“ANTHROPOLOGY IN RUINS”:  If you had wanted to ruin a perfectly good November weekend, it looks to me like attending the 2022 annual meeting of the American Anthropology Association would have been just the ticket.  Elizabeth Weiss attended for us and sends us this report.

GIVE THE GIFT OF ANTI-COMMUNISM:  I was thinking about my 7^th teacher today.  God bless Mrs. Naoma O’Neill.  One day out of the blue she insisted that I read Animal Farm.  I thought it sounded like a children’s book, so I was a bit skeptical.  But she was adamant that this was the right book for me.  If there is a 7^th grader in your life, maybe it’s time for Animal Farm.  And following up with The Black Book of Communism wouldn’t be a bad idea.  I have a feeling there aren’t many Mrs. O’Neills teaching in the public schools anymore.  You might need to fill in for them.

GOBBLEDYGOOK:  “Washington State Education Board Wants a ‘Cultural Shift’ to ‘Indigenous Pedagogy.'”

DAVID RANDALL:  “The Sign in Lee Jussim’s Window.”

IS JUDGE JUDY A CIVIL RIGHTS SCOFFLAW?:  I’m shocked.

THE REAL WAR ON WOMEN: Cambridge Dictionary changes its definition of “woman” to  … well … you know.

IT’S ABOUT ALL ABOUT REQUIRING EQUAL OUTCOMES, NOT EQUAL OPPORTUNITY:  On this day in 1970, Griggs v. Duke Power Co. was argued before the Supreme Court.  To understand just how awful this opinion was, read “Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal.”  I suppose in theory it’s possible for the Supreme Court to write a worse decision, but I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen one.

AARON SIBARIUM:  “Universal Basic Income Hits the Bay Area–If You’re Black.”  (Sigh. Why do we have to litigate this kind of idiocy?)

WELL … UH … MAYBE:  “Artificially Selecting for Intelligence in Dogs to Produce Human Level IQ Within 100 Generations.”  I think I like dogs just the way they are.

THIS IS WHY I DON’T PUT MUCH STOCK IN COMPARISONS OF “OFFICIAL” DEATH TOLLS:  Florida’s official death toll for Hurricane Ian is now 144.  By contrast, Puerto Rico officially claims a whopping 2975 deaths for Hurricane Maria in 2017.  That’s a big difference.  But as you might guess, the methodologies used to arrive at those figures were wildly different.  If you want to compare apples to apples, you’re better off comparing Ian’s 144 out of Florida’s population of 21.5 million to Hurricane Maria’s original count of 64 direct deaths out of Puerto Rico’s population of about 3.5 million.

In its recent report evaluating the Trump Administration’s response to Hurricane Maria, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights tried to compare the 2975 to much smaller numbers for Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma in Florida (both of which used the methodology used for Ian).   My Commissioner Statement in the report explains why this was error.

To be fair, the 2975 methodology isn’t crazy.  But it is a bit counter-intuitive. It looks to see how many “excess deaths” occurred during the six-month period following a natural disaster and assumes all of them are somehow disaster related, even if the connection is very, very loose.  That may well be an incorrect assumption, but in the absence of an alternative explanation for why deaths would be elevated during that period, it may be an assumption worth making for comparison’s sake.  The problem was that nobody has attempted to generate comparable figures for the other hurricanes.

HANS BADER:  “Crime Plunges in El Salvador as Criminals Are Sent to Prison.”  Salvadoran president vowed to cut crime by sending criminals to prison.  And it worked.  What a concept ….

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:  Here’s the Federalist Society panel I did on the Supreme Court’s Harvard/UNC case in November with Mike Carvin and Eric Segall.  (I’m mostly talking about this article.)

AARON SIBARIUM IS ON THE “WOKE” BEAT AT THE WASHINGTON FREE BEACON:  “The Hijacking of Pediatric Medicine.”

FROM THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SCHOLARS:  New Study Tracks Rise of DEI in STEM Departments, Associations, Grants, and Literature.  (One of the authors has chosen to remain pseudonymous.  I guess an academic can’t be too careful these days.  It’s way too late for me.)

Link that bypasses the press release and cuts straight to the report here.

HANS BADER:  California’s proposal to give all descendants of slaves $223,200 each in reparations for housing discrimination is unconstitutional.

MINDING THE CAMPUS:  It’s time for the 2022 Lysenko Award.

IT’S SCIENCE!!:  When Musk declares the NYT to be “a lobbying firm for the far left” for failing to cover “Twitter Files,” he may be pointing out an additional example of what Hal Pashler and I wrote about in “Perceptions of Newsworthiness Are Contaminated by a Political Usefulness Bias.”

ANOTHER VOTE OF “NO CONFIDENCE” IN THE (NEWLY WOKE) UNIVERSITY OF SAN DIEGO:  Some of you read James Allan’s essay on the mass retirement of USD’s more conservative law faculty members.  At the time of the essay, the count was four–Larry Alexander, Kevin Cole, Steven Smith, and me.  Well, you can add one more–Tom Smith.  This is a three-year process for all of us.  We won’t be out the door till 2025.  But if you know somebody who was considering attending USD School of Law because of its reputation for having an ideologically diverse faculty (we do get a fair number of those), you may want to give them the bad news.  There are still a few conservative faculty members left, but their numbers are dwindling fast.

IT’S A CRAZY OLD WORLD:  “Idaho Law Banning Transgender Athletes Heard in 9th Circuit.”

(My step-by-step argument for why Title IX does not require schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers of the sex they “identify” with is adaptable to the athletic context).

TRYING TO KEEP CLASSROOMS SAFE AND ORDERLY IS RACIST:  There really are Biden Administration officials who think that.  It’s modern progressive gospel.  We really are in a mess.  I just wish I had better news.

MORE ON COLORADO SPRINGS SHOOTING SUSPECT:  The New York Post details “their” [non-binary pronouns preferred] problems.

HEATHER MAC DONALD:  What happened to the crime issue in the midterms? 

It turns out that black lives really don’t matter.  In the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, conservatives had relentlessly raised the alarm about the post–George Floyd crime surge: homicides had risen 29 percent in 2020 (the largest increase on record), and they have continued rising since then. Democrats and their media allies responded either that crime was a racist fiction or that, because post-Floyd crime levels nationally were still lower than they were in the early 1990s, there was nothing to see here, folks, move on!

These opposing positions were tantamount to saying that black lives matter or that they don’t. Black Americans have borne the brunt of the increased violence since the George Floyd race riots. Their share of homicide victims went from 53 percent in 2019 (blacks are 13 percent of the national population) to 56 percent in 2020. At least an additional 2,164 black lives were lost in 2020 over the 2019 count, compared with an increase of 950 white and Hispanic homicide victims combined in 2020. Such disparities only worsened in 2021 and 2022. In 2020, blacks between the ages of ten and 24 died of gun homicide at 20 times the rate of whites in the same age range. In 2021, blacks between the ages of ten and 24 died of gun homicide at nearly 25 times the rate of whites of the same age.

It’s the only racial disparity that progressives don’t care about.

AFTER SCHOOL SATAN CLUB:  California elementary school has a new “After School Satan Club.”  Parents not amused.

FRANCES WIDDOWSON:  “The Perils of University Indigenization.”

I’M COVID POSITIVE, BUT SO FAR NOT ALL THAT SICK:  At least it gives me a chance to post.  Here’s an interesting piece:  “A Woke Panic on Maternal Mortality.”

As is often the case, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights provides early warning as to the issues progressives will emphasize (and seek funding for).  We did a report last year on the racial disparities in maternal mortality.  My dissenting statement is here.  Progressives seem to believe the racial differences in maternal mortality are the result of uncaring doctors who pay no attention to the pain of African American mothers, because they just don’t give a d*mn.  Progressives don’t even attempt to explain why non-Hispanic white mothers die in childbirth more often than Asian or Hispanic mothers.