You can buy the science you want

This according to NPR. So now we know the reason Americans started getting obese at the same time the government started telling us what to eat. The result? Today, almost one-third of all American adults are obese and the rate is increasing. And this year, for the first time, a majority of American adults are either diabetic or pre-diabetic.

But remember when you are told that you are killing the planet: global warming research has nothing to do with money! It's hard science and scientists would never let their research and publishing be influenced by grants, awards, and seats at international conferences!

Update: The science is settled!

Update: Dozens of Failed Climate Predictions Stretch 80 Years Back

Christians under genocide and American victimhood

Just last July, Britain's Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt - the equivalent of our secretary of state - pointed out that Christians around the world were the most persecuted group of all.

When the Berlin Wall fell 30 years ago, the European nations that Brother Andrew had visited undercover won their liberty and achieved one of the greatest advances of human freedom in modern history.

Yet when I became Foreign Secretary, I learned that almost a quarter of a billion Christians were still enduring persecution around the world.

The evidence shows sadly that the situation is becoming worse. The number of countries where Christians suffer because of their faith rose from 128 in 2015 to 144 a year later. In the Middle East, the very survival of Christianity as a living religion is in doubt.

A century ago, 20% of the region’s people were Christians; today the figure is below 5%.

(On Gov.UK, "Persecution of Christians review: Foreign Secretary’s speech following the final report") Secretary Hunt went on to say that 80 percent of the world's victims of religious persecution are Christians.

And that persecution is very often, if not usually, of the murderous kind:

Mass grave of murdered Christians in Syria.
Photos like this have been taken in many other places in the world.

Now,

The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) shared the report compiled by the Bishop of Truro, the Right Reverend Philip Mounstephen. It states that violence and oppression against Christians are worsening as time goes by.

"Evidence shows not only the geographic spread of anti-Christian persecution, but also its increasing severity," the report states. "In some regions, the level and nature of persecution is arguably coming close to meeting the international definition of genocide, according to that adopted by the UN."

The evidence shows that Christianity is "by far the most widely persecuted religion." 

Original ACLJ report is here.

Meanwhile, in the United States the hip and "woke" compete with one another on who belongs to the most oppressed victim group. Because victimhood brings status in the US today; the US is rapidly becoming ever-more dominated by a victimhood culture.

What we call victimhood culture combines some aspects of honor and dignity. People in a victimhood culture are like the honorable in having a high sensitivity to slight. They’re quite touchy, and always vigilant for offenses. Insults are serious business, and even unintentional slights might provoke a severe conflict. But, as in a dignity culture, people generally eschew violent vengeance in favor of relying on some authority figure or other third party. They complain to the law, to the human resources department at their corporation, to the administration at their university, or — possibly as a strategy of getting attention from one of the former — to the public at large.

The combination of high sensitivity with dependence on others encourages people to emphasize or exaggerate the severity of offenses. There’s a corresponding tendency to emphasize one’s degree of victimization, one’s vulnerability to harm, and one’s need for assistance and protection. People who air grievances are likely to appeal to such concepts as disadvantage, marginality, or trauma, while casting the conflict as a matter of oppression.

The result is that this culture also emphasizes a particular source of moral worth: victimhood. Victim identities are deserving of special care and deference. Contrariwise, the privileged are morally suspect if not deserving of outright contempt. Privilege is to victimhood as cowardice is to honor.

When I posted the ACLJ report elsewhere, adding that "Americans would not know actual victimhood if it punched them in the face," a liberal friend of 20-plus years responded,

Suggest that to the family of the black man shot dead by police in a Walmart for holding a toy gun. Or the family of the black child shot dead by police in a Chicago park a few years ago for the same thing. The cop just rolled up, jumped out of the car and opened fire.

Then there are the thousands driven into bankruptcy by medical bills. The mentally ill walking the streets because we won't pay for treatment.

Or the veterans who can't receive decent care or who rely on food stamps that may be cut again so corporations can have tax cuts.

Or...

Don, I don't deny that Christians are being killed in other lands and that it is indeed genocide. But I think you are being pretty selective in defining victims. There are indeed many victims to be found in the US.

Of course there are true victims in America today. The murder rate in Chicago, Baltimore and some other Democrat-controlled cities is shocking. Those killed are certainly victims and often innocent victims.

But what we do not have is a real victim class, despite the devoted efforts of the Left to paint all black people, all homosexuals, all women, etc. as members of a specially-victimized class of persons, all of whom are dragged into victimhood just because of that identity.

No. Not even close to that. In the US today we do not have anything that even approaches the loosest definition of genocide as is happening to our brothers and sisters in Christ in much of the world. We do not have anything that approaches deliberate, planned, lethal persecution of a victim-class of people who are being killed, harmed, injured, deprived of rights or punished simply because of their religion.

And anyone who says, "Oh, America has lots of victims, too!" simply proves my point, that in America today, status-victimhood is a sought-after possession, and those who say that are incredibly equating, "I was triggered and offended by that joke about gays," with, "My husband and my children were beheaded because they were Christians."

I will backtrack, though, on one class of people who are definitely being killed genocidally in America purely because of their identity. That is the unborn, especially unborn black Americans.

But that is not merely acceptable to the Left, it is positively desirable. So perhaps you will understand when I find such protests against this post entirely unpersuasive and in fact unserious.

End note: American Christians are by no means under persecution (though sometimes discrimination), but that is not to say that the rhetorical groundwork is not being laid: Former Antifa College Professor: Kill Christians, Clock Trump With a Bat

Jeff Klinzman is a former adjunct Antifa College Professor at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “Former” because he turned in his resignation after his online comments garnered a considerable backlash. ...

Klinzman also acknowledged that he was Antifa, and made incendiary statements on his facebook page…such as wanting to “stop evangelical Christians” and then included a poem that said, “Kill them all and bury them deep in the ground.”
 
“It’s not pretty, and I’m not proud, but seeing what evangelical Christians are doing to this county and its people fills me with rage, and a desire to exact revenge.” 

He knows he need not worry, though. Another college will quickly hire him, and at a large increase in compensation.

Headlines you can't make up

Link

Middlebury College has canceled a campus speech by conservative Polish Catholic philosopher Ryszard Legutko in response to planned protests by liberal activists.

A professor of philosophy at Jagiellonian University and a member of the European Parliament, Legutko was scheduled to speak Wednesday at the Vermont college's Alexander Hamilton Forum, delivering a lecture entitled "The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies." A member of the anti-Communist Polish resistance during the Cold War, Legutko warns that western democracy is also susceptible to creep towards totalitarianism.

But in the days leading up to the speech, some Middlebury students and professors wrote an open letter demanding the university rescind its sponsorship. The liberal activists took issue with Legutko's pointed critiques of multiculturalism, feminism, and homosexuality, calling them "homophobic, racist, xenophobic, [and] misogynistic."

I am sure you can fill in the rest.

Segregation returns, George Wallace smiles

My alma mater, Wake Forest University, was founded in 1834, taking its name from the North Carolina town where it was first located. In 1956 it moved to in Winston-Salem, N.C., where it prospered as its reputation for first-class liberal-arts education became established more strongly over the years. By the time I graduated in 1977, WFU was ranked as one of the best universities in the southeastern United States; today as one of the best in the nation in the fabled USNews rankings.

Now, however, Wake Forest has decided to throw that all away and return to its Jim Crow past - in the name of diversity and inclusivity, of course. How? "University hosts no-whites-allowed faculty and staff listening sessions."

The listening sessions come amid ongoing racial tensions on campus, including a protest Monday at which some students decried the “white supremacy” that allegedly runs rampant at the private, North Carolina institution.

“Dear faculty and staff colleagues, this is a reminder about our upcoming listening sessions on inclusion that I am holding for faculty and staff of color over the next several weeks,” stated an April 18 email from Michele Gillespie, dean of the college, to campus employees.

The email, a copy of which was obtained by The College Fix, continued:

Here are the upcoming dates and information:

–For faculty/staff who identify as faculty/staff of color: Monday, April 22 at 4:00 pm in ZSR Room 476 (we will be joined by Associate Dean Erica Still)

–For faculty/staff who identify as faculty/staff of color: Thursday, May 2 at 11:00 am in ZSR 476 (we will be joined by Associate Dean Erica Still)

–For staff who identify as staff of color ONLY: Monday, May 6 at 4:00 pm in ZSR Room 477

Please know that I have requested that all department chairs provide staff release time to be able to attend a listening session.

Thankfully, the faculty is not in lockstep with this (though faculty dissidents will not risk publicity).

One professor at the school who asked for anonymity said the situation is absurd right now.

“It’s hard to respond to the ridiculous accusation that Wake Forest tolerates or encourages ‘white supremacy’ and inflicts ‘trauma on students of color,'” the professor said in an email to The Fix. “I question whether it is worth responding to people who use such hyperbolic and hysterical rhetoric. Though the more you placate them, the more they escalate their rhetoric and demands.”

Well, yeah. Welcome to Leftism. What the school is encountering are what I termed "destructors."

 Understand that demands from destructive persons cannot ever be satisfied. For their real goal is not an actual solution to the putative issue, for as the old SDS slogan explains, "This issue isn't the issue." The real goal, very cleverly concealed behind aggrieved tones of voice and claims of how moral/spiritual/right minded/self-denying/unselfish (the list goes on an on) they are is always the same: "I must get my way, all the time."

But that's not the heart of the issue, either. These persons simply must have an enemy, someone or some group who opposes them. For the "my way" that destructors must get is inextricably linked to triumph over an opponent. That's why anyone who does not agree or assent to their demands is a target: the issue is not the demands, but the opposition.

Every issue is personal for destructors. It is not possible to hold a reasonable, contrary position. To resist a destructor's demand is not mere disagreement. It is to oppose the ordering of the world itself in some sense: the Constitution, human decency, morality, even to defy God himself.

"The issue isn't the issue." Demands are only a pretense to evoke the fight. The fight itself is the goal. It is the only goal. Destructors never consider any issue closed for which they do not achieve total victory. They die in every ditch. Every fight is to the death because their very concept of self is woven into it.

That is why university President Nathan Hatch's appeasement efforts are doomed to failure.

Indeed, a month prior to Monday’s protest, President Hatch had already capitulated to numerous demands regarding the university’s racial unrest, including granting the Black Student Alliance control of an exclusive and highly sought after campus lounge space next to one of the main dorms. He also promised more diversity and “unconscious bias” training.

But there can never be enough concessions or "bias training" to placate the protesters. (To his credit, I will say that President Hatch's statement responding to the Sri Lanka massacre of Christians was excellent.)

Wake Forest is walking where North Carolina State University already trod two years ago: "Now the Left thinks George Wallace was a trailblazer." There, the administration pledged to create a segregated housing option for “women of color” only.

Wallace was first elected governor of Alabama in 1963. In his inaugural address that year, Wallace spoke the words that would come to mark his legacy: "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny... and I say ... segregation today ... segregation tomorrow ... segregation forever."

And now, in 2019, in keeping with the segregationist tradition and antebellum values of the George Wallace wing of the American Left, I give you Wake Forest University.

"I'm George Wallace and I approve this action!"

Update: The Wall Street Journal weighs in on, "Segregation by Design on Campus, 

How racial separatism become the norm at elite universities like Yale, Brown and Wesleyan."

The killing fields of western civilization

If this is true, there are three broad areas that constitute the killing fields of modern civilization: academia, the churches, and corporate practices.

For academia, read "Decline & fall: classics edition -- On identity politics in classical studies."

Well, this year, [Donna] Zuckerberg noted, the magazine would aim to make sure that “at least [at least] 70 percent of our contributors be women and 20 percent of our writers be poc,” i.e., “people of color,” i.e., not white. (But isn’t race merely a “social construction”? No, silly, that was last year.) And just how are those percentages going to be achieved? Well, going forward, Eidolon will ask people pitching stories for “demographics,” i.e., are you black or white? Male or female? “I have no interest,” Zuckerberg sermonized, “in providing bland and false reassurances that we only care about good ideas and good writing and not who our authors are.” Who would doubt it? And what about merit? “[A]ppeals to merit,” she said, are “often . . . white supremacist dog-whistles.” So: “If you’re white and we publish you, you will know, for maybe the first time in your career, that it was because of the merit of your idea and not because you’re white.”

 We’d like to know if there are any cases of anyone anywhere being published in a classics journal because he (or even she) was white. 

The article's writer, btw, is not white.

For churches, "Why Social Justice Is Killing Synagogues and Churches -- Data suggests that the more a religious movement is concerned with progressive causes, the more likely it is to rapidly lose members."

Ultimately ... religions, including Judaism [and churches - DS], can only hope to thrive if they serve a purpose that is not met elsewhere in society. It is all well and good to perform good deeds, but if religions do not make themselves indispensable to families, their future could be bleak. [boldface added]

For the business world, the account of an information-technology security engineer, no link, this was posted on a closed Facebook group, but I am pasting all of what he wrote (protecting his name).

Fellow Members,

I just experienced a disturbing couple of days with my employer that I would like to share with you.

I work for the security unit of one of the largest consultancies in the world. Essentially, I help companies to secure their websites.

Once a year, our entire organization gets together for teambuilding, planning, networking, and that sort of thing. I went to the same event this time last year, and I found it rewarding and inspiring. I came away with many ideas on how to do my job better, and many new relationships with peers.

This year was different. While there were certainly many of the same networking opportunities, the overriding theme of the two days was inclusion and diversity. Essentially, we just spent thousands of dollars to fly everyone to one place to spend two days learning how to be more inclusive and more diverse.

As I’ve mentioned here before, my organization has a goal of being 50% women by 2025. I can’t imagine how we can reach such a goal, given that university technology programs are not graduating anywhere near 50% women.

Don’t misunderstand me. People want to come and work for us, so we have added some great women to our organization. It’s been a pleasure to work with them. However, it seems obvious to me that we are going to have to begin to forgo some great male talent soon if we hope to reach this 2025 goal.

I shared with you a couple of weeks back that an internal recruiter was complaining to me that she now has a diversity goal for talent which she is struggling to meet. So, again, our goal is no longer to find the right people, but to find the most diverse people. Our company gives referral bonuses if you were for good people who are hired. That number is now doubled if you refer “diverse“ candidates.

I have managed technical people for nearly 30 years. I’ve managed people of different races, nationalities, sexual orientation - whatever. As a manager, if you can help me reach my goals, you can work for me. I have been a popular manager throughout my career, because I take care of my people.

However, this is different than adding people to my team simply because of their gender, nationality, or sexual orientation. Why the hell should I even care about their sexual orientation? What does that have to do with securing some company’s website?

About 50% of the two days was spent on exercises related to inclusion and diversity. I was given a spreadsheet, and asked to fill it in with the names of the six people I trust the most (other than family). I was then asked to check boxes when the attributes of those people were the same as mine. The attributes were age, race, gender, nationality, and sexual orientation. I was then asked to look at all the checkmarks and ask myself if I should “re-think” the list of the people that I trust the most.

My list was filled with my oldest friends in the world – guys I went to high school with. I’ve been lucky enough to maintain those friendships over the years. I value them as much as anything else in my life.

My employer just asked me to re-think those friendships, because my friendships are not inclusive and diverse enough, in their opinion.

The reason they gave me is that we hire people we trust, and we won’t hire with an eye toward inclusion and diversity if we only trust people like ourselves.

Well, I’ve never hired any one of my old friends. They are my friends. These are not professional relationships. I trust many people professionally of many races, genders, national origins, etc. Again, my litmus test is simple. Can you help me sell my software and delight my customers?

I’m proud to be a good mentor of people younger and less experienced than myself. I’ve trained many people to be better technically, and better with soft skills, such as public speaking. The people I have trained have included people of many races, genders, and national origins. Some I know to be gay, simply because I found out somehow. One woman who worked for me shared with me, over a beer, that she was gay. She opened up to me because, she wanted to tell me how comfortable she was working for me, when other male managers were uncomfortable with her. Frankly, I can’t imagine how anybody could be uncomfortable with her. She did a great job, and every customer loved her. It was her choice to open up to me about her sexual orientation, and that’s fine, but it had no bearing on my view of her. Had another event, I met her partner. This woman was as I have it a baseball fan as I am. We hit it off completely.

This person doesn’t work for me today, but we’re still in touch. She reaches out to me sometimes for career advice, and she has used me as a reference.

We had a number of other exercises, such as putting little shapes on our shirts and then grouping ourselves in any way we thought appropriate, to “prove“ that we naturally go toward people like ourselves. What it proved to me what is that, to get done with the exercise, we’ll go stand next to the people who are closest to us.

I had a funny experience right after this exercise. The exercise was right before lunch. There was a woman ahead of me in the lunch line. I had spoken to her for a while in a different breakout session, and I thought she was great. I made a mental note to keep her in mind for a future project.

However, in the lunch line, she suddenly became very angry due to the lack of a vegetarian option. I looked at the lunch selections. There was a large salad, including a great deal of variety, plus carrots, potatoes, and potato pierogies. Weren’t these vegetarian options? This woman threw her tray down in disgust and stormed off.

I couldn’t help but wonder if all of the inclusion and diversity exercises we had just completed pushed her out of her “teambuilding“ mode, and into her “identity” mode. It was night and day. She was like the guy in the Snickers commercial who turns into Betty White when he’s hungry.

Then, the part that really disturbed me. After the exercises were completed, a woman got up and explained that we were going to begin to have Ask Anything webinars. Executives would essentially be put on the hot seat, and lower level employees could ask them anything. Examples cited were sexual orientation and religion.

So, executives in our organization are going to be forced to go on webinars and talk about their sexuality and their religion? Really?

And, while you would not be forced to attend these events, you would get a “flair” on your personal page if you did. Remember Jennifer Aniston in that movie where she was a waitress, and she kept getting in trouble with her boss because she wouldn’t wear enough flair? This is the same idea.

I don’t want to hear about somebody’s sexuality or religion, so I would be unlikely to attend such an event, but now everyone in the company would be aware of my choice, simply due to the lack of flair on my personal page. Will this be career limiting for me?

Of course, I’ve probably reached as high as I’m likely to go in this organization, given that I’m a 55-year-old white guy. I don’t meet the current leadership criteria.

Frankly, I think this whole idea is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

I work with some great people, and we do great work for customers throughout the world. I came away from these two days concerned that leadership is going to destroy the great thing we have by this over the top focus on inclusion and diversity.

Doesn’t it make more sense to grow our organization by bringing in great talent without consideration for all of these other attributes?

Well, I guess that’s my unconscious bias talking.

I posted earlier this excerpt from Victor Davis Hanson's essay, The Return of Ancient Prejudices.

What is behind the rebirth of these old prejudices? In short, new, evolving prejudices.

First, America seemingly no longer believes in striving to achieve a gender-blind, racially and religiously mixed society, but instead is becoming a nation in which tribal identity trumps all other considerations.

Second, such tribal identities are not considered to be equal. Doctrinaire identity politics is predicated on distancing itself from white males, Christians and other groups who traditionally have achieved professional success and therefore enjoyed inordinate “privilege.”

Third, purported victims insist that they themselves cannot be victimizers. So, they are freer to discriminate and stereotype to advance their careers or political interests on the basis of anything they find antithetical to their own ideologies. ...

And what fuels the return of American bias is the new idea that citizens can disparage or discriminate against other groups if they claim victim status and do so for purportedly noble purposes.

Oh, my: "Why Diversity Programs Fail," at Harvard Business Review.

It shouldn’t be surprising that most diversity programs aren’t increasing diversity. ...

In analyzing three decades’ worth of data from more than 800 U.S. firms and interviewing hundreds of line managers and executives at length, we’ve seen that companies get better results when they ease up on the control tactics. It’s more effective to engage managers in solving the problem, increase their on-the-job contact with female and minority workers, and promote social accountability—the desire to look fair-minded. That’s why interventions such as targeted college recruitment, mentoring programs, self-managed teams, and task forces have boosted diversity in businesses. Some of the most effective solutions aren’t even designed with diversity in mind.

To vast swaths of the Political Class, this is a feature, not a bug: "Millennial Males with Degrees are Getting Crushed in the Workplace."

Honor-Shame dynamics enter the STEMs

I have posted before of how the Left's social dynamic, its basic way of relationships with other persons, is one of honor-shame. Honor-shame is the basic dynamic that human beings evolved with and is still found in Arab and other cultures around the world. 

The Middle East Quarterly explains the essence of the honor/shame culture:

[I[n traditional Arab society ... a distinction is made between two kinds of honor: sharaf and ‘ird. Sharaf relates to the honor of a social unit, such as the Arab tribe or family, as well as individuals, and it can fluctuate up or down. A failure by an individual to follow what is defined as adequate moral conduct weakens the social status of the family or tribal unit. On the other hand, the family's sharaf may be increased by model behavior such as hospitality, generosity, courage in battle, etc. In sum, sharaf translates roughly as the Western concept of "dignity."

Honor, then, is what is granted by the community, by the social units of society. Likewise, shame or disgrace is also so given. The psychologist who used the nom de blog of Dr. Sanity explained in Shame, the Arab Psyche, and Islam, that in Arab cultures, the principal concern over conduct is not that which is guilty or innocent, but that which brings honor or shame.

[W]hat other people believe has a far more powerful impact on behavior than even what the individual believes. [T]he desire to preserve honor and avoid shame to the exclusion of all else is one of the primary foundations of the culture. This desire has the side-effect of giving the individual carte blanche to engage in wrong-doing as long as no-one knows about it, or knows he is involved

In contrast, she says, the West has a Guilt/Innocence culture. "The guilt culture is typically and primarily concerned with truth, justice, and the preservation of individual rights."

Now we come to this, which I present as another exhibit in my premise: "Profs say female STEM grades don’t reflect ‘perceived effort’."

Four professors from Otterbein University argue in a recent academic journal article that "grading practices" may be at least partly responsible for the lack of women in STEM fields.

Based on surveys of 828 STEM students, the professors conclude that female students believe they work harder than their male classmates for similar grades, indicating that "women's higher perceived effort levels are not rewarded."

 [The] Otterbein University professors suggest that women may be averse to STEM fields because they feel they work harder than male students without earning higher grades.

After conducting a study of 828 students in STEM classes, the professors discovered that while women felt they put more effort into their classes than men, they received approximately equivalent grades, which “indicates that women's higher perceived effort levels are not rewarded."

"Science educators could redistribute grades more akin to non-STEM disciplines to increase STEM retention."    Tweet This

"This, in turn, returns us to questions of grading practices,” the professors write. “Does a course grade primarily reward conceptual understanding and problem-solving ability, or does it primarily reward hard work, reflected in course attendance, submission of assignments on time, etc., or some mixture of the two?”

Let's consider this sentence fragment: "... while women felt they put more effort into their classes than men, they received approximately equivalent grades... "

This is literally a Marxist view, the labor theory of value. The women worked harder, so they should get better grades. That the women may not have worked better seems not to have crossed their minds.

In my college days, my friends were envious that I rarely typed (as in, with a typewriter; I am a fossil) a draft of my term papers. I just sat down, banged the keys for awhile, and voila! A term paper came forth, for which my usual grade was an A. My buddies, meanwhile, would labor over draft after draft before going final, and maybe they got an A and maybe they didn't.

I was simply a better writer than they were; it just came naturally to me. But I could labor hours over math assignments and still not finish them, while my friends had long finished theirs and were out dancing with the cheerleaders. However, the professors apparently think that effort counts more than results, even in engineering, and for term papers I should have received only a C or so, and my friends an A because they worked harder than I did, and the reverse for math, right?

Labor is in itself valueless. Example: I hire a local young man to cut my grass and edge the walks and driveway. It's his business. He arrives with a large riding mower and knocks out my half-acre of green in probably not more than 15 minutes, maybe 20; I have never timed him. Now, I could buy a lawn mower, although not one as expensive as his, and I could cut my own grass. But it would take me much longer and require more effort from me than it does from him.

But would my yard be better maintained or look nicer just because I worked harder at it than he did?

But that is not even the real point of the professors' study. The real key point is this: "women felt they put more effort" than the men. How would they know? They can't know. The whole thing is not really about what actually happened, it's about how they felt about what happened. This is foolish, of course, and indicates another step down the road of what I have maintained for many years: led by the Left, America is adopting an honor-shame social ordering and dynamic.

Think of it this way -- these women students feel shamed by their perception of their inferior academic performance. The answer is not to work harder or smarter. It is to recover their honor. And that means that grading must be preferentially curved to do that:

Citing research by Kevin Rask, now a professor at Colorado College, they propose that “science educators could redistribute grades more akin to non-STEM disciplines to increase STEM retention.” 

Yeah, the bridge you will be driving across the chasm a 10 years from now will have been designed by an engineer who was literally given a pass in order to keep her "motivated." Good luck with that.

Update: As someone commented elsewhere, "Grades should reflect knowledge and ability, not effort. I don't want my brake system designed by somebody who's degree is basically a participation trophy."

And I thought the science was settled

Geosystems scientists at Oxford University, that well-known den of climate-change deniers, have concluded that "Global warming may be occurring more slowly than previously thought."

Not warming very fast after all.

Computer modelling used a decade ago to predict how quickly global average temperatures would rise may have forecast too much warming, a study has found.

 

The Earth warmed more slowly than the models forecast, meaning the planet has a slightly better chance of meeting the goals set out in the Paris climate agreement, including limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

 

Scientists said previous models may have been “on the hot side”.

 

The study, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, does not play down the threat which climate change has to the environment, and maintains that major reductions in emissions must be attained.

 

But the findings indicate the danger may not be as acute as was previously thought.

 

Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford and one of the study’s authors told The Times: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.”

Don't you hate it when nature won't cooperate in confirming your politics? By that I refer again to Ottmar Edenhofer, the lead author of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report and co-chair of the IPCC's Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change.

He told Germany's Neue Zurcher Zeitung in November, as reported by Investors.com:
"The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War."

Edenhofer let the environmental cat out of the bag when he said "climate policy is redistributing the world's wealth" and that "it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization." ...

Edenhofer claims "developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community" and so they must have their wealth expropriated and redistributed to the victims of their alleged crimes, the postage stamp countries of the world. He admits this "has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole."

What is climate science really about? Oh, you know:

Remember, climate science's only customers are governments because climate science has no product.

Now the Left thinks George Wallace was a trailblazer

George Wallace was governor of Alabama for a total of 16 years, though not all sequentially. He served from 1963-1967, 1971-1979, and 1983-1987. He gained national notoriety for taking a stand (literally) against integration of the schools and universities of Alabama, even personally standing in the doorway of a classroom building of the University of Alabama to block black students from entering in 1963.

In his inaugural address that year, Wallace spoke the words that would come to mark his legacy: "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny... and I say ... segregation today ... segregation tomorrow ... segregation forever."



Let it be noted that Wallace was a Democrat for all 16 years of his multiple terms. He died at age 79 in 1998. And now, in 2017, in keeping with the segregationist tradition and antebellum values of the George Wallace wing of the American Left, we have this:

The new Director of Multicultural Student Affairs at North Carolina State University recently pledged to create a segregated housing option for “women of color” only.

Nashia Whittenburg, who was hired by NC State less than a month ago, shared her plans to create the housing option for female minority students in a university news release published Tuesday, adding that she plans to submit an official proposal for the housing option by February 2018.

"Here is your opportunity to get some support and to deal with some of the microaggressions."

“The point and purpose is if you are a Latina and you are an engineering major, with a very specific specialization, you may not ever see anybody who looks like you,” Whittenburg explained. “But when you come home, here is your opportunity to get some support and to deal with some of the microaggressions you might have had to deal with throughout your entire day when you’ve been at class.”

"Microaggressions.? Don't you love that? These students' precursors never suffered "microaggressions." They suffered macroaggressions - they were beaten, harassed, roughed up physically and their families were threatened. They were openly cursed and treated with vile contempt - and that was on a good day.

And they put up with it, indeed forced the issue, in order to break down barriers, not create them, to move physically and morally into the mainstream of American life, not withdraw from it.

While NC State already has two housing options for racial minorities—one exclusively for black males and another for Native American students—the school does not currently have one for female racial minority students, hence Whittenburg’s proposal.

It's a thing, apparently, and is being protested (and hopefully sued) at the University of Connecticut by the New York Civil Rights Coalition.

Stacey Dash has some pointed comments at Patheos.com.

Why college grads don't know how to think

This does not mean what you probably think it does. Not any longer.

Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills -- Results of a standardized measure of reasoning ability show many students fail to improve over four years—even at some flagship schools, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of nonpublic results.

Freshmen and seniors at about 200 colleges across the U.S. take a little-known test every year to measure how much better they get at learning to think. The results are discouraging.

At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table, The Wall Street Journal found after reviewing the latest results from dozens of public colleges and universities that gave the exam between 2013 and 2016. (See full results.)

At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.

That's because the test the freshmen and seniors take are not designed to test the critical thinking that is taught them in high school and college. Nor is this result the least surprising.

Why College Graduates Still Can’t Think.

Traditionally, the “critical” part of the term “critical thinking” has referred not to the act of criticizing, or finding fault, but rather to the ability to be objective. “Critical,” in this context, means “open-minded,” seeking out, evaluating and weighing all the available evidence. It means being “analytical,” breaking an issue down into its component parts and examining each in relation to the whole. 

Above  all, it means “dispassionate,” recognizing when and how emotions influence judgment and having the mental discipline to distinguish between subjective feelings and objective reason—then prioritizing the latter over the former.

I wrote about all this in a recent post on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Vitae website, mostly as background for a larger point I was trying to make. I assumed that virtually all the readers would agree with this definition of critical thinking—the definition I was taught as a student in the 1980s and which I continue to use with my own students.

To my surprise, that turned out not to be the case. Several readers took me to task for being “cold” and “emotionless,” suggesting that my understanding of critical thinking, which I had always taken to be almost universal, was mistaken.

I found that puzzling, until one helpful reader clued me in: “I share your view of what critical thinking should mean,” he wrote. “But a quite different operative definition has a strong hold in academia. In this view, the key characteristic of critical thinking is opposition to the existing ‘system,’ encompassing political, economic, and social orders, deemed to privilege some and penalize others. In essence, critical thinking is equated with political, economic, and social critique.”

Boldface added. What is the result? Where to begin? Well, how about where the overwhelming majority of American kids get their education, the public schools system. Education journalist Bruce Deitrick Price explains what happened when a parent had an unplanned, frank conversation with her child's principal:

Finally the principal, aggravated and arrogant, told me schools no longer believe in academic excellence because demanding subjects no longer appeal to the mainstream student or to his parents.

He proclaimed that his program, his syllabus, his teachers were all fully in compliance with local, state, and federal standards, and he wasn't going to change a single thing to accommodate me or my daughter.

He said proudly he is a "Progressive," he has a Ph.D., and he had "helped" develop and design many of those standards, and he believed in them.  He said any kid who wants a higher-level education for a professional career will have to get it somewhere else. 

And then they go college. Notre Dame Prof. Patrick Daneen writes,

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture. ...

At best, they possess accidental knowledge, but otherwise are masters of systematic ignorance. It is not their “fault” for pervasive ignorance of western and American history, civilization, politics, art and literature. They have learned exactly what we have asked of them – to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present.

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

Providence College Prof. Anthony Esolen describes what he and his peers are up against in “Exercises in Unreality: The Decline of Teaching Western Civilization.”

I now regularly meet students who have never heard the names of most English authors who lived before 1900. That includes Milton, Chaucer, Pope, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, and Yeats. Poetry has been largely abandoned. Their knowledge of English grammar is spotty at best and often nonexistent. That is because grammar, as its own subject worthy of systematic study, has been abandoned. Those of my students who know some grammar took Latin in high school or were taught at home. The writing of most students is irreparable in the way that aphasia is. You cannot point to a sentence and say, simply, ‘Your verb here does not agree with your subject.’ That is not only because they do not understand the terms of the comment. It is also because many of their sentences will have no clear subject or verb to begin with. The students make grammatical errors for which there are no names. Their experience of the written language has been formed by junk fiction in school, text messages, blog posts, blather on the airwaves, and the bureaucratic sludge that they are taught for ‘formal’ writing, and that George Orwell identified and skewered seventy years ago. The best of them are bad writers of English; the others write no language known to man.

Wall Street Journal editorialist Bret Stephens wrote in 2012,

A few months ago, I interviewed a young man with an astonishingly high GPA from an Ivy League university and aspirations to write about Middle East politics. We got on the subject of the Suez Crisis of 1956. He was vaguely familiar with it. But he didn't know who was president of the United States in 1956. And he didn't know who succeeded that president. ...

Many of you have been reared on the cliché that the purpose of education isn't to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong. I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.

Then there is Lucia Martinez, an English professor at Reed College who identifies as gay and mixed-race. She wrote, “I am intimidated by these students.”

Prof. Martinez

“I am scared to teach courses on race, gender, or sexuality, or even texts that bring these issues  up in any way—and I am a gay mixed-race woman,” she wrote. “There is a serious problem here… and I’m at a loss as to how to begin to address it, especially since many of these students don’t believe in either historicity or objective facts.” (link)

Noted British philosopher Roger Scruton explains one result:

Young people today are very reluctant to assume that anything is certain, and this reluctance is revealed in their language. In any matter where there might be disagreement, they will put a question mark at the end of the sentence. And to reinforce the posture of neutrality they will insert words that function as disclaimers, among which the favourite is ‘like’. You might be adamant that the Earth is spherical, but they will suggest instead that the Earth is, ‘like, spherical?’

Whence came this ubiquitous hesitation? As I understand the matter, it has much to do with the new ideology of non-discrimination. Modern education aims to be ‘inclusive’, and that means not sounding too certain about anything in case you make people who don’t share your beliefs feel uncomfortable. Indeed, even calling them ‘beliefs’ is slightly suspect. The correct word is ‘opinions’. If you try to express your certainties in a classroom today you are apt to be looked at askance, not because you are wrong, but because of the strangeness of being certain about anything and the even greater strangeness of wanting to impart your certainties to others. The person with certainties is the excluder, the one who disrespects the right we all have to form our own ‘opinions’ about what matters.

However, as soon as inclusiveness itself is questioned, freedom is cast aside. Students seem to be as prepared as they ever were to demand that ‘no platform’ be given to people who speak or think in the wrong way. Speaking or thinking in the wrong way does not mean disagreeing with the beliefs of the students — for they have no beliefs. It means thinking as though there really is something to think — as though there really is a truth that we are trying to reach, and that it is right, having reached it, to speak with certainty. What we might have taken to be open-mindedness turns out to be no-mindedness: the absence of beliefs, and a negative reaction to all those who have them. The greatest sin is a refusal to end each sentence with a question mark.

Ah, yes: it is objectively true that there is no such thing as objective truth. And critical thinking means you know how to denounce the system in proper Marxist terms.

Citing the Gospels in public must be banned

Georgia Gwinnett College has filed legal documents claiming that quoting or discussing the New Testament Gospels is speaking "fighting words" and therefore must be banned from the campus.

The college's Student Code of Conduct defines “disorderly conduct” to include any expression “which disturbs the peace and/or comfort of person(s).” The administration officially enforces this to mean that anyone who does not like what someone says may compel the speaker to be banned, no matter the intention or the content of the speech, but apparently especially Christian speech.

And we say we live in a free country?

"The Coddling of the American Mind"

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.

The Atlantic: The Coddling of the American Mind

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

Read the rest, and consider that the article is two years old. Academia's psychosis had only deepened since then. And yes, some law professors now do refuse to teach rape law or any other law relating to sexual matters.

Plante is one of many academics who increasingly find themselves walking on eggshells to avoid offending their students. Some law school professors have stopped teaching rape law due to complaints from students who claim the subject is traumatizing—even though educating students about this important topic should be more important than making everybody in class comfortable all of the time. 

If professors want to warn their students before discussing particularly disturbing subjects, that’s fine. But it’s concerning that strenuous objection from the students is leading academic to stop teaching these subjects entirely.

But why stop there? Jesus died, but we can't talk about that:

Students in a Bible course at the University of Glasgow are being given trigger warnings before being shown images of the crucifixion — and permission to skip those lessons altogether if they are worried they’ll feel too uncomfortable.

Universities are significantly oriented therapeutically and this increasing trend is overwhelming the educational emphasis.

Outside of hospitals, the university has arguably become the most medicalized institution in Western culture. In 21st-century Anglo-American universities, public displays of emotionalism, vulnerability, and fragility serve as cultural resources through which members of the academic community express their identity or make statements about their plight. On both sides of the Atlantic, professional counselors working in universities report a steady rise in demand for mental-health services.

Among academics there is widespread agreement, too, that today’s students are more emotionally fragile and far more likely to present mental health symptoms than in the past. There is little consensus, however, about why this is so. Marvin Krislov, the president of Oberlin College, has more questions than answers on this score:

I don’t know if it’s related to the way we parent. I don’t know if it’s related to the media or the pervasive role of technology—I’m sure there are lot of different factors—but what I can tell you is that every campus I know is investing more resources in mental health. . . . Students are coming to campuses today with mental-health challenges that in some instances have been diagnosed and in some instances have not. Maybe, in previous eras, those students would not have been coming to college.

Observers of the educational scene have known for years that the very class of students demanding protection from being offended or being exposed to "triggering" material are also the same ones who very hostilely and sometimes violently strike back at persons they classify as aggressors or oppressors. The Atlantic's article calls this "vindictive protectiveness," and recounts how a student at the University of Michigan who poked fun at "what he saw as a campus tendency to perceive microaggressions in just about anything." Retribution was harsh.

A group of women later vandalized Mahmood’s doorway with eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages such as “Everyone hates you, you violent prick.” When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response.

Understand that today's college students are tomorrow's business operators and future managers. They will bring this kind of disfunctionality with them. In fact, it's already been in the workplace for some years. Just a few days ago I met a man with whom I fell into a long conversation that rambled through many topics. At one point he said that he has a difficult time hiring young men or women in his business. "They can't communicate clearly and don't think ahead well." It's not going to get better any time soon, either.

Update: Your tax dollars at work and where else but the University of California system? I'm not even going to print the headline, so click here if you dare.

Refuting the religion of science

Ian Hutchison is a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT. Here he rebuts the idea that science is the ultimate way of knowing about the Real.



"Scientism" is used to describe faith in science. Prof. Hutchison is a Christian. In an address at the Veritas Forum, he spoke of three hypotheses to explain why he believes in the resurrection of Jesus:

Hypothesis one: We’re not talking about a literal resurrection. Perhaps it is just an inspiring myth that served to justify the propagation of Jesus’ exalted ethical teachings. A literal resurrection contradicts the known laws of nature. Maybe scientists can celebrate the idea of Jesus’s spirit living on, while his body remained in the grave.  

Hypothesis two: We really believe in the bodily resurrection of the first century Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth. My Christian colleagues at MIT – and millions of other scientists worldwide – somehow think that a literal miracle like the resurrection of Jesus is possible. And we are following a long tradition. The founders of the scientific revolution and many of the greatest scientists of the intervening centuries were serious Christian believers.  

Hypothesis 3: I was brainwashed as a child. ... But no, I did not grow up in a home where I was taught to believe in the resurrection. I came to faith in Jesus when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University and was baptized in the chapel of Kings College on my 20th birthday. 

Hypothesis two wins:

        To explain how a scientist can be a Christian is actually quite simple. Science cannot and does not disprove the resurrection. Natural science describes the normal reproducible working of the world of nature. Indeed, the key meaning of “nature”, as Boyle emphasized, is “the normal course of events.” Miracles like the resurrection are inherently abnormal. ...

Today’s widespread materialist view that events contrary to the laws of science just can’t happen is a metaphysical doctrine, not a scientific fact. What’s more, the doctrine that the laws of nature are “inviolable” is not necessary for science to function. Science offers natural explanations of natural events. It has no power or need to assert that only natural events happen. 

So if science is not able to adjudicate whether Jesus’ resurrection happened or not, are we completely unable to assess the plausibility of the claim? No. Contrary to increasingly popular opinion, science is not our only means for accessing truth. In the case of Jesus’ resurrection, we must consider the historical evidence, and the historical evidence for the resurrection is as good as for almost any event of ancient history. 

It is refreshing that a scientist understands the principle of "limit questions." Limit questions are those that are outside the realm of a particular field of knowledge. For example, suppose you attended a concert by the London Symphony. As you are leaving afterward, you overhear a man in front of you say, "Speaking as a cardiologist, it is my medical opinion that this was the finest performance of Saint-Saux's Symphony Number Three in C Minor ever presented anywhere."

Immediately you can see that such a statement is simply nonsense. It may well have been the best-ever performance of the symphony, but true or false, it is not a medical question and so his opinion "as a cardiologist" has no authority at all. The quality of a concert is a limit question for physicians. It is outside medical science’s realm of knowledge and expertise.

This is exactly the mistake that many scientists, such as Stephen Hawking, make. When they denounce Christians for affirming the resurrection, they claim that science has proved it was impossible. But as Prof. Hutchison explains, miracles are inherently limit questions for science.
It gets worse. Comes now Wharton School professor and forecasting expert J. Scott Armstrong, whose research shows that fewer than one percent of published scientific papers published in scientific journals actually follow the scientific method. 

“We also go through journals and rate how well they conform to the scientific method. I used to think that maybe 10 percent of papers in my field … were maybe useful. Now it looks like maybe, one tenth of one percent follow the scientific method” said Armstrong... .

Scientific integrity requires scientists and non-scientists alike to recognize that there are limits to scientific knowledge. Failing this is the main error of the New Atheist movement, whose advocates insist that,

·       only science reveals the Real, 

·       only science can discover truth 

·       scientific knowledge is exhaustive and inherently unlimited. 

But these claims are themselves not testable with the scientific method. They are not scientific claims at all, but claims of faith in science, or scientism. Richard Lewontin, an evolutionary biologist and geneticist, explained in The New York Review of Books in 1997 (link) that scientism has a…

... prior commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations ... . Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

This is not evidence of an inquiring mind. The intellectual atheists' veil was further pulled back by Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy and law at New York University:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.  It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief.  It's that I hope there is no God!  I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.  My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.  One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind… This is a somewhat ridiculous situation… [I]t is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist. (The Last Word, pp. 130-131, quoted by fellow philosopher Edward Feser.)

Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, put it this way:

I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption…. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless. … 

For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was …liberation from … a certain system of morality.  We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom…. There was one admirably simple method in our political and erotic revolt: We could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever. Similar tactics had been adopted during the eighteenth century and for the same reasons. (Ends and Means, 270-273)

However, affirming the resurrection of Jesus is not wishful thinking, it is the most reasonable conclusion based on the non-supernatural facts and circumstances surrounding the issue. Note well, please: that the resurrection of Jesus did occur is the ending point of examination of the facts, not the beginning point.

The resurrection of Jesus is foremost an historical question, not primarily a scientific one or even, really, a religious one. And so there will be limits of what science can declare about it just as there are limits on what science can declare about any other historical event. For example, it cannot be "scientifically proven" that Gen. George Washington led his army across the Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776, to attack Hessian forces at Trenton, N.J. That is an historical question, not scientific one.

I have posted about these before. It is the waning days of the Lenten season and Easter is approaching, so I'll revisit them. But not today. Today, let's just deal with one, which is the claim by many scoffers and skeptics that Jesus never really existed in the first place. But what happens when, live and on the air, an atheist holding that position runs into a non-Christian, world-recognized scholar who says that position is silly? Well, this.

Update: Michael Polanyi, a Fellow of the Royal Society and former professor of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester: "Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in, is essentially incomplete and a false pretension. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs which are not scientific statements, and this is untrue... ." Read more.