LESLIE EASTMAN REVIEWS James Lacy & Katy Grimes’ new book, California’s War Against Donald Trump.
Archive for 2017
October 19, 2017
GREAT MOMENTS IN 2017 HEADLINES: 6 Vegan Alternatives For Threatening Sexual Predators (Just Like Carrie Fisher Did!). Including this:
3.A Picture of Elizabeth Warren Elizabeth Warren is one of the most feared women in Congress. She can reduce a full-grown adult male to a sniveling, terrified puddle on the floor. She is a symbol of justice, a symbol of feminism, and a symbol that if you ever touch my friend ever again, you will pay in blood (just not animal blood).
The 21st century is really not working out the way it was supposed to.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: US consulting firm with ties to the Clintons lobbied on behalf of Russia’s nuclear giant.
JUNK SCIENCE AND “IMPLICIT BIAS:” Are We All Unconscious Racists? No: there’s scant evidence to support the trendy implicit-bias theory.
Though proponents refer to IAT research as “science”—or, in Kang’s words, “remarkable,” “jaw-dropping” science—their claims about its social significance leapfrogged ahead of scientific validation. There is hardly an aspect of IAT doctrine that is not now under methodological challenge.
Any social-psychological instrument must pass two tests to be considered accurate: reliability and validity. A psychological instrument is reliable if the same test subject, taking the test at different times, achieves roughly the same score each time. But IAT bias scores have a lower rate of consistency than is deemed acceptable for use in the real world—a subject could be rated with a high degree of implicit bias on one taking of the IAT and a low or moderate degree the next time around. A recent estimate puts the reliability of the race IAT at half of what is considered usable. No evidence exists, in other words, that the IAT reliably measures anything stable in the test-taker.
But the fiercest disputes concern the IAT’s validity. A psychological instrument is deemed “valid” if it actually measures what it claims to be measuring—in this case, implicit bias and, by extension, discriminatory behavior. If the IAT were valid, a high implicit-bias score would predict discriminatory behavior, as Greenwald and Banaji asserted from the start. It turns out, however, that IAT scores have almost no connection to what ludicrously counts as “discriminatory behavior” in IAT research—trivial nuances of body language during a mock interview in a college psychology laboratory, say, or a hypothetical choice to donate to children in Colombian, rather than South African, slums.
Read the whole thing.
SO ACCORDING TO THIS ARTICLE, “female sexuality is often shrouded in shame and secrecy.” Yet I don’t see very many published pieces celebrating the glory of the male orgasm.
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FASTER, PLEASE: Researchers uncover new approach to suppress HIV production.
LET HE WHO HAS NEVER CHILLED OUT AT AN L.A. POST-BURNING MAN DECOMPRESSION SESSION CAST THE FIRST STONE: “Yet even as [former Weinstein attorney/enabler Lisa] Bloom was still coming to terms with the events of the past month — she attended the post-Burning Man gathering L.A. Decompression over the weekend in an attempt to gain perspective — she seemed focused on some of the smaller details of what went wrong.”
BRUCE BAWER: A Visit to Tivoli.
HOW CAN WE MISS HIM IF HE WON’T GO AWAY: Barack Obama is “back” on the campaign trail he never really left.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:
● Shot: Louisiana State University builds $85 million recreation complex including a giant “lazy river” concrete swimming pool meets aqua maze.
● Chaser: The best of times, the worst of times: Inside LSU’s Middleton Library and the Cox Center. Extensive photos illustrate how the library is crumbling with extensive flooding damage while the Cox Communications Academic Center for Student-Athletes is gleaming, spotless, and modern.
“SHOCKED” OR “SHOCKED, SHOCKED?” Judge shocked to learn NYPD’s evidence database has no backup.
As part of an ongoing legal battle to get the New York City Police Department to track money police have grabbed in cash forfeitures, an attorney for the city told a Manhattan judge on October 17 that part of the reason the NYPD can’t comply with such requests is that the department’s evidence database has no backup. If the database servers that power NYPD’s Property and Evidence Tracking System (PETS)—designed and installed by Capgemini under a $25.5 million contract between 2009 and 2012—were to fail, all data on stored evidence would simply cease to exist.
Courthouse News reported that Manhattan Supreme Court judge Arlene Bluth responded repeatedly to the city’s attorney with the same phrase: “That’s insane.”
New York City is in the very best of hands.
HARVEY WEINSTEIN, MICHAEL MOORE, AND THE END OF THE 1960s SEXUAL REVOLUTION.
Read the whole thing.
A VOICE OF DECENCY: Kelly Speaks About Son’s Death and Criticizes Congresswoman Wilson.
John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, delivered an emotional, personal defense of President Trump’s call this week to the widow of a slain soldier, describing the trauma of learning about his own son’s death in Afghanistan and calling the criticism of Mr. Trump’s call unfair.
Mr. Kelly said that he was stunned to see the criticism, which came from a Democratic congresswoman, Representative Frederica S. Wilson of Florida, after the president delivered a similar message to the widow of one of the soldiers killed in Niger. He said afterward he had to collect his thoughts by going to Arlington National Cemetery for more than an hour.
In a remarkable, somber appearance in the White House briefing room, Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine general whose son was slain in battle, said he had told the president what he was told when he got the news.
“He was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed,” Mr. Kelly recalled. “He knew what he was getting into by joining that one percent. He knew what the possibilities were, because we were at war.”
“I was stunned when I came to work yesterday, and brokenhearted, when I saw what a member of Congress was doing,” he said. “What she was saying, what she was doing on TV. The only thing I could do to collect my thoughts was to go walk among the finest men or women on this Earth.”
It was an indecent thing she did, but it served its purpose. It buried the story about driving ISIS out of Raqqa, with the Trump Administration having done in months what Obama didn’t do in years.
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FINALLY: Finally, proof that gators are snacking on sharks.
Researchers have found that American alligators like nothing better than to snack on sharks and stingrays and have been found grabbing the fearsome sea creatures as they swim by in estuaries in Florida and Georgia.
In a study published in the journal Southeastern Naturalist, James Nifong of Kansas State University and Russell Lowers, a wildlife biologist at the Kennedy Space Center, detailed for the first time how alligators on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts are eating small sharks and stingrays.
“Before this,” Nifong said in a statement from Kansas State, “there have only been a few observations from an island off the Georgia coast, but the new findings document the occurrence of these interactions from the Atlantic coast of Georgia around the Florida peninsula to the Gulf Coast and Florida panhandle.” He said the alligators were spotted eating three species of shark as well as stingrays.
Anyone else see big potential for a “Sharkgator” franchise on SyFy?
WE SHOULD RETURN TO 28-YEAR COPYRIGHT TERMS, RENEWABLE ONCE FOR 14 MORE: Disney: The Only Fun Allowed At Children’s Birthday Parties Is Properly Licensed Fun.
STARTING TO HAVE MY DOUBTS ABOUT BETTERIDGE’S LAW OF HEADLINES: Is Hollywood sitting on a pedophilia scandal?
Related: Barbara Walters faces backlash after Corey Feldman clip resurfaces.
(Classical reference in headline.)