Category Archives: Transhuman News

Greg Gutfeld on the set of his late-night Fox News show. (Photo: Fox News)

The new late-night vehicle for longtime Fox News Channel contributor Greg Gutfeld, excitedly named Gutfeld!, is the ratings surprise of the year. Since debuting this spring it has routinely finished second in the ratings to Stephen Colberts Late Show and, despite being on cable instead of network, it often comes in second to Colbert among all shows inthe 25-to-54 demo hour. This is entirely appropriate, because Gutfeld! islargely an answer to the partisanship of Colberts show.

Before you reach for your keyboard: I didnt say it was like Colberts show. If youre a big fan of Colberts show, youll probably hate Gutfeld! But its arrival was inevitable. In the current politicized atmosphere of American entertainment, having a right-wing answer to Colbert was too tempting for Fox News to pass up.And Gutfeld was the obvious choice to host, since he had experience running Foxs overnight yukfest Red Eye from 2007 to 2015. On that show Gutfeld would review offbeat news stories and the foibles of Democrats with a panel that included comedians, entertainment writers, and other not-obviously-right-wing-shills. Imagine Chelsea Handler as a Republican and youd be close.

But the new Gutfeld! is less like Red Eye and more like The Five, Fox News answer to The View. There are fewer wacky news items and more harangues.The panelists all seem like they were vetted by Hannitys people. Disillusioned ex-Red Eye panelists say they hate the new show. Gossip stories portray Gutfeld as a Lonesome Rhodes type, a onetime folksy dude who let success go to his head and now specializes in alienating those around him. (If you thought Meghan McCain leaving The View was dramatic, that was a model of decorum compared with Juan Williams leaving The Five reportedly because he couldnt take any more of Gutfeld.)

All of this may be true, but I also have to admitthat I kind of like Gutfeld! The host has an appealingly weird personality. I met Robert Bork once, he offered during a recent roundtable. Best smoker I ever saw. And yes, the flashes of anger are undeniable, but every comic will tell you thats part of the package. We should start calling Jen Psaki Miss Information, Gutfeld said, archly raising his eyebrowsin the direction of radio host Lauren Chen. How do I come up with this stuff, Lauren?

And once you get beyond the tactlessopening bit unfunny cold opens are a specialty of the Colbert show as well the banter is relatively amusing. And the panelists do score some not unfair points about the usual suspects, which these days includewoke Hollywood, woke Biden, woke protestors, woke cities and woke CNN anchors. Also, I miss seeingRepublicans in late night. Theyve been almost completely shut out. Jimmy Kimmel has COVID denier Adam Carolla on his show occasionally, but that feels more like the times David Letterman would have comic George Miller on his show, not because hes funny but because you dont give up on your old friends.

Its part of a wider politicization of late-night TV that Ive bemoaned before. But this is not the national crisis that Trumpists make it out to be. Most of the people who have been canceled are still making bank. Theyre even burnishing their brands with appearances on shows like Canceled in the USA. The real problem is that entertainment is now subject to the same echo-chamber effect as news. Colbert has his anti-Trump parody videos, so it was only a matter of time before Gutfeld! came along and started doing pro-Trump parodies.

What I really miss is the sound of interesting clashes between conservatives and liberals. And there once was a show that featured that and did it well. It was called Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher and it was literally canceled by ABC. Maher had carefully cultivated a following for his show featuring the likes of Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter sparring with lefty celebrity types. It graduated from Comedy Central to ABC, which paired it up with Nightline. All was going well until six days after 9/11. With the Twin Towers still smoking and Americans still reeling, one of Mahers guests, the conservative provocateur and future Trump pardonee Dinesh DSouza, pushed back against President Bushs characterization of the 9/11 attackers as cowards. Au contraire, said DSouza, they were warriors because they were willing to be slammed into concrete for their cause. Maher completely agreed, adding that Americans had been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. In the outrage that followed, sponsors and affiliates began dropping Politically Incorrect and ABC parted ways with Maher.

About a year later heemerged on HBO as host of his currentshowReal Time. I interviewed him early on (oddly at the same offices and studio hed been using for Politically Incorrect). Maher promised he would continue to have pro-Bush as well as anti-Bush viewpoints represented on his new show. He even wanted to try to balance the number of Democrats and Republicans in his studio audience. But that didnt last long. The Great Sort was underway, and soon it became clear the only people who wanted to be in his audience were Democrats. Maher, no dummy, went with the flow.

And now, all these many years later, we have Gutfeld! with a pro-Fox News studio audience, pro-Fox News panelists, pro-Fox News punchlines, and presiding over it all, the former overnight sensation turned company man, a fellow who used to fulminate at his fellow panelists for excessive Trumpsplaining who now cant Trumpsplain enough. (Why the hysteria over January 6 as opposed to the ongoing violence in Portland, Atlanta, San Francisco, L.A., New York, Seattle? he ranted the other night. Oh, I dont know, maybe because one of those types of violence is ongoing and the other is unprecedented?) It's in lockstep withthe Fox News base, just as Colbert's showiswith his liberal base. I guess we can be thankful some Fox smart-aleck didnt name itPolitically Incorrect with Greg Gutfeld!

Gutfeld! airs weeknights on Fox News at 11:00 PM ET/8:00 PM PT

Aaron Barnharthas written about television since 1994, including 15 years as TV critic for theKansas City Star.

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Gutfeld! Is The Right's Inevitable Answer to Stephen Colbert - PRIMETIMER

Indian industry did not like all aspects of the economic reforms, particularly the reduction in import duties and the sudden opening up of the economy. The Bombay Club refers to a lobby of leading industrialists who wrote to the government demanding a level playing field for Indian companies. B is also for Bank Nationalisation. In 1969, an increasingly left-leaning Prime Minister Indira Gandhi nationalised 14 big commercial banks. The Reserve Bank of Indias history of the Indian economy calls it the single most important economic decision taken by any government since 1947. Yes, even more momentous than the reforms we are celebrating.

B also stands for Broad Banding. This has nothing to do with the internet age. It was a policy that allowed companies to switch production between similar product lines such as trucks and cars. Also check out BICP (Bureau of Industrial Costs and Pricing), and BIFR (Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction), which still exist in one form or another.

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An alphabet soup of the Indian economy pre-reforms, and after - Moneycontrol.com

Two years ago, Wall Street banks were on their way out of a long-term relationship with the oil industry. Now, with oil prices over $70 for the first time in three years, big bond buyers are snapping up oil bonds once again.

Only there is a condition this time.

The Wall Street Journals Joe Wallace and Collin Eaton wrote this week that Wall Street was buying bonds from non-investment-grade U.S. energy companies, which took advantage of record low interest rates to raise some $34 billion in fresh debt in the first half of the year.

Thats twice as much as the industry raised over the same period last year. But investors dont want borrowers to use the cash to drill new wells. They want them to use it to pay off older debt and shore up balance sheets.

It makes sense, really, although it is a marked departure from how banks normally react to oil industry crises. The 2014 oil price collapse, in hindsight, may have been the last normal crisis. Oil prices fell, funding dried up, supply tightened, prices went up, banks were willing to lend again, and producers poured the money into boosting production.

Since then, however, the energy transition push has really gathered pace and banks have more than one reason to not be so willing to lend to the oil industry. With the worlds biggest asset managers setting up net-zero groups to effectively force their institutional clients to reduce their carbon footprint and with the Biden administration throwing its weight behind the push for lower emissions, banks really have little choice but to follow the current. Their own shareholders are increasingly concerned about the environment, too.

Yet business is business, and nowhere is this clearer than in banks dealings with the oil industry. Bank shareholders may be concerned about the environment, but they certainly would be more concerned about their dividendand part of that comes from income made from lending to oil. And the higher oil prices go, the more willing banks will be to lend to those that produce it.

When they were unwilling to lend to the oil industry, other lenders stepped in. Last year, alternative investment firms scooped up hundreds of millions in oil industry debt from banks that were cutting their exposure to the politically incorrect industry. Hedge funds and other so-called shadow lenders dont seem to have banks misgivings about profiting from oil and gas.

Now banks have mellowed towards oil somewhat, but it is an interesting twist that the current loans come with the condition of not boosting output. Again, it makes sense. For years, the shareholders of U.S. shale oil companies have been complaining about poor returns as the companies put everything into output growth. Now its payback time, and shareholders want their returns.

So do lenders, apparently.

Per the WSJ article, this year, bond buyers want to see companies repairing their balance sheets and delivering to creditors and shareholders rather than plowing money into new wells.

This, by the way, would strengthen the borrowers themselves, positioning them better for whenever they can afford to start boosting production again. This may happen before too long. The International Energy Agency said earlier this month it expected oil demand to hit 100.6 million bpd next year, and OPEC this week predicted that demand will top 100 million bpd in 2022. Thats a lot of additional oil, and some of it will come from those same non-investment-grade borrowers from the U.S. shale patch.

In the meantime, however, oil companies restraint is helping to keep prices where they are and add upward pressure on them. U.S. oil production as of July 9 stood at 11.4 million bpd. That was 100,000 bpd higher than in the previous week and 400,000 bpd higher than a year ago. It was, however, way lower than the 12.3 million bpd for the week to July 10, 2019.

Production restraint, then, is paying off in more than one way. On the one hand, it has kept prices highereven if some shale producers failed to benefit fully from them as they hedged their 2021 production too soon. On the other, these higher prices are making banks more willing to lend to oil companies again. On a third hand, the shareholders of these companies are finally being made happy with the new prioritization of returns and debt repayment.

The U.S. shale oil industry after the worst of the pandemic appears to have become leaner, again, but also healthier in terms of balance sheet strength. This is particularly true for those who are preparing themselves for a world where demand for oil would be much lower and prices would also be lower, according to industry insiders cited by the WSJ reporters. Investor interest in oil, then, is still alive and kicking, despite the ESG investment rush and all that. It is a simple example of the basic principle of how markets work: if there is money to be made from something, money will be made from that something, regardless of its reputational standing in the public eye.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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The Oil Industry Is Borrowing Again, But This Time It's Different - Markets Insider

It is nearly sixty years since the embalmed body of Joseph Stalin was secretly removed from its display case in the mausoleum on Red Square and buried under the Kremlin walls. Yet the Soviet dictator, who was responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviet people, refuses to stay dead and buried.

In May 2021, 56 percent of Russians polled by the independent Levada Center agreed that Stalin was a great leader double the figure in 2016, when the Stalinization of mass consciousness had already been a clear trend for several years.

The trouble is that the pantheon of Soviet gods has been obsolete since before the days of perestroika, but it has not been replaced by any new heroes. Theres always President Vladimir Putin, of course, but even he has lost half of his appeal as a great historical figure in recent years: back in 2017, 32 percent of Russians polled considered the president the most outstanding figure in Russian history, up there with the poet Alexander Pushkin, and outranked only by Stalin. Now, with 15 percent of the vote, he only just makes the top five, behind Peter the Great and just ahead of Yury Gagarin, the first man in space.

Attitudes to Stalin in Russia are intrinsically tied to the Soviet Unions victory in World War II, over which Stalin presided, and which has become the sacred cornerstone of modern Russian identity. Now the Russian elites are privatizing that victory to shore up the position of the ruling regime. The Russian parliament has passed a new law making it illegal to equate the wartime actions of the Soviets with Nazi Germany. In July 2021, Vladimir Putin signed the document, which also prohibits denying the decisive role of the Soviet people in the victory over fascism.

To people outside of Russia, it might seem deeply shocking and incomprehensible that Stalins popularity is growing at such a pace. Yet it is an entirely natural consequence of the policy advanced and sponsored by the Russian state of historical amnesia and the literal rewriting of history. Even events that were never the subject of ideological or factual debate are suddenly starting to be contested. And as historical knowledge fails to be passed down among the general public, a new mythology is rapidly taking shape.

Just a few years ago, the idea of a state-owned news agency questioning well-known facts about the Katyn massacre in which thousands of Polish officers were shot dead by the Soviets would have been impossible: it seemed that the days of blaming the Germans were long over. Yet that is precisely what happened last year. Today, the limits of what is acceptable both ethically and in terms of the treatment of facts are expanding, and red lines are being trampled with impudence and abandon.

In a different article, the same state-owned news agency described time spent in the notorious Gulag prison camps as a ticket to a better life. Even in Soviet times, when historical discourse was very limited and being in possession of or distributing Alexander Solzhenitsyns book The Gulag Archipelago could land people in prison, no one in the official media would have dared to make that kind of judgment about the Stalinist meat grinder: there were universal ethical boundaries, invisible though they might have been.

The results of introducing this simplified version of history into the mass consciousness can best be seen in how Russians perceive the most important event for them in history: World War II.

The legitimization of the current political regime and the unity of the majority of the nation hang largely on the memory of the war. Putin himself has effectively rehabilitated the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in which the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany agreed to carve up Eastern Europe between them, so that in the official version, it was nothing less than a diplomatic triumph for the Soviet Union. An episode that was a source of shame for Soviet ideologists and historians, that Soviet leaders including Mikhail Gorbachev denied and attempted to conceal to the last, has now become a matter of pride for the leadership.

In addition, a widespread idea has taken hold that the Red Army was blindsided by the suddenness of the invasion by Nazi Germany, and that the Soviet Union had not prepared for war in order to avoid provoking Germany. In fact, the German attack came as no surprise at all, and the fear of provoking the Nazis was Stalins own paranoia though it did not stop him from preparing for war in his own particular way.

Indeed, Stalins preparations would prove to be disastrous for the Soviet Union. Back in 2005, 40 percent of a Levada Center poll respondents agreed that the leadership of the Red Army had been decimated by Stalins purges: the mass arrests within the military shortly before war broke out had remained common knowledge since perestroika. In 2021, just 17 percent of respondents agreed with the same statement. Twenty-three percentage points in sixteen years is a staggering degradation in Russians knowledge of their history.

The memory of repression has failed to become the glue of the nation that memory of the war has. For many Russians, its not just a nonessential part of their countrys history, its an ideologically controversial period. After all, those who work hardest to preserve the memory of the repression the NGO Memorialhave been labeled foreign agents by the state.

When asked their opinion about Memorials Last Address project, in which commemorative plaques are put up on the buildings where victims of repression lived, just 17% of Russians polled expressed a negative attitude, but their motivations were symptomatic. The most common reasons given were they were repressed for a reason, along with the buildings will look like cemeteries, I dont see the point, and we dont need that kind of memory.

As a result, the correct memory of the war is being pitted against the incorrect, supposedly politically motivated memory of the repression, and the increasingly frequent acts of vandalism against the Last Address plaques stand testament to that. In the city of Yekaterinburg in June, unidentified people covered the plaques with stickers depicting symbols of Victory Day, the state-backed, increasingly bombastic public holiday celebrating the wartime victory. This is a literal illustration of the opposition between the two discourses dividing the nation when they should unite it.

For now, instead, Russians are united by Stalin, whom 56% consider a great leader, and for whom respect is ever growing: from 21% of respondents in 2012 to 45% in 2021, after the controversial raising of the retirement age and the pandemic, which have dented Putins popularity. As disappointment in Putin grows, people return to the familiar figure of the wartime leader.

Stalin stands in for the lack of modern heroes, and overshadows all the most important historical events of the twentieth century, symbolically compensating for the failures, defeats, and setbacks of more recent years. In Russia, there can be no modernization without de-Stalinization.

This article was first published by the Carnegie Moscow Center.

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Why Is Stalin's Popularity On the Rise? - The Moscow Times

Yan Xuetong and Wang Jisi, considered to be two of the high priests of the Chinese foreign policy community, have written recent pieces in the Foreign Affairs. It is no coincidence these were timed to dovetail with Xi Jinpings speech for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC), on July 1, 2021. Their task is to interpret for the outside world what Xi Jinping means when he says that the Chinese people have stood up and the era of suffering bullying has gone, never to return. Given the elevated status of these two gentlemen, it is well worth reading their pieces in full.

Wang and Yan start by acknowledging that recent changes in US policy mean that relations are unlikely to grow any less tense or competitive. Wang holds America responsible for this adversarial environment. According to him, the US-China relationship has always revolved around two ideas: The idea that the US will respect and not de-stabilise Chinas internal order and the idea that the Chinese will not intentionally weaken the US-led international order. This implicit understanding, Wang holds, is now unravelling and the Americans are to blame. Wang wants us to believe that this situation has come to pass because the US is seeking a regime change. China, according to both, is not to blame in any way, and is simply responding to American provocation. Wangs advice to Washington is to return to the earlier implicit consensus.

Both scholars wish to persuade readers (and nations) that if this is not the case, then unbridled competition can only end one way badly for America. America is plagued by political dysfunction, socio-economic inequality, ethnic and racial divisions and economic stagnation. Wang, in particular, stretches the argument by describing gun violence and urban unrest in America as a degree of chaos and violence without parallel in China and by drawing comparisons between the political chaos of the 2020 presidential election especially compared with the order and predictability of the Chinese system. He says that Washington must accept that CPC enjoys immense popularity among the Chinese people; its grip on power is unshakeable. The strained effort almost looks like a justification to the Chinese people about the benefits and resilience of the Communist dictatorship.

Yan uses US ill-intention towards China to justify the paradigm shift to a more assertive foreign policy. For over a decade, China has been attacking American unipolarity and the Cold-War type alliance. The new challenge for Beijing is how to be seen to be championing the cause of multipolarity while actually striving for a duopoly with the US or, as Yan cleverly phrases it, a multipolar order with US-Chinese relations at its core. To build a justification for these contradictory objectives, Yan advances several arguments. He refers to Chinas dual identity, claiming that there is no contradiction between China seeking global co-hegemony and, at the same time, continuing to be a developing country, as a demonstration of its geo-political alignment. Yan also talks up inclusive multilateralism, which is apparently what Beijings frenzied efforts at building plurilateral platforms, including in South Asia, are all about. Is this not the alliance-building that China accuses America of? Apparently not, because America is engaged in exclusive multilateralism. The rather specious argument that Yan makes to differentiate between the two is that Chinas coalitions are open and non-threatening but the American ones are issue-based coalitions in opposition to China.

In case the rest of the world is still confused about what China might be doing differently from America, Yan helpfully adds that America exports its value system (democracy) as part of its foreign policy, while China does not. According to Yan, that is because China is a developing country with Chinese characteristics, which, somehow, implies that its political system and governance model cannot merely be exported to other countries. The argument is unconvincing when President Xi has, on more than one occasion, referred to the Chinese model as an alternative for developing countries who wish to be independent.

Their main message to the Americans is to give up on pressuring China to change its political system as this will be futile, and to return to accommodating the Chinese Communist Party as a legitimate global player. The Chinese message to the rest is to bend to Chinas inevitable hegemony. At the conclusion of both essays, readers might be left wondering why China wants to return to the old consensus when Chinas rise and American decline are both assured. Is it because they still need a few years more of co-habitation before they have the power to topple America from its global perch? Or, is it the deep sense of vulnerability that the party feels despite the claim that time and momentum are on Chinas side? How does one explain the stepped-up campaigns for political education among cadres and the restrictions on politically incorrect information its citizens can access if, according to Wang, the leadership is immensely popular?

From Indias perspective, three points might deserve attention. First, the statement that there is a paradigm shift in post-Covid Chinese foreign policy. Second, Yans forthright statement that Beijing views Americas so-called issue-based coalitions (he presumably includes the Quad) as the most serious external threat to its political security and the biggest obstacle to national rejuvenation. Finally, that China is still offering accommodation if Washington just respects Beijings internal order and acknowledges Chinas regional dominance.

This column first appeared in the print edition on July 19, 2021 under the title Beijings world view. The writer is a former foreign secretary and author of The Long Game: How Chinese Negotiate with India

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What Beijing wants to tell the rest of the world - The Indian Express

Dealing with disability and figuring out how to best manage it played a big part in my time at Stanford, said Roy Perkins, Earth systems BS 20, who wears prosthetics on both legs. I am very independent, and I knew going to college is a big transition for everybody, so I didnt really connect the dots between the extra time and energy I spent on certain things like showering with the struggle of being a student and full-time athlete. I gradually made more accommodation requests to the Office of Accessible Education which eliminated a lot of my mobility issues and helped me to become a better student as well.

What is disability?

More than 26% of adults in the United States, or 61 million people, have some kind of documented disability. In the world, its estimated that one-fifth of the global population, or between 110 million and 190 million people, experience significant disabilities.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which passed in July 1990, defines disability as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. While the ADA does not specifically name all of the conditions that are covered, many covered disabilities can affect a persons vision, movement, bodily function, thinking, remembering, learning, communicating, hearing, and/or mental health. Some of these conditions may be more visible, while others may be less apparent.

People can experience disability in many ways they may show neurodivergent traits like autism or ADHD; use an assistive device like a wheelchair, cane, or a hearing aid; have experienced an injury; have a chronic illness or condition; or have a mental health condition. Disability may grow progressively worse, remain static, or affect an individual intermittently throughout their life. As a result, people with disabilities have widely varied experiences and potential needs for accommodation.

Disability in academia

Compared to the 26% of the U.S. adult population with a disability, only 11% of undergraduate and 7% of graduate students with a documented disability are pursuing STEM majors in the U.S. This may mean that students with disabilities are less likely to enroll in STEM fields or are underreporting their disabilities to avoid stigmatization.

When going into the workforce, only 4.8% of graduating students entering STEM careers self-disclose their disabilities. Concerns about stigma extend to the professoriate as well. Some U.S. faculty members say stigma prevents them from being open about their conditions, and that the pathway to academia may not encourage retention for those with disabilities.

For students who exhibit neurodiversity, including traits like ADHD, autism, or dyslexia, having customized learning opportunities in the classroom can be critical to a successful educational experience. For example, approximately 25% of college students who receive disabilities services are diagnosed with ADHD, making that the most common type of disability supported by college disability offices. In this 2021 study, researchers found that college students with ADHD frequently received grades half a grade below their peers across all four years, and that college students with ADHD were significantly less likely to stay enrolled across semesters. Among the top indicators that might predict academic success for students with ADHD was having received academic support and accommodations throughout high school and college.

Disability in the field

Physical barriers to geoscience learning can exist in the field from remote field excursions with uneven terrain, unusually long or strenuous travel expectations, inflexible transport options, lack of restrooms, or lack of accessible learning tools or connectivity. These roadblocks are also found on campuses through inaccessible labs, hidden ramps, broken elevators, poorly designed displays, or weak color contrast.

However, many of the barriers in place are a result of the perceptions that some geoscientists have about disability. Commonly held stereotypes about who a geoscientist is, as well as biases about what those with disabilities can or cannot do, give the impression that certain physical abilities are a prerequisite to being a geoscientist. Biased employers or advisors may opt not to select persons with a disability for roles or invite them to field excursions because of perceived barriers.

Other barriers to inclusive fieldwork may be institutional. Inflexible policies on transportation or accommodations, lack of funding for learning tools like interpreters, failure to provide medical professionals, reluctance to complete additional paperwork, or lab restrictions related to disability are all examples of institutional obstacles and discrimination that may be in place.

As fieldwork is considered integral to a geoscience education, disability rights advocates have long pushed for improved accommodations in field and other physical learning opportunities. In 2020, the global pandemic highlighted the issue of field accessibility, driving a shift toward virtual field learning and extended use of visualization tools like Google Earth, remote sensing resources, drone imagery, and ultrahigh-resolution photography. At Stanford Earth, faculty and staff have developed a collection of Stanford Earth Virtual Field Trips that will serve as a tool to make some field learning more accessible to all students.

Shifting the narrative

The stereotype of the able-bodied geoscientist works to exclude students with visible disabilities, and it may also show students with less noticeable disabilities that they arent welcome either.

Nearly one in five Americans will experience a mental illness in a given year, and some of these individuals may classify as disabled. Adults with disabilities report mental health distress nearly five times more often than non-disabled people do. In 2018, an estimated 17.4 million adults with disabilities experienced frequent mental distress associated with limitations in daily life, increased use of health services, poor health behaviors, and chronic illness.

Individuals with less visible disabilities may experience increased fatigue and pain that impacts their performance and that causes them to feel the pressure to prove the validity of their disability to their supervisors and colleagues who dont recognize their disability. Conversely, individuals with less visible disabilities may also choose not to disclose their conditions because of the stigma associated with disability that can be detrimental to their careers.

Looking beyond what is legally required by the ADA, institutions can use the Universal Design for Learning guidelines to optimize teaching and learning based on scientific insights into how people learn, whether they have more or or less obviousdisabilities.

For Stanford community members hoping to learn more, good places to begin are the Stanford Office of Accessible Education, the Stanford Office of Digital Accessibility, the Stanford Disability Initiative, andStanford Counseling & Psychological Services (CAPS).

Stanford Earth transitioned the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) into its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiative in 2020. As part of an effort to celebrate and discuss identity, four Stanford Earth community members talk about how disability, neurodivergence, and chronic illness have informed and impacted their careers.Stanford Earths Assistant Director of DEI Isabel Carrera Zamanillo; MS student Sabrina Tecklenburg; and alumni Roy Perkins, BS 20, and Bliss Temple, BA 04, BS 04, discuss their hopes for the future of diversity and inclusion in the geosciences.

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Q&A: Why discuss disability in the geosciences? - Stanford University News - Stanford University News

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon weighed in on the "misinformation" war and how his satirical news site has been able to thrive amid a constant onslaught from the left.

Appearing at Turning Point USA's Student Action Summit in Tampa, Dillon knocked the Biden administration's efforts to combat so-called coronavirus "misinformation" on social media, which he said suggests that Big Tech is "acting like an arm of the government" and that such companies have become "state actors."

"It's really troubling to see them going in that direction and speaking about it so openly, like they're not even trying to hide that that's how they're working together with Facebook," Dillon said during an interview with Fox News on Monday. "I really think they're giving a handout to anybody who's seeking to fight in court to argue that Facebook is acting on behalf of the government and, you know, requires some kind of regulation for that reason. So, it's really interesting to see what's going on there but I think it's also, you know, pretty disturbing."

BABYLON BEE CEO ON NYT RETRACTING CLAIM SATIRE SITE PEDDLES FAKE NEWS: IT'S MALICIOUS BECAUSE THEY KNOW BETTER

When asked if he was concerned that the White House would eventually take aim on the Babylon Bee over "misinformation," Dillon acknowledged that "the left has made us a target," pointing to the coverage the satirical site received from The New York Times, which resulted in a retraction.

"I don't expect it to come from the White House for them to get involved with us, but I think honestly- look, this is a way of gauging success in my mind," Dillon told Fox News. "If they were to attack us that way. I mean, that means we're doing something right."

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon said his satirical news site is "punching back" amid censorship attempts from the left.

Dillon spoke at length about how the Bee has become a frequent target of liberals, calling it "intimidating" but also "encouraging" at the same time.

"On one level, it is a little bit scary to have like people in positions of power like that saying those kinds of things because- I mean, these are things that threaten the business," Dillon said. "I don't think a lot of people understand that the focus has been so much on getting misinformation off of these platforms. And if you get lumped in with the end of that bucket, and you're considered misinformation, you're not going to have a home on YouTube or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or any of them. You're going to be off of all of them. So our business is driven by traffic and shares and engagement on those platforms, so it's really important for us to maintain that and to see attacks coming from that place, it's like, you know, this is the business is in jeopardy. So on the one hand, you know, it's very intimidating."

NEW YORK TIMES ADMITS BABYLON BEE IS SATIRE, NOT MISINFORMATION, IN CORRECTION

"On the other hand I think it's encouraging. It's a combination of intimidation and encouragement at the same time because it's like we are, we are in a battle right now, we're often accused of punching down the likes to be punched down, I can't make jokes about women because they're beneath me. I guess that'd be punching down we're really punching back," Dillon continued. "You know, the culture war- we've been on the ropes and for a long time. I think we're defending ourselves against attacks, they're coming from the top down, they're coming from politicians, celebrities, corporations, the biggest of all of them. So we're really, honestly, conservatives doing comedy are really kind of like in the fetal position curled up on the floor trying to just stay alive and fight back, they're not really punching down on anyone. So I do think it's encouraging to some extent too."

Dillon reflected on the Babylon Bee's successes, which began at the tail end of the Obama administration in 2016, exploded during the Trump era and continued under Biden.

"When conservatives are winning, they're under a lot of attack and there's a lot to fight back against, And when conservatives are losing, there's a lot at stake and there's a lot of, you know, targets you want to go after to be proactive in that fight," Dillon explained. "So I think, really, it doesn't really matter to us from a business perspective and for, like, popularity and how we grow, it doesn't really matter who's in power. Obviously, we have our own preferences for what we would like to see. But as far as how that plays out, it works either way."

The Babylon Bee CEO did acknowledge how both President Biden and former President Trump are "difficult to satirize" since they are "like parodies of themselves."

"Trump is like this larger-than-life character, he says ridiculous things you'd never expect anybody to say, he's not politically correct. Biden, you can quote him verbatim and it seems like satire," Dillon elaborated. "So, both of them present their own challenges. I don't think it really makes much of a difference to us whether or not one or the other is in power."

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Dillon also spoke about how the left has tried to "strangle comedy" with various "rules" to prevent people from being offended, boasting how the Bee makes jokes "you're not allowed to make."

"A comedian's job is to flout those rules and to make fun of whoever the idiot was who presented them to you," Dillon explained. "Comedians who, like, self-censor and response to that power move of trying to like get satirists and comedians in line, they are themselves a joke So I think what we do differently is we simply make the jokes that you're not supposed to make. We're very politically incorrect, we're attacking the sacred cows of the powers that mean."

He added, "It's my hope that we encourage more people to do it because there need to be more people who are making those kinds of jokes. I think comedians need a backbone and the comedians that take advantage of that situation, this fertile environment where leftists have choked themselves and they're silencing themselves, there's a huge opportunity for comedians to like rise up and fill that gap."

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Babylon Bee's Seth Dillon on 'misinformation' wars, how satire site continues to thrive in Biden era - Fox News

By Jennifer Agiesta, CNN Polling Director

(CNN) -- Polls in the final weeks of the 2020 election campaign were farther off the mark from the election results on average than polls in any election in decades, according to a new task force report released Monday. The analysis, from the American Association for Public Opinion Research, suggests partisan differences in who chooses to take polls -- portending challenges for pollsters trying to avoid similar problems in the future.

While nearly all polls in the two weeks leading up to Election Day correctly pegged Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential race nationwide, polling performance was more mixed across states, and the average size of the miss on the margin in the presidential race and other contests was larger than in other recent years. The errors tended to be larger in more Republican parts of the country, and overall, consistently underestimated the support for Republican candidates, a trend observed in several recent federal elections.

The average 2020 errors were high regardless of how a poll's interviews were conducted or how it selected people to interview. There were errors across contests as well -- it wasn't just the presidential polls that missed, but the down-ballot ones, too. The errors were also fairly consistent over time, meaning polls conducted just before the election, when more voters would have made up their minds, were no better than those a week or even months earlier.

The report suggests that the widespread miss across polls was not due to a repeat of the errors that sent 2016 state polling astray -- including late shifts in voter preferences and not ensuring that polls included the correct share of people without college degrees -- but rather that new sources of error had emerged, with the evidence largely pointing toward differences in political views between those who responded to polls and those who did not.

But in analyzing the data collected through those pre-election surveys, the task force did not have enough information to say with certainty what caused those errors or whether they were limited only to election estimates. Being more precise would require in-depth study of those who chose not to participate in polls, a task pollsters are just beginning to undertake.

"Following up with the people who we tried to contact but who aren't taking our polls is really important for getting an understanding about, is there something systematically different about them? Why are they not participating and what reasons do they give? How much of this is unique to the particular moment versus something that's a more structural or enduring issue that polling's going to confront going forward?" said Joshua D. Clinton, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University who chaired the task force.

In one effort to pinpoint the source of the error, the task force adjusted the results of several pre-election surveys so that poll takers presidential preferences matched the outcome of the election to see what else might change. That meant, for example, taking a national survey where Biden had 52% support and Donald Trump had 42% and weighting it so that Biden supporters made up 51% of the total and Trump supporters represented 47%.

The exercise did not significantly move the numbers for demographics like age, race, education or gender -- traits which researchers often use to correct for survey non-response. But it did move the numbers for partisanship and for self-reported 2016 vote. That suggests two possibilities: Either the makeup of partisans reached by the poll was incorrect, or that the types of people reached within some subsets were not representative.

As many states have finalized voter records with updated information on who voted in 2020 and how they cast their ballots, more pollsters and voter list vendors have started to release their own analyses of what happened in polling and in the election. Several of those have pointed toward conclusions similar to those suggested by the AAPOR Task Force Report, and a consensus appears to be building around four possible ways that the polls missed.

First, the polls may have underrepresented the share of Republicans in the electorate. Perhaps Republicans were dissuaded from taking polls by the frequent criticism leveled against them by Trump, or because of lower levels of trust in frequent sponsors of polls such as media organizations and academic institutions. Or, with the politicization of the pandemic and Republican leaders railing against pandemic-related restrictions, it's possible Republicans were just harder to reach because they were less likely than Democrats to stay home as a precautionary measure against Covid-19

Second, the group of people interviewed in polls and identified as likely voters may have included too many Democrats. The theory holds that Democrats were unusually enthusiastic about the election and were also more apt to stay home because of the politicization of responses to the coronavirus pandemic, and therefore, may have been easier to reach and more apt to take a survey once they were contacted.

Third, the polls could have had the right overall share of Democrats and Republicans but got the wrong types of people within those subsets or among independents. Maybe they interviewed too many Republicans who had turned away from Trump and not enough of his core supporters, for example.

And fourth, polling may have erred in its estimates of how infrequent voters would behave, either in how many new voters would turn out or their candidate preferences. Turnout in 2020 was so high that at minimum, about 1 in 7 voters were people who did not cast ballots in 2016, nearly three times higher than the equivalent figure between 2012 and 2016. And since poll respondents do tend to be more politically engaged than those who opt out of polls, it's especially difficult to tell whether the poll respondents in this more disengaged subset of the electorate were representative of the broader group of new voters.

But moving from possible explanations to clear answers is a challenge, and pollsters don't yet have the data they need to draw firm conclusions. There are few agreed-upon sources of truth for the election polling metrics that matter the most, such as partisanship, which makes it challenging to effectively diagnose what went wrong when polls miss.

There are voter lists which show who voted in 2020, but information on the demographic characteristics and political leanings of voters comes from statistical modeling and varies depending on who is doing the modeling. Exit polls, which traditionally interviewed voters as they left their polling places and therefore avoided the peril inherent in identifying likely voters, are now more reliant on pre-election surveys to capture the sizable pool of absentee and early voters, and so are subject to some of the same concerns as other pre-election polls.

And even the Census Bureau's estimates of the voting population from its post-election Current Population Survey have some error built in due to reliance on self-reported voting behavior, which is often overstated, and those figures don't include any information about vote choice.

None of these sources can definitively show what the difference is between the voters who took polls in 2020 and those who did not. Without more concrete information about who the people are who did not take polls in 2020 and why they opted not to, finding solutions could be a challenge.

A consortium of Democratic campaign pollsters released a post-election assessment in April which suggested that getting the wrong people within their subset of Trump supporters was a bigger problem than wrongly estimating the size of any particular group.

"What we have settled on is the idea there is something systematically different about the people we reached, and the people we did not," the report states, going on to note that initial analysis points to an underrepresentation of people who saw Trump as presidential and an overrepresentation of those who favored government action.

Similarly, an analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation on polling conducted with the Cook Political Report also points to political differences between those taking polls and those who did not: "What is clear in our analysis and others' is that polls are missing a certain segment of voters who disproportionately supported President Trump."

Surveys conducted using online panels, where the same people are interviewed at fairly regular intervals, have some ability to track voter preferences over time using data collected as past elections happened rather than being dependent on a poll taker's ability to accurately report what they did four years ago.

Doug Rivers, a Stanford University political science professor and chief scientist for YouGov, drew on YouGov's data to provide evidence suggesting a difference among Republicans at a Roper Center event in January. Looking at YouGov's panelists, Rivers said, "the 2016 Trump voters who still approved of Trump in December of 2019 had declining participation rates over 2020, and 2016 Trump voters who ... disapproved of him at the end of 2019 actually had increasing participation rates, the only group that actually went up in its participation rate over time. So our weighting on 2016 Trump vote unfortunately had the effect that we had too many 2016 Trump voters who were not enthusiastic about him and too few who were enthusiastic about him."

Differential non-response -- the technical term for this type of issue -- hadn't been much of a problem for surveys until now. The share of people contacted to participate in polls who choose to take part -- the response rate -- has declined sharply in the last two decades, but research assessing the validity of low-response rate polls generally found that they were still gathering a representative sample of Americans.

Analysis from the Pew Research Center as recently as 2016 found that low-response-rate telephone polls produced estimates on many demographic and political measures that were similar to high-response-rate polls. For many surveys, adjusting a handful of demographic results to match the population totals in a process called weighting -- typically for age, race and ethnicity, gender, and educational attainment -- was enough to ensure that poll results would represent the views of the full adult population.

But the new report suggests such straightforward adjustments may no longer do the trick for polls seeking to measure election preferences, and the finding could have implications for the interpretation of data on other political and issue topics.

If the main source of error turns out not to be the relative size of the groups of partisans who were interviewed, but a difference within a group of partisans between those who respond to polls and those who do not, it would be hard to find evidence of that error outside of a comparison to election results. A poll could look completely reasonable in its partisan composition and still be off the mark if it isn't taking the right steps to account for differences within partisan groups. That would mean a poll's ability to get the right result could become more reliant on statistical modeling.

"The polling results are increasingly dependent upon the statistical adjustments that are being done," said Clinton in presenting the preliminary results of the report to AAPOR's conference attendees in May. "That makes it very hard as a consumer to evaluate what's going on because you don't know how much of what's going on is due to the data that's being collected vs. the assumptions that are being made to adjust those results."

Until there is a clear consensus on which of the most likely possible causes of the 2020 errors contributed the most, pollsters may have a difficult time choosing which adjustments to make and proving that their polls are really representative. Some have begun applying new weights to their surveys to adjust for partisan composition or self-reported 2020 vote preferences, but there isn't much evidence to suggest that those adjustments do enough to make up for what happened in 2020.

The answer likely lies in knowing more about who took the poll and who opted out.

"There are different clues that you get depending on the methods that you use," Clinton said in an interview. "If you're doing a registration-based sample, then I think you can get clues, because you know, or you think you know, what the demographics and the partisanship are of the people who aren't responding to your survey...Or if you are doing an online survey from an existing panel that has taken other surveys in the past, that may give you clues by saying are there characteristics of people who are choosing to take the survey or not."

The pollsters who can successfully interpret those clues will be able to paint a more accurate picture of public opinion in America today.

Disclaimer: The author is a member of the AAPOR task force involved in preparing this research.

The-CNN-Wire & 2021 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.

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How pollsters are trying to fix election polls after 2020 - WDJT

Over the last weekend, a few hours ahead of the Copa finals between Argentina and Brazil, a diehard Argentinian fan forwarded me a link to a report on how, in a town in Bangladesh, theres been a ban on public television display of the match. The ban has been imposed so that warring factions dont get violent: there had already been cases of fights between camps the Argentinians and the Brazilians through the tournament, and some people sustained injuries. All this was taking place far, far away from the scene of the actual football action, but I was intrigued how an event totally dissociated from geography was stoking such intense emotional fervour and leading to physical brawls.

I remembered instantly how in my hometown, Kolkata, not too far from where all this (the Bangladesh ban) happened, the joke is that if India plays Brazil in the city, the latter would feel more at home. Most Bengalis are Brazilians when it comes to football.

Growing up, in my neck of the woods, Bengal, football, much more than cricket, had an entire population in thraldom. A Keralite friend pointed out it used to be the same in her state, but I dont have first-hand data.

These days, my team is England, fuelled by my deep love for Gary Lineker and David Beckham. Since Beckham played for Manchester United, there was a time, in the late 90s and the turn of the millennium, when I followed the English Premier League with rapt attention. But even before that, in the early 80s, I had become a football fanatic. At that time, it was a trend. If you lived in Kolkata, you had to be either a Mohun Bagan supporter or an East Bengal one. Both were club sides, and the rivalry (initially) started out as a regional divide. Mohun Bagan embodied the colours of those who were originally from the western province of Bengal; East Bengal (as is evident from the name) of those from the side where the sun rose. But along the way, those boundaries got blurred, and it became a matter of an undefinable allegiance.

Whenever these two sides would play, each neighbourhood, at times buildings too, would flaunt club flags, and youd know immediately how the dice was loaded in a particular area. Post-victory, the winning side fans would take out processions, waving flags, beating drums, shouting slogans (the ones reserved for the losing side would now be considered pejoratives). Wed stand on terraces and balconies, and watch, like they were some Republic Day rallies.

My grandfather claimed his family was from the west, and he was withering of his (very politically-incorrect) opinion of those from the east, but I became an unfazed East Bengal fangirl after I watched a movie on television.

It was a movie called Mohunbaganer Meye (The Mohun Bagan Girl). Veteran actor Utpal Dutt played an inveterate Mohun Bagan fan. His son was an East Bengal supporter. Father and son had formed an uneasy truce at their polarised home, but the father was very clear that when sonny gets married, it would be subject to only one condition (in those days, it was apparently unthinkable for Bengali men to get hitched without parental approval): the woman who would become the daughter-in-law of the household should be a Mohun Bagan supporter. Period.

The problem was that the son already had a girlfriend, an East Bengal fan. So they embark on a plan: she would lie about her loyalties. They get married and, soon after, theres a Mohun Bagan-East Bengal match. East Bengal wins. Father is devastated. Son and daughter-in-law are over the moon, and are celebrating in the (what they assume) privacy of their bedroom, when father walks in and realises hes been played in more senses than one. The shock is too much for him to weather, so he has a heart attack or at least a panic attack I forget. Of course, alls well that ends well, so, if memory serves me right, they decide to bury the hatchet and live happily ever after.

I decided to be on the side of true love, so, overnight, I morphed into a fan.

I realised I wasnt the only one. In school, I started mingling with girls who were football fanatics too. And once, when there was a league final between the two sides, and one side won (I forget who), there was pandemonium in my classroom the next day. Violence erupted. There were girls beating each other up, pulling hair, abusing in girlie slang. The principal had to intervene, and teachers stepped in to physically segregate the two warring clans. But many of the girls ceased to be on talking terms with the others till the end of the term.

sushmita@khaleejtimes.com

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WKND Musings: How soccer violence continues to plague the world of sports - Khaleej Times

Residents hold a peaceful protest against looting and taxi violence on 19 July 2021 in Cape Town. (Photo: Gallo Images / Brenton Geach)

Dale T McKinley is a political activist, researcher-writer and lecturer who presently works at the International Labour, Research and Information Group.

At first, I hesitated to put fingers to keyboard on what transpired last week, given the large number of reports, analysis-opinion pieces, statements and general commentary that have populated the media and civil society terrains. Yet, as I read through many of them (and there are several exceptions), two crucial things became clear: the dominant causal narratives are overly simplistic and often unidimensional, and the dominant analytical tropes miss some basic facts.

The combined result is that the picture of what has happened is only partial, thus making a fuller understanding, representation and explanation more difficult. In this respect, and intentionally leaving aside the terrain of addressing what is to be done?, there are three foundational points that ground the events of the last week and two factual points that need to be made.

Foundational point number one

The historic (apartheid era) and more contemporary (post-apartheid) structural/systemic realities of South African capitalist society are foundational to any understanding and interpretation/analysis. These realities are multifaceted and encompass the following:

Foundational point number two

Expanding on the last reality as above, understanding and locating the character and role of the ANC which was the dominant former liberation movement and since 1994 has been the dominant and ruling political party in SAs representative democracy is absolutely central. The ANCs historic and ongoing macro-strategy of accession and accumulation, through the vehicle of the state at all levels, has incubated and spread a politics whose core and dual purpose is the retention of personal and organisational power as well as the advancement of individual and class material benefits.

Besides the more than predictable governance and policy choices that flow from these realities, the natural result has always been and remains the presence of different factions (inclusive of the two presently dominant ones revolving around President Cyril Ramaphosa and former president Jacob Zuma), vying from different angles and through different means, for the organisational and institutional drivers seats.

In all of this, the ANC (regardless of whatever faction has been dominant) approaches, engages and uses the people/the masses in whatever way best facilitates the overall strategy and the more specific practical pursuit of position and power. This is the case whether that pursuit takes place through the avenues of party politics, electoral politics and/or mass/civil society politics and struggle.

Nowhere has this been more evident in recent times than in respect of the effective abandonment of the majority poor and workers to deal with the devastating socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic.

Foundational point number three

There is a small group of well-financed, equipped and dedicated opportunistic and reactionary political operators, thieves and saboteurs most of whom are either present or ex-members of the ANC in one form or another who operate simultaneously in the public sphere and the dark shadows of anonymity.

This group is varyingly gathered and organised around the persona and political-economic patronage circle of Zuma, the so-called Radical Economic Transformation (RET) faction in the ANC and includes ex (and possibly serving) government officials (at different levels), intelligence operatives, police personnel and a motley crew of plain criminal elements.

Their main propaganda weapons include: pseudo-radical rhetoric around RET; opportunistically attacking the political and institutional legitimacy of the Constitution and the judiciary while making full use of both when it suits them; engaging in fake, racialised posturing as allies and defenders of the workers and poor; hypocritically claiming to confront White Monopoly Capital; and, more recently, using the cover of victimhood and grievance centred on Zumas legal cases and incarceration.

Practically, the core aims for some time now have been to germinate and execute a plan to: engage in an already successful campaign of turbo-charging the looting of public resources and state capacity; create parallel and wholly unaccountable structures/entities to fight internal state and ANC factional battles; construct the pretence of an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics while simultaneously forging an alternative regime of accumulation with both friendly and gangster capitalists as well as with more localised business mafias; and spread disinformation (mostly through social media), that seeks to foment racial (and to a lesser extent ethnic) division as well as incite violence and fear-mongering.

Factual point number one

Almost everything that took place as part of the unrest happened in certain parts of the two provinces of KZN and Gauteng and even then, especially in Gauteng, only in some areas/townships and not in many others. This was for very specific reasons, related mostly to: the key targets of those that initially engaged in acts of sabotage, incited violence and who threw the first matches; the social, economic and political differentiations within and between various poor/working-class communities; and, the somewhat special character of the two provinces spatial, residential and consumer geographies.

The forms of unrest that then came to dominate in KZN and Gauteng did not spread in any meaningful or sustained way to the other seven provinces in which the majority of South Africas population resides (55% by the latest count) and where most all of the same economic, political and social cleavages beset that majority. This does not mean that further unrest, inclusive of some of the same forms that occurred last week, is not eminently possible on a more nationwide scale whether in the more immediate or medium term.

Regardless, the dominant narrative and claiming/framing is that what happened last week was at a national, societal (qua, South Africa) level.

Whether intentional or not, this logically leads to an interpretive conclusion (especially in an age of social media-framed dumbing down and sound bites) that the various actors in the unrest are representative of all of the country, the society and its peoples.

As above, while the systemic and ANC realities are most definitely national and certainly South African in the sense of all who live in the country, the specific events that animated this unrest were definitely not. Saying and arguing otherwise is not only factually incorrect but borders on being patronising of the actual majority.

Factual point number two

There was a small minority of people inclusive of those who live in poor/marginalised communities who actually participated in the various forms of unrest and more particularly the targeting of shops and businesses (both corporate and small-scale) in the two provinces that do not sell/trade food items. Yes, there were thousands who did, but there were many more millions who did not and whose actions could/can never be captured on video/camera and broadcast to the nation and the world.

While an argument can be made that attributes a mass character to the taking of food in certain areas, a dominant narrative that ascribes the unrest to the masses might be representatively and politically satisfying but again, it is not factually correct.

Further, such a narrative indirectly makes a highly contestable assumption, namely that the majority of the masses are/would be, in silent acquiescence to what transpired. Likewise, it surfaces an almost pre-constructed, instrumentalist understanding of and approach to the agency of ordinary people.

This does not mean that the vast majority are not suffering, that there is not a real food crisis, a real jobs crisis, a real climate crisis, a real health crisis, a real social crisis or any of the other crises that do exist; nor, does it mean that those masses do not have fundamentally immediate needs or that they do not want meaningful socioeconomic redistribution and systemic change. It just means that even despite the structural/systemic realities that frame our society and peoples individual and collective lives, at a very fundamental level different people make different choices, not only about how they want to live, but about how they go about confronting those realities and trying to change their lives. DM

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Unrest: Of understanding, representation and explanation - Daily Maverick