When “The Lost City Of Z” director James Gray announced his latest film “Ad Astra” at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, he made the bold declaration that it would be &#8220;the most realistic depiction of space travel that&#8217;s been put in a movie and to basically say, &#8216;Space is awfully hostile to us.'&#8221; While it is unclear if he succeeded in that regard, the feature is lined with an all-star cast and stunning visuals. The movie, on paper, seems idyllic. Its science fiction story does its best to depict a realistic version of space and space travel with incredible technical skill and stunning effects, but it fails to make an emotional connection.
In the “near future,” Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) works for the United States Space Command. After a series of electric surges begin threatening Earth’s solar system, he is called to a meeting with the brass. There he learns that his thought-dead father, famous astronaut Commander H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones) may be alive. It is thought the “Project Lima” mission he vanished on sixteen years ago may have something to do with the surges since they are originating from Neptune, where his father’s team vanished in an attempt to contact extraterrestrials.  
Roy is being sent to Mars with his father’s old friend Colonel Thomas Pruitt (Donald Sutherland), who had a falling-out with his dad before the Project Lima mission. They travel first to the moon where they are attacked by space pirates. Surviving the attack, Roy parts ways with Pruitt, who was injured during the assault. However, he gives Roy a message revealing a dark secret about his father and their mission. Roy boards another rocket to Mars as the surges increase in size and frequency. With the danger growing, his only hope is to contact his father before time runs out.
From a technical perspective, the movie is incredible. Everything was done with excellent detail. As Roy makes his journey into deep space, farther than most have gone before, you feel every tense moment of the lack of gravity, confinement, and the claustrophobic nature of the space vessels. There is a moment early on in the film when the character takes a high fall and you watch every moment with anticipation at the realism on screen. In addition, the musical score by Max Richter, who also worked on “Hostiles,” perfectly complemented the plot as it unfolded before you. 
However, while this movie is impressive when it comes to the technical aspects, it ultimately fails to give the viewer a way to connect with it on a personal and emotional level. 
Though brilliantly acted by Pitt, Roy’s character is a cold, distant protagonist who fails at evoking empathy. He follows the career path of his father, becoming an astronaut. This proves to be a detriment in his life, shown when his wife, Eve (played briefly by Liv Tyler) leaves him. His coldhearted nature pushes her away, but instead of feeling a connection with him over the collapse of his marriage, you almost feel relieved she got out when she did. 
Likewise, the tone of the film is incredibly nihilistic. Religion is portrayed as an obsession to “let go” rather than a personal matter of faith to hold tight. Relationships are shown to be nothing more than a mere bumping into each other rather than emotional connections that guide our life. In the end, only the “duty” of fulfilling the mission is shown to give any sense of peace. Give your life to the state, the mission, because even if they deceive you, they are still better than those old fashioned beliefs or relationships. This left the movie with no substance. 
While impressive in its visuals, composition, and even performances, the story of “Ad Astra” gets lost in its emptiness, both metaphorically in its depiction of space and literally in the weightlessness of its plot. 
Check out the trailer below:
<iframe title="Ad Astra | Official Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/P6AaSMfXHbA?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Premiere Of 20th Century Fox&#8217;s &#8220;Ad Astra&#8221; &#8211; Arrivals

‘Ad Astra’ Review- Technical Prowess, But Little Else

2016

Brad Pitt

Cannes

Hollywood

Religion

Science

space force

A man in England claimed he discovered a fossil while out walking his two dogs.
The man, 54-year-old Jon Gopsill, said his dogs sniffed out the fossil on a beach in Somerset, which is in South West England. The fossil is five-and-a-half feet long and is believed to have been unearthed by recent storms, The Telegraph <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/12/16/dog-walker-discovers-65-million-year-old-fossil-pets-sniff/">reported</a>. Gopsill, the outlet reported, fancies himself an amateur archaeologist and said he believes the fossil is 65 million-years-old and may be that of an ichthyosaur.
Ichthyosaurs were not dinosaurs, but ancient marine vertebrates, which resembled modern-day porpoise. They first appeared during the Triassic period, <a href="https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/ichthyosauria.html">according to</a> former University of California-Berkeley post-doctoral researcher Ryosuke Motani. They reached their highest population during the Jurassic period and began to decline afterward, disappearing during the Cretaceous period, which occurred several million years before the dinosaurs were wiped out.
Some rare fossils have shown that ichthyosaurs gave birth to live young and never left the water. There’s no indication that they had gills, making them similar to modern-day whales.
Gopsill said he had previously found other fossils – mostly ammonites, and the Telegraph reported that “West Somerset’s northern bays are known for their fossil finds,” including rocks from the Jurassic and Triassic eras. The outlet reported that just last year, “part of the lower jaw of a 85-foot ichthyosaur was found in the Somerset village of Lilstock, thought to be 235 to 200 million years old.”
Gopsill told the outlet he reported the fossil he discovered to the Somerset Heritage and the Natural History Museum.
&#8220;I often go to the beach walking with my dogs and when the tide goes out we go out to the rocks because they like playing there,&#8221; Gopsill told the Telegraph. &#8220;I have always been a bit of an amateur fossil hunter and I have found a good supply of ammonites, so I always keep my eyes open.”
&#8220;We were at the beach when I saw this thing and thought &#8216;what&#8217;s that?&#8217; so I went a bit closer and thought &#8216;wow,&#8217;” he continued. &#8220;I thought it was obviously a fossilised sea creature, possibly an ichthyosaur. It doesn&#8217;t have a head, I have look[ed] around but I can&#8217;t find it. It has been there for at least 65 million years.”
&#8220;I realised straight that it was amazing, museum quality stuff, as soon as I saw it I knew I found something special. I was just blown away to see it there. It really is incredible that is has survived for such a long time and is now just there for everyone to see,” Gopsill concluded.
Dr. Mike Day, who curates the Earth Sciences department at the Natural History Museum, <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7796945/Dog-walker-stumbles-five-half-foot-long-Jurassic-fossil-Somerset-beach.html">confirmed to The Daily Mail</a> that the fossil found by Gopsill was likely that of an ichthyosaur.
“Looking at this specimen, based on the number of bones in the pectoral paddle, the apparent absence of a pelvic girdle, as well as the distinctive ‘hunch’ of the back, this is likely to be the remains of an ichthyosaur,” Day told the outlet. “It is not possible to identify the exact type of ichthyosaur from these images alone however.”

Ichthyosaur

A Dog Walker In The U.K. Just Found A 65 Million-Year-Old Fossil Thanks To Two Very Good Doggos

England

The absolute worst case of professional incompetence and dishonesty is in the area of climate science. Tony Heller has exposed some of the egregious dishonesty of mainstream environmentalists in a video he&#8217;s titled &#8220;My Gift To Climate Alarmists.&#8221; Environmentalists and their political allies attribute the recent increase in deadly forest fires to global warming. However, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture&#8217;s Forest Service, forest fires reached their peak in the 1930s and have declined by 80% since then. Environmentalists hide the earlier data and make their case for the effects of global warming by showing the public and policymakers data from 1980 that shows an increase in forest fires.
Climate scientists claim that rising sea levels are caused by man-made global warming. Historical data from the tide gauge in Lower Manhattan shows that sea levels have been rising from about the time when Abraham Lincoln was president to now. Heller says that sea levels have been rising for about 20,000 years. He points out that anthropologists believe that when the sea level was very low people were able to walk from Siberia to North America.
Hot weather is often claimed to be a result of man-made climate change. Heller presents data showing the number of days in Waverly, Ohio, above 90 degrees. In 1895, there were 73 days above 90 degrees. In 1936, there were 82 days above 90 degrees. Since the 1930s, there has been a downward trend in the number of days above 90 degrees. If climatologists hide data from earlier years and started at 1955, they show an increase in the number of above 90-degree days from eight or nine to 30 or 40. Thus, to deceive us into thinking the climate is getting hotter, environmentalists have selected a starting date that fits their agenda.
You might ask: &#8220;Who is Tony Heller? Does he work for big oil?&#8221; It turns out that he is a scientist and claims to be a lifelong environmentalist. From what I can tell, he has no vested interests. In that respect, he is different from those who lead the environmental movement, who often either work for or are funded by governments.
Once in a while environmentalists reveal their true agenda. Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC&#8217;s fourth summary report released in 2007, speaking in 2010 advised: &#8220;One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world&#8217;s wealth.&#8221; U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres said that the true aim of the U.N.&#8217;s 2014 Paris climate conference was &#8220;to change the (capitalist) economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.&#8221; Christine Stewart, Canada&#8217;s former Minister of the Environment said: &#8220;No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits. &#8230; Climate change (provides) the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.&#8221; Tim Wirth, former U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs and the person most responsible for setting up the Kyoto Protocol said: &#8220;We&#8217;ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.&#8221;
Not all scientists are dishonest and not all news reporters are leftists with an agenda. But one wonders at the deafening silence where there&#8217;s clear, unambiguous evidence. For example, if ocean levels have been rising for some 20,000 years, why do scientists allow environmentalists to get away with the claim that it&#8217;s a result of man-made global warming? Why aren&#8217;t there any reporters to highlight leftist statements such as those by Edenhofer, Stewart and others who want to ride global warming as a means to defeat capitalism and usher in socialism and communism? I would prefer to think that the silence of so many scientists represent their fears as opposed to their going along with the environmental extremist agenda.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

iceberg

WILLIAMS: Scientists: Dishonest or Afraid?

Climate Change

On the campus of Baylor University in Waco, Texas Thursday, bestselling author and editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire Ben Shapiro explained why the Left, which portrays itself as the great promoter and defender of science, frequently rejects it, discarding scientific evidence whenever it conflicts with progressive ideology.
&#8220;Tonight I&#8217;m talking about why the Left hates science,&#8221; Shapiro began (video below). &#8220;Now to a lot of folks on the Left, this sounds ridiculous. After all, it&#8217;s right-wingers who are &#8216;climate deniers,&#8217; &#8216;science deniers,&#8217; and they believe in that book, the Bible, and they&#8217;re all wild and crazy – they don&#8217;t believe in anything like the scientific method. But the truth is, right now many of the attacks on science are coming from the political Left.&#8221;
Shapiro first zeroed in on the significant difference in the Left and Right’s diverging views of human nature, the former pushing the idea of &#8220;infinite human malleability,&#8221; which posits that human beings can be altered &#8220;from anything to anything,&#8221; particularly by government coercion – thus providing &#8220;the impetus for top-down governmental control.&#8221;
&#8220;If you can remove the remediating institutions of society, human beings can be remade from the top down,&#8221; Shapiro explained in summary of the Left&#8217;s view of an &#8220;infinitely malleable&#8221; human nature. The problem, Shapiro argued, is that this view is undermined by reality. &#8220;Infinite engineering of humankind, unfortunately, tends to be undermined by the facts of human nature,&#8221; he stated.
Conservatives view human beings in a more scientific way, Shapiro suggested, believing that we operate in part by a &#8220;fixed human nature&#8221; and accept the premise that “human beings are happiest when they exercise reason in accordance with that nature.&#8221;
While the Left &#8220;likes to pretend that it loves science,&#8221; Shapiro argued, &#8220;much of what it terms science is not in fact science.&#8221; As examples, Shapiro pointed to the Left&#8217;s embrace of political science and the social sciences, which &#8220;often do not meet the rigorous standards of science.&#8221;
What the Left actually means by &#8220;science,&#8221; Shapiro underscored, is &#8220;anything that is not religion.&#8221;
“That’s because people on the secular Left see religion as an obstacle to progress – all progress,” the bestselling author explained. “They’re not merely concerned with Galileo – who, by the way, was an ardent believer in the Divine. They’re concerned that religion acts as a retrograde check on their ambitions to rewrite society, including the rewriting of fundamental societal truths, like distinctions between the sexes and the value of the family unit.”
This “animus for religion,” said Shapiro, “is why so many on the Left will routinely characterize science-based conservative positions as religious in nature.”
As an example, he pointed to the Left’s criticism of pro-lifers, which focuses mainly on the fact that many pro-lifers’ believe in the Bible as a definitive authoritative source. While it may be true that pro-lifers are often people of faith, that point is simply &#8220;a convenient strawman&#8221; for the political Left, said Shapiro.
The distinction the Left attempts to impose between religion and science, Shapiro maintained, is ultimately &#8220;false,&#8221; resting on &#8220;an utter misunderstanding of both science and religion.&#8221;
Watch Shapiro’s speech below:
<iframe title="Why does the Left hate science? | Ben Shapiro LIVE at Baylor University" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/B-t2h84zu8Q?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
&nbsp;
Shapiro&#8217;s speech at Baylor is part of the Young America’s Foundation&#8217;s Fred Allen Lecture Series. Last week, Shapiro visited the campus of Boston University to address the Left&#8217;s Claim that &#8220;America was built on slavery,&#8221; a view Shapiro argued is based on reductive presuppositions that result in a grim and flawed vision of what defines the country.  (<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/livestream-ben-shapiro-america-wasnt-built-on-slavery">Watch the speech here</a>.)
A week earlier, Shapiro spoke at Stanford University, focusing on the “dangerous game” being played by the Alt-Right, whose leaders he condemned as espousing racist and anti-Semitic views diametrically opposed to conservatism, and their counterparts on the radical Left, who attempt to brand conservatives as &#8220;Alt-Right&#8221; despite their glaringly diverging views. (<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-shapiro-dismantles-the-alt-right-and-radical-lefts-dangerous-game">Watch the speech here</a>.)
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-alt-right-hecklers-attempt-to-trap-ben-shapiro-fail-miserably">WATCH: Hecklers Attempt To Trap Ben Shapiro, Fail Miserably</a>

Ben Shapiro

WATCH: Ben Shapiro: How The Left Pretends To Love Science But Actually Hates It

Leftism

Progressivism

Two individuals, a married couple in China, have been diagnosed with &#8220;pneumonic plague,&#8221; according to <a href="https://nationalpost.com/news/world/two-counts-of-pneumonic-plague-diagnosed-in-china-authorities-attempting-to-prevent-outbreak">international reports</a> &#8212; a strain of the plague &#8220;more infectious than the strain that ravaged Europe in the Dark Ages.&#8221;
According to Chinese state-run media, per Canada&#8217;s National Post, &#8220;doctors in Beijing confirmed that the patients, from China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, were infected with pneumonic plague.&#8221; The two individuals who contracted the disease are receiving treatment at Chaoyang Hospital in Beijing.
The pair contracted the disease near their home in Inner Mongolia, making them the second such couple to have contracted the plague in that general region since May, when a Mongolian couple died from eating raw organ meat from an infected marmot, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/13/health/china-plague-intl-hnk-scn-scli/index.html">CNN reports</a>. The husband contracted the disease first and was nursed by the wife until she also fell ill.
&#8220;Plague, caused by bacteria and transmitted through flea bites and infected animals, can develop in three different forms. Bubonic plague causes swollen lymph nodes, while septicemic plague infects the blood and pneumonic plague infects the lungs,&#8221; CNN continues. &#8220;Pneumonic &#8212; the kind the Chinese patients have &#8212; is more virulent and damaging. Left untreated, it is always fatal, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).&#8221;
Most victims of the bubonic plague catch the disease from infected parasites, typically fleas or body lice. The &#8220;pneumonic plague,&#8221; which can be an advanced form of the bubonic plague, is transmitted from person to person, according to the WHO, and has a 24 hour incubation period, during which it targets a person&#8217;s lungs and respiratory system.
There are typically several incidents of the plague each year in China &#8212; and even a couple in the United States &#8212; and most do not result in outbreaks like the one that killed an estimated 50 million people in Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. The disease, the WHO says, lives on in low levels in rodent populations, and circulates among animals that live alongside humans, including cats and dogs, so its difficult to eradicate completely.
&#8220;From 2010 to 2015, more than 3,248 cases were reported worldwide, including 584 deaths, according to the WHO. The three most endemic countries are the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar, and Peru,&#8221; CNN reports.
While researchers are developing a vaccine, there is currently no blanket preventative measure for the disease, aside from using DEET-based insect repellents.
In this case, though, such numbers do little to quash concerns that China could be dealing with an actual outbreak, particularly given that Chinese state-run media wouldn&#8217;t acknowledge an out-of-hand situation. The mere fact that the Chinese government is acknowledging two incidents of the pneumonic plague seemed to set off alarm bells on social media, particularly among watchdogs of Chinese current events.
UPI notes that &#8220;Chinese authorities have previously reported cases of the bubonic plague. In 2009, there were 12 confirmed cases of the plague; three people died. The following year, China claimed seven confirmed cases of the plague and two deaths. In 2014, there were three confirmed cases of the plague, and three people dead from the fatal disease, according to Chinese government statistics.&#8221;
&nbsp;

New clinic centre opened

Two People In China Have The Plague

China

Imagine being pulled over on suspicion of driving drunk even though you hadn’t had a drop of alcohol. Now imagine a blood alcohol test showing you were at twice the legal limit – again, even though you hadn’t drunk any alcohol.
Such was the case of a North Carolina man, who insisted he hadn’t drunk despite his blood alcohol level being 0.2%, more than twice the legal limit of 0.08%. He was pulled over but refused to take a breathalyzer, so he was taken to a hospital, where his BAC was determined.
He continued to say he hadn’t touched alcohol but, naturally, no one believed him.
It wasn’t until he was studied by researchers at the Richmond University Medical Center in New York that he found out what was causing his alleged drunkenness – a medical condition.
CNN <a href="https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/10/25/health/beer-stomach-autobrewery-syndrome-trnd/index.html">reported</a> the man was discovered to have a rare condition known as auto-brewery system (ABS) or gut fermentation syndrome. The condition causes his body to convert carbohydrates into alcohol.
The doctors that studied him published a study in BMJ Open Gastroenterology about his condition and what they did to treat him. The study’s lead author, Fahad Malik, chief internal medicine resident at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, told CNN what happens to a person with the condition.
“These patients have the exact same implications of alcoholism: the smell, the breath, drowsiness, gait changes,&#8221; Malik told the outlet. &#8220;They will present as someone who&#8217;s intoxicated by alcohol, but the only difference here is that these patients can be treated by antifungal medications.&#8221;
The man didn’t have the condition his entire life. It wasn’t like he was falling down “drunk” in grade school. The condition developed after he took antibiotics to treat an injury to his thumb.
“His personality started to change, researchers wrote in the study, and he experienced episodes of depression, &#8216;brain fog,&#8217; memory loss and aggressive behavior that was out of character for him,” CNN reported.
Three years after his drunk driving arrest, doctors in Ohio found two strains of yeast and told him to cut carbs out of his diet and take supplements. He seemed fine at first, but a few weeks later he began acting drunk again.
Nothing seemed to help the condition, and at some point the man fell down due to his blood alcohol level, leading to brain bleeding. Eventually, after finding an online support group, the man was directed to the Richmond University Medical Center. The researchers there found that, possibly due to the antibiotics he had taken for his thumb, his “gut microbiome” had been altered, leading to ABS.
The man was given probiotics and treated with antifungal therapies, which helped his condition. After a year and a half – except for one time when he ate pizza and beer – he appears to be nearly cured.
“Approximately 1.5 years later, he remains asymptomatic and has resumed his previous lifestyle, including eating a normal diet while still checking his breath alcohol levels sporadically,&#8221; the study’s authors wrote, as reported by CNN.
This man is not the only one with this condition. It has been studied since the early part of the century, and researchers hope their method of treating the North Carolina man can help others with the condition.

drunk

Police Thought He Was Drunk. It Turns Out He Had A Rare Medical Condition That Made His Body A Brewery.

Alcohol

Health

Recently, The Atlantic Monthly published <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/?fbclid=IwAR2jRgvcsnILYqgaMph5gxz9K-5hNu4mCcRJ9vLrXHVFzM1cD3vhD0iP5oc">an article</a> entitled “A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked.” The article details the latest discoveries in neuroscience regarding the age-old debate between <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/#DoWeHaveFreeWill">free will and determinism</a>. According to the piece, the available science now suggests that we may, in fact, have free will contrary to the biological determinism impressed upon us by the scientific community for almost a century. And so the debate rages on for yet another millennia, if not till kingdom come.
More importantly, the article illustrates a vital point for those of us who maintain faith as a central aspect of our lives. It’s imperative as people of faith that we do not attempt to corroborate our beliefs with scientific facts or endeavors. Not only is it a fool’s errand, it’s also a detriment to faith itself.
While it may seem intriguing or even somewhat reasonable to buttress our religious beliefs with scientific evidence, it very much runs the risk of delegitimizing the very beliefs we are attempting to prove as empirically true. Nevermind that it can be a <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/science-red-seas-parting-180953553/">theological wild goose chase</a>, scientific theories are disproven all the time. If we seek scientific corroboration for our deeply held religious beliefs those very beliefs run the risk of being disproven as well.
<blockquote>“But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” – C.S. Lewis</blockquote>
An inherent aspect of science is that it remains in a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_theories_in_science">constant state of flux</a> wherein in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity">new discoveries</a> supplant long-held theories in an instant. For example, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craniometry">craniometry</a> was considered a perfectly valid method to scientifically measure human intelligence in the nineteenth century. We know now that it’s bunk and the methods and paradigms employed to reach such conclusions were specious at best.
Regardless, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that some piece of scripture in the Abrahamic traditions seemingly supported the antiquated idea that head size was indicative of intelligence. The instant the scientific theory is rendered obsolete, the scripture is as well. One is, essentially, building exegetical constructs on quicksand.
That doesn’t mean that science cannot provide us with a continued sense of wonderment toward all that God has created nor does it mean that we dismiss scientific truths for the sake of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/46432/cases-measles-us-climbs-highest-level-25-years-ashe-schow">rote, blind dogma</a>. Not at all. What it does entail is that religious truths cannot reside in the lower, earthly strata of the scientific worldview. Simply put, religious truths must supersede them.
<blockquote>“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – Hamlet, William Shakespeare</blockquote>
It also has to be vehemently stated that though we may not find tenable support in science for our religious beliefs, this does not mean, in any way, that we abandon our critical faculties when studying our respective traditions. Faith must be an active pursuit if it’s to maintain its necessary vitality and strength and not be reduced to some dust-covered ornament on a shelf. God gave us both a head and a heart for a reason.
That said, we need to also consider just how hopelessly dogmatic the scientific community continues to be as the defining paradigm for well over a century. In Why Religion Matters, renowned religious scholar Huston Smith drives home this point compellingly:
<blockquote>Among scientists themselves, debates over Darwin rage furiously, fueled by comments such as Fred Hoyle&#8217;s now-famous assertion that the chance of natural selection&#8217;s producing even an enzyme is on order of a tornado&#8217;s roaring through a junkyard and coming up with a Boeing 747. But when religion enters the picture, scientists close ranks in supporting Darwinism&#8230;Michael Ruse of the University of Guelph — a self-confessed bulldog for Darwinism — puts this colonization of theology by biology when he charges his fellow Darwinists with behaving as if Darwinism were a religion. (Why Religion Matters, p. 77)</blockquote>
While religious traditions continue to be maligned as antiquated and dogmatic pursuits, particularly by younger generations, they are completely unaware of just how dogmatically suspect many of their <a href="https://youtu.be/GlZtEjtlirc?t=203">own current conclusions</a> can be.
Smith continues:
<blockquote>Rustum Roy, a materials scientist at Pennsylvania State, goes further. Half seriously, he has threatened to sue the National Science Foundation for violating the separation of church and state in funding branches of science that turned themselves into religions&#8230;we have the curious spectacle of [Darwinism] colonizing not only theology but biology as well. (Why Religion Matters, p. 77)</blockquote>
While it may be intriguing to find parallels between our religious beliefs and all that science offers and continues to discover, it’s an unwise pursuit outside of some mild curiosity. Science is limited and reductive in scope and simply cannot grasp the awe, grandeur, and transcendence faith and God encompass beyond measure.

candle flame isolated on black

KHAN: Why Seeking Scientific Proof For Religious Realities Is A Fool’s Errand

California&#8217;s governor signed a first-of-its-kind bill late last week, dramatically limiting — if not completely erasing — exemptions to the state&#8217;s mandatory vaccination law for children.
Some California residents, however, who say that the bill represents a shocking governmental overreach that threatens their personal autonomy, are pushing to have the law included on the November ballot.
<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-governor-signs-bills-crack-down-fraudulent-vaccine-exemptions-n1051756">NBC News reports</a> that California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of bills designed to &#8220;crack down on doctors who write fraudulent medical exemptions for school children&#8217;s vaccinations,&#8221; in order to re-establish California&#8217;s falling childhood vaccination rate, which has given rise to a number of outbreaks of preventable diseases — including the measles — over the last several years.
&#8220;This legislation provides new tools to better protect public health, and does so in a way that ensures parents, doctors, public health officials and school administrators all know the rules of the road moving forward,&#8221; Newsom wrote in a statement to press accompanying the bill.
California already outlaws non-medical exemptions for vaccinations but lawmakers say parents who claim to be skeptical about the number and necessity of childhood vaccinations are obtaining fraudulent doctors&#8217; notes, allowing their children to attend school without being fully vaccinated, even though they aren&#8217;t actually medically fragile.
CNN reports that California&#8217;s vaccination rates have fallen dramatically over the course of the last decade, particularly in largely white, upper-middle-class enclaves where an anti-vaccination movement has taken root. The decision to require children to be immunized against specific diseases in order to attend school in the state has slowed the trend somewhat, but lawmakers feel making doctors who collude with patients who want to avoid vaccination, but aren&#8217;t actually medically fragile, responsible will stem the tide further.
&#8220;Under the new laws,&#8221; CNN reports, &#8220;the state will issue a standardized medical exemption certification form for doctors to complete and send to a child&#8217;s school. The form would outline the details of the exemption and include information about the medical basis for the exemption.&#8221;
Doctors who &#8220;grant five or more exemptions in a year&#8221; could find themselves subject to a state investigation, as could school districts where vaccination rates fall below 95% — the lowest rate necessary to preserve herd immunity and protect medically fragile children who legitimately cannot be vaccinated.
The bills are likely to go into effect January 1, 2020, but some anti-vaccination activists say they&#8217;re going to push for the measure to be included on the November ballot, because they believe punishing doctors who give false cover to anti-vaccine parents is a huge government overreach. Opposition to the bill has been strong, and anti-vaccine parents have hosted large protests at the California state capital building, calling in reinforcements from across the country in order to help preserve their ability to leave their children unvaccinated.
In one particularly disturbing incident, protesters <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/09/anti-vaccine-protester-menstrual-cup-blood-california-senate.html">threw what appeared to be menstrual blood</a> on legislators headed to a vote.
Three protesters, who all consider themselves members of an anti-vaccine movement, have submitted a request to put the issue to a referendum, which would force the state to defend the measure at the ballot box, <a href="https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article234989047.html">according to the Sacramento Bee</a>, which has followed the controversy surrounding the vaccine bill closely.
&#8220;Documents released by the Attorney General’s Office say the petition was submitted by Denise Aguilar, Heidi Munoz Gleisner and Tara Thornton. It was sent from a postal office near the Capitol,&#8221; the Sac Bee reports. &#8220;Aguilar, Munoz Gleisner and Thornton protested the vaccine bill throughout August and September. They temporarily shut down an Aug. 30 Assembly Appropriations Committee hearing where they stood on chairs and chanted after lawmakers advanced the bill.&#8221;
The legislator who drafted the bill says he&#8217;ll oppose the referendum measure.

vaccination_vaccine_gi.jpg

California Passes Stringent New Vaccine Requirements But Voters May Get Final Decision

California

Vaccines

On this week’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show: Sunday Special,” Shapiro spoke with physics professor Brian Keating, of The University of California – San Diego, about religious belief among scientists and the origins of the universe. Video and partial transcript below: 
SHAPIRO: [In your book &#8220;Losing the Nobel Prize,&#8221; you talk about] resistance to this idea that there was an origin to the universe. Specifically, that a lot of that was based on an anti-religious sentiment, which is, this looks a lot like the very beginning of the Bible and that scares a lot of scientists.
KEATING: Yea, so back then, in the 1950s and so forth when Fred Hoyle, who is an amazing astronomer, he won the basically the runner up prize to the Nobel Prize — the Crafoord Prize. He ended up saying that the reason that scientists are so adamant about the Big Bang is because they&#8217;re obsessed with Genesis 1:1. You know, can you imagine Lawrence Krauss or somebody just obsessed, &#8216;Oh, I have to prove that Genesis 1:1,&#8217; I mean, it&#8217;s absurd. As you pointed out earlier, most scientists are atheists and the majority of the National Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious organization on earth, are declared atheist or you know, 20% are agnostic or don&#8217;t know, and 10% believe.
So it&#8217;s interesting how much we&#8217;ve evolved just since the 1950s. And then to actually have that brought into focus, and that people now accept without a doubt that there was at the beginning of what we call the observable universe — that does not mean that we&#8217;ve witnessed time equals zero, and that&#8217;s where things get really interesting. &#8230; Let&#8217;s say time began: What causes something to begin when there&#8217;s no something to begin with, to begin with? How did time change from nothing into something? These are questions that have perfectly good answers, potentially, but we don&#8217;t have the data. So my job is to collect that data, or perhaps refute these models by collecting data that is objectionable under those hypotheses.
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SHAPIRO: So in this particular context, obviously, a lot of religious leaders say, well [we&#8217;ve] got a good answer for you, right. [Here&#8217;s] what kicked off time. But we have this whole religious literature that&#8217;s built around the idea that there was a thing that kicked off time, and that thing was God. This is what we call God in the Talmudic model. But the scientists that have been promoting a bunch of different theories as to why the universe was created the way that it was, why it exists in the way that it does. And it seems like a lot of this is a response to some of the arguments, yes, that some religious believers have made about the fine-tuning of the universe. The idea that a certain number of things had to go exactly right for us to be here at this time.
So you hear arguments made on a fairly routine basis about how, well, you know, that&#8217;s just how randomness works: We&#8217;re just the lucky ones. Religious believers argue back, well, but why are we the lucky ones? That&#8217;s a pretty convenient argument, that we happen to be the lucky ones. Why wouldn&#8217;t we have been one of the non-lucky ones, exactly? So how do you circle that square? How do you come down on that particular debate?
KEATING: I think, for me, it&#8217;s so much fun to think about these things. So nowadays, you know, you&#8217;re alluding to the anthropic principle, which I&#8217;ll describe in a minute, and the multiverse. It&#8217;s funny, in scientific circles with my scientist friends, I can&#8217;t say multiverse without getting into a fight. You know, you say multiverse, we&#8217;re gonna take sides. And some people say, that&#8217;s not even science or they&#8217;ll say, you know that&#8217;s pure nonsense, or they’ll say this is the best answer that scientists have. &#8230;
I mean, [some people], have much more faith in this kind of dispassionate science, which has led to this real canard almost, an overused stereotype that scientists are these dispassionate people that work, have no feelings and no objective, have no motive, no biases. In the book, I account for many different biases [and] prejudices that scientists, including me, are afflicted by. &#8230;
I think it&#8217;s interesting, I never hear from the religious. I hear crazy things from religious people, you know that are just non-scientific to bolster their own hypothesis — they&#8217;re perfectly willing to have confirmation bias sometimes, too. But in the case of the scientists, I think they&#8217;re — again, this is touching back on some deep thing within them, a sensitive nerve. [Perhaps they think] that if there were something true about religion, then I have all these obligations and I have enough to do at the faculty club already. &#8230;
But I think it&#8217;s very interesting to think about these questions of what generated this new pursuit in science. Was it a great reaction to these religious explanations? So Robert Jastrow worked at Goddard Space Center, and he wrote a book called &#8220;God and the Astronomers,&#8221; and he was [a] declared agnostic, and he said, upon the discovery of this cosmic background radiation &#8230; that people, scientists who were secular, climbed to the top of the mountain and found a band of theologians rejoicing up there.
On the other hand, when the Big Bang was first proposed by a Belgian priest named LeMaitre, he implicitly told the pope [to] not use this as evidence for the creation narrative of Genesis 1:1. &#8230; These are non-overlapping magisteria, in Stephen Jay Gould&#8217;s language. These are two different things.
I mean, to think about reading the Bible as a science book is as absurd as reading &#8220;A Brief History of Time&#8221; and thinking, oh, that&#8217;s how I&#8217;m gonna raise my children, [those are] my obligations as a moral, ethical being. So I think these controversies, to me, are so much fun, because these are two puzzles. We may go to our graves [without] answering these questions, but to not think about them? I think it leaves a life of slight impoverishment that my colleagues, unfortunately, many of them love to think about and love to talk about, [but] they stay in the closet about it.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/series/sunday-special">Watch full episodes of “The Ben Shapiro Show: Sunday Special” on-demand!</a>

Physicist Brian Keating Talking With Ben Shapiro

Physicist To Shapiro: Scientists Have A ‘Sensitive Nerve’ About Religion

The Ben Shapiro Show

Renowned writer and Yale University professor David Gelernter has turned away from Charles Darwin&#8217;s theory of evolution, arguing that it has too many holes and has aged out as a probable scientific theory.
The professor also argued that intelligent design is a serious theory that cannot be shooed away by anti-religious sentiment. Furthermore, he lamented the lack of &#8220;free speech&#8221; concerning theories outside of Darwinism, which has become a &#8220;religion&#8221; to many academics spanning the various scientific fields.
As highlighted by Rachel Alexander at <a href="https://stream.org/author/rachelalexander/">The Stream</a>, Gelernter outlined his rejection of Darwinian thought in an essay published in the Claremont Review of Books, aptly titled, &#8220;<a href="https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin/">Giving up Darwin</a>.&#8221;
&#8220;Darwin&#8217;s theory predicts that new life forms evolve gradually from old ones in a constantly branching, spreading tree of life,&#8221; the professor says in the paper. &#8220;Those brave new Cambrian creatures must therefore have had Precambrian predecessors, similar but not quite as fancy and sophisticated. They could not have all blown out suddenly, like a bunch of geysers.&#8221; He explains, &#8220;Each must have had a closely related predecessor, which must have had its own predecessors.&#8221;
Among many other reasons, Gelernter also points to the near impossibility of creating a functional stable protein. &#8220;Immense is so big, and tiny is so small, that neo-Darwinian evolution is — so far — a dead loss. Try to mutate your way from 150 links of gibberish to a working, useful protein and you are guaranteed to fail. Try it with ten mutations, a thousand, a million — you fail. The odds bury you. It can&#8217;t be done.&#8221;
Though he doesn&#8217;t personally subscribe to the theory of intelligent design, Gelernter said it is an &#8220;absolutely serious argument,&#8221; noting that it is the &#8220;first, and obviously most intuitive [theory] that comes to mind,&#8221; Alexander noted.
During a conversation organized by the Hoover Institute in June, Gelernter explained that pro-Darwinian academics will &#8220;destroy&#8221; you if you challenge the theory.
&#8220;I have to distinguish between the way I&#8217;ve been treated personally, which has been a very courteous and collegial way by my colleagues at Yale, they&#8217;re nice guys and I like them, they&#8217;re my friends,&#8221; he said. &#8220;On the other hand, when I look at their intellectual behavior, what they publish, and, much more important, what they tell their students, Darwinism has indeed passed beyond a scientific argument. Glernter explains, &#8220;As far as they are concerned, take your life in you hands to challenge it intellectually. They will destroy you if you challenge it.&#8221;
&#8220;What I&#8217;ve seen, in their behavior intellectually and at colleges across the West, is nothing approaching free speech on this topic,&#8221; he continued. &#8220;It’s a bitter rejection, not just — a sort of bitter, fundamental, angry, outraged, violent rejection, which comes nowhere near scientific of intellectual discussion. I&#8217;ve seen that happen again and again. &#8216;I&#8217;m a Darwinism, don&#8217;t you say a word against it, or, I don’t wanna hear it, period.'&#8221;
&#8220;I am attacking their religion,&#8221; he stated. &#8220;It is a big issue for them.&#8221;
WATCH:
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H/t <a href="https://stream.org/renowned-yale-computer-science-prof-leaves-darwinism/">The Stream</a>

David Gelernter

WATCH: Renowned Yale Prof Leaves Darwinism, Says Intelligent Design ‘Absolutely Serious’ Theory

Yale

A number of senators, including the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, received a highly classified briefing from the United States Navy Thursday on the subject of &#8220;unidentified flying objects,&#8221; <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/20/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-briefs-us-senators/index.html">according to a report from CNN</a>.
The briefing stemmed from a news report that emerged earlier this month, suggesting that the U.S. Navy and other branches of the military have had a number of close encounters with &#8220;unidentified aircraft&#8221; that the military later labeled as &#8220;UFOs.&#8221; The briefing came at the request of &#8220;key oversight committees,&#8221; <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/19/warner-classified-briefing-ufos-1544273">Politico reports</a>.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) was among those selected to receive the classified briefing, though his spokesperson suggested that it wasn&#8217;t because of an interest in possible alien life, but rather a concern for the safety of military pilots in his constituency.
&#8220;If pilots at Oceana or elsewhere are reporting flight hazards that interfere with training or put them at risk, then Senator Warner wants answers. It doesn&#8217;t matter if it&#8217;s weather balloons, little green men, or something else entirely &#8212; we can&#8217;t ask our pilots to put their lives at risk unnecessarily,&#8221; his spokeswoman told CNN Thursday.
The Navy confirmed that it was speaking with select legislators about the issue, but focused the exchange on the Navy&#8217;s efforts to identify and ultimately classify the &#8220;unidentified aircraft&#8221; and &#8220;unidentified flying objects&#8221; their pilots encounter.
&#8220;Navy officials did indeed meet with interested congressional members and staffers on Wednesday to provide a classified brief on efforts to understand and identify these threats to the safety and security of our aviators,&#8221; a spokesman for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare told reporters. &#8220;Follow-up discussions with other interested staffers are scheduled for later today (Thursday, 20 June). Navy officials will continue to keep interested congressional members and staff informed. Given the classified nature of these discussions, we will not comment on the specific information provided in these Hill briefings.&#8221;
Interest in the U.S. military&#8217;s involvement with so-called &#8220;UFOs&#8221; piqued late in 2018, when a report in The New York Times revealed that the Pentagon had kept an &#8220;X-Files&#8221; office of sorts, designed to record and track military encounters with unidentified aircraft. The report was short on details of the encounters themselves, but did note that military pilots regularly reported interacting with odd aircraft and &#8220;unidentified flying objects,&#8221; including aircraft that seemed to move in ways that defied current technology.
In May,<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots.html"> The New York Times published a second report</a>, this time detailing the experiences of several Navy pilots who claimed to have encountered aircraft flying well above 30,000 feet, but with no visible exhaust or heat signature. The same report indicated that back in April, the Navy had retooled its reporting policies for pilot-UFO encounters.
In both reports, military officials cautioned that &#8220;UFO&#8221; does not necessarily mean &#8220;alien spacecraft.&#8221; More likely, pilots reporting &#8220;UFOs&#8221; have had encounters with experimental technology, classified programs, or foreign aircraft. The reporting system, officially put into place in April, is supposed to help streamline how these encounters get reported, not necessarily to keep track of whether members of the U.S. military are routinely encountering alien life.
But that hasn&#8217;t stopped people &#8212; even formerly high level defense officials &#8212; from speculating.
&#8220;We know that UFOs exist. This is no longer an issue,&#8221; Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/u-s-senators-briefed-on-ufos-as-suspicions-grow-surrounding-naval-sightings">told Fox News in an interview</a>. &#8220;The issue is why are they here? Where are they coming from and what is the technology behind these devices that we are observing?&#8221;
The Navy says it will continue to brief senators on the UFO program in order to help neutralize potential safety hazards to government employees.

Select Senators Got A Classified Briefing On UFOs From The U.S. Navy

Technology

U.S. Navy

Chicago&#8217;s Field Museum of Natural History is home to some of the world&#8217;s most treasured artifacts &#8212; mummies, rare gemstones, the taxidermied corpses of a pair of man-eating lions &#8212; and now, one huge, gender-neutral dinosaur skeleton.
<a href="https://arcdigital.media/the-case-of-sue-the-woke-dinosaur-52515d08ac64?sk=7308a27c609d6ecdb6f15155794d72a9">According to Arc Digital,</a> &#8220;Sue,&#8221; Field Museum&#8217;s Tyrannosaurus Rex &#8212; one of the most complete and largest T-Rex skeletons ever discovered &#8212; is working on becoming a &#8220;gender neutral&#8221; icon by adopting gender-neutral pronouns in her new private exhibit on the museum&#8217;s second floor.
Sue is not, in fact, gender neutral or gender fluid. The T-Rex skeleton, discovered in South Dakota in the 1990s, was either male or female. The scientists who discovered Sue believed the skeleton belonged to a female because female T-Rexes are larger than male T-Rexes, and Sue was one of the largest dinosaur skeletons ever found; she&#8217;s named &#8220;Sue&#8221; after Susan Hendrickson, who led the team that unearthed her.
But back in March 2017, Arc Digital reports, the museum decided to have a little fun, and in response to a question lobbed during a Twitter Q&amp;A, Sue claimed that she was &#8220;gender neutral&#8221; because her sex was unknown, and that she preferred the pronouns they/their/them.
By May 2017, though, Sue, who had graced the museum&#8217;s central rotunda for more than a decade, was due to move upstairs to make room for an even larger dinosaur skeleton, and when constructing her pernament home in the museum&#8217;s dinosaur exhibit, museum officials adopted Sue&#8217;s social media gender-neutral tendencies and made them official.
&#8220;In her new suite, some of the signage describing the fossil has adopted non-binary pronouns,&#8221; Arc Digital says. &#8220;One sign does make the distinction between SUE the museum ambassador/Twitter star and the fossil itself, noting that the fossil is properly referred to as &#8216;it.&#8217; But some of the rest of the signage uses &#8216;their&#8217; pronouns and seems more interested in teaching museum-goers about the trendy movement for acceptance of non-binary identity than it does about paleontology.&#8221;
In an interview with Them magazine, museum officials point out that docents and volunteers are asked to refer to Sue by her gender neutral pronouns, and that in Sue&#8217;s online presence &#8212; mostly on Twitter &#8212; she is a &#8220;gender-neutral&#8221; persona.
In the grand scheme, one gender-neutral dinosaur probably isn&#8217;t going to make much difference in how sex and gender are viewed by modern society, and the museum argues that the imaginary Sue the Dinosaur is entirely separate from the massive skeleton that serves as an example of T-Rex in the museum&#8217;s gallery. But it is a little weird that it would matter &#8212; or that a reputable scientific establishment would dabble in trendy, unscientific gender theory.
Plus, it&#8217;s not as though Sue doesn&#8217;t have a gender. The museum just can&#8217;t predict and confirm the dinosaur&#8217;s sex with any test currently in use. The only gender confirmation system available for Sue is to test whether or not she was carrying eggs at the time of her death. She was not, but that doesn&#8217;t conclusively rule out that Sue was a female, just that she wasn&#8217;t currently fertile when she passed on.

Chicago&#8217;s Field Museum Now Insists You Refer To Its T-Rex Skeleton Using Gender Neutral Pronouns

Gender

Gender Pronouns

At least six Los Angeles Police Department officers from the same downtown precinct are showing signs of typhoid fever and a &#8220;typhus-like&#8221; illness after working in or near the city&#8217;s growing homeless encampment.
Late last week, radio host Dr. Drew Pinsky <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/health/dr-drew-says-third-world-countries-would-be-insulted-to-be-compared-with-los-angeles">made headlines declaring</a> that Los Angeles is the epicenter of a &#8220;public health emergency&#8221; stemming from a growing homeless population that finds nothing wrong with setting up permanent encampments across large swaths of the city&#8217;s downtown area, and cautioned that, unless city officials took immediate action, it&#8217;s likely the homeless population in LA could see an outbreak of the bubonic plague.
The plague, of course, killed tens of millions across Europe in the 14th century, before the advent of public sanitation and clean water systems. But as Pinksy recalled to Fox News host Laura Ingraham last week, Los Angeles is suffering from a complete lack of a sanitation strategy, and just as these serious communicable diseases seem to be taking root, the city council is considering a ban or moratorium on using rat poison.
The six LAPD officers include at least one detective who has already been diagnosed with typhoid fever. The city&#8217;s police union announced late Saturday that five others are showing symptoms of the same rare illness.
Typhus and typhoid fever are spread through contaminated food and water, and through fleas and ticks. The six officers, who work at the city&#8217;s Central Division Station, may have come in contact with the disease while policing the city&#8217;s growing homeless encampments &#8212; particularly on Skid Row, which is in the Central Division&#8217;s district &#8212; or simply from interacting within the station itself. A state investigation into conditions in and around the Central Division Station, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/health/dr-drew-says-third-world-countries-would-be-insulted-to-be-compared-with-los-angeles">the Associated Press reports</a>, turned up a myriad of public health issues, landing the building a $5,000 fine and an order to clean up immediately.
But the city&#8217;s police officer&#8217;s union says it isn&#8217;t that simple. Los Angeles needs to get serious about breaking up homeless encampments &#8212; even if they feel a sense of progressive empathy over them &#8212; before they become a widespread public health hazard.
In addition to typhus and typhoid fever &#8212; and potentially the plague &#8212; officers of LAPD&#8217;s Central Division Station contend routinely with cases of Hepatitis A and staph infections, a union spokesperson said in a press conference Saturday.
&#8220;The last thing I need is my members coming to work worried about contracting an infectious disease and bringing it home to their families,&#8221; the spokesperson told reporters.
Infectious disease experts told the Associated Press that conditions inside the station would have had a marked effect on the spread of illnesses like typhus. The police union agrees and believes the city of Los Angeles should make keeping police officers safe and improving their working conditions at top priority.
Los Angeles, of course, isn&#8217;t the only city facing these kinds of problems &#8212; and it certainly isn&#8217;t the first time Los Angeles has faced typhus and typhoid fever. Several years ago, when the homeless population temporarily exploded, LA faced a small outbreak of the disease that led to a massive cleanup. This time around, though, like its sister city, San Francisco, California, Los Angeles&#8217; city government isn&#8217;t chomping at the bit to address the root cause of the problem: rampant homelessness.
In San Francisco, there is a similar threat of disease, particularly given that sidewalks and public ways across the city are littered with human waste, and the homeless encampments there have gotten so crowded that some members of the transient population are now building makeshift boats so that they can live in San Francisco&#8217;s famous bay.

LAPD Officers Treated For Typhoid Fever, &#8216;Typhus-Like&#8217; Symptoms After Working Near Homeless Encampments

Los Angeles

While left-wing activists often accuse conservatives of being &#8220;science deniers&#8221; when it comes to global warming, one biology professor at Williams College has noticed a troubling trend since the election of Donald Trump: students&#8217; zealous embrace of social justice ideology is increasingly resulting in &#8220;denialism&#8221; when it comes to well-established biological ideas.
In an op-ed for The Atlantic titled &#8220;<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/self-censorship-campus-bad-science/589969/">Self-censorship on Campus is Bad for Science</a>,&#8221; Biology Professor Luana Maroja &#8212; who has found herself in the middle of social justice outrage in the past, and <a href="https://www.thecollegefix.com/this-scientist-took-on-student-activists-who-cheered-for-censorship-now-shes-refuting-their-violence-claims/">pushed back</a> (h/t <a href="https://hotair.com/archives/2019/05/29/williams-college-professor-students-social-justice-ideology-trumps-science/">John Sexton</a>) &#8212; describes a shift she&#8217;s witnessed among a growing number of her students since Trump won the presidency.
&#8220;At that moment, political tensions were running high on our campus. And well-established scientific ideas that I&#8217;d been teaching for years suddenly met with stiff ideological resistance,&#8221; she writes. Among those ideas is the concept of heritability, &#8220;the degree to which offspring genetically resemble their parents,&#8221; both physically and in behavior.
&#8220;In a classroom discussion, I noted that researchers have measured a large average difference in IQ between the inhabitants of the United States and those of my home country, Brazil,&#8221; Maroja writes. &#8220;I challenged the supposed intelligence differential between Americans and Brazilians. I asked students to think about the limitations of the data, which do not control for environmental differences, and explained that the raw numbers say nothing about whether observed differences are indeed &#8216;inborn&#8217;&#8212;that is, genetic.&#8221;
Even though she specifically challenges the reductive and potentially racist conclusions that some might reach, many of her students, &#8220;without any evidence,&#8221; reject the very notion of scientifically conducted IQ tests, declaring them to be bogus science, &#8220;invented to ostracize minority groups,&#8221; and refuse to accept the well-established idea that IQ is partly influenced by genetics. She found similar pushback from students about any scientific studies about inherent differences between men and women and different races.
&#8220;Similar biological denialism exists about nearly any observed difference between human groups, including those between males and females,&#8221; she writes. &#8220;Unfortunately, students push back against these phenomena not by using scientific arguments, but by employing an a priori moral commitment to equality, anti-racism, and anti-sexism. They resort to denialism to protect themselves from having to confront a worldview they reject&#8212;that certain differences between groups may be based partly on biology. This denialism manifests itself at times in classroom discussions and in emails in which students explain at length why I should not be teaching the topic.&#8221;
The &#8220;denialism&#8221; at times goes as far as even rejecting the notion that people have a biological instinct to protect their kin because some students thought it was Maroja &#8220;actually endorsing Trump&#8217;s hiring of his family.&#8221;
She goes on to address the concept that infamously got James Damore fired: that some genetic differences might lead to disproportionate representation of males or females in some fields, particularly STEM fields. For social justice activists, since all people are supposedly &#8220;blank slates,&#8221; the only explanation for more men being in STEM fields than women is that they are &#8220;cesspools of sex discrimination.&#8221;
&#8220;This is what happens when ideology replaces biology,&#8221; she writes. &#8220;It&#8217;s become taboo to even mention the possibility that men and women might have different preferences.&#8221; <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/self-censorship-campus-bad-science/589969/">Read the full op-ed here</a>.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47201/poll-should-males-who-identify-females-be-allowed-james-barrett">Poll: Should Males Who Identify As Females Be Allowed To Compete In Women&#8217;s Sports?</a>

Professor: Since Trump, My Students Have Become Biology Deniers For Social Justice

Donald Trump

Education

Race

Social Justice

Tornadoes ripped through Oklahoma and Missouri overnight Saturday night, leaving at least two dead, dozens injured, and more missing.
Oklahoma has been raked by severe weather all week, with multiple incidents of tornadoes over the course of several days, but Saturday night, large, F3 tornadoes formed across the state, as well as across the Texas panhandle and parts of Missouri.
<a href="https://weather.com/news/news/2019-05-26-oklahoma-tornadoes-el-reno-sapulpa">The Weather Channel reports</a> that the first tornado touched down in El Reno, Oklahoma &#8212; about 25 minutes outside Oklahoma City &#8212; just after 10:30 p.m. Two people who were taking shelter in their mobile home were killed and at least 30 more were injured when the same formation tore through a motel at the corner of Interstate 40 and U.S. Highway 81. Some of the injuries were deemed &#8220;critical&#8221; but no specifics were given about victims&#8217; injuries.
The City of El Reno has established a GoFundMe to help residents affected by the tornado, which lasted only &#8220;5 to 10 minutes&#8221; but lofted debris &#8220;up to a height of 7,000 feet,&#8221; ripping mobile homes from their foundations and tearing through streets and highways.
&#8220;It&#8217;s a tragic scene out there,&#8221; El Reno Mayor Matt White told journalists Sunday morning. &#8220;People have absolutely lost everything.&#8221;
&#8220;The thing about El Reno is we are more than a community, we are a family. &#8230; We&#8217;re going to overcome this. It&#8217;s so devastating to see the loss out there,&#8221; White later added.
Areas in metropolitan Oklahoma City also reported damage from the high winds and heavy rain that followed the tornado, including &#8220;trees snapped in half&#8221; and blown-out windows.
A second tornado scraped through the suburbs of Tulsa, Oklahoma, causing damage but, so far, no reported injuries. Officials are still determining the strength of that weather formation. That tornado comes on the heels of days of rain that forced the evacuation of hundreds of Tulsa residents. More rain is expected this week.
Missouri, Kansas, and the Texas panhandle also suffered significant storm damage on Friday, and then again overnight Saturday to Sunday, the latest incidents in a week of weather that has seen back-to-back severe storms and tornadoes &#8212; a weather pattern that meteorologists <a href="https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article230790399.html">told the Kansas City Star</a> repeats itself every 15-20 years, leaving typically hardy mid-westerners tired and weather-weary.
&#8220;[A]s the clock ticked toward midnight, a twister with EF-3 winds in excess of 135 miles per hour cut a path through Jefferson City, the state&#8217;s capital, heaving bricks and turning homes into dollhouses ripped open to the sky,&#8221; the Kansas City Star reported on the severe weather that ripped through Friday. <a href="https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/monster-tornado-that-ripped-20-mile-trail-of-destruction-through-missouri-capital-was-almost-a-mile-wide/70008358">Three people were left dead Friday night</a> after the same tornado destroyed Golden, Missouri, AccuWeather adds.
Although some politicians have seized on the record-breaking weather as proof of &#8220;climate change,&#8221; local meteorologists say that that explanation is somewhat lacking. Certainly, global warming may cause incremental temperature shifts that ultimately affect weather patterns, but there is &#8220;no clear link&#8221; between global warming and the number of tornadoes that hit a given area of the United States.
Tornado alley, though &#8212; the area of the United States where severe weather is more likely &#8212; is shifting, as is tornado season. Areas to the south and east are now more likely to experience tornadoes alongside the central plains states, and tornadoes begin forming in early May now, rather than in early June.
Scientists tell the Kansas City Star that they&#8217;re not willing to make any proclamations as to why &#8220;Tornado Alley&#8221; is slowly relocating, and while it may be climate motivated, much more research is needed.

Tornadoes Rip Through Oklahoma And Missouri, Killing 5 And Injuring Dozens

Your father may have smelt of elderberries, but he probably wasn&#8217;t using them to fight the flu.
That&#8217;s despite the findings of the University of Sydney, which previously published a study claiming that eating elderberries could help fight the flu. The university has now been forced to retract that study, according to Melbourne, Victoria <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/university-of-sydney-pulls-claims-elderberries-can-fight-flu-20190515-p51nij.html">local news outlet</a> The Age.
In retracting its survey, the university admitted it had overhyped the results. Also, the study was partly funded by a company that sells flu remedies made with elderberries and even sent an employee to help with the research. Oh, and the researchers only dosed human cells with concentrated elderberry juice. No tests were actually conducted on humans or mice (or hamsters), the Age reported. The outlet stated that it did &#8220;not suggest this is improper, and do not question the validity of the study itself or the work of the study&#8217;s authors,&#8221; however.
The university had touted the study in a press release on its website, saying, &#8220;Eating elderberries can help minimise influenza symptoms.&#8221; The press release has since been removed and the university now acknowledges it has no real evidence to support the original claim.
&#8220;It has withdrawn the press release and launched an investigation into how it was produced, and said it would change its practices to always highlight industry funding,&#8221; the Age reported.
The press release did not mention that Pharmacare, a company that sells elderberry flu remedies, helped pay for and conduct the research. The actual study did declare that an employee worked on the research.
One of the study&#8217;s authors told the Age that Pharmacare asked not to be mentioned in the press release &#8211; and the university obliged.
&#8220;We asked them, &#8216;Do you want to be named?&#8217; Although they were very excited about all the promotion of their products, they don&#8217;t want to be specifically named,&#8221; the author told the outlet.
Beyond that, Pharmacare was also shown &#8220;a near-final copy&#8221; of the university&#8217;s press release before it was distributed, a university spokeswoman told the Age.
Ken Harvey, an associate professor and president of Friends of Science in Medicine, told the Age that the press release was &#8220;appalling.&#8221;
&#8220;This is an appalling misrepresentation of this Pharmacare-funded in-vitro study,&#8221; Harvey said. &#8220;It was inappropriate and misleading to imply from this study that an extract was &#8216;proven to fight flu.&#8217;&#8221;
In a statement, the University of Sydney&#8217;s acting deputy vice-chancellor for research, professor Laurent Rivory told the Age that future press releases would include funding information.
&#8220;The accurate reporting of our research is crucial. It should have been clearer in the media release that the research didn&#8217;t involve the human consumption of elderberries and that more research was required before the full impact on humans could be determined,&#8221; Rivory said. &#8220;There was no attempt to hide the funding source from the media. The authors included Pharmacare among its financial contributors in the published paper, which is publicly available online and a link to this paper was included in the final media release.&#8221;

Australian University Retracts Study Claiming Elderberries Help Fight The Flu

Australia

By Miles O&#8217;Brien, former Transporter Chief of USS Enterprise-D during Borg encounter 
Personal Log, stardate 72761.9.
Looking back, it&#8217;s amazing we survived at all. Meeting the Borg, to paraphrase captain Jean Luc-Picard, jolted us out of our complacency. But our unpreparedness was our own fault. 
We were silly enough to believe that the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW9WGibEF04" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">collapse</a> of the Klingon Empire meant Starfleet no longer needed to maintain a strong military arm. It would be easy to blame the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03QKSjBiG2c" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">parasite conspiracy</a> that infiltrated Starfleet Command, yet that would ignore the culture of appeasement in the decades following the Khitimar accords. 
I witnessed it first hand while fighting against the Cardassian border incursions. Imagine watching the spoonheads <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVHR0UPHERQ" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">commit genocide</a> and enduring decades of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owyj_5TuHQw" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">attacks</a>, and still refusing to rearm! (Having been inside the mind of a Section 31 operative, I suspect we have them to thank for the Bajoran resistance&#8217;s success in tying down the Cardassians and for the Romulans&#8217; &#8220;<a href="http://tng.trekcore.com/audiocaps/1x26/1x26-morecomplicated-e.mp3" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">matters more urgent</a>&#8221; that kept those powers from attacking us with full force.)
But I never thought I&#8217;d find myself thankful to Q. I have to admit that we owe him an eternal debt of gratitude for <a href="http://chakoteya.net/NextGen/142.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">what he did</a> 30 years today. 
(Q is more of a force of nature than a &#8220;he,&#8221; but it nevertheless came to us in the form of a man that day.) 
Picard&#8217;s confidence had turned to arrogance, so much so that he was willing to ignore Q&#8217;s <a href="http://tng.trekcore.com/audiocaps/2x16/2x16-seehowready-e.mp3" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">warning</a> that the Federation was &#8220;moving faster than expected, further than they should&#8221; and that we were &#8220;not prepared&#8221; for what awaited us. Q told us: &#8220;You judge yourselves against the pitiful adversaries you have encountered so far. The Romulans, the Klingons. They are nothing compared to what&#8217;s waiting. Picard, you are about to move into areas of the galaxy containing wonders more incredible than you can possibly imagine, and terrors to freeze your soul. I offer myself as guide only to be rejected out of hand.&#8221;
Picard&#8217;s answer was &#8220;we are resolute, we are determined, and your help is not required.&#8221; Q had had enough. &#8220;We&#8217;ll just have to see how ready you are,&#8221; he said, and with a snap of his fingers he sent us to <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/System_J-25" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">System J-25</a> &#8211; on the far end of the Beta Quadrant (two years, seven months away from the nearest starbase at maximum warp). As Q vanished, Picard turned to our enigmatic El-Aurian bartender, <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Guinan" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Guinan</a>. &#8220;Your people have been in this part of the galaxy,&#8221; he said, &#8220;what can you tell us?&#8221; &#8220;Only that if I were you,&#8221; she responded, &#8220;I&#8217;d start back now.&#8221; 
To listen to Picard&#8217;s log from that day is humorous, in a macabre way: &#8220;Captain&#8217;s log, stardate 42761.9. Despite Guinan&#8217;s warning, I feel compelled to investigate this unexplored sector of the galaxy before heading back.&#8221; Guinan wasn&#8217;t just some chatty talk show host. Her&#8217;s was a voice of wisdom to be heeded, and she was terrified. But Picard decided to ignore her. We did indeed discover a Class M planet. &#8220;There is a system of roads on this planet,&#8221; said Data, &#8220;which indicates a highly industrialized civilization. But where there should be cities there are only <a href="https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/4/42/New_Providence_colony.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20130423000041&amp;path-prefix=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">great rips</a> in the surface.&#8221; (&#8220;It is as though some great force just scooped all the machine elements off the face of the planet,&#8221; added Worf.) This meant that whatever tore its way through the Neutral Zone with Romulus &#8211; leaving similar scars on the colonized planets &#8211; was nearby. It was at that very moment that a giant cube appeared onscreen. We asked Guinan if she recognized it. &#8220;My people encountered them a century ago,&#8221; she said. They destroyed our cities. They scattered my people throughout the galaxy. They&#8217;re called the Borg. Protect yourself, Captain, or they&#8217;ll destroy you.&#8221;
The next log states as follows: &#8220;Captain&#8217;s log, supplemental. We have been attacked without provocation by an alien race which Guinan calls the Borg. It appears that we have neutralised their vessel. Commander Riker is leading an away team in an attempt to learn more about them.&#8221; This was sent after the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs173OfGmm4" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">loss</a> of eighteen shipmates before successfully blasting the Borg cube&#8217;s cutting and tractor beams. Picard decided to once again ignore Guinan and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olak3vCXzQ0" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">beamed</a> an away team over to the cube. The countless bipedal lifeforms with cybernetic implants were hooked into machines on the walls, while others roamed around paying no heed to the Enterprise crew. 
Commander Riker reported on his discovery that &#8220;the Borg have developed the technology to link artificial intelligence directly into the humanoid brain&#8221; and &#8220;the Borg seem to be using their combined power to repair the ship.&#8221; At this, the captain ordered me to beam the away team back to the Enterprise and &#8220;get the hell out of here.&#8221;
The last log has a more familiar tone when dealing with Borg encounters &#8211; Panic and Fear. &#8220;Captain&#8217;s log supplemental. We are unable to maintain the gap between the Enterprise and the Borg ship.&#8221;
Q appeared on the Bridge to taunt us as we<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHzz6Ztcmzc" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> futilely tried to run for our lives</a>. He told us: &#8220;They will follow this ship until you exhaust your fuel. They will wear down your defences. Then you will be theirs. Admit it, Picard. You&#8217;re out of your league. You should have stayed where you belonged. You can&#8217;t outrun them. You can&#8217;t destroy them. If you damage them, the essence of what they are remains. They regenerate and keep coming. Eventually you will weaken, your reserves will be gone. They are relentless. Where&#8217;s your stubbornness now, Picard, your arrogance? Do you still profess to be prepared for what awaits you? I&#8217;ll be leaving now. You thought you could handle it, so handle it.&#8221;
I have been critical of captain Picard throughout this log, but let it never be said that he didn&#8217;t always come through for us in the end. With a fate worse than death closing in, Picard humbled himself before Q and <a href="http://tng.trekcore.com/audiocaps/2x16/2x16-ineedyou-e.mp3" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">begged</a> him to save us: &#8220;You wanted to frighten us. We are frightened. You wanted to show us that we were inadequate. For the moment, I grant that. You wanted me to say I need you. I need you!&#8221; 
With a snap of his finger, Q brought us back to where we started, safely out of range of the Borg. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Wru5teAPw" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Reflecting</a> on these events with Guinan, Picard expressed gratitude to Q. &#8220;Maybe Q did the right thing for the wrong reason,&#8221; said the captain. &#8220;Perhaps what we most needed was a kick in our complacency, to prepare us for what lies ahead.&#8221;
For a long time I did not want to admit it, but Q was right. We weren&#8217;t ready, and we had to be forced to recognize that. Nevertheless, if I live to be 500 years old, I will never forget the first time I heard the harsh, collective <a href="http://tng.trekcore.com/audiocaps/2x16/2x16-borghail-e.mp3" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">voice</a> of the Borg: &#8220;We have analyzed your defensive capabilities as being unable to withstand us. If you defend yourselves, you will be punished.&#8221; 
This begs the question: what if our &#8220;defensive capabilities&#8221; were able to withstand them? What if, instead of naive pseudo-pacifism, we had spent the previous decades continually working to improve our capacity to defend ourselves? What if, upon first contact, we were strong enough to blast those Borg bastards into space dust? 
Consider: until they encountered Species 8472, the Borg never showed fear of anything. But faced with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufHHzzMO7sM" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">an enemy they couldn&#8217;t defeat</a>, the Borg ran scared. After they survived this encounter &#8211; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSUAQNSx5fs" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">thanks</a> to Admiral Janeway &#8211; they never messed with 8472 again. But the Borg were not afraid of the Federation, because the Federation were pacifistic and lightly armed. Had Starfleet crushed the Borg at System J-25 &#8211; or at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-0Jg6_zHu0" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Wolf 359</a> &#8211; the Borg may well have left the Federation alone. But the military weakness caused by decades of pacifism signaled to the Borg that the Federation was vulnerable to invasion and assimilation. Had it not been the sheer luck of Voyager being lost in the Delta Quadrant and learning how to fight the Borg, the entire Alpha and Beta Quadrant would have fallen to the Collective. 
Even after Wolf 359 we still had not learned our lesson! We were <a href="http://chakoteya.net/DS9/447.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">supposed</a> to have had an entire Battlefleet of Defiant-class ships, but once the Borg threat momentarily subsided we dropped the project &#8211; and had only one <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50d18pM4Rec" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">prototype</a> by the time the Dominion invaded.
And for all our Federation talk about no longer being &#8220;obsessed with the accumulation of things&#8221; and having &#8220;eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions,&#8221; to be faced with real existing collectivism was horrifying. In the future, captain Picard, who used to scoff at all things capitalistic, would be forcibly assimilated into the collective for just a short time, but long enough to be permanently <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuzoxcErOc8" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">traumatized</a> when his individualism and free will were taken away.
When I visited my fellow history buff Dr. Bashir the other day, he showed me something from an old physical book he had. It was a <a href="http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/ronald-wilson-reagan/speech-at-omaha-beach-june-6-1984.php" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">quote</a> from a 20th century leader at a war memorial of his fellow countrymen: &#8220;We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.&#8221; Sure, we laugh at their intellectual &#8220;infancy&#8221; now, but maybe they were on to something.

The Borg 30 Years Later, A Reflection From Miles O&#8217;Brien, Transporter Chief of USS Enterprise-D

After the Pentagon released a cache of documents outlining the United States&#8217; military&#8217;s policy towards cataloging &#8220;unidentified flying objects&#8221; &#8212;UFOs &#8212; the U.S. Navy promised to report UFO encounters to the public on a rotating basis. Now, though, they&#8217;re not so sure that&#8217;s a good idea.
<a href="https://www.newsweek.com/ufo-sightings-2019-us-military-tic-tac-pentagon-navy-unidentified-aerial-1412272?utm_source=GoogleNewsstandUS&amp;utm_medium=Feed&amp;utm_campaign=Partnerships">Newsweek reports</a> that the Navy issued a statement last week indicating that they have no current plans to report UFO sightings or &#8220;unexplained aerial phenomena&#8221; encounters made by Navy pilots until they can draft formal procedures for handling, investigating, and disseminating such claims.
&#8220;There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air spaces in recent years,&#8221; the Navy said in a statement released to media on May 1. &#8220;The Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in drafts.&#8221;
In an interview with The Washington Post, Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for the office of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, admitted that the Navy has several encounters with &#8220;unexplained&#8221; or &#8220;unidentified&#8221; aircraft per month, but that, of course, not all of those encounters remain unexplained, and not all associated aircraft remain unidentified.
The revelation might seem like something straight out of &#8220;The X-Files,&#8221; but interest in the U.S. military&#8217;s UFO encounters has piqued since late 2017, when <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html">a cache of declassified Pentagon documents</a> revealed that the government had been keeping closer tabs on UFOs and potential UFOs than Americans might have expected.
Included in the cache was a report from the USS Nimitz, which listed an incident in which &#8220;the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group tracked multiple UFOs off California&#8217;s Baja Peninsula, with pilots, radar technicians and other military officials confirming the mysterious technology,&#8221; according to Newsweek.
&#8220;At a certain point, there ended up being multiple objects that we were tracking,&#8221; one officer wrote in his official report of the incident. &#8220;They all generally zoomed around at ridiculous speeds, and angles and trajectories and then eventually they all bugged out faster than our radars.&#8221;
The New York Times also revealed, then, that former U.S. Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) had spearheaded a multi-year, multi-million dollar investigation into the Pentagon&#8217;s UFO files that included a special investigator charged with combing through UFO-related documents and a program to store and catalog UFO-related debris.
&#8220;Under [the investigator&#8217;s] direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena,&#8221; the NYT reported. &#8220;Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes. In addition, researchers spoke to military service members who had reported sightings of strange aircraft.&#8221;
The Pentagon program was ultimately discontinued, but branches of the U.S. military were charged with putting together a way for the public to examine UFO claims without having to wait years for the documents to be declassified. For now, though, it seems, the public will just have to wait a little bit longer.

The U.S. Navy Promised To Reveal UFO Encounters But Now They&#8217;re Not So Sure

Harry Reid

Pentagon

<a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/why-we-should-all-use-they-them-pronouns/">Scientific American</a> has proposed the rather unscientific idea of calling people by &#8220;genderless&#8221; pronouns like &#8220;they&#8221; and &#8220;them.&#8221;
In an article written last week, the publication highlighted a new virtual assistant named &#8220;Q&#8221; that has been assigned no gender, which should serve as a guideline for how people should now refer to each other from here on out.
&#8220;Whereas Siri, Alexa and most other electronic helpers speak in conspicuously feminine tones, Q has been engineered to create a gender-neutral effect,&#8221; says the article. &#8220;As a result, users can benefit from all the useful information and guidance available to us today, without reinforcing the old-fashioned idea that the role of eager helpmate is necessarily played by a woman.&#8221;
The article goes on to note the many cultural shifts already happening that will eventually pave the way to everyone referring to another as a &#8220;they,&#8221; a &#8220;them,&#8221; or an &#8220;it.&#8221; United Airlines recently announced, for instance, a new booking option that will permit people to say Mx in place of Mr. or Mrs. Professional settings have also begun business meetings in which people introduce themselves by stating their preferred pronouns. LGBTQ leaders and feminists have also put forward the idea of stating preferred pronouns on email signatures.
However, while Scientific American appreciates these gestures of &#8220;gender inclusion,&#8221; the publication feels it does not go far enough because they &#8220;leave intact the presumption that gender identity is relevant in all social interactions,&#8221; which the publication claims creates a problem, most especially for women. Scientific American cites several studies to underline its point, such as women with feminine names on their resumes being less likely to earn a job. Their solution: &#8220;them&#8221; and &#8220;they.&#8221;
&#8220;The universal singular they is inclusive of people who identify as male, female or nonbinary (e.g., &#8220;Drew is in my class; they are a great student&#8221;). It avoids the problem of misgendering by not using pronouns to gender people in the first place,&#8221; the article said. &#8220;Plus, it reduces the salience of gender in everyday interactions, which is likely to be a good thing for women.&#8221;
In response to those who would dismiss the proposition as &#8220;pie-in-the-sky thinking,&#8221; the article dares to argue that the change in pronouns could be the same revolution as the word Ms. in the 1960&#8217;s. The problem with that analogy, however, is that Ms. was an outflow of the French terms &#8220;Madame&#8221; and &#8220;Mademoiselle&#8221; &#8212; a woman and a girl. It was not so much a revolution as an adoption of what already existed.
The Scientific American article does not even address how this will be socially enforced, which may be through the shame and hectoring of more traditionally-minded people as backward-thinking bigots who wish to oppress women. In fact, by characterizing the use of traditional pronouns as oppressive, Scientific American has already laid the groundwork for that social reality, which has already arrived in some quarters.
Twitter, for instance, recently updated its &#8220;hateful conduct policy&#8221; to include &#8220;misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.&#8221; Also, the website IMDB was <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/46011/deadnaming-trans-actors-blast-imdb-publishing-paul-bois">recently heckled</a> by LGBT activists for allowing trans actors birth names to be included in their bios.

Scientific American: Let’s Use Genderless Pronouns

LGBT

A scientifically unproven experiment on children suffering from gender dysphoria at a NHS gender clinic in the U.K. has led to as many as 18 resignations from clinicians.
&#8220;They believe that some gay children struggling with their sexuality are being wrongly diagnosed as &#8216;transgender&#8217; by the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic,&#8221; reports <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/calls-to-end-transgender-experiment-on-children-k792rfj7d?shareToken=e7b0f97f17f44641d2feb7ea215c6ab5&amp;wgu=270525_54264_15546872509905_cd777960ef&amp;wgexpiry=1562463250&amp;utm_source=planit&amp;utm_medium=affiliate&amp;utm_content=22278&amp;fbclid=IwAR2OHL0eRkfF3cGv2I5vnrS38oeRzPiDKf9tfMwXvV2USpTmKPrC5v5Uxfk">The Times of London</a>. &#8220;All five former staff were responsible for deciding which trans-identifying youngsters should be given hormone blockers to halt their sexual development. The vast majority of those who begin blockers go on to irreversible cross-sex hormones once they reach 16.&#8221;
Over the past decade, the number of children referred to the clinic has skyrocketed from just 94 in 2010 to a whopping 2,519 just last year. At the clinic, treatment can begin at an age as young as three. Often, the children are subjected to the experiment without proper assessment from an expert as to the nature of their gender confusion, according to some NHS specialists.
&#8220;I felt for the last two years what kept me in the job was the sense there was a huge number of children in danger. I was there to protect children from being damaged,&#8221; one clinician told The Times.
&#8220;This experimental treatment is being done on not only children, but [on] very vulnerable children,&#8221; said another.
The five clinicians that spoke with The Times pointed the blame at transgender advocacy charities like &#8220;Mermaids&#8221; for making the false claim that gender transitioning in children will suddenly cure them of their dysphoria and concomitant emotional distress. For reasons political, not medical, the clinicians claim they were often put under intense pressure to subject children to the experiment &#8212; despite the lack of a proper medical assessment.
&#8220;The specialists expressed concern that many children decided they wanted to change gender after suffering homophobic bullying,&#8221; reports The Times. &#8220;Yet these young people were still referred down the route of hormone treatment, they claimed, without clinicians always exploring the possibility they may simply be gay. One clinician said that she feared the use of hormone therapy for such children could result in a scandal.&#8221;
Children who have already started puberty can be given hormone blockers, which completely stops the body&#8217;s development in its tracks. Though the blockers can be reversed, little is known on the effect they have on the brain.
The GIDS clinic has denied all accusations, saying their service respects each and every individual case.
In the United States, Dr. Michelle Cretella, M.D., F.C.P., president of the American College of Pediatricians, has <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/29822/lgbt-mob-protests-pediatrician-saying-paul-bois">denounced gender transitioning</a> in children as child abuse.
&#8220;When it comes to what is causing rising numbers of people to identify as transgender, all teenagers go through a phase known as &#8216;gender formation,&#8221; Cretella said at a talk in Rhode Island last year. &#8220;During this time, she says, a certain number are susceptible to &#8216;marketing&#8217; that they are &#8216;trapped in the wrong body.'&#8221;
Cretella has also <a href="https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/im-a-pediatrician.-heres-what-i-did-when-a-little-boy-told-me-he-was-a-girl">written</a> that biological sex goes all the way back to a human being&#8217;s conception and that sexuality is an unchangeable binary.
&#8220;Biological sex is not assigned,&#8221; she wrote. &#8220;Sex is determined at conception by our DNA and is stamped into every cell of our bodies. Human sexuality is binary. You either have a normal Y chromosome, and develop into a male, or you don&#8217;t, and you will develop into a female. There are at least 6,500 genetic differences between men and women. Hormones and surgery cannot change this.&#8221;

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