Welcome to CaturSaturday, March 2, 2024: National Banana Cream Pie Day, something that would make a terrific breakfast now, wouldn’t it?
It’s also International Rescue Cat Day, World Teen Mental Wellness Day (they need it!), National Read Across America Day, and Texas Independence Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the March 2 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The NYT still thinks Israel possibly bears almost all responsibility for the fracas in Gaza yesterday that left 100 killed. Hamas says Israel killed them, Israel says they were trampled or run over, and the IDF shot only ten people who approached soldiers menacingly, and killed none of them. But you know the NYT, which took a long time to admit that no, a rocket that exploded in a Gazan hospital was misfired by Islamic Jihad. Well, here we go again:
World leaders on Friday intensified their demands on Israel to get more aid into Gaza and provide more answers about the deaths of scores of Palestinians in a scene of chaos surrounding a humanitarian convoy its forces were securing.
Many questions remained unanswered as the Israeli military and Gazan officials offered divergent accounts of one of the deadliest known disasters involving civilians in the nearly five-month war. Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, called on the Israeli military to “fully explain” the killings in northern Gaza on Thursday and joined the calls for a cease-fire that would allow for the release of Israeli hostages and for more aid to enter the territory.
How come nobody asks Hamas to “fully explain the killings”? Isn’t that weird? And a cease-fire that would “allow for the release of Israeli hostages” would also mandate the release of thousands of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli jails and revitalize Hamas. And no, Hamas would never release all the hostages at once. Don’t people realize this? But I fulminate.
“People in Gaza are closer to death than to life,” she said on social media. “More humanitarian aid must come in. Immediately.”
France’s foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné, called for an independent investigation and said the deadly chaos surrounding the convoy was the result of a humanitarian catastrophe that has left Gazans “fighting for food.”
“What is happening is indefensible and unjustifiable,” Mr. Séjourné told France Inter on Friday. “Israel must be able to hear it and it must stop.”
The disaster unfolded Thursday morning as thousands of hungry people gathered near a food convoy in Gaza City, with Israeli troops and tanks nearby. It was a scene increasingly common in Gaza, where Palestinians fighting starvation amid Israel’s war against Hamas are regularly massing around the relatively small number of aid trucks being allowed into the territory.
This is insane. There are hundreds of trucks of food lined up inside the Gazan border waiting to move to warehouses, but what’s holding them up is not Israel, but UNRWA, which is in charge of distributing the food, and there’s plenty of it. But UNRWA won’t do it unless they’re guarded by Hamas police, who of course will deliver the food mostly to Hamas! Look at this tweet: these are trucks that Israel has already checked and approved (COGAT is an Israeli organization, and they’re using private contractors, which is hard because the deliveries are dangerous):
300 trucks worth remain on the Gazan side of Kerem Shalom, to be picked up and distributed by aid organizations.
— COGAT (@cogatonline) March 1, 2024
The UN needs to step up and do its damn job, and the world needs to stop blaming Israel for causing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza by supposedly blocking food and medicine from coming in. People who believe that are. . . well, this is a family-friendly site and I’ll stop here.
For an article about how the NYT tends to take Hamas’s word over the IDF’s, see this article from the Elder of Ziyon.
The WSJ just announced that the U.S. will deliver food to Gaza via airdrops. Fine, but who’s going to prevent the food from going to Hamas? Who will be there when the goods hit the ground?
*As always, I’ll put up three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at the Free Press, this week called “TGIF: Bad things happened.”
→ Remember when this was a free speech group?
I don’t know when every institution had to become part of a singular political borg with the same opinion on everything. So the ACLU is for student debt cancellation, which is related to their mission. . . how again? Another example is The Intercept, a publication that once did fabulous investigative reporting on government spying and such, and now is just a daily screed against Israel, with random Google Gemini–approved hot takes thrown in. Sad.
→ Pogromi Mami! Jewish students at UC Berkeley hosted an event with Ran Bar-Yoshafat, an Israeli lawyer, and the response from campus groups was to smash their way into the building. The protestors broke glass and chased the Jewish students, who had to be evacuated by security through the campus tunnel system, because Free Palestine. Video here of the protest smashing the walls of Zellerbach Playhouse, and you can hear the eerie sound of glass breaking. The protesters are very clear: They will not allow any “Zionist” on campus. Given that most American Jews are not for the total destruction of Israel, you see the bind. Toughie! (Editor’s note: For more on the violence at UC Berkeley, read Greg Lukianoff and Angel Eduardo in our pages.)
And it looks like it was crafting night at the University of Santa Barbara’s Multicultural Center, where a group of students doing a “collective action” made signs targeting Tessa Veksler, the student body president and the daughter of Soviet Jewish refugees. Signs said things like: “You can run but you can’t hide Tessa Veksler.” And: “Attention Tessa Veksler supports genocide.” And: “Get the Zionist out of office.” Being a successful and proud Jewish student on an American campus sounds fun, no? In the Multicultural Center’s now-deleted Instagram, someone involved with it apparently posted: “Why does our school support a regime to feast on the blood of our fellow humans.” Asked where Jews in Israel would go when they were kicked off the land, one of the leaders of the Multicultural Center wrote: “Back to Poland or the USA.” Cool. Back to Poland.
→ What if gender nonconforming kids won’t kill themselves? A major new study out of Finland has found that “gender-affirming care” does not, in fact, impact adolescent suicide rates. The activist line for years has been that you have to give young children cross-sex hormones the minute they ask for them instead of starting with counseling—since otherwise, they’re at major risk of suicide. But it’s just not true. From the Finnish scientists’ conclusion: “Clinical gender dysphoria does not appear to be predictive of all-cause nor suicide mortality when psychiatric treatment history is accounted for.” The Finnish scientists argue that more effort should be put into treating the other psychiatric issues these kids show coming in.
And how did the pro-pediatric transition community take it? Not well. Mostly, they went after the messengers who dared to cover the study, like one Benjamin Ryan, a smart science writer. Here’s a spokesperson for GLAAD yelling at Ben on Twitter/X: “It’s awful to hate yourself so much to write about junk science just to make yourself feel good.” It kind of seems like GLAAD is extra-bullying Ben in a gay way, calling him self-hating? GLAAD used to be, like, a normal and good group that helped lessen homophobia. Now I think it just called me a fat lesbian.
*Anybody who follows Google knows that it’s buying into Social Justice and CRT big time (remember when it fired James Damore?), and Andrew Sullivan decries this change in his new column, “Google’s brand-new woke AF world.”
You can see the shift at Google if you go back and look at their original goals. In 2004, in their Founders Letter just before the IPO, Larry Page and Sergey Brin described what they hoped to achieve: “Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective.” And that’s how Google succeeded.
Not anymore. Compare the Page/Brin vision to Google’s “Objectives for AI applications” two decades later, long after the Damore Rubicon. As Nate Silver notes, Google offers seven formal principles that guide Gemini AI, and the objective truth is not among them. The overriding goal is to be “socially beneficial” — which may, of course, require demoting or disappearing data, ideas or facts, if they might be deemed by some as socially non-beneficial. And the words of Page and Brin — “unbiased and objective” — have been replaced by a mandate to “avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias,” which is subtly different. It’s about ensuring that Google does not amplify existing bias in society, meaning sexism, racism, etc. Here’s Nate:
Google has no explicit mandate for its models to be honest or unbiased. (Yes, unbiasedness is hard to define, but so is being socially beneficial.) There is one reference to “accuracy” under “be socially beneficial”, but it is relatively subordinated, conditioned upon “continuing to respect cultural, social and legal norms”.
When “respecting cultural norms” supersedes accuracy, there is, in fact, no guarantee of accuracy. Indeed, there’s an implicit mandate to be inaccurate if that is “socially beneficial.”
Now imagine the kind of Google employee who can rise through the purged, mono-cultural woke ranks to run Gemini. Once upon a time, you might have thought of a pale-faced geek tapping diligently into a screen for months on end. But at woke Google, you get the senior director of product for Gemini Experiences, Jack Krawczyk. A sample of his tweets:
- “White privilege is fucking real. Don’t be an asshole and act guilty about it — do your part in recognizing bias at all levels egregious.”
- “This is America where racism is the #1 value for our populace seeks to uphold above all others.”
And the best thing about Biden’s inauguration speech, Krawczyk believed, was “acknowledging systemic racism.” He’s deep, deep, deep in the DEI cult, surrounded solely by people deep, deep, deep in the DEI cult.
That’s the neoracist Google that Sundar Pichai has deliberately created. From a leaked 2016 meeting he presided over, in the wake of Trump’s election victory, a Google staffer urged the entire staff to mobilize against white supremacy: “Speaking to white men, there’s an opportunity for you right now to understand your privilege [and] go through the bias-busting training, read about privilege, read about the real history of oppression in our country.” Every executive on stage — the CEO, CFO, two VPs, and the two co-founders — applauded the employee.
Sullivan then shows what happens when you ask Gemini some political or ideological questions (try it—it’s fun!), and concludes this:
In fact, on every contentious contemporary issue, I was unable to find a single one that didn’t reflect the most far-left position, while offering no alternative resources to balance it out. It’s critical theory all the way down — presented as objective fact.
*A bunch of hackers, probably Russian, has just disrupted the pharmaceutical-drug distribution network in America, snarling pharmacies who can’t connect drug prices with what insurance companies will pay. The result: some people aren’t getting their meds.
Change Health and a rival, CoverMyMeds, are the two biggest players in the so-called switch business, charging pharmacies a small fee for funneling claims to insurers.
“When one of them goes down, obviously it’s a major problem,” said Patrick Berryman, a senior vice president at the National Community Pharmacists Association.
A notorious Russian-speaking ransomware ring known as ALPHV claimed responsibility for the Feb. 21 breach, capping a string of attacks that included several hospitals.
The lasting issues underscore the continued fragility of critical infrastructure nearly three years after a ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline prompted a shutdown of the biggest network of fuel pipelines in the United States. Service stations, particularly in the eastern half of the country, ran short of fuel as consumers rushed to gas up.
I haven’t tested this yet, as the only drugs I get are ones to help me sleep, and that only every three months. If you’ve run into this problem, please mention it below.
*I’ll add this story from the AP because it shows the kind of damage that the proliferation of guns, and the lack of regulation, is causing in America. As we all know, legal guns bought for defensive purposes cause far more deaths of innocent people (including suicides) than of home invaders or other baddies. The ratio is in fact 34 to 1! So much for the mantra that “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.” Don’t people care about this lopsided and wrong-way ratio? Anyway, here’s another innocent person who died for the crime of turning into the wrong driveway. I’ve put one sentence in bold which teaches an obvious lesson:
A man who fatally shot a 20-year-old woman after the SUV she was riding in mistakenly drove into his rural driveway in upstate New York was sentenced Friday to more than 25 years to life in prison.
Kevin Monahan, 66, was convicted of second-degree murder in the death last April of Kaylin Gillis. She was riding in a caravan of two cars and a motorcycle that was trying to leave after pulling into Monahan’s long, winding driveway while looking for a party at another person’s house in the town of Hebron.
“I think it’s important that people know that it is not OK to shoot people and kill them who drive down your driveway,” Judge Adam Michelini said. Apart from the wider deterrent effect, Michelini said it’s important that Monahan remain behind bars rather than be free to harm more people.
The judge handed down the maximum sentence after Gillis’ father, boyfriend and best friend told Monahan and the packed court room about their anguish and the immeasurable void in their lives.
The judge sentenced Monahan to 25 years to life for the second-degree murder and handed down a consecutive sentence of one-and-a-third to four years for tampering with physical evidence. A sentence for reckless endangerment will be served concurrently.
Michelini scolded Monahan for showing no remorse.
“You murdered Kaylin Gillis. You shot at a car full of people and you didn’t care what would happen and you repeatedly lied about it. You deserve to spend the maximum time in prison allowable under the law,” the judge said.
This is inevitable if people are willy-nilly allowed to have lots of guns under little regulation. Someone blows his top and gets angry, and—presto!—the solution is at hand. Of course there’s no way American can stop this, and so innocent people will keep dying at a ratio of 34 to 1 or thereabouts.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are sleeping together again:
A: I like when you sleep like that.Hili: Be quiet, you will wake Szaron up.
Ja: Lubię jak tak śpicie.Hili: Cicho bądź, bo Szarona obudzisz.
*******************
From the Dodo Pet:
An accurate description from Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:
From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy. (Wendy’s instituted “dynamic pricing” in which prices change during the day):
From Masih; check out the crimes this singer is being imprisoned for. And the video is him singing a lovely song.
Iranian authorities have sentenced Grammy award winner Shervin Hajipour to 3 years and 8 months in prison and prohibited him from leaving Iran for two years.
He is receiving this unjust punishment for “propaganda against the state” and “provoking people to protest in order to… pic.twitter.com/Y3dy7r7SUI
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) March 1, 2024
Davidson has been colonized by wokeness:
Studying Spanish or Cell Biology at Davidson College?
According to the syllabi, you must also:
-reflect on “your complicity in upholding systems of oppression,” and
-“hold you and your classmates accountable in addressing racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia head on.” pic.twitter.com/PoFy8vDAy0
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) February 27, 2024
From Barry, a wonderful video (the second one) of a cat seeing snow for the first time. The first one’s of a d*g, but it’s also pretty good.
Seeing snow for the first time❤️ pic.twitter.com/Xk3mCqhYHt
— Amit Shah (Parody) (@Motabhai012) February 29, 2024
From Malcolm, a cat playing with cherries:
She loves to play with the cherries instead of eating them 😭 pic.twitter.com/PtgZrPWWZl
— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) February 29, 2024
From Luana, a d*g without merit:
when u lied on ur CV but got the job pic.twitter.com/UNhCCIDtdY
— B&S (@_B___S) February 29, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial; a girl who died in the camp at age 17:
2 March 1925 | A Polish Jewish girl, Jeannette Woda, was born in Siedlce. She lived in Paris.
On 13 July 1942 she was deported to #Auschwitz. She did not survive. pic.twitter.com/FNVWnAkJir
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) March 2, 2024
Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. I’ve posted this one before but it’s worth seeing again. It’s one of the most amazing nature videos I’ve seen:
Male jaguar pulling an 8 ft caiman out of the water pic.twitter.com/sofJb9ttj9
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) February 29, 2024
Matthew’s comment on this one was, “Plagiarism!” But is it given the well known story?
The 1916 silent film version of Snow White made a strong impression on a young Walt Disney. Its influence can be seen in his first animated feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) pic.twitter.com/yme4JVN9mW
— Silent Movie GIFs (@silentmoviegifs) February 27, 2024
I just went to the academics section of the Davidson College website and was surprised at the large number of “studies” majors and minors they offer. When I first saw studies courses a couple of decades ago, I thought that they were groupings of courses that were on the forefront of scholarly effort…not yet defined enough for a major, but worth diving into and would either prove themselves over time to drop the nebulous studies moniker or prove to be vacuous and be totally dropped from further consideration. Clearly I was wrong as these studies departments seem to live in perpetuity. Can anyone explain to me exactly what studies are please? For example how would a mathematics studies dept or major differ from one simply called mathematics? Thank you
In a “mathematics” course you would study mathematics.
In a “mathematics studies” course you could learn that maths is racist and that it was invented by white people as a tool to oppress blacks.
“The UN needs to step up and do its damn job, and the world needs to stop blaming Israel for causing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza by supposedly blocking food and medicine from coming in. People who believe that are. . . well, this is a family-friendly site and I’ll stop here.” Please don’t stop for me. Everyone knows that the UN and the world media lie continuously about Israel.
I agree with you 100% but the UN will never ever step up and do anything which could benefit Israel or tell the truth. It is a total dysfunctional antisemitic disaster and it needs to be dismantled. The USA can and should remove all funding and send it packing from US territory. It is not fit for purpose.
On a brighter note, I love the smart dog and the cat playing with cherries just made my day.
Underscoring this: “It [the UN] is a total dysfunctional antisemitic disaster and it needs to be dismantled. The USA can and should remove all funding and send it packing from US territory. It is not fit for purpose.”
On this day:
537 – Siege of Rome: The Ostrogoth army under king Vitiges begins the siege of the capital. Belisarius conducts a delaying action outside the Flaminian Gate; he and a detachment of his bucellarii are almost cut off. [Having your bucellarii almost cut off sounds painful!]
1498 – Vasco da Gama’s fleet visits the Island of Mozambique.
1657 – The Great Fire of Meireki begins in Edo (now Tokyo), Japan, causing more than 100,000 deaths before it exhausts itself three days later.
1797 – The Bank of England issues the first one-pound and two-pound banknotes.
1807 – The U.S. Congress passes the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, disallowing the importation of new slaves into the country.
1859 – The two-day Great Slave Auction, the largest such auction in United States history, begins.
1867 – The U.S. Congress passes the first Reconstruction Act.
1877 – Just two days before inauguration, the U.S. Congress declares Rutherford B. Hayes the winner of the 1876 U.S. presidential election even though Samuel J. Tilden had won the popular vote.
1882 – Queen Victoria narrowly escapes an assassination attempt by Roderick Maclean in Windsor.
1903 – In New York City the Martha Washington Hotel opens, becoming the first hotel exclusively for women. [It’s been mixed-sex since 1998.]
1949 – Captain James Gallagher lands his B-50 Superfortress Lucky Lady II in Fort Worth, Texas, after completing the first non-stop around-the-world airplane flight in 94 hours and one minute.
1962 – Wilt Chamberlain sets the single-game scoring record in the National Basketball Association by scoring 100 points.
1965 – The US and Republic of Vietnam Air Force begin Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam.
1969 – In Toulouse, France, the first test flight of the Anglo-French Concorde is conducted.
1978 – The late iconic actor Charlie Chaplin’s coffin is stolen from his grave in Switzerland.
1983 – Compact discs and players are released for the first time in the United States and other markets. They had previously been available only in Japan.
1989 – Twelve European Community nations agree to ban the production of all chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) by the end of the century.
1995 – Researchers at Fermilab announce the discovery of the top quark.
1998 – Data sent from the Galileo spacecraft indicates that Jupiter’s moon Europa has a liquid ocean under a thick crust of ice.
2022 – Russian forces capture the city of Kherson during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which subsequently began the start of the Russian occupation and military-civilian administration in Kherson. Kherson is the only regional capital in Ukraine that Russia captured. [Ukraine recaptured the city in November of the same year.]
Births:
1545 – Thomas Bodley, English diplomat and scholar, founded the Bodleian Library (d. 1613).
1860 – Susanna M. Salter, American activist and politician (d. 1961).
1900 – Kurt Weill, German-American pianist and composer (d. 1950).
1901 – Grete Hermann, German mathematician and philosopher (d. 1984). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]
1902 – Moe Berg, American baseball player and spy (d. 1972). [Served as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Although he played 15 seasons in the major leagues, almost entirely for four American League teams, Berg was never more than an average player and was better known for being “the brainiest guy in baseball.” Casey Stengel once described Berg as “the strangest man ever to play baseball.”]
1904 – Dr. Seuss, American children’s book writer, poet, and illustrator (d. 1991).
1919 – Jennifer Jones, American actress (d. 2009).
1922 – Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, American saxophonist (d. 1986).The
1922 – Frances Spence, American computer programmer (d. 2012). [One of the original programmers for the ENIAC (the first electronic digital computer). She is considered one of the first computer programmers in history.]
1930 – Tom Wolfe, American journalist and author (d. 2018).
1931 – Mikhail Gorbachev, Russian lawyer and politician, the 8th and final leader of the Soviet Union, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2022).
1942 – John Irving, American novelist and screenwriter.
1942 – Lou Reed, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, and actor (d. 2013).
1948 – Rory Gallagher, Irish singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (d. 1995).
1950 – Karen Carpenter, American singer (d. 1983).
1961 – Simone Young, Australian conductor, director, and composer. [Currently chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.]
1962 – Jon Bon Jovi, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, and actor.
1968 – Daniel Craig, English actor and producer.
1971 – Dave Gorman, English comedian, author and television presenter.
1977 – Chris Martin, English singer-songwriter (Coldplay).
1980 – Rebel Wilson, Australian actress and screenwriter.
At a formal dinner party, the person nearest death should always be seated closest to the bathroom. (George Carlin):
1791 – John Wesley, English cleric and theologian (b. 1703).
1797 – Horace Walpole, English historian and politician (b. 1717).
1895 – Berthe Morisot, French painter (b. 1841). [She was a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists.]
1930 – D. H. Lawrence, English novelist, poet, playwright, and critic (b. 1885).
1939 – Howard Carter, English archaeologist and historian (b. 1874).
1943 – Gisela Januszewska, Austrian physician (b.1867). [Received the highest decorations for her service during the First World War and social activism in Austria afterwards, but was deported to a Nazi concentration camp, where she died, during the Second World War.]
1944 – Ida Maclean, British biochemist, the first woman admitted to the London Chemical Society (b. 1877).
1962 – Charles Jean de la Vallée-Poussin, Belgian mathematician and academic (b. 1866).
1982 – Philip K. Dick, American philosopher and author (b. 1928).
1987 – Randolph Scott, American actor and director (b. 1898).
1991 – Serge Gainsbourg, French singer-songwriter, actor, and director (b. 1928).
1999 – Dusty Springfield, English singer (b. 1939).
2008 – Jeff Healey, Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1966).
2019 – Mike Oliver, British sociologist, disability rights activist (b. 1945).
Woman of the Day:
[Text from Wikipedia]
Grete Hermann (born on this day in 1901, died 15 April 1984) was a German mathematician and philosopher noted for her work in mathematics, physics, philosophy and education. She is noted for her early philosophical work on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and is now known most of all for an early, but long-ignored critique of a “no hidden-variables theorem” by John von Neumann. It has been suggested that, had her critique not remained nearly unknown for decades, the historical development of quantum mechanics might have been very different.
Hermann studied mathematics at Göttingen under Emmy Noether and Edmund Landau, where she achieved her PhD in 1926. Her doctoral thesis, “Die Frage der endlich vielen Schritte in der Theorie der Polynomideale” (in English “The Question of Finitely Many Steps in Polynomial Ideal Theory”), published in Mathematische Annalen, is the foundational paper for computer algebra. It first established the existence of algorithms (including complexity bounds) for many of the basic problems of abstract algebra, such as ideal membership for polynomial rings. Hermann’s algorithm for primary decomposition is still in contemporary use.
From 1925 to 1927, Hermann worked as assistant for Leonard Nelson. Together with Minna Specht, she posthumously published Nelson’s work System der philosophischen Ethik und Pädagogik, while continuing her own research.
As a philosopher, Hermann had a particular interest in the foundations of physics. In 1934, she went to Leipzig “for the express purpose of reconciling a neo-Kantian conception of causality with the new quantum mechanics”. In Leipzig, many exchanges of thoughts took place among Hermann, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and Werner Heisenberg. The contents of her work in this time, including a focus on a distinction of predictability and causality, are known from three of her own publications, and from later description of their discussions by von Weizsäcker, and the discussion of Hermann’s work in chapter ten of Heisenberg’s The Part and The Whole. From Denmark, she published her work The foundations of quantum mechanics in the philosophy of nature (German original title: Die naturphilosophischen Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik). This work has been referred to as “one of the earliest and best philosophical treatments of the new quantum mechanics”.In this work, she concludes:
In June 1936, Hermann was awarded the Richard Avenarius prize together with Eduard May and Th. Vogel.
Earlier, in 1935, Hermann published a critique of John von Neumann’s 1932 proof that was widely claimed to show that a hidden variable theory of quantum mechanics was impossible. Hermann’s work on this subject went unnoticed by the physics community until it was independently discovered and published by John Stewart Bell in 1966, and her earlier discovery was pointed out by Max Jammer in 1974. Some have posited that had her critique not remained nearly unknown for decades, her ideas would have put in question the unequivocal acceptance of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, by providing a credible basis for the further development of nonlocal hidden variable theories, which would have changed the historical development of quantum mechanics.
As Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, Hermann participated in the underground movement against the Nazis. She was a member of the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK).
By 1936, Hermann left Germany for Denmark and later France and England. In London, in order to avoid standing out on account of her German provenance, she married a man called Edward Henry early in 1938. Her prescience was justified by events: two years later the British government invoked its hitherto obscure Regulation 18B of the Defence (General) Regulations 1939, identifying several thousand refugees who had fled Germany for reasons of politics or race as enemy aliens and placing them in internment camps.
After the war ended in 1945 she was able to combine her interests in physics and mathematics with political philosophy. She rejoined the Social Democratic Party (SPD) on returning in 1946 to what would become, in 1949, the German Federal Republic (West Germany). Starting in 1947 she was one of those contributing behind the scenes to the Bad Godesberg Programme, prepared under the leadership of her longstanding ISK comrade Willi Eichler, and issued in 1959, which provided a detailed modernising platform that carried the party into government in the 1960s.
She was nominated professor for philosophy and physics at the Pädagogische Hochschule in Bremen and played a relevant role in the Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft. From 1961 to 1978, she presided over the Philosophisch-Politische Akademie, an organisation founded by Nelson in 1922, oriented towards education, social justice, responsible political action and its philosophical basis.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grete_Hermann
The Attagirls on X went with Susanna Madora Salter, the first woman elected as a Mayor in the United States and one of the first to serve in any political office in the USA.
https://twitter.com/TheAttagirls/status/1763827834122854528
SULL-I-VAN FTW
If there was ever to be a successor to Hitchens, Sully might be close.
I beg to differ. Sully regularly osculates the rump of religion and so is not even in the running to be Hitch’s successor in my book.
“Sully regularly osculates the rump of religion […]”
A certain Christian religious sect – perhaps Catholicism – sometimes – Religion in its entirety, perhaps – he loves it of course – the evangelism is weak though, if that’s what it is.
It’s also […] World Teen Mental Wellness Day (they need it!)
He/him/she/her/ze/zir/they/them need it!
+1
Google was yielding obviously biased search results years before Gemini AI appeared. As an experiment, one can compare the images returned by Google and Bing when searching for American scientists. Results today are similar to those of a few years ago. Though I don’t remember the year I noticed this phenomenon, it was probably after the 2016 Google meeting referred to by Andrew Sullivan.
I have always been perplexed by Google’s dropping “Don’t Be Evil” as their corporate motto. I mean, why announced it, why not just ignore it? It seems like we really shouldn’t be surprised that they’ve gone in this direction.
A good example of Google search bias is that, at the height of covid, a Google search for “Great Barrington Declaration” would get you a link to that declaration only on the 4th page of items. The first page would consist entirely of media pieces denouncing the declaration.
Other search engines would return the declaration itself within the first 3 items listed.
One year, in the not-too-near future, serious adults will once again address issues of science and medicine without political distortion, media manipulation, tribal thinking, and panicked perceptions. When that time comes, one of the prime topics for discussion will be this:
How is it that two internationally recognized epidemiologists—one from Oxford, the other from Harvard—can join a respected health policy economist from Stanford to coauthor a document that recommends practices commonly found in pandemic response plans prior to December 31st, 2019 only to be denounced as “fringe epidemiologists” by the director of the US National Institutes of Health, condemned by journalists as right-wing, ignorant extremists who want to kill us all, and throttled by social media.
On NPR just now, voter turnout in Iran put at 40% – a historic low. And in Moscow, strong turnout for Navalny’s funeral. Good signs!
“How come nobody asks Hamas to “fully explain the killings”? Isn’t that weird?” Yes, it’s weird, and it’s even weirder that my wife and I were discussing that very question yesterday. Our thoughts you ask? (You didn’t ask, but well… .)
Israel is expected to explain every mishap and fix every problem because Israel is a modern, western society whose public and leadership have western values and sensibilities.* The world calls on Israel because calling on Hamas is hopeless. The world knows that Hamas can’t possibly be counted on as a partner for peace or for anything else. Israel and the modern world share values; Hamas does not.
And so, just as it is hopeless to demand that an infant not soil its diapers, it is hopeless to demand civility of Hamas. The world knows that Hamas is incapable of acting within a civilized framework: respecting life, valuing individual rights, reason, and all the rest. Israel is all we’ve got.
*By “western,” I mean upholding the Enlightenment values of reason, freedom, respect for life, sovereignty of the individual, and veneration of truth.
Agree. Then we should leave them alone to finish the job of winning, instead of expressing outrage even before the facts are in.
But then maybe it’s all for show, to keep the Islamists from rioting in the western cities which they are on the brink of controlling. Maybe behind the scenes, the only place diplomacy counts, things are under control. Fortunately FDR didn’t suspend Lease-Lend in 1941 just because a couple of tons of thermite fell on German towns as Britain struggled to hit back against the Blitz.
+1 Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
So you’re saying Hamas is incapable of changing its behaviour? I’m not buying it.
Why should they change when no one criticizes them?
With regard to gun violence and self defense, here is critical commentary on the numbers the FBI uses.
Frankly, given the partisan and activist stance of outlets like the Wapo, we should be suspicious of all their factual claims, especially as the touch political topics of the day.
I think one reason why city dwellers are so determined to disarm the populace is that in the city cops are close by and probably most city folks believe that the cops can protect them.
In the suburbs, things are typically much different. It may take 20-30 minutes for the police to show up, and during that time you are on your own. Suburbanites know they cannot count on the police to protect them, and so must protect themselves.
If America wasn’t an out-of-control, gun-worshipping country, suburbanites wouldn’t need the police to protect them in the first place. I’m sure that people in countries where guns are illegal aren’t paranoid about needing to protect themselves.
Several years ago, my elderly mother went onto town on some errand or other. When she got back to the ranch, she noticed that a pickup had turned into the gate about five minutes behind her.
As she got close to the door of the main house, one of the men from the truck approached her and asked a nonsensical question about directions to somewhere.
She explained that she could not help them, that they were on private property, and that they should leave. Shen went inside, but they did not leave. The guy at the door stayed there, trying to talk to her, and the passenger from the truck started walking around the house to the back.
She told them that she was armed, to no effect. It was not until they saw that she had a pistol in her hand that they got in their truck and drove off.
An elderly neighbor lady was taking a nap in her upstairs bedroom when she heard a loud noise. She saw that a van was parked at the side of her house, and it was apparent that the occupants were rummaging around downstairs, after having climbed through a window. She waited at the top of the stairs with a pistol pointed down to the landing. When one of the guys came around the corner and looked up into the barrel of her gun, they ran without saying a word.
These are two anecdotes. They are not statistics or data. Since no shots were fired, they also apparently do not count as defensive gun usage.
I could relate a bunch of such stories, including first hand accounts of my encounters with poachers. What I could not do is tell you about someone close to me who fired their gun at someone, even in self defense.
Another thing about the two anecdotes is that even once the ladies established beyond any doubt that the intruders were up to no good, they did not fire. This is because first, they grew up learning gun safety, and also that neither of them is a homicidal maniac, unlike the person in NY who shot the innocent person in their driveway.
“… here is critical commentary on the numbers the FBI uses.”
Unfortunately, that critical commentary is coming from John Lott, Jr. who is a rather … controversial figure. That his Crime Prevention Research Center had Ted Nugent on its Board of Directors doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
I think Nellie Bowles’s description of the Finnish study is just wrong. It didn’t find ‘that “gender-affirming care” does not, in fact, impact adolescent suicide rates’.
The study looks at the ~2100 under-23s in Finland referred to gender-identity-related medical services from 1999 to 2019, and ~16600 matched controls. It looks at all-cause mortality and suicide.
What it consistently finds is that outcomes for the former group are worse than those for the latter group, but in most cases the numbers are too small for them to declare statistical significance.
This is partly because they’ve chosen p=0.01 as their cutoff for significance rather than the more traditional p=0.05. (On the grounds that they are looking at several different things and they want to avoid the “green jelly bean effect” https://xkcd.com/882/.)
All-cause mortality: 0.5% (11 deaths out of 2083 people) versus 0.3% (44 deaths out of 16643 people). p=0.05. Gender-referred people are dying more, but they don’t have a large enough sample for the chance of seeing this at random to be < 1%.
Suicide: 0.3% (7 suicides out of 2083 people) versus 0.1% (13 suicides out of 16643 people). p=0.004. This _is_ statistically significant even at the p=0.01 level.
So then they built two regression models to predict death and suicide. One uses just (registered) sex, year of birth, and gender-referred or not. The other also uses number of referrals to specialist psychiatric services. (The idea is that gender issues can be comorbid with other things that make you more likely to kill yourself.) Note that the more inputs you give a regression model, the wider the confidence intervals get.
The simpler model finds that being gender-referred means a 2x higher risk of death and a 4.3x higher risk of suicide; p=0.03 and p=0.002 respectively; only the latter passes their p=0.01 threshold.
The more complicated model finds that being gender-referred makes no difference at all to all-cause mortality (they say p=1.0 but surely that isn't actually right) and a 1.8x higher risk of suicide (p=0.3).
Notice that so far _every_ comparison says that gender-referred people are at more risk, with the single exception of the fancier model for all-cause mortality.
They also did the analysis replacing the whole gender-referred group with (1) those who did, and (2) those who didn't, go on to some sort of medical transition. This is with the model that _does_ take psychiatric referrals as an input.
All-cause mortality: non-transitioning gender-referred youngsters 1.4x more likely to die than controls, transitioning ones 0.7x. (They say p=0.5 for both, which tells you something about the power of their study: they just don't have enough data to distinguish.)
Suicide: non-transitioning gender-referred 3.2x more likely to kill themselves, transitioning 0.8x. (The former is p=0.05.)
In other words, being gender-referred but _not_ transitioning seems to have much worse outcomes than being gender-referred and transitioning, which seems to leave you on par with the general population.
So. Did the study show that gender-affirming care doesn't impact suicide rates? Not at all. The study _didn't have enough people to tell_ what impact gender-affirming care has on suicide rates, at least with the p=0.01 confidence level they chose to require.
But every comparison in it shows (albeit not reaching the level of significance they chose) (1) that gender-referred young people are more likely to die and more likely to kill themselves, (2) that gender-referred young people who don't transition are more likely to die and more likely to kill themselves, and (3) that gender-referred young people who _do_ transition are not more likely to die or to kill themselves.
Everything in the study is what you would expect to see in a world where gender-dysphoric young people are more likely to kill themselves but medical transition fixes that.
Most things in the study are _also_ compatible with a world where that isn't so, in the sense that in such a world all but one of the results they found could happen more than 1% of the time by chance.
(One thing that the study _does_ appear to show fairly clearly is that suicide rates among gender-dysphoric young people in Finland, at least those who get referred to gender identity services[1], are not super-high. Obviously 7 suicides out of 2083 people is 7 too many, but it doesn't seem like a number that justifies the "would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?" rhetoric one sometimes hears.)
[1] Presumably some gender-dysphoric people _don't_ get referred to such services. That might be because the dysphoria isn't very severe, which presumably makes them less likely to kill themselves, or because their parents are uncooperative, which presumably makes them more likely to kill themselves. It seems plausible that the "gender-referred" group is at least somewhat representative of gender-dysphoric young people as a whole.
A few other notes:
1. Mean and median age were 18.5 and 19, so this is a study of young adults as much as it's a study of children. A lot of the arguing about medical treatment of gender-dysphoric young people is specifically about children, and it doesn't seem like we can conclude all that much about them from this.
2. They're looking at referrals up to 2019, and their latest data come from early 2022. So if there's anything that makes (some or all) gender-dysphoric young people more or less likely to die, or to kill themselves, more than a few years after referral, they won't catch all of that. (Oversimplified example: imagine that gender-dysphoric people get referred, see how they're feeling 10 years after referral, and kill themselves if it's bad enough: their data obviously can't show any of those deaths for the more recent cases.)
Thank you for the thought and effort you’ve into this.
I would just say that the fortunately small number of suicides is what doomed the study to be unable to demonstrate statistical significance, given the number of subjects they had to work with, 2083. In a retrospective study like this you can’t increase statistical power by planning to enrol more subjects, the way you can with a prospective trial. If you have 2083 in your files, that’s all you have.* This “negative” study can’t prove that gender care doesn’t reduce suicide risk, only that it is yet another study that fails to prove it does. It is more like yet another Covid trial not showing any benefit from ivermectin. It is fun to speculate about how the results might have been different had the study been designed differently, (or “better”) but this is the study they got.
Let’s imagine, though, that gender care really did cut the suicide rate from 7 of 2083 to, say, 2 of 2083, a generous, best-case assumption that most would regard as “life-saving.” That means you would have to treat 2083 people with irreversible hormones and surgery to prevent 5 suicides, never mind what other mental health treatment might have achieved similar or better results. (Hormones and surgery are not anti-depressants.) You would also have to track all-cause mortality. If a young person dies in a car wreck or in a violent confrontation with police instead of what the coroner rules a suicide, he’s still dead. This “number needed to treat” is an important metric in burdensome or expensive interventions applied to large populations when the event you are trying to prevent is rare. It is inherently a judgment between competing values and is not objectively or statistically determined. “If it saves one life…” is not how society makes decisions or allocates resources, which is what the gender advocates are asking us to do.
Finally, it is irresponsible to “presume” that the suicide risk is higher in children whose parents push back against referring them to gender clinics. There is no basis for that assertion, even as a hypothesis to advance about the limitations of a study.
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* A rule of thumb is that if the confidence interval on your main outcome measure includes both no effect and some positive effect that you would have felt worth having, the study was too small. Better luck next time.
Yup, strongly agree that one of the most interesting takeaways here is that thankfully the suicide rate just doesn’t seem to be that large. I’m not sure there’s any way that designing the study differently could have made it more conclusive (given what actually happened in the real world) — it’s just really difficult to get strong evidence from small amounts of data.
But it’s _definitely_ not correct to present the study as (1) evidence that gender dysphoria doesn’t put young people at increased risk of suicide or (2) evidence that “gender-affirming care” doesn’t reduce that risk; everything the study found is exactly what you’d expect if it does and it does.
I agree that all-cause mortality is a more important metric overall — if some treatment or absence-of-treatment turned 100 non-suicide deaths into 30 suicide deaths and no others, it would probably be a big gain. (Depending on the details, of course; for instance, maybe suicide deaths are worse because they’re evidence of extreme misery before the death.) The numbers in the study suggest that gender-dysphoric young people _also_ have higher all-cause mortality than the general population, and that gender-dysphoric young people who undergo medical transition don’t, so to whatever extent death is what you care about the study suggests that transition is good for those people on the whole.
(The study found 44 deaths among 16643 people which would be 5.5 deaths among 2083, versus 11 actual deaths, so 5.5 excess deaths. It found 13 suicides among 16643 people which would be 1.5 deaths among 2083, versus 7 actual suicides, so 5.5 excess suicides. So it sure _looks_ as if what’s happening is that gender dysphoria is associated with increasing risk of suicide but not of other modes of death. But of course all these numbers are too small to draw any conclusion with much confidence.)
I concede that “presumably” was too strong, but I’d be _really_ surprised if it didn’t turn out that there are more suicides (proportionally) among young people who want medical treatment for gender dysphoria but whose parents won’t let that happen, than among young people who want medical treatment for gender dysphoria and get it. (More generally, I would expect more suicides among young people who want _almost anything_ very strongly and whose parents forbid it, than among young people who want the same thing very strongly and get it.)
“Being really surprised” that something could turn out to be true is not evidence that it’s false. It’s just evidence of cognitive bias. That’s the logical fallacy of incredulity. You’re asking us to be cognitively biased to believe three things:
1) that good parenting—not letting children have things they want that the parents believe in good faith are bad for them—causes suicides,
2) that giving in to suicide blackmail (often at the behest of the helping professions) reduces the probability that actual suicide will occur, and
3) that gender-affirming care is itself effective in preventing suicide, and not just in growing breasts or a beard. (That’s what this study fails to show, remember.)
And you’re asking us to accept that cognitive bias in order to bolster a study not even designed to test that hypothesis, because adolescents in conflict with parents and not referred to the gender clinic were never assessed.
Surveys (themselves biased by self-report and recall) indicate that gender-confused adolescents who say they are not affirmed by their parents report more suicidal thinking and sometimes non-suicidal self-harm. Whether this, if real, is down to hateful transphobic parents or whether it is the way disturbed children interact with their parents cannot be determined. But it’s not suicide, obviously, or they wouldn’t be completing the surveys.
Suicide is an important issue for the public health, which is why I’m asking indulgence to over-comment here. I wish you would retract your incredulity bias that non-affirming parents are killing their children.
Well said, as always, thank you for bringing sense to the subject.
I’m afraid almost everything you say about what I’m asking you to do, and why, is wrong.
I wasn’t claiming that “I’d be really surprised” was _evidence_. (It never occurred to me that anyone would think it was such a claim, or I’d have said explicitly that it wasn’t.)
I deny that saying or thinking something would be surprising is evidence of cognitive bias. (Which is not, of course, to claim that I’m free of cognitive biases, either in general or here; I just don’t think that saying I’d be surprised by something is any evidence one way or the other.) I’d be really surprised if the temperature here in the UK were 30 degC tomorrow. I’d be really surprised if Nikki Haley were the next president of the United States. I’d be really surprised if any of my religious acquaintances started performing undeniable miracles. I’d be really surprised if my house burned down this week. Etc. I may of course have cognitive biases around any or all of these things, but they are also things that just are very unlikely and saying “I’d be really surprised if” is not an indication of bias.
I am not asking anyone to be cognitively biased. (I actively hope you aren’t, whether you end up agreeing with me or not.)
I am not asking anyone to believe that good parenting causes suicides. In the scenario we’re considering — a young person is severely gender-dysphoric, hates having the body they do, wants medical treatment to change it, cannot get it because their parents won’t allow it, and eventually commits suicide — it is the gender dysphoria that caused the suicide, not the parents’ obstruction. (Whether or not it is in fact “good parenting”, which is of course a bitterly disputed question.)
I am not asking anyone to give in to “suicide blackmail”. The only thing I said that has anything to do with “suicide blackmail” is that the numbers found in this study don’t seem to justify the “would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?” rhetoric that’s used sometimes.
(I _do_ think that if someone is so unhappy about something that they might in fact kill themselves over it, then that is an argument for changing it, even when doing so has costs. This has nothing to do with blackmail.)
The numbers in this study do seem to suggest — even though they could not possibly, given the small numbers of people involved[1], _prove_ — that “gender-affirming care” makes its recipients less likely to kill themselves.
[1] Actually, I haven’t checked whether if the regression were rerun with _zero_ suicide deaths in the “gender-referred + medical transition” group it would find evidence sufficient for statistical significance at the authors’ chosen p=0.01 level. But my guess from eyeballing the numbers is that it wouldn’t.
I’m not asking you to do anything “to bolster [this] study”. It makes no difference to me what you think of the study. (I’m not hugely impressed by it myself.) I only mentioned any of this because I thought I ought to point out that the study only looks at gender-dysphoric young people _who were referred to gender identity services_, and having done so it seemed worth mentioning my best guesses at how other subpopulations of gender-dysphoric young people might differ. Obviously no one else is under the least obligation to agree with my guesses, and I wasn’t claiming otherwise.
I agree that self-reported suicidal ideation isn’t the same thing as suicide; I’m not sure exactly why you bring that up, as it has nothing to do with anything earlier in the discussion.
I did not claim, and do not believe, that “non-affirming parents are killing their children”. Some — and, it seems, mercifully rather few — children are killing themselves. Parents’ interactions with their children presumably (I _do_ claim that this is a reasonable presumption) sometimes have some influence on whether they kill themselves or not. I have a guess at which way around that influence goes, in the case of children severely enough gender-dysphoric to seek medical treatment whose parents won’t let them. Again, no one else is under any obligation to agree with my guesses.
Anyway, at this point both my comments and yours are > 10% of the thread and, per Da Roolz, I shall shut up for a while.
Thank you for this comment. My daughter wanted a medical intervention for self diagnosed gender dysphoria which we absolutely refused. It was a long year but she no longer feels that way. This rush for medical interventions is very disturbing.
Reply to Kathleen V-
Where I live, there is a grey area related to this. The concept of an alleged risk to children from possible parental abuse is used routinely to keep parents from knowing or interfering.
This includes secret prescriptions of hormones and other drugs. The point of the secrecy is to keep the parents from knowing anything is amiss until the child is thoroughly indoctrinated.
In our case, a school counselor convinced our child and several others that normal awkwardness of puberty was a sure sign of transgender identity. Beyond that, they gave the kids completely unrealistic impressions of the likely results of transitioning.
No matter how the parents react, the child is set up for a harsh encounter with reality eventually.
Beyond all that, the hormones cause mood swings, so various antidepressants are used to mitigate those effects. It is inevitable that they occasionally “crash” to some degree or other.
It seems outlandish that we need to talk about whether parents are responding appropriately to conditions that need never have been produced.