How ... inconvenient

Massive Genetic Study Reveals 90 Percent Of Earth’s Animals Appeared At The Same Time | Tech Times:

Landmark new research that involves analyzing millions of DNA barcodes has debunked much about what we know today about the evolution of species. 

In a massive genetic study, senior research associate at the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University Mark Stoeckle and University of Basel geneticist David Thaler discovered that virtually 90 percent of all animals on Earth appeared at right around the same time. 

More specifically, they found out that 9 out of 10 animal species on the planet came to being at the same time as humans did some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
"This conclusion is very surprising," says Thaler, "and I fought against it as hard as I could."

How can that be?

As to how that could have happened, it's unclear. A likely possibility is the occurrence of a sudden event that caused large-scale environmental trauma and wiped out majority of the Earth's species.

"Viruses, ice ages, successful new competitors, loss of prey — all these may cause periods when the population of an animal drops sharply," explains Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment.

But we are still awaiting to know what that crisis occasion or event was.

Honor-Shame dynamics enter the STEMs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

School Shootings: increasingly within the boundaries

In the wake of this week's mass murders at a Texas high school by (allegedly) a 17-year-old student, it is chilling to think that what used to be outside the margins regarding guns and schools is now becoming normalized: "The Best Explanation for Our Spate of Mass Shootings Is the Least Comforting."

Writing in 2015, Malcolm Gladwell wrote what I think is still the best explanation for modern American mass shootings, and it’s easily the least comforting. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex argument, essentially he argues that each mass shooting lowers the threshold for the next. He argues, we are in the midst of a slow-motion “riot” of mass shootings, with the Columbine shooting in many ways the key triggering event. Relying on the work of Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, Gladwell notes that it’s a mistake to look at each incident independently:

But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyonearound him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

Actually, this "infectious" behavior is well known and described by people who study and teach leadership. Take, for example, this video that was used in the TED talk below about the very processes Granovetter described.



Here are two real problems: First is what Granovetter describes and the TED talk confirms: once there are enough early adopters of a behavior, then mass adoption easily follows. Hence, Gladwell describes school shootings as a "slow motion riot." But portents are that it won't stay slow.

Second is what is revealed by retired Army officer and psychologist Dave Grossman, who documents in Assassination Generation: Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing and other works that more and more boys are growing up learning to kill vicariously through both popular media and electronic gaming - and that for increasing numbers the vicarious violence will give way to actual.

In one of his early works, On Killing, Grossman documented the great difficulty the US Army had in World War II in training its soldiers, especially infantrymen, actually to take the enemy's life. The leadership found that American men came into the military with deeply-inbred reluctance to harm other human beings, and that only a small minority of infantry even fired their rifles once in a firefight.

Grossman's thesis in what is happening to America today is that we have, as a whole society, widened the boundaries of what constitutes prohibited violence. Prior generations had mass murderers, of course, but even the most depraved killers in the not-too-distant past would never have even thought of shooting schoolchildren at their desks. Now it is, as Gladwell notes, becoming increasingly within the boundaries of conduct that society has moved.

In the coming days the editorialists and TV commentators will have a lot more to say. I do not expect their offerings to be much different from what they said after the Parkland, or Aurora, or Sandy Hook massacres or ... well, pick one. The media’s talking heads will recycle the same things they said before. We’ll hear a lot about America’s gun culture, and all the talk will be about guns and not about the culture.

Does America have a "gun culture?" You bet it does, and it this is it:

This movie was to open in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012, the
day of the killing rampage in Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Warner Bros. pulled the opening

The Hollywood gun culture:

Business Insider reprints part of an AskMen piece on
"The 99 Most Desirable Women Of The Year."
Here is no. 99, Bérénice Marlohe, who plays Severine in Skyfall.

Glorifying violence, especially gun violence, is the present purpose of America's entertainment industry. This is what untold numbers of our children are doing in their homes:



The margins continue to be moved, whether we want it or not. Because there is too much money being made by murder-as-entertainment to give it up, and we the people are willingly paying for it.

Update: One of the ways that the Columbine shooting remains key is in how subsequent school chooters have imitated it to some degree. Not every shooter, but enough to see that Columbine still forms a template. For example,

Some aspects of Friday's [Texas] shooting had echoes of the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999. The two teenaged killers in that incident wore trench coats, used shotguns and planted improvised explosives, killing 10 before committing suicide themselves.

As did the accused killer in Texas, except for the suicide. Reports say, though, that he told police he intended to commit suicide but found he could not go through with it.

FOFB: The Ben Hur Chariot Race(s)

There have been three makes of the 1880 novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, by Lew Wallace. Wallace had been a major general in the Civil War, commanding a Union division in combat. Ben Hur is

... considered "the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century". It became a best-selling American novel, surpassing Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) in sales. The book also inspired other novels with biblical settings and was adapted for the stage and motion picture productions. Ben-Hur remained at the top of the US all-time bestseller list until the publication of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936). The 1959 MGM film adaptation of Ben-Hur is considered one of the greatest films ever made and was seen by tens of millions, going on to win a record 11 Academy Awards in 1960, after which the book's sales increased and it surpassed Gone with the Wind. [Wikipedia]

The first motion-picture adaptation was a silent film released in 1925, the most recent was released in 2016. All three versions feature the famous chariot race as the hinge of the narrative, about which all else revolves.

The 1959 version has justifiably gone down in cinematic history as one of the towering achievements of the silver screen. Here is an explanation of the its chariot race from Turner Classic Movies' FB page:
At the time of its release in 1959, MGMS’s lavish quasi-biblical spectacle Ben-Hur was the most expensive film ever made, with a budget of nearly $16 million. The famed chariot race alone required an 18 acre set at Rome’s Cinecitta Studios, a five week shooting schedule & 7,000 extras, won a record 11 Academy Awards.

The chariot race in Ben-Hur was directed by Andrew & Yakima.​The chariot arena covering 18 acres, was the largest film set ever built at that time. Constructed at a cost of $1 million, it took a thousand workmen more than a year to carve the oval out of a rock quarry. The racetrack featured 1,500-foot long straights & five-story-high grandstands. Over 400 km of metal tubing were used to erect the grandstands​.​A chariot track identical in size was constructed next to the set & used to train the horses & lay out camera shots. Planning for the chariot race took nearly a year to complete. Seventy-eight horses were bought & imported from Yugoslavia and Sicily in November 1957, exercised into peak physical condition, and trained by Hollywood animal handler Randall to pull the quadriga.

The firm of Danesi Brothers built 18 chariots,​ ​nine of which were used for practice, each weighing 410 kg​. Principal cast members, stand-ins, and stunt people made 100 practice laps of the arena in preparation for shooting. Heston & Boyd both had to learn how to drive a chariot. Heston, an experienced horseman, took daily three-hour lessons in chariot driving after he arrived in Rome. The chariot scene took over three months​ ​to film at a total cost of $1 million​ ​& required more than 320 km of racing to complete.​

The cameras used during the chariot race also presented problems. The 70mm lenses had a minimum focusing distance of 50 feet, and the camera was mounted on a small Italian-made car so the camera crew could keep in front of the chariots. The horses, however, accelerated down the 1,500-foot straight much faster than the car could, and the long focal length left ​cinematographers​ with too little time to get their shots. The production company purchased a more powerful American car, but the horses were still too fast, and even with a head start, the filmmakers only had a few more seconds of shot time. As filming progressed, vast amounts of footage were shot for this sequence. The ratio of footage shot to footage used was 263:1, one of the highest ratios ever for a film​ for this 11 minute spectacle​​ and rest is history.

Here is a clip from the 1959 chariot race.




And here is a similar sequence from the 2016 release. Not nearly as much construction was needed for it because of CGI.



And the 1925 race, when anything remotely resembling special effects, as we know it, was unheard of then.



Finally, just for kicks and grins, what if retired NASCAR driver Darrel Waltrip had narrated the 1959 race?

Quote of the day on SJWs

The pursuit of abstract social justice goes hand-in-hand with the view that power struggles and relations of domination express the truth of our social condition … . The goal is to seize power and to use it to liberate the oppressed… .

Intellectuals who think that way are already ruling out the possibility of compromise. Their totalitarian language does not set out a path of negotiation but instead divides human beings into innocent and guilty groups. Behind the impassioned rhetoric of the Communist Manifesto, behind the pseudo-science of Marx’s labour theory of value, and behind the class analysis of human history, lies a single emotional source resentment of those who control things [Italics added]. This resentment is both rationalized and amplified by the proof that property owners form a ‘class’. According to the theory, the ‘bourgeois’ class has … systematic access to the levers of power, and a shared body of privileges. Moreover all those good things are acquired and retained through the ‘exploitation’ of the proletariat, which has nothing to part with except its labour, and which will therefore always be cheated of its just deserts.

 Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands — Thinkers of the New Left, in chapter 1

And Fredrik deBoer in "bingo cards go both ways," 2014:

I meet and interact with a lot of young lefties who are just stunning rhetorically weak; they feel all of their politics very intensely but can’t articulate them to anyone who doesn’t share the same vocabulary, the same set of cultural and social signifiers that are used to demonstrate you’re one of the “right sort of people.” These kids are often great, they’re smart and passionate, I agree with them on most things, but they have no ability at all to express themselves to those who are not already in their tribe. They say terms like “privilege” or “mansplain” or “tone policing” and expect the conversation to somehow just stop, that if you say the magic words, you have won that round and the world is supposed to roll over to what you want. 

Elections are still rigged

In 1980 a Marxist writer explained how elections work - and are supposed to work - in a bourgeoisie country (and the USA is definitely that). After delineating the tedium and manufactured excitement of the primaries and delegate counting and national political conventions and all the rest of American politics, writer Paul Saba explained how the elections were "Reaffirming the Marxist Theory of the State":

What is the purpose of this elaborate extravaganza? Marxists have long noted that insofar as its stated purpose is concerned–determining the question of political power in modern society–it is no more than a charade, a political sleight of hand in which the more things seem to change, the more do they remain the same. But Marxists do not deserve any special credit for making such an observation. One hardly has to be a Marxist to grasp the fact that bourgeois elections do not, in any way, impinge upon or alter questions of power. The general cynicism among the masses toward politics and politicians–a cynicism which runs far deeper than can be measured solely by noting the large numbers of people who do not bother to vote in elections–is itself proof that the futility and corruption of bourgeois politics has become a part of U.S. folklore.

In Marxist theory the whole point of elections is to give the proles the illusion that they have a say in the outcome and how the country is run. But they don't and they shouldn't. At least, not by the bourgeois world view.

What Marxists should do about this was debated quite a bit before the Russian Revolution. On the one hand, a faction believed that once the workers had cast off their chains and appropriated the means of production (the industrial plant), then the proletariat would be able to vote truly and well because the capitalist bourgeoisie would not be allowed or able to blinker them and the natural purity of their proletariat hearts. Hence, right away elections could continue to be held and this time, dadgummit, they actually would mean something.

But in American Democrat party theory, that day is still a long time off.

Levi Tillemann, an author, inventor, and former official with the Obama administration’s Energy Department, moved back home [to Colorado] to make a run against Coffman. He focused his campaign on clean elections, combatting climate change, “Medicare for All,” free community college, and confronting economic inequality and monopoly power. Another candidate for the nomination, Jason Crow, a corporate lawyer at the powerhouse Colorado firm Holland & Hart and an Army veteran, meanwhile, appeared to have the backing of the Democratic establishment, though it wasn’t explicit.

But that was about to change. Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in the House of Representatives, went to Denver and met with Tilleman.

Tillemann met the minority whip at the Hilton Denver Downtown to make the case that the party should stay neutral in the primary and that he had a more plausible path to victory than the same centrism that Coffman had already beaten repeatedly. Hoyer, however, had his own message he wanted to convey: Tillemann should drop out. In a frank and wide-ranging conversation, Hoyer laid down the law for Tillemann. The decision, Tillemann was told, had been made long ago. It wasn’t personal, Hoyer insisted, and there was nothing uniquely unfair being done to Tillemann, he explained: This is how the party does it everywhere.

Tilleman recorded the conversation, though, and you can hear it at the link. 

The establishment Democrat party has become the Revolutionary Vanguard of Marxism-Leninism. The Russian Bolsheviks, seeing themselves as the Vanguard, took to heart Marx's instruction that a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat - meaning by Lenin and his gang, not the general proletariat - was the key to bringing forth True Communism.

The vanguard revolutionaries understood that to leap from workers in chains, unaware of how deluded and ignorant they really were, and in political infancy, to the status of the True Communist Man was stupidly unrealistic. So their own dictatorship was a deplorable but critically-important step to bring the long-oppressed and unenlightened proles to political maturity and understanding. Truly fair, honest and meaningful elections certainly would be held - eventually. Just not yet. But trust us, it's right around the corner, any day now. Forever.

Understand that the only time the Vanguard actually seized power was in the aftermath of the Russian civil war that followed the Russian revolution. And the Vanguard were all of the privileged classes of Russia. In fact, the Vanguard must be of the privileged classes of the society that is overturned, because only the well educated men and women of the non-working classes have the leisure time to study how Marxism works. (Well, it doesn't work, but you get what I mean, I hope).

Remember, the point of Marxist revolutions is not to empower the people, it is to brings the reins of state power to the Marxist revolutionaries. Which always means the Vanguard because for the proles' own good the vanguard of the revolution (maybe in its fifth generation by now!) must also be the conservators of the revolution. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.

And that is the state of the political establishment in America today. 

Syria gas attack and "zero evidence"