own unchecked biases especially early in my academic career and the limitations of my university library.

ANYWAY here's some books about sex that have been influential/informative to me in one way or another:

The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Michael Warner, 1999)

Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (Laura M. Carpenter, 2005)

Virgin: The Untouched History (Hanne Blank, 2007)

Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education Before the 1960s (Susan K. Freeman, 2008)

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (Mary Roach, 2008)

Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution (Revised Edition) (Susan Stryker, 2008)

The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women (Jessica Valenti, 2009)

Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (Amy T. Schalet, 2011)

Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Hanne Blank, 2012)

Rewriting the Rules: An Integrative Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships (Meg-John Barker, 2013)

The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Realities (Rachel Hills, 2015)

Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Tranform Your Sex Life (Emily Nagoski, 2015)

Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men (Jane Ward, 2015)

Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education (Jonathan Zimmerman, 2015)

American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus (Lisa Wade, 2017)

Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy (Hallie Lieberman, 2017)

Histories of the Transgender Child (Jules Gill-Peterson, 2018)

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights (Juno Mac and Molly Smith, 2018)

Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (Angela Chen, 2020)

Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (Kim Gallon, 2020)

A Curious History of Sex (Kate Lister, 2020)

Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity (Peggy Orenstein, 2020)

Black Women, Black Love: America's War on Africa American Marriage (Dianne M. Stewart, 2020)

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality (Jane Ward, 2020)

Hurts So Good: The Science and Pleasure of Pain on Purpose (Leigh Cowart, 2021)

Strange Bedfellows: Adventures in the Science, History, and Surprising Secrets of STDs (Ina Park, 2021)

The Right to Sex: Feminist in the Twenty-First Century (Amia Srinivasan, 2021)

Love Your Asian Body: AIDS Activism in Los Angeles (Eric C. Wat, 2021)

Superfreaks: Kink, Pleasure, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Arielle Greenberg, 2023)

[yourreddancer]

Heather Cox Richardson 11.15.24

One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states. 

In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.

It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.

The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. 

A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first  Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science. 

But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition.

In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.

After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”

The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values. 

When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.

Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault. 

In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies. 

When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination. 

After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.

When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” 

During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.

But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars. 

There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.

In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

[lost-carcosa]

Today is a dark day in history. Barely a year after the fascists were defeated in World War II in Europe, a future “leader” was defecated into existence in the United States. A hateful, racist, incompetent, orange-tainted blithering blowhard son of a KKK member anal fissure of a fascist. A smegma stain on the Stars and Stripes. And since it would drive him bugshit, let’s make this entry about the myriad accomplishments of the man Trump hates more than anyone else: President Barack Obama.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: June 14, 1946--

Barack Obama was the first U.S. president not born in North America. And no, it wasn’t Kenya. That’s a racist rumor spread by that callous cockwomble with an insectoid IQ. President Obama was born in Hawai‘i, which IS part of the United States, just not North America, so fucking get over it.

In fact, celebrate. These are President Obama’s words: “The opportunity that Hawai‘i offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear.”

He didn’t have daddy bucks or influence to get him into fancy schools; he went to a top-tier private school with the help of a scholarship, also taking a job at Baskin-Robbins. He succeeded via his intelligence and drive while simultaneously facing down centuries of systemic racism that threw roadblocks in front of him at every turn for no other reason than his skin contained more melanin than the ruling class’s does.

A mere fifteen years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Barack Obama graduated from Columbia University with a degree in political science, specializing in international relations. In 1988 he began studying law at Harvard and was the first Black person to head the Harvard Law Review. Afterward, he worked as a civil rights attorney while teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago for a dozen years. He served three terms in the Illinois state senate, then won his U.S. Senate seat in a landslide in 2004. In 2008, he became the first Black person to win the presidency, clearing the electoral college vote at 375 to 173 and nabbing the popular vote at 52.9 to 45.7 percent.

In 2009, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Oh, and he knows words. President Obama is the actual author of four books, three of which hit #1 on The New York Times bestseller list. He served two terms as president, and while there are criticisms to be levied, most who aren’t irradiated Oompa Loompa cultists would agree Obama did a decent job most of the time, especially when you consider that the GOP basically declared war against his administration. Alas, his successor had the personality of a toilet bowl owned by someone prepping for a colonoscopy. Rather than accept the results of the 2020 election, the corrupt motherfucker attempted a violent coup. Then in 2024, this man with an ability to transform any clitoris into a clitorisn’t became the first American president to be a convicted felon.

June 14, 1946, was a dark day in history indeed.

Those who cannot remember the past … need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of “On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down” at JamesFell.com/books.

[James Fell on facebook]

[fullofmultitudesfullofshit]

i've been thinking about AI a lot lately, and i know a lot of us are, it's only natural considering that it's forced onto us 24/7 by most search engines, pdf readers, & microsoft and apple, but i think what is increasingly making me crazy, as an academic, college teacher, and grad student, is the forcible cramming of it into our everyday lives and social institutions.

no one asked for this technology -- and that's what's so alarming to me.

technology once RESPONDED to the needs and intuitions of a society. but no one needed AI, at least not in the terrifying technocratic data mining atrophying cognitive thought that it's evolving into, and no asked for this paradigm shift to a digital shitty algorithm that we don't understand.

it's different from when the iphone came out and started a revolution where pretty much everyone needed a smartphone. there was an integration -- i remember the first iphone commercial and release news. it wasn't so sudden, but it was probably inevitable given the evolution of the internet and technology that everyone would have a smartphone.

what i know about AI is this: from the first 6 months of ChatGPT's release, they have tried to say it is INEVITABLE.

I walked into my classroom in Fall of 2023 to a room full of 18 year-olds, and suddenly, they were all using it. they claimed it helped them "fill in the gaps" of things they didn't understand about writing. i work with 4th year college students applying to med school -- they use "chat" to help them "come up with sentences they couldn't come up with on their own." i work with a 3rd year pharmacy school student applying to a fellowship who doesn't speak english as a primary language and he's using "AI to sound more American." i receive a text from an ex-boyfriend about how he 'told ChatGPT to write a poem about me.' (it's supposed to be funny. it's not.) i'm at a coffee shop listening to two women talk about how they use ChatGPT to write emails and cut down on the amount of hours they do everyday. i scroll past an AI generated advertisement that could have been made with a graphic designer. i'm watching as a candidate up for the job of the new dean to the college of arts and sciences at my university announces that AI should be the primary goal of humanities departments -- "if you're a faculty member and you're not able to say how you USE AI in your classroom, then you're wasting the university's time and money." i'm at a seminar in DC where colleagues of mine -- fellow teachers and grad students -- are exclaiming excitedly, "I HATE AI don't get me wrong, but it's helpful for sharpening my students' visual analytical skills." i'm watching as US congressional republicans try to pass a law that puts no federal oversight on AI for ten years. i'm watching a YouTube video of a woman talking about Meta's AI data center in her backyard that has basically turned her water pressure to a trickle. i'm reading an article about how OpenAI founder, Sam Altman, claims that ChatGPT can rival someone with a PhD. i'm a year and half away, after a decade of work, from achieving a PhD.

billionaires in silicon valley made us -- and my students -- think that AI is responding to a specific technological dearth: it makes things easier. it helps us understand a language we don't speak. it helps us write better. it helps us make sense of a world we don't understand. it helps us sharpen our skills. it helps us write an email faster. it helps us shorten the labor and make the load lighter. it helps us make art and music and literature.

the alarming thing is -- it is responding to a need, but not the one they think. it's responding to a need that we are overworked. it's responding to a need that the moral knowledge we need to possess is vast, complicated, and unknowable in its entirety. it's responding to a need that emails fucking suck. it's responding to a need that art and music, which the same tech and engineering bros once claimed were pointless ventures, are hard to think about and difficult to create. it's responding to the need that we need TIME, and in capitalism, there is rarely enough for us to create and study art that cannot be sold and bought for the sake of getting someone rich.

AI is not what you think it is -- of course, it is stupid, it is dumb, and i fucking hate it as much as the next guy, but it is a red fucking flag. not even mentioning the climate catastrophe that it's fast tracking, AI tech companies by and large want us to believe that there isn't time, that there isn't a point to doing the things that TAKE time, that there isn't room for figuring out things that are hard and grey and big and complicated. BUT WORTH, FUCKING, DOING.

but there is. THERE ALWAYS IS. don't let them make you think that the work and things you love are NOT worth doing. AI is NOT inevitable and it does NOT have to be the technological revolution that they want us to think it is.

MAKE ART.

ASK QUESTIONS.

STUDY ART.

DO IT BAD; DO IT SHITTY.

FUCK AI FOREVER.

[mariacallous]

A grant to study linguistic differences between Hebrew and English was flagged as an example of “woke DEI grants” in a new database released by Sen. Ted Cruz.

The database is part of ongoing Republican efforts to justify significant cuts to federal research funding and diversity programs under President Donald Trump.

The $226,000 grant, given by the National Science Foundation to the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2022, was flagged by the Texas Republican senator’s team as having an inappropriate focus on “gender.” 

But according to the description of the research in Cruz’s own database, the sole mention of gender in the grant’s description is in reference to the fact that the Hebrew language (like many) assigns gender to nouns.

The UMass grant was also one of seven in Cruz’s database of Biden-era grants that stated an intent to promote partnerships between American and Israeli research institutions — something that did not appear to mitigate opposition from Cruz, an avowed supporter of Israel. He said in a statement that the more than 3,400 grants in his database demonstrated that the NSF had funded “questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.”

A request for comment to Cruz’s office was not returned; nor was an inquiry sent to UMass. Cruz, the chair of the Senate committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, said in a statement that his data “exposes how the Biden administration weaponized federal agencies to push a far-left ideology.” 

He added, “Congress must end the politicization of NSF funding and restore integrity to scientific research.”

The public database of grants compiled by Cruz provides a window into how Trump and his allies are thinking about cuts to research funding. The flagged grants mentioning Israel were made to six universities including Brown, the University of Michigan and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. They cover a range of scientific topics, from studying cognition to magnetic technologies to energy storage. 

What they have in common is a stated intent to collaborate with an Israeli university. For example, Michigan’s grant specifically references a partnership with Ben-Gurion University in the southern Israeli city of Beersheva, while a second UMass grant mentions partnering with Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in the port city of Haifa, as well as “outreach by the Israeli collaborator to local high schools in Haifa.”

The second common thread among the Israel-related grant descriptions is the use of keywords flagged by the database as related to gender or DEI. Cruz’s team sorted the grants based on the presence of keywords related to the categories of “gender,” “status,” “social justice,” “race” and “environmental justice.”

None of the grants to mention Israeli partnerships make such topics the focus of their research, though some state a general commitment to “groups underrepresented in science” or “outreach to women and underrepresented minorities.” UMBC’s grant states that it will allow participation “for local high school students from underrepresented groups on the US side, and from various nationalities on the IL [Israeli] side.”

The UMass grant exploring the Hebrew and English languages makes no such commitment to diversity. Its reference to gender comes as it states that “English and Hebrew differ in how they organize the words within sentences and whether they assign gender to nouns; Hebrew assigns masculine and feminine genders to nouns, similar to languages like Spanish and French but unlike English.” 

The project’s stated focus is to study how such linguistic differences affect “interpretation errors” among people who speak both languages.

Cruz’s dragnet of so-called “woke” research grants also comes as a number of American researchers and campus groups have pushed for boycotts of all Israeli institutions, in protest of Israel’s war in Gaza. 

The database was posted as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has targeted federal research funding on the basis of keywords that, the Trump team claims, reveal evidence of gender- and DEI-driven agendas. On Tuesday a federal judge intervened to block steep cuts to medical research funding at the National Institutes of Health. Another injunction blocked key parts of Musk’s effort to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development. 

A report last week in the Washington Post found that NSF staff were also being directed to comb through their research projects in search of dozens of offending keywords, including “women,” “victims,” “trauma” and “ethnicity.” Such efforts are part of a larger slashing of federal spending, including the shuttering of entire departments, that scholars say is unlawful and may be leading to a constitutional crisis.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved in our archive

By Henry I. Miller and Jonathan Bloom

The divisiveness pervading science and medicine has intensified since the COVID-19 pandemic, fueled by debates over vaccines, mandates and public health measures. Although anti-vaccine sentiment predates the pandemic, a small number of rogue physicians and influencers have amplified disinformation, jeopardizing public trust.

Medical doctor and Johns Hopkins University Professor Benjamin Mazer described the post-pandemic bitterness in The Atlantic:

[People are] angry about losing a job, getting bullied into vaccination, or watching children fall behind in a virtual classroom. That legacy of bitterness and distrust is now a major political force. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on the precipice of leading our nation’s health care system as secretary of Health and Human Services … and the Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya is expected to be picked to run the National Institutes of Health. These men … are united by a lasting rage over COVID.

Bhattacharya’s nomination has since been announced officially. As one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), a statement issued by unorthodox scientists during the pandemic, Bhattacharya promoted outdated and dangerous public health strategies, prioritizing mass infection of the population over proven containment measures.

The GBD proposed addressing COVID-19 by protecting the “vulnerable” (mainly, the elderly) while allowing mass exposure among lower-risk groups to achieve “herd immunity.” Though theoretically plausible early in the pandemic, the rapid emergence of more infectious and dangerous variants made this strategy catastrophic. Even with cautious measures, COVID claimed over 1.3 million lives in the U.S. alone

Allowing the virus to spread among young people inevitably endangered older populations. As NYU neurologist Dr. Jonathan Howard wrote in “We Want Them Infected,” his book that took a critical look at rogue scientists like Bhattacharya: “You cannot hermetically seal off the vulnerable from the rest of society, especially not in a country as interconnected as the United States.”

The GBD also ignored vaccines’ critical role in ending the pandemic. Even after vaccines became available, proponents continued to downplay their importance while opposing measures like masking and testing. This resistance fueled vaccine skepticism, which persists today.

The GBD’s advocates underestimated COVID’s impact, consistently downplaying its risks. For example, Bhattacharya claimed the virus had been “defanged” on five separate occasions between 2021 and 2022, during which 380,000 Americans died. Long COVID — the persistence of symptoms or the appearance of new ones, following the acute infection — continues to afflict millions, including many young, previously healthy individuals.

Howard’s book outlines how herd immunity proponents misled the public, minimizing the virus’ dangers while promoting mass infection. The title, “We Want Them Infected,” is derived from a 2020 email by Paul Alexander, a Trump administration advisor, who advocated infecting young people to accelerate herd immunity.

The GBD became a political tool, embraced by the first Trump administration, to justify lax pandemic policies. Public health measures like masking and vaccination became polarizing issues, undermining trust in science. Diseases like measles, whooping cough and polio, once eradicated, are now resurging as anti-vaccine sentiment spreads.

Proponents of the GBD, including Bhattacharya, continue to influence public health debates. Bhattacharya and coauthor Martin Kulldorff serve on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Public Health Integrity Committee. Bhattacharya’s nomination to head the NIH raises concerns about the future of that renowned institution and of evidence-based public policy.

The flaws of the GBD offer important lessons. Public health policies must be guided by rigorous science, not ideology. Complacency and political interference exacerbate crises, as demonstrated by the politicization of basic precautions like masking and vaccination. Accountability is essential to restoring trust and ensuring better leadership during future pandemics.

The story of the Great Barrington Declaration is a cautionary tale of how ideology and misinformation can undermine public health. Its failures led to unnecessary suffering and eroded trust in science. As we reflect on the pandemic, it is vital to learn from these mistakes and prioritize evidence-based strategies for future crises. In the words of Dr. Howard: “We owe it to the millions of people who have suffered and died to get this right.”

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Glenn Swogger Distinguished Fellow at the American Council on Science and Health. Formerly a research fellow at the NIH, he was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Jonathan Bloom is director of chemical and pharmaceutical sciences at the American Council on Science and Health.

[serendip8y]

Why We Must Mobilise

Robert Reich

Read in the Substack app

The first 100 days: Why we must mobilize

Now is the time for all of us to become activists and force this despicable regime out of office

Robert Reich

Apr 28, 2025

Friends,

Today is the start of the 14th week of the odious Trump regime. Wednesday will mark its first 100 days.

The U.S. Constitution is in peril. Civil and human rights are being trampled upon. The economy is in disarray.

At this rate, we won’t make it through the second hundred days.

Federal judges in more than 120 cases so far have sought to stop Trump — judges appointed by Republicans as well as Democrats, some appointed by Trump himself — but the regime is either ignoring or appealing their orders. It has even arrested a municipal judge in Milwaukee who merely sought to hear a case involving an undocumented defendant.

Recently, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit — an eminent conservative Reagan appointee who is revered by the Federalist Society — issued a scathing rebuke of the Trump regime. In response to its assertion that it can abduct residents of the United States and put them into foreign prisons without due process, Wilkinson wrote:

“If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.”

Judge Wilkinson’s fears are already being realized. Early Friday morning, ICE deported three U.S. citizens — aged 2, 4, and 7 — when their mothers were deported to Honduras. One of the children, having Stage 4 cancer, was sent out of the United States without medication or consultation with doctors.

Meanwhile, the regime continues to attack all the independent institutions in this country that have traditionally served as bulwarks against tyranny — universities, nonprofits, lawyers and law firms, the media and journalists, science and researchers, libraries and museums, the civil service, and independent agencies — threatening them with extermination or loss of funding if they don’t submit to its oversight and demands.

Trump has even instructed the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue, the platform that handles the fundraising for almost all Democratic candidates and the issues Democrats support.

At the same time, Trump is actively destroying the economy. His proposed tariffs are already raising prices. His attacks on Fed chief Jerome Powell are causing tremors around the world.

Trump wants total power, even at the cost of our democracy and economy.

His polls are dropping, yet many Americans are still in denial. “He’s getting things done!” some say. “He’s tough and strong!”

Every American with any shred of authority must loudly and boldly sound the alarm.

A few Democrats and progressives in Congress (Bernie Sanders, AOC, Cory Booker, Chris Van Hollen, Chris Murphy) have expressed outrage, but most seem oddly quiet. Granted, they have no direct power to stop what is occurring, but they cannot and must not appear to acquiesce. They need to be heard, every day — protesting, demanding, resisting, refusing.

Barack Obama has spoken up at least once, to his credit, but where is my old boss, Bill Clinton? Where is George W. Bush? Where are their former vice presidents — Al Gore and Dick Cheney? Where are their former Cabinet members? They all must be heard too.

What about Republican members of Congress? Are none willing to stand up against what is occurring? And what of Republican governors and state legislators? If there were ever a time for courage and integrity, it is now. Their silence is inexcusable.

Over 400 university presidents have finally issued a letter opposing “the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” Good. Now they must speak out against the overreach endangering all of American democracy.

Hundreds of law firms have joined a friend-of-the-court brief in support of law firm Perkins Coie’s appeal of the regime’s demands. Fine. Now, they along with the American Bar Association and every major law school, must sound the alarm about Trump’s vindictive and abusive use of the Justice Department.

America’s religious leaders have a moral obligation to speak out. They have a spiritual duty to their congregations and to themselves to make their voices heard.

The leaders of American business — starting with Jamie Dimon, the chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who in normal times has assumed the role of spokesperson for American business — have been conspicuously silent. Of course they fear Trump’s retribution. Of course they hope for a huge tax cut. But these hardly excuse their seeming assent to the destruction of American democracy and our economy.

Journalists must speak out too. In the final moments of last night’s “60 Minutes” telecast, Scott Pelley, one of its top journalists, directly criticized Paramount, CBS’s parent company. “Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” he told viewers, explaining why the show’s executive producer, Bill Owens, had resigned.

“Stories we pursued for 57 years are often controversial — lately, the Israel-Gaza War and the Trump administration. Bill made sure they were accurate and fair. He was tough that way. But our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it.”

Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of Paramount, is seeking the Trump regime’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of the media company, and Paramount is obviously intruding on “60 Minutes” content to curry favor with (and not rile) Trump.

Kudos to Pelley for speaking out and to Bill Owens for resigning. We need more examples of such courage. (They both get this week’s Joseph Welch Award, by the way, while Shari Redstone and Paramount get this week’s Neville Chamberlain.)

***

Friends, we have witnessed what can happen in just the first hundred days. I’m not at all sure we can wait until the 2026 midterm elections and cross our fingers that Democrats take back at least one chamber of Congress. At the rate this regime is wreaking havoc, too much damage will have been done by then.

The nation is tottering on the edge of dictatorship.

We are no longer Democrats or Republicans. We are either patriots fighting the regime or we are complicit in its tyranny. There is no middle ground.

Soon, I fear, the regime will openly defy the Supreme Court. Americans must be mobilized into such a huge wave of anger and disgust that members of the House are compelled to impeach Trump (for the third time) and enough senators are moved to finally convict him.

Then this shameful chapter of American history will end.

[danikriatura]

Kwame Ture, aka Stokely Carmichael, one of the most effective and best-known organizers during the Civil Rights movement, was born on June 29, 1941.

Carmichael was born in Trinidad but his family--his parents and four sisters--moved to New York City. His mother, Mabel F. Carmichael, was a stewardess for a steamship line, and his father, Adolphus, was a carpenter who also worked as a taxi driver. The Carmichael family eventually left Harlem to live in Morris Park in the East Bronx, where Carmichael graduated with honors from the Bronx High School of Science, a specialized public high school for gifted students. He went on to attend Howard University, a historically-black school in Washington, D.C.--having rejected scholarship offers from several white universities, and graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1964.

At Howard, Carmichael was the leader of the Non-Violent Action Group (NAG), a militant student protest organization that fought against racism in Washington, D.C. and surrounding areas. Carmichael brought NAG into affiliation with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced "Snick").

Carmichael participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, serving as a regional director for SNCC workers and helping to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). He had become deeply disillusioned with the national Democratic Party when it refused to seat the multi-racial MFDP delegation in place of the official all-white, pro-segregation Mississippi Democratic Party during the 1964 Democratic Party National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. After this, Carmichael started to search for alternative means to politically empower African-Americans. He was increasingly influenced by the ideologies of Malcolm X and Kwame Nkrumah.

Carmichael became chairman of SNCC in 1966, taking over from John Lewis. A few weeks after Carmichael took office, James Meredith was shot by a sniper during his solitary "March Against Fear," and Carmichael continued the march. It was during this march, in June 1966, that Carmichael was arrested for the 27th time in his civil rights career. Upon his release, he gave his first "Black Power" speech, using the phrase to urge black pride and socio-economic independence. Although Black Power was not a new concept, Carmichael brought it into the spotlight and made it a rallying cry for young African Americans. He urged "black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, and to build a sense of community," although some within the movement were alarmed and critical of this change.

SNCC gradually became more radical and focused on Black Power as its core goal and ideology. Carmichael became critical of civil rights leaders who simply called for the integration of African Americans into existing institutions of the middle class mainstream. He believed that to genuinely integrate, Blacks first had to unite in solidarity and become self-reliant.

He began to make his increasingly radical beliefs known, no longer supporting the use of nonviolence. He clashed with Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, on this. Although Carmichael did not want white people on the march, he gave way to the influence of Martin Luther King, Jr., who did.

In 1966, Carmichael journeyed to Lowndes County, AL, where he brought together the county's African-American residents to form the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). The organization was an effort to form a political party that would bring black residents of Lowndes — who were a majority in the county, but held no elected offices and were locked out of local politics — into power. The organization chose a black panther as its emblem, ostensibly in response to the Alabama Democratic Party's use of a White Rooster. While he was in Lowndes, the number of registered black voters rose from 70 to 2,600 — 300 more than the number of registered white voters. He became the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party.

In 1967, Carmichael stepped down as chairman of SNCC, and was replaced by H. Rap Brown. The group was organized to manage by consensus but SNCC members were affronted by Carmichael's celebrity status and his habit of making policy announcements before the group had agreed to them.

Carmichael wrote the book "Black Power" (1967) with Charles V. Hamilton and became a strong critic of the Vietnam War. After his expulsion from the SNCC, Carmichael became more clearly identified with the Black Panther Party as its "Honorary Prime Minister," and becoming more of a speaker than an organizer, traveling throughout the country and internationally advocating for his vision of "black power."

In 1969, he and his then-wife, the South African singer Miriam Makeba, moved to Guinea-Conakry where he became an aide to Guinean prime minister Ahmed Sékou Touré and the student of exiled Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah. Makeba was appointed Guinea's official delegate to the United Nations. Three months after his arrival in Africa, in July of 1969, he published a formal rejection of the Black Panthers, condemning the Panthers for not being separatist enough and their "dogmatic party line favoring alliances with white radicals.”

It was at this stage in his life that Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture to honor the African leaders Nkrumah and Touré who had become his patrons. Carmichael remained in Guinea after he separated from the Black Panther Party. He continued to travel, write, and speak out in support of international leftist movements, and in 1971, published his work in a second book, "Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism." Carmichael and Makeba separated in 1973. After they divorced, he entered a second marriage with Marlyatou Barry, a Guinean doctor whom he also divorced.

Stokely was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1996, and after two years of treatment at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, he died at the age of 57 in Conakry, Guinea. Benefits were held in Denver; New York; Atlanta; and Washington, D.C., to help defray his medical expenses. The government of Trinidad and Tobago, where he was born, awarded him a grant of $1,000 a month for the same purpose. He died on November 15, 1998.

Ture went to his death saying that the CIA had poisoned him with cancer. Ture died of prostate cancer at the age of 57 in 1998. His friend, multi-media artist and activist Wayne “Rafiki” Morris, said Ture said “without equivocation” that the CIA gave him cancer. “I knew Kwame from 1976 and for all the time I knew him he never drank or smoked cigarettes,” Morris said. “He was a very good swimmer and exercised regularly, he didn’t have any medical condition and was very conscious of his health.”

Stokely Carmichael is credited with coining the phrase "institutional racism,” which is defined as a form of racism that occurs in institutions such as public bodies and corporations.

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson gave a speech celebrating Kwame Ture's life, stating: "He was one of our generation who was determined to give his life to transforming America and Africa. He was committed to ending racial apartheid in our country. He helped to bring those walls down.”

Source: African American Registry

[probablyasocialecologist]

While home interiors depicted a blissful atomic future, their occupants lived in an age of revanchist conservatism. American society had become increasingly atomized and patriarchal during this time. Women were important contributors to wartime atomic science: Maria Goeppert-Mayer worked on the Manhattan project, and was awarded a Nobel Prize for her contributions to science by 1963; Leona Woods Marshall Libby worked in Enrico Fermi’s lab at the University of Chicago, where she demonstrated the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. When men returned from war, many women were discouraged from continuing their careers as scientists, technologists, and academics. As mainly white working women became wives in picket-fenced suburbia, they turned to the domestic affairs of the home to regain some control. As such, the demand for Atomic Age style was created by these women’s purchasing decisions. Atomic aesthetics in the home eventually served to “feminize” the atom, further domesticating its image.

[...]

Beauty queens and pin-up girls proliferated after World War II. The new vogue for radioactivity reached pageantry, with new beauty contests celebrating all things nuclear. From Miss Atomic Blast to Miss Atomic Bomb, this cheerful embodiment of lethal nukes has been described variously as commercializing, feminizing, and disarming the atom. By 1955, atomic pageantry had diversified to celebrate and normalize uranium mining and nuclear energy, as Colorado and Utah became home to expansive uranium mining programs. In a contest sponsored by the Uranium Ore Producers Association and the Grand Junction Chamber of Commerce to celebrate Colorado’s uranium mining boom, the winning Miss Atomic Energy was rewarded with a truckload of uranium ore worth approximately $5000 in today’s money — and a trophy in the shape of Rutherford’s iconic atomic model. The bikini bathing suit debuted in 1946, taking its name from Bikini Atoll, where the U.S. undertook its first nuclear weapon detonations since Hiroshima. Louis Réard’sdesignwas itself derived from a less revealing French design created by Jacques Heim, known as “L’atome.” Both garments played with the semiotics of nuclear warfare. Models were initially scandalized by the bikini’s skimpiness and refused to wear it. By 1951, however, a bikini round had been integrated into the annual Miss World competition, further linking the atom with ideals of feminine beauty. 

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Colin Wright

Published: Oct 2, 2023

On September 25, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) announced that they were cancelling a panel discussion titled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology,” originally scheduled as part of their annual conference in Toronto from November 15–19. The cancellation and subsequent response by the two organizations shows the extent to which gender ideology has captured academic anthropology.

The panel would have featured six female scientists, specializing in biology and anthropology, to address their profession’s growing denial of biological sex as a valid and relevant category. While terminological confusion surrounding the distinction between sex and gender roles has been a persistent issue within anthropology for decades, the total refusal of some to recognize sex as a real biological variable is a more recent phenomenon. The panel organizers, eager to facilitate an open discussion among anthropologists and entertain diverse perspectives on a contentious issue, considered the AAA/CASCA conference an optimal venue to host such a conversation.

The organizations accepted the “Let’s Talk About Sex” panel without incident on July 13, and planned to feature it alongside other panels including those on politically oriented subjects, such as “Trans Latinx Methodologies,” “Exploring Activist Anthropology,” and “Reimagining Anthropology as Restorative Justice.” Elizabeth Weiss, a professor of anthropology at San José State University, was one of the slated panelists. She had intended to discuss the significance in bio-archaeology and forensic anthropology of using skeletal remains to establish a decedent’s sex. While a 2018 article in Discover titled “Skeletal Studies Show Sex, Like Gender, Exists Along a Spectrum” reached different conclusions, Weiss planned to discuss how scientific breakthroughs have made determining the sex of skeletal remains a more exact science. Her presentation was to be moderate; she titled it “No Bones About It: Skeletons Are Binary; People May Not Be,” and conceded in her abstract the growing need in forensics to “to ensure that skeletal finds are identified by both biological sex and their gender identity” due to “the current rise in transitioning individuals and their overrepresentation as crime victims.”

Despite having already approved the panel, the presidents of the AAA (Ramona Pérez) and CASCA (Monica Heller) unexpectedly issued a joint letter on September 25 notifying the “Let’s Talk About Sex” presenters that their panel was cancelled. They claimed that the panel’s subject matter conflicted with their organizations’ values, jeopardized “the safety and dignity of our members,” and eroded the program’s “scientific integrity.” They further asserted the panel’s ideas (i.e., that sex is a real and important biological variable) would “cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.” To ensure that similar discussions would not be approved in the future, the AAA/CASCA vowed to “undertake a major review of the processes associated with vetting sessions at our annual meetings.”

The following day, the panelists issued a response letter, expressing their disappointment that the AAA and CASCA presidents had “chosen to forbid scholarly dialogue” on the topic. They rejected the “false accusation” that supporting the “continued use of biological sex categories (e.g., male and female; man and woman) is to imperil the safety of the LGBTQI community.” The panelists called “particularly egregious” the AAA/CASCA’s assertion that the panel would compromise the program’s “scientific integrity.” They noted that, ironically, the AAA/CASCA’s “decision to anathematize our panel looks very much like an anti-science response to a politicized lobbying campaign.”

I spoke with Weiss, who expressed her frustration over the canceled panel and the two presidents’ stifling of honest discussion about sex. She was concerned about the continual shifting of goalposts on the issue:

We used to say there’s sex, and gender. Sex is biological, and gender is not. Then it’s no, you can no longer talk about sex. Sex and gender are one, and separating the two makes you a transphobe, when of course it doesn’t. In anthropology and many topics, the goalposts are continuously moved. And, because of that, we need to stand up and say, “I’m not moving from my place unless there’s good scientific evidence that my place is wrong.” And I don’t think there is good scientific evidence that there are more than two sexes.

Weiss was not the only person to object. When I broke news of the cancellation on X, it immediately went viral. At the time of writing, my post has more than 2.4 million views, and the episode has ignited public outcry from individuals and academics across the political spectrum. Science writer Michael Shermer called the AAA and CASCA’s presidents’ letter “shameful” and an “utterly absurd blank slate denial of human nature.” Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and political science at Duke University, described it as “absolutely appalling.” Jeffrey Flier, the Harvard University distinguished service professor and former dean of the Harvard Medical School, viewed it as “a chilling declaration of war on scholarly controversy.” Even Elon Musk expressed his disbelief with a single word: “Wow.”

Despite the backlash, the AAA and CASCA have held firm. On September 28, the AAA posted a statement on its website titled “No Place For Transphobia in Anthropology: Session Pulled from Annual Meeting Program.” The statement reiterated the stance outlined in the initial letter, declaring the “Let’s Talk About Sex” panel an affront to its values and claiming that it endangered AAA members’ safety and lacked scientific rigor.

The AAA’s statement claimed that the now-canceled panel was at odds with their first ethical principle of professional responsibility: “Do no harm.” It likened the scuttled panel’s “gender critical scholarship” to the “race science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” the main goal of which was to “advance a ‘scientific’ reason to question the humanity of already marginalized groups of people.” In this instance, the AAA argued, “those who exist outside a strict and narrow sex/gender binary” are being targeted.

Weiss remains unconvinced by this moral posturing. “If the panel was so egregious,” she asked, “why had it been accepted in the first place?”

The AAA also claimed that Weiss’s panel lacked “scientific integrity,” and that she and her fellow panelists “relied on assumptions that ran contrary to the settled science in our discipline.” The panelists, the AAA argued, had committed “one of the cardinal sins of scholarship” by “assum[ing] the truth of the proposition that . . . sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.” In fact, the AAA claimed, the panelists’ views “contradict scientific evidence” about sex and gender, since “[a]round the world and throughout history, there have always been people whose gender roles do not align neatly with their reproductive anatomy.”

There is much to respond to in this portion of AAA’s statement. First, it’s ironic for the organization to accuse scientists of committing the “cardinal sin” of “assuming the truth” of something, and then to justify cancelling those scientists�� panel on the grounds that the panelists refuse to accept purportedly “settled science.” Second, the panel was organized to discuss biological sex (i.e., the biology of males and females), not “gender roles”; pivoting from discussions of basic biology to murkier debates about sex-related social roles and expectations is a common tactic of gender ideologues. Third, the AAA’s argument that a person’s “gender role” might not “align neatly” with his or her reproductive anatomy implies the existence of normative behaviors for members of each sex. Indeed, this is a central tenet of gender ideology that many people dispute and warrants the kind of discussion the panel intended to provide.

The AAA’s statement made another faulty allegation, this time against Weiss for using “sex identification” instead of “sex estimation” when assessing the sex of skeletal remains. The AAA claimed that Weiss’s choice of terminology was problematic and unscholarly because it assumes a “determinative” process that “is easily influenced by cognitive bias on the part of the researcher.”

Weiss, however, rejects the AAA’s notion that the term “sex determination” is outdated or improper. She emphasized that “sex determination” is frequently used in the literature, as demonstrated in numerous contemporary anthropology papers, along with “sex estimation.” Weiss said, “I tend not to use the term ‘sex estimation’ because to estimate is usually associated with a numeric value; thus, I do use the term ‘age estimation.’ But just as ‘age estimation’ does not mean that there is no actual age of an individual and that biological age changes don’t exist, ‘sex estimation’ does not mean that there isn’t a biological sex binary.” She also contested the AAA’s claim that anthropologists’ use of “sex estimation” is meant to accommodate people who identify as transgender or non-binary. Rather, she said, “sex estimation” is used when “anthropologists are not 100 [percent] sure of their accuracy for a variety of reasons, including that the remains may be fragmented.” But as these methods improve—which was a focus of her talk—such “estimations” become increasingly determinative.

After making that unfounded allegation against Weiss, the AAA further embarrasses itself by claiming that “There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification,” and that sex and gender are “historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable categories.”

Each of these assertions is empirically false. An individual’s sex can be determined by observing their primary sex organs, or gonads, as these organs determine the type of gamete an individual can or would have the function to produce. The existence of a very rare subset of individuals with developmental conditions that make their sex difficult to assess does not substantiate the existence of a third sex. Sex is binary because are only two sexes, not because every human in existence is neatly classifiable. Additionally, while some organisms are capable of changing sex, humans are not among them. Therefore, the assertion that human sex is “dynamically mutable” is false.

Weiss appropriately highlights the “false equivalency” inherent in the claim that the existence of people with intersex conditions disproves the binary nature of sex. “People who are born intersex or with disorders of sex development are not nonbinary or transgender, they are individuals with medical pathologies,” she said. “We would not argue that because some people are born with polydactyly (extra fingers or toes), often seen in inbred populations, that you can’t say that humans have ten fingers and ten toes. It's an absurd conclusion.”

On September 29, the AAA posted a Letter of Support on its website, penned by anthropologists Agustin Fuentes, Kathryn Clancy, and Robin Nelson, endorsing the decision to cancel the “Let’s Talk About Sex” session. Again, the primary motivation cited was the panel’s opposition to the supposed “settled science” concerning sex. The authors disputed the panelists’ claim that the term “sex” was being supplanted by “gender” in anthropology, claiming instead that there is “massive work on these terms, and their entanglements and nuances.” They also reiterated the AAA’s false accusation that the term “sex determination” was problematic and outdated. Nonetheless, the canceled panel could have served as a prime venue to discuss these issues.

In response to these calls for censorship, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) issued an open letter to the AAA and CASCA. FIRE characterized the groups’ decision to cancel the panel as a “retreat” from their scientific mission, which “requires unwavering dedication to free inquiry and open dialogue.” It argued that this mission “cannot coexist with inherently subjective standards of ‘harm,’ ‘safety,’ and ‘dignity,’ which are inevitably used to suppress ideas that cause discomfort or conflict with certain political or ideological commitments.” FIRE implored the AAA and CASCA to “reconsider this decision and to recommit to the principles of intellectual freedom and open discourse that are essential to the organizations’ academic missions.” FIRE’s open letter has garnered signatures from nearly 100 academics, including Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and Princeton University’s Robert P. George. FIRE invites additional academic faculty to add their names.

The initial letter and subsequent statement by the AAA/CASCA present a particularly jarring illustration of the undermining of science in the name of “social justice.” The organizations have embarrassed themselves yet lack the self-awareness to realize it. The historian of science Alice Dreger called the AAA and CASCA presidents’ use of the term “cardinal sin” appropriate “because Pérez and Heller are working from dogma so heavy it is worthy of the Vatican.” Indeed, they have fallen prey to gender ideologues, driven into a moral panic by the purported dangers of defending the existence of biological sex to people whose sex distresses them. The AAA/CASCA have determined that it is necessary not only to lie to these people about their sex but also to deceive the rest of us about longstanding, foundational, and universal truths about sex.

Science can advance only within a system and culture that values open inquiry and robust debate. The AAA and CASCA are not just barring a panel of experts with diverse and valid perspectives on biological sex from expressing their well-considered conclusions; they are denying conference attendees the opportunity to hear diverse viewpoints and partake in constructive conversations on a controversial subject. Such actions obstruct the path of scientific progress.

“When you move away from the truth, no good can come from it,” Weiss says. The AAA and CASCA would be wise to ponder that reality.

==

I miss the days when anti-science meant creationists with "Intelligent Design," flat Earthers, and Jenny McCarthy-style MMR anti-vaxers.

It's weird that archaeologists are now denying evolution and pretending not to know how babies are made. Looks like creationists aren't the only evolution-denial game in town any more.

[feelingbluepolitics]

An Ethical AI-generated Prompt Sheet for Those Thanksgiving Conversations

*based on a neutral question

Question:

On issues relevant in our politics right now, which political platform is more beneficial to us, Democrat or Republicon, and why?

Response:

Analyzing the two major U.S. political platforms—Democrat and Republican—requires a clear, issue-by-issue comparison based on policies and their likely impacts on society. Below is an overview of how each party approaches the listed issues and which platform tends to benefit the majority of Americans, based on available evidence and historical actions.

1. Climate Change and Energy

• Democrats: Support renewable energy investment, international climate agreements (e.g., Paris Accord), and regulations on emissions.

• Benefit: Reduces long-term environmental risks and creates clean energy jobs.

• Republicans: Focus on deregulating fossil fuels, questioning climate science, and prioritizing short-term energy independence through oil and gas.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Climate science overwhelmingly shows the urgency of reducing emissions to prevent global warming and its catastrophic effects.

2. Wealth Inequality

• Democrats: Advocate for higher taxes on the wealthy, expanding social safety nets, and raising the minimum wage.

• Benefit: Promotes economic fairness and reduces poverty rates.

• Republicans: Favor tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, arguing it boosts economic growth (“trickle-down economics”).

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Data shows tax cuts for the wealthy primarily widen inequality, while social programs reduce economic disparity.

3. Reproductive Rights

• Democrats: Support access to abortion, contraception, and reproductive healthcare.

• Benefit: Empowers individuals to make personal medical decisions, reducing maternal mortality rates.

• Republicans: Advocate for restricting or banning abortion, often without exceptions for rape or incest.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Restricting abortion leads to unsafe procedures and worsens healthcare outcomes for women.

4. Healthcare Access

• Democrats: Push for expanding Medicaid, lowering drug costs, and supporting universal healthcare.

• Benefit: Reduces the number of uninsured Americans and improves public health.

• Republicans: Seek to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and reduce government involvement in healthcare.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Expanding access improves health outcomes, while Republican policies risk leaving millions uninsured.

5. Gun Violence

• Democrats: Advocate for universal background checks, assault weapon bans, and red flag laws.

• Benefit: Reduces gun deaths and mass shootings, according to studies from countries with similar laws.

• Republicans: Oppose gun control measures, emphasizing Second Amendment rights.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Data consistently shows that stricter gun laws correlate with lower rates of gun violence.

6. Education and Student Debt

• Democrats: Propose reducing student loan debt, increasing public education funding, and making college more affordable.

• Benefit: Expands access to education, which drives economic mobility.

• Republicans: Support school choice, privatization, and reducing federal involvement in education.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Underfunded public schools and high student debt hinder social mobility, which Democrats address more effectively.

7. Voting Rights

• Democrats: Work to expand voting access through early voting, mail-in ballots, and combating voter suppression.

• Benefit: Increases voter turnout and strengthens democracy.

• Republicans: Focus on voter ID laws, restricting voting methods, and questioning election integrity.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Voting restrictions disproportionately harm marginalized groups and undermine democratic participation.

8. Judicial Integrity

• Democrats: Push for judicial appointments that preserve civil rights, voting rights, and environmental protections.

• Benefit: Ensures balanced courts that reflect public values.

• Republicans: Focus on appointing conservative judges, often with corporate or religious biases.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Progressive judicial rulings better protect individual freedoms and minority rights.

9. Media and Information Integrity

• Democrats: Support policies to combat disinformation and promote media literacy.

• Benefit: Encourages informed citizenry and accountability for platforms spreading falsehoods.

• Republicans: Often align with narratives undermining trust in mainstream media and fact-checking.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Misinformation destabilizes democracy, making this issue critical.

10. Immigration

• Democrats: Advocate for comprehensive immigration reform, including pathways to citizenship and humane treatment of migrants.

• Benefit: Bolsters the economy, addresses labor shortages, and upholds human rights.

• Republicans: Emphasize border security, including walls and mass deportations, often framing immigration as a threat.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Immigrants contribute significantly to the economy, and humane policies align with democratic values.

11. Corporate Accountability

• Democrats: Push for stronger regulations on corporations, including anti-trust actions and environmental accountability.

• Benefit: Prevents corporate abuse and ensures fair competition.

• Republicans: Advocate for deregulation and reducing corporate taxes.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: History shows unchecked corporations exploit workers and the environment.

12. Digital Privacy and AI

• Democrats: Support regulating tech companies and protecting digital privacy.

• Benefit: Balances innovation with individual rights.

• Republicans: Often resist regulation, favoring corporate interests.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Without regulations, tech monopolies and privacy violations harm consumers.

13. Infrastructure and Transportation

• Democrats: Invest in public transit, green infrastructure, and broadband expansion.

• Benefit: Improves quality of life and creates jobs.

• Republicans: Focus on traditional infrastructure projects but resist spending on green initiatives.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Comprehensive infrastructure plans address future needs.

14. Military Spending vs. Human Needs

• Democrats: Aim to reduce excessive military budgets and redirect funds toward healthcare, education, and climate action.

• Benefit: Balances security with societal well-being.

• Republicans: Advocate for high military spending, often at the expense of domestic programs.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Excessive military budgets often neglect urgent domestic priorities.

15. Food Security and Safety

• Democrats: Support sustainable farming, SNAP benefits, and food safety regulations.

• Benefit: Addresses hunger while ensuring food safety.

• Republicans: Focus on reducing regulations and cutting food assistance programs.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Robust food programs and safety regulations are vital for public health.

This analysis generally favors the Democratic platform across these issues, as it aligns more closely with data-supported policies that prioritize equity, sustainability, and public welfare.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

New method successfully recycles carbon fiber composite into reusable materials

USC researchers have developed a new process to upcycle the composite materials appearing in automobile panels and light rail vehicles, addressing a current environmental challenge in the transportation and energy sectors. The study recently appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. "I wasn't sure if it was possible to fully recycle composite materials," said Travis Williams, professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. "As wonderful as these materials are for making energy-efficient vehicles, the problem with composites is we don't have a practical route to recycle them, so the materials end up in landfills." The chemistry demonstrated in the study, a partnership among Williams and professors Steven Nutt of the M.C. Gill Composites Center at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Clay C.C. Wang of the USC Alfred E. Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Berl Oakley of the University of Kansas, is a new approach that shows that composite materials can be recovered and recycled in a manner that preserves the integrity of the materials.

Read more.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

By Edward H. Kaplan and Evan Morris

At Ben Gurion-Soroka Hospital, Technion-Rambam Hospital, and the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical Center, we saw how integrated their medical schools and faculty are. The percentage of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who are Arabs greatly exceeds their share in the total population.

We heard Arab university vice presidents, and their Jewish counterparts take full pride in jointly leading Israeli university life. Unlike the scene on American campuses, Muslim and Christian Arabs, Druze and Jewish students understand that their job is to learn, not to fight each other.

In presentations by an Israeli Arab journalist and a Druze professor, we learned that contrary to conceptions prevalent on American campuses, the majority of Israeli Arabs do not seek to separate from Israel. Indeed, while Israeli Arabs do have demands, we learned they are in service of more integration into Israeli society—better schools, law enforcement, and physical infrastructure—not less. Similarly, we learned from a Druze professor the strong connection to the Jewish State felt by the Israeli Druze.

We met face-to-face with faculty in academic disciplines matching our own at each of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the Weizmann Institute of Science, and Tel Aviv University. We also met with the leaders of Sapir College in Sderot which came under direct attack on October 7, and Tel Hai Academic College which is currently evacuated due to the Hezbollah threat from Lebanon.

The President of Israel's Academy of Sciences and Humanities and a Nobel Prize winner addressed the challenges facing Israeli academics in discussion with us. Facing such brilliance (and in such a small country), we were dismayed to learn the extent of academic discrimination being directed at Israeli academics: faculty who were invited to address conferences only to be told later—and in one case upon arrival in Australia—that they were no longer welcome to speak; external reviewers returning evaluation requests because they refuse to consider Israeli scholars; journals reneging on decisions to publish papers that were already accepted.

This is especially upsetting to us given the emergence of organized faculty extremists on American campuses with the publicly stated objective of boycotting Israeli academia. Our reaction to such prejudice is clear: we will build upon already existing collaborations with our Israeli colleagues, invite Israeli speakers to campus, offer to provide objective evaluations and reviews within our academic areas of expertise, and provide opportunities for budding young Israeli researchers.