Unless they’re into Scientism!(tm)
Tag: science
‘Follow the Science’ With Dr. Fauci
No matter what we are told by the “experts,” science is constantly evolving and is rarely ever as settled as those in power want us to believe. Doctors are often forced to make consequential decisions and recommendations based on partial or incomplete sets of data and information. Perhaps no one knows this better than Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
According to Fauci, it is now safe for schools to reopen. All it took was the passing of President Biden’s “COVID relief bill,” which will likely be signed into law this week. “As we now have the relief bill signed at $1.9 trillion — a lot of that is going into addressing COVID-19 including help to the schools to allow them to more safely bring the kids back,” Fauci said on Monday. Considering that the Congressional Budget Office estimated that 95 percent of the money appropriated from the bill to fund schools will not be spent this year, there was no reason for Fauci to present its passing as a prerequisite for reopening schools — unless of course we fool ourselves into believing that he is motivated by science, and not by whatever the Biden administration tells him to say.
Biden Wars Against Biological Sex And Due Process With Two New Executive Orders
Days after corporate media outlets said Joe Biden is “rolling back the culture war,” the president continued his war on biological sex and due process on Monday with the introduction of two executive orders that seek to dismantle Trump-era protections in the name of “advancing gender equity and equality” and promoting it as “a matter of human rights, justice, and fairness.”
Biden’s first order mandates the creation of a gender policy council, disguising issues such as promoting access to abortions and pushing gender- and race-driven agendas as a way to “advance gender equity and equality, with sensitivity to the experiences of those who suffer discrimination based on multiple factors, including membership in an underserved community.”
“We are very inclusive in our definition of gender,” council co-chair Jennifer Klein said in a White House briefing Monday. “We intend to address all sorts of discrimination and fight for equal rights for people, whether that’s LGBTQ+ people, women, girls, men.”
In addition to a commitment to fight “systemic bias and discrimination, including sexual harassment,” the council also plans to address women in the workforce, economic disparities including wage gaps, and “the caregiving needs of American families,” specifically examining “policies to advance equity for Black, indigenous and Latina women and girls of color.”
“It is, therefore, the policy of my Administration to establish and pursue a comprehensive approach to ensure that the Federal Government is working to advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity, in advancing domestic and foreign policy — including by promoting workplace diversity, fairness, and inclusion across the Federal workforce and military,” the order states.
In his second order, Biden instructs the Department of Education to review the Trump administration and former education secretary Betsy DeVos’s due process expansions on college campuses, which gave students accused of sexual misconduct a chance to receive a fair trial, investigation, and evaluation. The president hopes to reinstate at least some Obama-era policies that overhaul Title IX and potentially withhold or cut funding from schools that don’t comply with broader sexual harassment definitions and lowered evidence standards for victims, as he previously promised on the campaign trail.
It’s Science!(tm), man…
SUNY Geneseo Suspends Education Student for Saying ‘A Man Is A Man, A Woman Is A Woman’
State University of New York (SUNY) Geneseo has suspended an education student from required teaching programs after he expressed his views on biology in a social media post. In one video, the student says that “a man is a man,” and “a woman is a woman.” The university states that the student’s conservative social media posts call into question his ability to “maintain a classroom environment protecting the mental and emotional well-being of all of [his] students.”
Education student Owen Stevens received an email from SUNY Geneseo, informing him that he was suspended from his field teaching programs after his classmates saw his Instagram videos, according to a report by Daily Wire.
“A man is a man, a woman is a woman. A man is not a woman, and a woman is not a man,” said Stevens in one of the videos in question. “A man cannot become a woman, and a woman cannot become a man.”
“If I’m a man, and I think I’m a woman, I’m still a man. If I’m a woman who thinks I’m a man, I’m still a woman,” the student added. “Regardless of what you feel on the inside, is irrelevant to your biological status. It doesn’t change the biology.”
Amid protests against racism, scientists move to strip offensive names from journals, prizes, and more
For Earyn McGee, terminology matters.
McGee, a herpetologist, studies the habitat and behavior of Yarrow’s spiny lizard, a reptile native to the southwestern United States. The University of Arizona graduate student and her colleagues regularly pack their things—boots, pens, notebooks, trail mix—and set off into the nearby Chiricahua Mountains. At their field site, they start an activity with a name that evokes a racist past: noosing.
“Noosing” is a long-standing term used by herpetologists for catching lizards. But for McGee, a Black scientist, the term is unnerving, calling to mind horrific lynchings of Black people by white people in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. “Being the only Black person out in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of white people talking about noosing things is unsettling,” she says. McGee has urged her colleagues to change the parlance to “lassoing,” which she says also more accurately describes how herpetologists catch lizards with lengths of thread.
McGee isn’t alone in reconsidering scientific language. Researchers are pushing to rid science of words and names they see as offensive or glorifying people who held racist views.
Scientists clone the first U.S. endangered species
Scientists have cloned the first U.S. endangered species, a black-footed ferret duplicated from the genes of an animal that died over 30 years ago.
The slinky predator named Elizabeth Ann, born Dec. 10 and announced Thursday, is cute as a button. But watch out — unlike the domestic ferret foster mom who carried her into the world, she’s wild at heart.
“You might have been handling a black-footed ferret kit and then they try to take your finger off the next day,” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service black-footed ferret recovery coordinator Pete Gober said Thursday. “She’s holding her own.”
Elizabeth Ann was born and is being raised at a Fish and Wildlife Service black-footed ferret breeding facility in Fort Collins, Colorado. She’s a genetic copy of a ferret named Willa who died in 1988 and whose remains were frozen in the early days of DNA technology.
Accommodating Trans Athletes Without Rejecting the Reality of Human Biology
If the world’s sporting bodies were forced to choose between (a) the traditional differentiation of sports competitions along male-female lines, and (b) a system of unfettered gender self-identification, the choice would not be difficult: The idea that half the planet should focus on being a good loser while male bodies dominate the medal podium is preposterous and sexist.
From puberty onwards, male physiological advantages express themselves as increased muscle mass, higher lung capacity and blood flow, and increased bone strength. As recent studies have shown, these advantages generally don’t go away simply because an athlete has changed their pronouns and hormone chemistry. At the highest levels, the difference between male and female world records typically hovers around 10 percent. The men’s world record in the 100m dash, for instance, is 9.58 seconds. The record among women, by contrast, is 10.49 seconds—a time that is routinely bested by teenaged male athletes at high-school track meets. And so while the number of transgender women competing may still be small, their likelihood of out-competing biological females is high. And in sports that involve physical contact, such as rugby and boxing, ignoring the biological differences between men and women isn’t just unfair, but also dangerous.
In their sights…
Everything They Don’t Like Is Now a Public Health Emergency
Dissecting the Letter
“White supremacy is a lethal public health issue.” The language used here is important. White supremacy is lethal. Racism kills people. What is not written is, “Sometimes white supremacists, acting out of hatred, kill black people,” or even, “All white supremacists are culpable in the murder of black people.” Instead, the agency is assigned to racism itself. It is racism, not racist people, that is the public health issue; it is white nationalism that kills people. This is the same tactic used by antigun lobbies in their slogan “Guns kill people.” If guns kill people, guns need to be illegal. People killing people with guns is already illegal, just as white supremacists killing black men is already illegal. To advance further legal change, you have to change the language. “White supremacy kills people” leads the same people who want guns outlawed to want white supremacy outlawed. While the letter does not draw out these ideas to their logical conclusions, the logic employed is well down the slippery slope of sacrificing free speech.
“We do not condemn [demonstrations that call attention to the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy] as risky for COVID-19 transmission.” That’s weird because every other kind of gathering is condemned by these people as risky.
Hellbound and Down 
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