Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Plenty of Science Shows That Men and Women Are Just Programmed Differently

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Why aren't there more women criminals?! Men in jail outnumber women by a ratio of 14-to-1. We male stutterers outnumber women, too.

This isn't fair! We need more affirmative action! These disparities must be caused by sex discrimination because everyone knows there are no real differences between genders.

After all, Google fired engineer James Damore for daring to suggest that there is a biological reason men dominate tech leadership.

Google's CEO said: "To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive."

Then the media lied about what Damore wrote.

The Washington Post: "women may be genetically unsuited" for tech jobs.

CNN: "women are not biologically fit."

But Damore never said that.

New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, Huffington Post and even Forbes called his memo "anti-diversity." The Atlantic worsened it to an "anti-diversity screed."

But it wasn't "anti-diversity." "I value diversity," Damore wrote, saying he is "not denying that sexism exists."

It certainly wasn't a "screed." It was a thoughtful argument suggesting that "not all differences are socially constructed ... (M)en and women biologically differ."

Can't have that.

The enlightened media quickly explained, "Differences between men and women are slim to none" (CNBC) and "major books have debunked the idea of important brain differences" (Recode).

Wow. "Major books"!

This is absurd. Of course, there are big differences!

I didn't always understand that. My Princeton professors taught me that differences are caused by sexism. Boys are encouraged to achieve, girls to nurture. If we socialize equally, they said, just as many girls will want to go to monster truck rallies and become CEOs. Boys will nurture and more will take up ballet.

Some of it happened. Men did become more nurturing. More women became CEOs.

But no amount of government force and corporate "diversity, integrity, governance" programs will equalize the numbers.

Plenty of science shows that men and women are just programmed differently. Google banning talk about that is appalling. (Though owners can do as they like with their companies.)

When I was at ABC News, I did a TV special titled "Boys and Girls Are Different."

On the show, the Kinsey Institute's former director explained that right after birth, males and females behave differently: "Males startle more... Give a little puff of air on their abdomen, they (are) much more likely to startle." And females move their lips more than males.

Infant girls usually sit up without support before boys; boys crawl away from their caretakers sooner. This happens before parents, or society, have much influence.

Even male baby monkeys like playing with trucks more than female monkeys do.

When I reported that, I got a taste of the Damore treatment.

A 20/20 correspondent confronted my TV producer in the ladies room, asking, "How could you have worked on that disgusting show?"

Feminist icon Gloria Steinem said gender differences shouldn't even be researched. She told me it's "anti-American, crazy thinking."

"Aren't women, in general, better nurturers?" I asked.

"No," answered Steinem. "Next question."

At the time, fire departments had just dropped strength tests to help female applicants. One critic of the change complained that instead of being carried out during a fire, now she would be dragged downstairs, her head hitting each stair. Steinem responded, "It's better to drag them out ... Less smoke down there."

This is nuts.

It was also nuts more recently when tennis commentator John McEnroe was attacked for saying that if Serena Williams played with men she'd be ranked "like 700."

Why is this even controversial?

Men and women are simply different, and we should acknowledge that difference.

Yes, America was extremely sexist just 50 years ago. It was taboo for women to smoke, wear pants in public or to go a bar alone. A woman couldn't get a credit card without a husband's or father's signature. Really.

Today, though, company heads are less likely to be female not simply because of sexism but because women are less crazy than men—less likely to be career-obsessed or to take stupid risks for money. That's also a reason there are fewer women in jail. Is that a bad thing?

Women live longer, have more friends, create better work-life balances.

Social engineers may dream of a society where genders are exactly equal. But it's not going to happen. Companies and governments trying to force it will just make life worse.

COPYRIGHT 2017 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.



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Sunday, August 13, 2017

Government schools intentionally making children dumber?

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WASHINGTON – It’s no surprise to hear that America’s education system is in disarray, with Common Core dumbing down young students, faith absent from education and underpaid teachers increasingly unfit to serve as effective educators.

But all of that is by design, contends Alex Newman, an international journalist and co-author of “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.”

He recently appeared on the “Revealing the Truth with Rabbi Walker” Web TV show to discuss the issue.

Newman believes the government education system is not built to educate but to create obedient, unlearned drones who are subservient to authority.

“It’s really the education system that is at the foundation of what eventually emerges as culture, politics, government and all the rest of it,” Newman began. “Education is where we went wrong, so if we’re going to fix this, education is the place to be involved.”

Newman was educated at an array of top private schools but realizes his academic upbringing was irregular.

“On the other end of the spectrum [from private schools], you have what’s going on in the government schools. It’s worse than a bad education: It’s a system deliberately designed to handicap the individual.”

See what American education has become, in “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.”

According to Newman, government schools work to produce illiteracy, dumb down students and spread an atheistic worldview. Government education, he said, leads to “a hatred toward truth, objective reality and moral principles.”

Newman believes this is no accident and that the entire system is set-up to fail students “by design.”

While elites send their children to private schools for superior education, the vast majority of Americans are stuck in government schools. Average Americans are thus often left behind due to their educational upbringing and are unable to be as successful as the moneyed elites.

Furthermore, Christians and children of other faiths in government schools often find their beliefs under attack, especially those who are devout adherents.

A major cause of the dysfunction of government schools? A 19th century politician named Horace Mann.

“Horace Mann was actually opposed to Christianity; he was a Unitarian. He wanted to get Christ out of everything,” Newman explained.

Mann was appointed secretary of the board of education of Massachusetts in 1837 and from then on introduced the “Prussian Model” of education to government schools.

The model focused on “constant obedience and loyalty to the state,” according to Newman, and was in opposition to the original purpose of education in the United States, which focused on literacy to promote reading the Bible.

Mann spread his ideas across the country.

In the later 1800s, John Dewey solidified secular education in the United States.

Dewey, a socialist and atheist, Newman noted, was funded by a number of wealthy donors and spread his ideology to the colleges that educated teachers. Over 50 years, Dewey’s philosophy gradually gained prominence across the United States.

Dewey believed that “schools should teach secularism” and that they should “not worry as much about teaching reading and math,” Newman said.

Dewey’s philosophy ultimately infected the Department of Education at its founding in 1979.

Americans have become “dumber and dumber” with each successive generation, according to Newman, a claim backed by statistical data.

“Fifty-five percent of Americans are either illiterate or functionally illiterate,” Newman said. “This is essentially building a prison around children.”

Newman stressed again that this is all “by design.”

He believes the public education system threatens conservative values everywhere by creating voters that are unable to think for themselves.

“We can fight the political battles, but if we lose on the education front, this is all a moot point,” he said.

“If we don’t put the brakes on this, our society is not going to last.”

Newman contends the nation must return to effective methods of teaching the skills of reading and writing, and to teaching proper morals and values in schools. He sees promise in many of the small, independent Christian schools around the country.

Newman thinks Trump appointee Betsy DeVos has been a mixed bag so far as secretary of education, and he was more impressed during Trump’s campaign when he promised to abolish the Department of Education.

“Rather than focusing so much on charter schools,” Newman said, “Betsy DeVos should be focused on abolishing her department.”

That would lead to education being organized at the state or local level, allowing far greater freedom of ideas as well as superior teaching methods in the classroom.

If politicians can successfully abolish the Department of Education, “We will no longer have this top-down, centralized, one-size-fits-all model called ‘Common Core.'”

While Newman is optimistic about the future of American education, he realizes it will not be easy.

“This is going to be a very long term process,” Newman concluded.

Watch the full in interview:

See what American education has become, in “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.”

 

 



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Friday, August 11, 2017

Low calorie diet drinks and foods ‘trick the brain into making you fatter’ and could trigger diabetes, study claims

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The SunAugust 11, 2017 DIET drinks and foods trick the brain into making you fatter and could even trigger diabetes, a study suggests. The body has evolved to burn more calories if something tastes sweet because in nature sweeter substances contain more energy. But diet products that do not taste sweet confuse the brain into […]

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DNC Makes Unbelievably Feeble Response To Latest Russiagate Debunking Evidence

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The US power establishment’s confrontation with Russia is too important to be left to the whims of facts and evidence. The sprawling plutocratic power structure that is loosely centralized in the United States has been on a collision course with both Russia and China for a long while now and it needs to move its chess pieces into place. This conflict is about nothing other than power, money and resources, and you can’t persuade 320 million heavily-armed Americans to consent to a potentially world-ending conflict by telling them it’s about making plutocrats richer and more powerful.

So they lie. Among the many, many lies that America’s unelected power establishment advances on a daily basis, they are saying that the heightened tensions with the world’s only other nuclear superpower are about protecting America’s democracy. The allied plutocrats who own America’s elected officials and the rest of the secretive second government which manipulates US and international affairs have been hard at work lulling Americans back into the illusion that they live in a democracy with one hand while manufacturing support for military escalations with the other.

A pleasure to host #SecDef James Mattis at Amazon HQ in Seattle today

 — @JeffBezos

Though it’s unclear how much its officials know, the Democratic National Committee has played an important, willing role in all this. They disgraced themselves when they were caught rigging the party primary whose fairness they were singularly responsible for ensuring, possibly while involved in some highly illegal activities, so they’ve got every motive imaginable to try and shift the blame someplace else. Collaborating with the intelligence community to lie to the American people about Russia is a perfect way to do that.

It makes perfect sense, then, that when the left-leaning outlet The Nation brought the explosive findings of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity into the public spotlight with a lucid and thorough article, the DNC would want to push back on it. The findings both decimate the Russian hacking narrative and possibly implicate the DNC in colluding to frame Russia for what was almost certainly an insider leak, so some statement from the Committee was to be expected. I don’t think, though, that anybody expected its response to be quite so empty, vapid, butthurt and limp-dicked as the letter they ended up sending to The Nation’s editors:

The US intelligence community has an extensive history of lying to the American people to advance its own agendas. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is a well-documented fact, and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or dishonest. And yet of the 54 words in the DNC’s response to The Nation, four of them reference “conspiracy theory”.

It reminds me of former acting DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile repeating the phrase “we have ample evidence” for the Russian hacking no less than three times back-to-back like a gibbering lunatic, as though saying something more than once in quick succession compels the listener to accept it as truth:

Let me give that a try, just in case it works:

It is the US intelligence community’s job to lie to you.

It is the US intelligence community’s job to lie to you.

It is the US intelligence community’s job to lie to you.

The US intelligence community lies repeatedly and continually. Even when not trying to lie, they are often wrong. These are just facts.

 — @ggreenwald

We clear on that? Nobody gets to bully us into accepting the US intelligence community’s assertions as true, least of all the Committee that just got done violating its own Charter and actively sabotaging the will of the American people. Nobody gets to tell us that anyone who questions the same intelligence community who lied to us about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is a conspiracy theorist or a Trump supporter. Nobody gets to shame us for disbelieving known liars and manipulators. That is not a thing.

Never let anyone shout you down for expressing healthy skepticism about the US intelligence community’s claims. They forever forfeited their right to do that when they deceived the entire world into allowing the unforgivable Iraq invasion which slaughtered a million human beings and plunged the region into chaos, and they are now entitled to nothing other than a planet-sized grain of salt being placed atop everything they try to serve us. The “17 intelligence agencies agree” narrative once universally accepted as unquestionable Russiagate dogma became three agencies plus the ODNI, which turned out to actually be a couple dozen loyalists hand-selected by known Russophobic racist James Clapper, and now the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity have released some extremely damning evidence that absolutely must be addressed by the establishment which has been advancing the official Russia narrative.

#HackingHoax — Share This ‘Nation’ Article Every Day Until The Intel Community Addresses It

Day 2: I'm sharing this article every day until it gets a response from the intelligence community. #HackingHoax https://t.co/4sd55rnT89

 — @caitoz

Keep pushing.

— — —

I’m a 100 percent reader-funded journalist so if you enjoyed this, please consider helping me out by sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or throwing some money into my hat on Patreon.

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NSA forensic experts corroborate claim #Russiagate wasn’t a hack, but a leak—inside job by someone w/ access to DNC bit.ly/2ftuwns

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oTfX8R-B_normal.jpg Abby Martin
@AbbyMartin
NSA forensic experts corroborate claim #Russiagate wasn’t a hack, but a leak—inside job by someone w/ access to DNC bit.ly/2ftuwns

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Suicided? Despite No Gun, Police Say Lawyer Connected to DNC Fraud Suit Shot Himself

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Possibly 2017’s biggest story is the lawsuit Bernie Sanders’ supporters have brought against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) alleging the DNC committed fraud when it favored Clinton over Sanders in the primaries. Arguably, however, most Americans have never heard about the DNC voter fraud, mainly because the mainstream media is camped out on the alleged collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Shrouded in mystery, one of the DNC lawsuit’s most jaw-dropping events occurred May 24, when the body of U.S. District Attorney Beranton J. Whisenant, Jr. was found on a Hollywood, Florida beach.



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James Damore Explains: "Why I Was Fired By Google"

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Fired Google engineer Jame Damore has penned an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal explaining how his good-faith effort to discuss differences between men and women in tech couldn’t be tolerated in the company’s "ideological echo chamber," adding that self-segregation with similar-minded people has grown in recent decades as we spend more time in digital worlds "personalized to fit our views."

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I was fired by Google this past Monday for a document that I wrote and circulated internally raising questions about cultural taboos and how they cloud our thinking about gender diversity at the company and in the wider tech sector. I suggested that at least some of the male-female disparity in tech could be attributed to biological differences (and, yes, I said that bias against women was a factor too). Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai declared that portions of my statement violated the company’s code of conduct and “cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”

 

My 10-page document set out what I considered a reasoned, well-researched, good-faith argument, but as I wrote, the viewpoint I was putting forward is generally suppressed at Google because of the company’s “ideological echo chamber.” My firing neatly confirms that point.

 

How did Google, the company that hires the smartest people in the world, become so ideologically driven and intolerant of scientific debate and reasoned argument?

 

We all have moral preferences and beliefs about how the world is and should be. Having these views challenged can be painful, so we tend to avoid people with differing values and to associate with those who share our values. This self-segregation has become much more potent in recent decades. We are more mobile and can sort ourselves into different communities; we wait longer to find and choose just the right mate; and we spend much of our time in a digital world personalized to fit our views.

 

Google is a particularly intense echo chamber because it is in the middle of Silicon Valley and is so life-encompassing as a place to work. With free food, internal meme boards and weekly companywide meetings, Google becomes a huge part of its employees’ lives. Some even live on campus. For many, including myself, working at Google is a major part of their identity, almost like a cult with its own leaders and saints, all believed to righteously uphold the sacred motto of “Don’t be evil.”

 

Echo chambers maintain themselves by creating a shared spirit and keeping discussion confined within certain limits. As Noam Chomsky once observed, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

 

But echo chambers also have to guard against dissent and opposition. Whether it’s in our homes, online or in our workplaces, a consensus is maintained by shaming people into conformity or excommunicating them if they persist in violating taboos. Public shaming serves not only to display the virtue of those doing the shaming but also warns others that the same punishment awaits them if they don’t conform.

 

In my document, I committed heresy against the Google creed by stating that not all disparities between men and women that we see in the world are the result of discriminatory treatment.

 

When I first circulated the document about a month ago to our diversity groups and individuals at Google, there was no outcry or charge of misogyny. I engaged in reasoned discussion with some of my peers on these issues, but mostly I was ignored.

 

Everything changed when the document went viral within the company and the wider tech world. Those most zealously committed to the diversity creed—that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and all people are inherently the same—could not let this public offense go unpunished. They sent angry emails to Google’s human-resources department and everyone up my management chain, demanding censorship, retaliation and atonement.

 

Upper management tried to placate this surge of outrage by shaming me and misrepresenting my document, but they couldn’t really do otherwise: The mob would have set upon anyone who openly agreed with me or even tolerated my views. When the whole episode finally became a giant media controversy, thanks to external leaks, Google had to solve the problem caused by my supposedly sexist, anti-diversity manifesto, and the whole company came under heated and sometimes threatening scrutiny.

 

It saddens me to leave Google and to see the company silence open and honest discussion. If Google continues to ignore the very real issues raised by its diversity policies and corporate culture, it will be walking blind into the future—unable to meet the needs of its remarkable employees and sure to disappoint its billions of users.

As a reminder, a survey of Google employees reflected the company's divisions.

Of 440 Google employees who responded to a Blind survey on Tuesday and Wednesday, 56% said they disagreed with Google’s decision to fire Mr. Damore.



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New Documents Prove Mainstream Pro-Monsanto Article Was Actually Written by Monsanto

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TheLastAmericanVagabond.com

According to documents recently released amid a lawsuit against Monsanto regarding the safety of glyphosate, a widely used herbicide, a prominent academic from Stanford University allowed the agrochemical giant to pen an op-ed in his name. It was subsequently published in Forbes magazine. Henry I. Miller, a Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at the […]

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Thursday, August 10, 2017

By Firing the Google Memo Author, the Company Confirms His Thesis

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Most of the mainstream media refers to the former Google engineer's leaked internal memo as the "anti-diversity memo." Recode calls it "sexist." And Google fired James Damore for "perpetuating gender stereotypes." But in reality, the problem isn't diversity; it's that a senior software engineer admitted, perhaps unwittingly, to pondering three of the most scandalous thought crimes of contemporary American society.

The first crime is proposing that a meritocracy might be healthier for a company than bean-counting race, ethnicity and sex. The second is pointing out that ideological diversity matters. The third and most grievous of all is suggesting that men and women are, in general, physiologically and psychologically different, and thus they tend to excel at different things.

"On average," asserts Damore, "men and women biologically differ in many ways." He then has the temerity to accuse women of generally displaying a "stronger interest in people rather than things," of having empathy and "openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics," and of being less pushy and having less interest in status than male colleagues. Women, this guy says, are "more cooperative" than men and search out better "work-life balance."

There's much more, but I don't want to further upset any female readers.

One of the problems with this kerfuffle was that the vast majority of the histrionic reactions on social media and elsewhere have misrepresented not only what the memo says but also its purpose. It was neither a screed nor anti-diversity. It was the kind of unvarnished, dispassionate and meticulous case that I imagine many engineers offer. It's difficult to believe anyone who read through it with an open mind could interpret the author's notions as an attempt to consolidate the patriarchy or make life less diverse in his field.

The other, bigger problem is the reaction to it demonstrates that the author is completely right about the lack of ideological diversity and the consequences of that lack.

Damore's contentions about the bias at Google is a near-perfect summation of the dangers manifest in all close-minded institutions, including most of the news media and many universities. He points out that conflating "freedom from offense with psychological safety" shames people into silence. Further, he argues that these monocultures foster unhealthy environments where people can no longer honestly debate important topics. Finally, and most destructively, he says that these bubbles then promote "extreme and authoritarian elements."

We see incidents of this kind of close-mindedness all the time in schools and in government. Just ask Brendan Eich, who was hounded out of the office of Mozilla CEO in 2013 for having had the wrong opinion on same-sex marriage in 2008, despite zero evidence that he had ever discriminated against anyone in his life.

r, better yet, ask Danielle Brown, Google's new vice president of diversity, integrity and governance. She wrote in response to the engineer's memo, "Diversity and inclusion are a fundamental part of our values and the culture," and then rebuked the statement, telling employees that she wouldn't link to the letter because everyone disagrees with its contents. Rather than showing appreciation for diverse thinking among her ranks, Brown even went on to insinuate that the engineer's suggestions in the memo might undermine "discrimination laws."

Does Brown believe that dissenting Google employees will now feel safer sharing their opinions when they see that the company won't stand by those making unpopular ones? Because, after all, any old VP of diversity, integrity and governance can defend positions that confirm the biases of the majority of their workforce.

Of course, nothing in the letter states women aren't as good as men, or that women deserve less money, or that women aren't suited to be good at tech jobs, or that they should be victimized by the company. The author mostly theorized as to why self-selection might account for some of the disparity at Google.

This is certainly well within the boundaries of legitimate debate. Or it used to be. There are still people who believe human beings are diverse and complicated, and judging them solely by sex or color is just a ham-fisted social experiment. "Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group," says our engineer. His brand of American egalitarianism and idealism, however, is now frowned upon in large segments of society and at certain companies.

By firing Damore, Google confirms much of what he warns about. Of course, Google can take any political positions it likes. But its overwhelming power and reach into the everyday lives of so many Americans makes it a perfectly legitimate target for criticism.

"If we can't have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem," wrote Damore.

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Federal Court Rules Citizens Have No Right To Film Politicians & Police In Public

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TheLastAmericanVagabond.com

Contradicting the rulings of six others federal courts, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals annihilated free speech rights in upholding a district court decision stating citizens do not have the right to film public officials — politicians, police, and others — in public. (TFTP) In affirming the decision of the lower court to dismiss, the […]

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