That’s Number 1 but it should not stop you from looking at all the others: 10 Technological Marvels from the 20th Century that Today’s Kids Don’t Know What to Do With. I wonder what they’d make of a washboard. In thirty years’ time what will kids then make of the internet? No doubt gadgets are better now than they were and will keep on getting better as well if we can prevent ourselves from Venezueling our economies.
Bad sports in particular. Start with the single most important issue in the world over the last 24 hours: Serena Williams is calling out sexism in tennis. Here’s why. From the ever-reliable CNN.
At a news conference following her loss, Williams said she’s seen male players call other umpires “several things.”
“I’m here fighting for women’s rights and for women’s equality and for all kinds of stuff. For me to say ‘thief’ and for him to take a game, it made me feel like it was a sexist remark,” she said.“He’s never taken a game from a man because they said ‘thief.’ For me it blows my mind. But I’m going to continue to fight for women,” Williams said.
Billie Jean King, a tennis legend and equal rights advocate, agreed with her.
Then there’s this, from the just as reliable Huffington Post: Colin Kaepernick Praises NFL Week 1 Anthem Protests As Trump Fumes. Helps to explain why Nike lost a few billion on market cap, but who knows.
And for something closer to home: Hannah Mouncey withdraws from AFLW draft.
And as always it is important to keep politics out of sports.
From Swedish election: deadlock as far right makes gains.
In fact, part of the biggest story of our times.
Bad, sad, rad and mad, but funny.
Does belief in God make sense of the world? Or does reality itself point to God’s absence? Is God real or is he a product of human minds? The video is from Those Who Lack a Belief In God Usually Lack an Argument. In the debate above, both have arguments but only one has an argument in favour of God, and the opposite case seems absolutely empty. You should also go to the link.
Such a clever daughter he has, who can exactly replicate the beliefs and values of her parents. I refer here to Peter von Onselen’s 11-year who has “won a NSW writing competition run by the University of Western Sydney” which is retold in The Oz under the heading Liberal problem with gender even my daughter can see. So I will deal with the problems of gender-based decision-making her father can’t see, which is entirely to be expected. So let me begin with this:
The guiding principle for pupils was to choose a topic that mattered to them; Sasha chose to write an essay on women’s rights.
Beats me what rights are missing that this 11-year-old can identify, but that is what she chose. I know there is much going on about outcomes women are not achieving that many feel are their due, but there is certainly no absence of rights – as in cultural or legislative barriers to prevent any woman from doing whatever she can in whatever area she chooses – missing from her life. But that’s not what she is complaining about. PVO goes on a rant about Liberals bullying so the column is really about the Liberal Party. This then is what is being complained about.
My daughter put it like this: “A quota or target — guaranteeing a minimum number of women take up positions in parliament — would overcome discrimination which prevents them being judged on their abilities.”
I’d have to see more of what she wrote but what exactly is the evidence of this discrimination? But more to the point, she wants quotas for women! Never mind getting there on merit. She wants set asides, even if it discriminates against more qualified men. And why? To repeat:
“[It] would overcome discrimination which prevents them being judged on their abilities.”
Now, of course, they no longer teach grammar so no one would any longer point out that it should be “which prevents their being judged on their abilities”. But really, the entire point is that she does not want to be judged on her abilities in comparison to some male. She wants a female sinecure of some kind where she is judged only against her female peers. Not the kind of standard I’d want for heart surgeons and the garage mechanic fixing my brakes, but for Members of Parliament it may be less damaging. There is no arguing that every political party, and the top members of an elected administration, should have a sizeable number of female members, precisely because the female perspective is different on many of the issues that matter. However, she whines about equal numbers everywhere, and you can see a bright future for her in some socialist agency. As PVO says, which his daughter no doubt has latched onto:
There is no escaping the fact that it is harder for a woman to reach the top of her profession than it is for a man.
And the ridiculous example is that Australia has had only a single female Prime Minister. I might note that my home and native land has only had a single female Prime Minister as well, Kim Campbell, who ended up with the shortest tenure of any Canadian Prime Minister in history and then lost in a landslide, almost wiping out the Conservative Party at the same time. But that is beside the point. The reality is that no parent has anything other than a desire to see their daughters (and granddaughters) succeed. This is pure nonsense:
You can only imagine how young girls feel about such disparity in gender representation, long before the ingrained sexism in so many parts of society knocks them down and stifles their promotion or, worse still, their confidence…. I don’t want my daughter to lose that confidence she still has as a child.
If you really believe your daughter can do anything – she is certainly permitted to try her hand at anything but with no guarantees of success – but if you believe she can be successful at whatever she wishes to attempt to do, it is madness and profoundly self-defeating to build into her psychological mindset the belief that in spite of everything she is likely to fail because of some ingrained sexism which prevents her from succeeding. If you want to chop away her confidence, that is the way to do it, by telling her from the start that she is less likely to succeed than an equally placed male.
So to the finale.
Sasha’s last line in her piece was one I wish I’d thought of myself, it so perfectly cuts through on this issue of poor female representation in the upper echelons of politics, business and many other professions not traditionally decreed as “women’s work”: “Half the population deserves access to half the opportunities on offer.”
Personally, I think that is completely incoherent. The true point is that everyone, both male or female, has a right to compete for every one of the opportunities available. What we have here instead is a poorly worded stated desire that there should be a quota for women to ensure that half of all of the desirable jobs in the world go to them. Not based on merit. Not based on ability. Not based on smarts and proven competence. Just automatically half. What a buffoon PVO is:
Half the population deserves access to half the opportunities on offer. Damn right. It’s not merely a matter of breaking down legal discrimination, as has been occurring for years. It’s necessary also to address cultural discrimination and prejudice.
I find this particularly ridiculous. This is a quote from Sacha’s essay:
“When she finds out she is pregnant it should be a time of great joy in her life, and it is. But she is also worried that her male boss won’t be understanding: about the time she will need off to care for her newborn baby. Every day thousands of women worry they will end up in a lower paid job or even fired, just because they had a baby. This is despite laws saying that can’t happen. It does happen and it is not fair.”
As it happens, I worked on the parental leave test case many years back in which the issue was to set out in law the workplace rights that parents should have to allow mothers to raise their children in the face of business needs to be able to count on their employees showing up to work, and the importance of containing production and training costs. I had young children at the time so it was a personal issue I understood as well as one of public policy. The need to balance the two sides is something PVO is completely oblivious to.
In a previous workplace, my wife, then a law partner, no less, found herself being pressured to return to work from her first pregnancy sooner than she ideally wanted. A compliment as a worker, she was told; it nonetheless flew in the face of legislative rights for women to have 12 months’ unpaid maternity leave.
She was a law partner and they valued her work so much that they wanted her to come back to work sooner than she wanted to. Where’s the discrimination there? She was, of course, only “pressured” to come back. And this was no doubt some large-ish enterprise where it is somewhat easier to share the burdens. It gets worse if you are a four-person enterprise, for example. It is illegal to deny parental leave, and it is even illegal to discriminate against a woman because she is of an age when she might become pregnant, but you would not be amazed to find out that there may well be an employer or two – male and female – who will have such considerations in mind when they are hiring new employees.
From Steve Hayward at Powerline: Academic Cowardice Reaches a New Low. There are modern compulsory myths about the world and absolutely no one is permitted to even hint that they are untrue, even in a paper on mathematics that no one would ever have read except for all the havoc. The left are fascistic nazis in every way that counts. They would end free speech in a minute if they could and close down all public opposition to their beliefs. A terrible story foreshadowing a terrible future. It is similar in many ways to the story about “bullying” told by Andrew Bolt. Meantime, let us see what happened when it is pointed out that there is evidence that the male of the species have different characteristics than the female of the species, and in this we include the human species.
About ten days ago I reported on the academic study of “sudden onset gender dysphoria” that Brown University repudiated after it came under fire from the transgender community, but today I learn of a new suppression of academic expression that makes Brown’s cowardice look tame.
The good people at Quillette have the whole story (and if you’re not reading Quillette you should be). The story is long and detailed and hard to summarize, but these are the key elements:
• Prof. Ted Hill, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Georgia Tech, wrote an article, whose background research had been supported by the National Science Foundation, on the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH), which asserts that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women. This hypothesis is well known in the data on sex differences, and has a long lineage in evolutionary biology. After working with some other scholars to review the data further and enlisting one (Sergei Tabachnikov of Penn State) as a co-author, Hill secured publication in the journal Mathematical Intelligencer, whose editor-in-chief is Marjorie Wikler Senechal, Professor Emerita of Mathematics and the History of Science at Smith College.
She liked our draft, and declared herself to be untroubled by the prospect of controversy. “In principle,” she told Sergei in an email, “I am happy to stir up controversy and few topics generate more than this one. After the Middlebury fracas, in which none of the protestors had read the book they were protesting, we could make a real contribution here by insisting that all views be heard, and providing links to them.”
Well you can guess where this story goes from here. When a pre-print version of the article appeared online, feminists took aim, and succeeded spinning up an inquisition against the authors:
On August 16, a representative of the Women In Mathematics (WIM) chapter in his department at Penn State contacted [Sergei Tabachnikov] to warn that the paper might be damaging to the aspirations of impressionable young women. . . Sergei said he had spent “endless hours” talking to people who explained that the paper was “bad and harmful” and tried to convince him to “withdraw my name to restore peace at the department and to avoid losing whatever political capital I may still have.” Ominously, “analogies with scientific racism were made by some; I am afraid, we are likely to hear more of it in the future.”
The the National Science Foundation ran for the tall grass:
The National Science Foundation wrote to Sergei requesting that acknowledgment of NSF funding be removed from our paper with immediate effect. I was astonished. I had never before heard of the NSF requesting removal of acknowledgement of funding for any reason. On the contrary, they are usually delighted to have public recognition of their support for science.
The ostensible reason for this request was that our paper was unrelated to Sergei’s funded proposal. However, a Freedom of Information request subsequently revealed that Penn State WIM administrator Diane Henderson (“Professor and Chair of the Climate and Diversity Committee”) and Nate Brown (“Professor and Associate Head for Diversity and Equity”) had secretly co-signed a letter to the NSF that same morning. “Our concern,” they explained, “is that [this] paper appears to promote pseudoscientific ideas that are detrimental to the advancement of women in science, and at odds with the values of the NSF.”
Next:
That same day, the Mathematical Intelligencer’s editor-in-chief Marjorie Senechal notified us that, with “deep regret,” she was rescinding her previous acceptance of our paper. “Several colleagues,” she wrote, had warned her that publication would provoke “extremely strong reactions” and there existed a “very real possibility that the right-wing media may pick this up and hype it internationally.” For the second time in a single day I was left flabbergasted. Working mathematicians are usually thrilled if even five people in the world read our latest article. Now some progressive faction was worried that a fairly straightforward logical argument about male variability might encourage the conservative press to actually read and cite a science paper?
It gets still worse from here. The authors placed the article online in a second journal, the New York Journal of Mathematics, only to see the article suddenly disappear after another campaign to suppress it. The entire article is stomach turning. But do read it: I’ve only samples a few highlights in this summary.
From Instapundit. And it may be all they have, but it’s quite a lot.
I’ve written before about how jihadists and anti-Semites have mastered the PR game and co-opted the alleged intelligentsia of Oxbridge and the extreme US left.
But take heart: an Op/Ed in yesterday’s WSJ points out that smugness, a false sense of superiority and a compliant liberal press are all they have. The facts speak for themselves:
In 2012 [Corbyn] approved of a mural that grotesquely depicted Jewish bankers, and he did not reverse himself until earlier this year…In 2012 he appeared on Iranian television to celebrate the release of Palestinian terrorists by Israel in a painful prisoner exchange with Hamas. He referred to the returning convicts as “brothers.”
And most sickening of all:
In 2014 he laid a wreath at the graves of terrorists involved in the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Summer Olympics in 1972.
Meanwhile, this quote in the comments sums up what I also believe:
Comparing Corbyn’s overt anti-Semitism to Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech are only similar in that they are/were controversial. Powell was vilified for stating that if his country opens its borders to immigratnts whose values were incompatible with British values, Britain will cease to be Britain. He was, of course, correct, and there are now 1 million Muslims now living in metropolitan Londonistan. When Powell made that speech, how many British women and girls had to worry about acid attacks, FGM, forced marriages, honor killings or rape/grooming gangs?
As for Corbyn, what’s sick is that he’s not nearly as “controversial” as he should be. Why? Well, those 1 million Muslims in Londonistan agree with him. So do the millions of other Muslims in England, and the millions of other Btitish who’ve been barraged by Jew and Israel hatred from the BBC, the academy, the left and the media for the past 20 years.
And if you want truly macabre, this is near the norm in parts of the diaspora:
From The Campus Review. This is an exact reprint.
The report, by QS and student recruitment agency the Institute of Student Employers, found that employers thought students deficient in 12 of the 15 skills surveyed.
Having also gleaned insights from 16,000 students, the report authors noted that students and employers held different views on which skills were most valuable. While students believed creativity and data analysis were key, employers preferred problem-solving, teamwork and communication skills.
The results also varied by business size, as well as location. For example, large companies prized leadership over technical skills, and North American employers were relatively satisfied with their graduate employees – especially compared with Latin American ones.
Global Overview of Core Skills: Importance v Satisfaction
Photo: QS/Institute of Student Employers
Dasha Karzunina, Market Insights Manager at QS, said the report verifies widely-held beliefs about students’ skills gaps. This implies that a purpose of university education is to prepare students for employment. Undoubtedly many – if not all universities would affirm this. Yet some people argue that preparing students for employment is the job of vocational providers, not universities.
These, however, are lone voices. Students want graduate jobs, so universities, swayed by market forces, attempt to ready students for them. Examples include the growing emphasis universities place on inculcating soft, transferable skills in students to suit the rapidly shifting employment landscape, and the increasing prominence of experiential learning and industry placements across degrees.
To further prepare students for careers, universities could introduce measures that enhance their resilience – their largest skill ‘gap’. For instance, universities could consider improving resilience as part of the student experience, even as an educational outcome.
| Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Tweets Support for Colin Kaepernick |
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| Breitbart Sports, by Dylan Gwinn Original Article | ||||
| Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took to Twitter on Monday, to lend support to anthem-protesting former quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Ahmadinejad wrote: The #NFL season will start this week, unfortunately once again @Kaepernick7 is not on a NFL roster. Even though he is one of the best Quarterbacks in the league.#ColinKaepernick #NFL — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (@Ahmadinejad1956) September 3, 2018 Ahmadinejad served as Iran’s president from 2005-2013. During that time he ruthlessly suppressed all political opposition. Most notably in 2009, when he oversaw the murder and incarceration of | ||||
| Did Nike make a huge NFL-like mistake embracing Colin Kaepernick? |
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| American Thinker, by Thomas Lifson Original Article | ||||
Is there business logic for Nike embracing Colin Kaepernick? I think there is, for the NFL and athletic shoe business are very different. In the conservative blogosphere, on Fox News, and among my friends, the name of Nike has been forever damaged by the brand’s embrace of Colin Kaepernick, who sparked the widespread disrespect for our flag by NFL players kneeling during the National Anthem. (snip) Nike has recently been losing ground to Adidas. The endorsement power of Michael Jordan for the Air Jordan line of shoes had been hugely profitable, but that power is fading: (Tweets) Charles Robinson, NFL reporter for Yahoo
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There is then, of course, this:
Nike’s Kaepernick Ad Has Cost The Company Over $4 Billion So Far
Law of Markets 