In Episode 27 Professor (Department of English, University of Ottawa) Janice Fiamengo discusses the fifth of five pernicious feminist terms: Microaggression. Fiamengo also explains how feminists use the theory of microaggression, and the misandric claim that masculinity is toxic, in their strategy for power through the dehumanization of males.
Month: June 2016
Why Social Justice Warriors Throw Tantrums
Language Warning:
Mandating the fairness of SJW warriors in the workplace:
Two Key Unanswered Questions for State Dept.
1. How many other times has this State Department or the administration, more broadly, deleted video that was perhaps inconvenient for them politically?
2. Who ordered this deletion?
Whale of a Tale ~ Debating Evolution
This post is with thanks to Philip Cunningham.
(For a great introduction to the below video of which the following is a clip from, see Evolution News & Views)
More About the Male (Whale’s) Refrigeration System ~ The system actually works better when the whale swims hard. How can that be, when the testes are located right between the abdominal swimming muscles? It’s like trying to keep a refrigerator cold between two furnaces.
It works because the blood pumps harder during exercise, allowing more heat to escape into the water through the dorsal fin and tail. The higher volume of cool venous blood then enters the “miraculous web” (Latin rete mirabile, read more here) between the abdominal muscles, where the heat from the arteries is transferred to the cooler veins before entering the testes. It’s a marvelous solution: a “counter-current heat exchanger” (CCHE) mechanism.
As Richard Sternberg and Paul Nelson explain in the film, without both internal testes and the refrigeration mechanism existing simultaneously, natural selection would halt, and whales would have gone extinct. Females, too, have a CCHE to protect the young during pregnancy. Similar CCHE systems are found in other marine mammals such as manatees and seals, providing more unlikely examples of “convergent evolution.”
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One of the key (most complete) missing link in this WILD scenario is Rodhocetus. Rodhocetus’ discoverer, Dr. Phil Gingerich, one of the leading experts on whale evolution, promoted the idea that Rodhocetus had a whale’s fluke (tail) and flippers. Later Dr. Gingerich admitted,
- “Since then, we have found the forelimbs, the hands, and the front arms of Rodhocetus, and we understand that it doesn’t have the kind of arms that can be spread out like flippers on a whale.”
When asked about the missing fluke, Dr. Gingerich replied,
- “I speculated that it might have had a fluke… I now doubt that Rodhocetus would have had a fluked tail.”
Without this fossil, there is no evolutionary story telling like we see in this WHALE OF A TALE:
Will museums and textbooks change their displays or portraits Rodhocetus as a transitional fossil? Don’t hold your breath.
(Philip Cunningham Intro) In the following video, Philip Gingerich, the paleontologist who discovered and reconstructed Rhohocetus, which has been called by evolutionists, ‘the most spectacular intermediary fossil in whale evolution’, states this about that, “most spectacular intermediary fossil”….
- “Well, I told you we don’t have the tail in Rodhocetus. We don’t know for sure whether it had a ball vertebrate indicating a (tail) fluke or not. So I speculated (that) it might have had a (tail) fluke…. Since then we found the forelimbs, the hands, and the front arms, the arms in other words of Rodhocetus, and we understand that it doesn’t have the kind of arms that can be spread out like flippers are on a whale.,, If you don’t have flippers, I don’t think you can have a fluke tail and really powered swimming. And so I now doubt that Rodhocetus would have had a fluke tail.”
Philip Gingerich paleontologist – Whale Evolution vs. The Actual Evidence – video – fraudulent fossils revealed (Starts at the 11:40 minute mark – see another clip of this here):
Here we get into the weeds with these fraudulent Plaster of Paris replicas for the myriad of students visiting natural history museum. The excerpt here comes from Uncommon Descent:
If you can’t find a missing link, just make one up with plaster and body parts and put it in museums. I don’t think the deception was deliberate in as much as it was self-deception and they just added plaster to conform a land fossil to look like a whale.
The two scientists who found the lion’s share of walking whale fossils essentially created the best fossil proof of evolution using plaster models and drawings and supplied these to museums and science magazines. In each case, they started with incomplete fossils of a land mammal. Whenever a fossil part was missing, they substituted a whale body part (blowholes, fins and flukes) on the skeletal model or skull that they distributed to museums. When these same scientists later found fossils negating their original interpretations, they did not recall the plaster models or drawings. Now museums are full of skulls and skeletons of ‘walking whales’ that are simply false.” Dr. Werner went on to say, “I suspect some curators are not aware of the significance of these substitutions nor are they aware of the updated fossils. Museums should now remove all of the altered skeletons, skulls and drawings since the most important parts of these ‘walking whales’ are admittedly made up. Museums will also have to delete these images from their websites as they are misleading the public.” –
Vestigial Responses
(just that, old… useless [baseless] theories)
Here is an example of my child’s biology textbook from grade school (enlargeable by just clicking the image ~ for maximum enlargement, right click with the mouse and choose, “open link in new tab“):
George B. Johnson and Peter H. Raven,
Biology: Principles & Explorations, Annotated Teacher’s Edition
(Austin, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2001), 284-285.
On page 288 of the same text we read:
- The pelvic bones found in modern whales are homologous to the pelvises that are found in land vertebrates. Although the whale pelvis bones are located near their reproductive organs, these bones do not function like a pelvis in a land vertebrate. The whale pelvis is located far from the vertebrae and has no apparent function. Thus, the whale pelvis is a vestigial structure.
The “pelvic bones” in whales are said to be vestigial. Here is another example from my son’s public schooling:
Vestigial Structures
Many organisms have features that seem to serve no useful function. For example, humans have a tailbone at the end of the spine that is of no apparent use. The human appendix, a small, fingerlike projection from the intestine, also has no known function. Some snakes have tiny pelvic bones and limb bones. Whales also have pelvic bones, along with a four-chambered stomach like that of a cow.
These apparently useless features are said to be vestigial. Vestigial (ves-TIJ-ee-uhl) features were useful to an ancestor, but they are not useful to the modern organism that has them. The vestigial tailbone in humans is homologous to the functional tails of other vertebrate species. A vestigial feature in a modern organism is evidence that the structure was functional in some ancestor of the modern organism. Moreover, an organism with a vestigial feature probably shares common ancestry with an organism that has a functional version of the same feature.
So what sort of evolutionary clues can vestigial features provide? Consider that normal sperm whales, like all whales, have small pelvic bones but no hind legs. A very small percentage of sperm whales, however, have vestigial leg bones, and some sperm whales even have bone-supported bumps protruding from their body.
Whales probably are descended from an ancestor that lived on land. In the whales’ genome, many of the genes needed to make hind legs have been conserved, or have remained unchanged. In normal whales, the genes for hind legs are turned off. In rare cases, however. the genes are partially turned on, and vestigial hind legs form. Thus. whales and other living things may display their evolutionary history in the usually unexpressed genes they carry.
Susan Feldkamp and Maureen Kilpatrick, editors, Modern Biology (Austin, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2002), 290.
Here, Philip Cunningham fills in what these “vestigial” bones are used for via a couple examples, the first being an Email Exchange regarding “vestigial legs” pelvic bones in whales:
The pelvic bones (supposed Vestigial Legs) of whales serve as attachments for the musculature associated with the penis in males and its homologue, the clitoris, in females. The muscle involved is known as the ischiocavernosus and is quite a powerful muscle in males. It serves as a retractor muscle for the penis in copulation and probably provides the base for lateral movements of the penis. The mechanisms of penile motion are not well understood in whales. The penis seems to be capable of a lot of independent motion, much like the trunk of an elephant. How much of this is mediated by the ischiocavernosus is not known.
In females the anatomical parts are smaller and more diffuse. I would imagine that there is something homologous to the perineal muscles in man and tetrapods, which affect the entire pelvic area – the clitoris, vagina and anus.
The pelvic rudiments also serve as origins for the ischiocaudalis muscle, which is a ventral muscle that inserts on the tips of the chevron bones of the spinal column and acts to flex the tail in normal locomotion.
James G. Mead, Ph.D. – Curator of Marine Mammals – National Museum of Natural History – Smithsonian Institution
This second example comes by way of PHYS.ORG and like all other vestigial organs, the “Darwinism-of-the-gaps” is proven to be vacuous:
Both whales and dolphins have pelvic (hip) bones, (supposed) evolutionary remnants from when their ancestors walked on land more than 40 million years ago. Common wisdom has long held that those bones are simply vestigial, slowly withering away…
New research from USC and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) flies directly in the face of that assumption, finding that,, pelvic bones serve a purpose…
“Everyone’s always assumed that if you gave whales and dolphins a few more million years of evolution, the pelvic bones would disappear. But it appears that’s not the case,”….
Dean collaborated with fellow co-corresponding author Jim Dines,,, on a painstaking four-year project to analyze cetacean (whale and dolphin) pelvic bones.
The muscles that control a cetacean’s penis – which has a high degree of mobility – attach directly to its pelvic bones….
The Smithsonian Institute has and article on this as well… the title is illuminating:
I thought this was a telling commentary in the article:
Testing any of this in the field is near impossible—for now, there’s no way to x-ray whales having sex underwater to reveal the inner workings of their anatomy. All the researchers can do at this point is speculate.
My only question would be…
…why this “speculation” wasn’t applied to the previously held position that these bones are vestigial.
Are Questions Now Considered Bigoted!?
Firefighters Called Terrorists For Having American Flags On Firetrucks
“They look like a bunch of yahoos,” Gralinski said. “Like in the paper, like ISIS in Syria going to take over a city. I don’t think they need that big flag on the back of the truck. That’s not America to me. Those are a bunch of terrorists. So, I’m going to ask you to take the flag off that truck.” (Daily Caller)
An American flag on the back of a fire truck and decals on the truck windows is leading to a new dispute at the Central Coventry Fire District. The firefighters union said they’re being asked to take them off. “The members are very upset,” Firefighters Union President David Gorman told NBC 10 News. “I have a couple members, armed service retired, retired from the guard.”
Friedman vs. Sanders ~ Democratic Socialism
I Fell In Love With… A Republican
Video Description:
A cute story of leftist female journalist falling in love with a Republican man (http://tinyurl.com/kydobey). She intimates the irony in her tolerant friends being the opposite towards her man… and his friend’s being more accommodating (tolerant) to her. Love the story. (Which is why I added the caller into the show defining “tolerance”)
It is like the an earlier story Dennis highlighted of a liberal Jewish woman:
…So, Tamara is in a quandary. She has actually fallen in love with one of those people she learned to deride.
Adding to her cognitive dissonance, this Republican has “a big generous heart.” That must really vex Tamara — aren’t conservatives greedy and far less compassionate than liberals?
For all these reasons, Tamara candidly concedes: “I can’t date a Republican! What was I thinking? What if I have little Republican babies?”…
Very funny! Maybe these women should start a help group?
Here is a portion of the article from Salon Prager is reading from:
….This would not be the last time Jimmy and I would find ourselves in the minefield where love and politics meet. What surprised me was that mostly it was not the intolerant, sanctimonious Republicans but my love-the-world, yoga-practicing, gluten-free progressive best friends who were apoplectic over my new romance. “A Republican? Are you that desperate? Don’t you know what they’re doing to our country?” (Funny, they were never as worried about the heroin addicts or that one guy who’d seen the inside of Folsom.)
Some friends of mine even disinvited us to a dinner party when they found out what Jimmy did for a living. Too bad. Not only because they made an awesome artichoke risotto, but because they missed talking to him. They missed his encyclopedic knowledge of American history, his fervent love of wilderness and of the American park system, his wry sense of humor, his love of great books, his punk-rockabilly past as a professional musician, his arrest record. They missed joining with me to tell him that he is socially liberal and fiscally just wrong, and they missed the argument over the fiscal part that always gets my blood going.
Mostly they missed knowing a man who is loyal to the people he loves. He is fierce, and smart, and unique, and particular, a man whose sum total is not represented by any politician or confined within the doctrine of political party. He drives me absolutely crazy at times, and there are things we will never, ever agree on, but being with him always makes me reconsider what I do believe, and why I believe it. It makes me look closer at all people and not assume I know everything about them from their (stupid, dumb-ass) bumper stickers. (OK, so I have to work on that part. Maybe.)
I guess I need to mention here that I married him. We eloped. Could you imagine a wedding reception? Just one mention of Ayn Rand and my mother would have broken a chair over somebody’s head.
But my point is, I realized that in all those years dating maybe I was the real narcissist, looking for someone exactly like me, who would reflect back to me exactly that which I wanted to see, that which I took to be the indisputable correct way of being. Maybe if we all slept with an enemy, or at least took him to dinner, we’d understand more, maybe even find places of agreement. It happens.
Take Jimmy’s dad, the Evangelical pastor, who now happens to be my father-in-law. He calls me “daughter.” I love him. We have great arguments. Once, he even saw my point and voted the same way I did. Granted, it was for Kirstie Alley on “Dancing With the Stars,” but, hey, it’s a start.
Victor Davis Hanson on “The Forgotten War” (Prager U)
What was the Korean War? And why was America involved in such a faraway conflict? Was the United States’ sacrifice–35,000 killed, over 100,000 wounded–worth it? Historian Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, shares the fascinating story of a transformative war that many have forgotten.
Here is the interview of Victor Davis Hanson about the above contribution to Prager U:
A Leftist Mother Bumps Up Against Reality
The transgender bathroom issue, flying in the face of biological reality and bullied through pressure from elites (see, for example, the corporations bullying North Carolina) is going to continue to open eyes. ~ American Thinker
Powerline has a story on the director of the Georgia ACLU bumbing up against reality:
ACLU LEADER QUITS AFTER DAUGHTERS ENCOUNTER MEN IN THE WOMEN’S RESTROOM
Maya Dillard Smith, interim director of the Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, has resigned over the ACLU’s position on who can use which public restrooms. The resignation occurred after her two daughters were traumatized by encountering men in the women’s restroom. Dillard Smith explained:
I have shared my personal experience of having taken my elementary school age daughters into a women’s restroom when shortly after three transgender young adults, over six feet [tall] with deep voices, entered. My children were visibly frightened, concerned about their safety and left asking lots of questions for which I, like many parents, was ill-prepared to answer.
Dillard Smith complained that the ACLU has become “a special interest organization that promotes not all, but certain progressive rights” and that the “hierarchy of rights” the ACLU chooses to defend or ignore is “based on who is funding the organization’s lobbying activities.” Further expressing her disillusionment, Dillard Smith stated:
I understood it to be the ACLU’s goal to delicately balance competing rights to ensure that any infringements are narrowly tailored, that they do not create a hierarchy of rights, and that we are mindful of unintended consequences. I believe there are solutions that can provide accommodations for transgender people and balance the need to ensure women and girls are safe from those who might have malicious intent.
Unfortunately, as she has learned, Dillard Smith’s view of the ACLU bears little relation to reality. The ACLU’s goal — like that of the LGBT movement — is to shove a radical agenda down the throats of the American people, not to balance rights and find reasonable accommodations…
These are “special rights” and not “equal rights” as the Constitution calls for… not a “hierarchy of rights,” who decides which right is more important? For instance, when you stop protecting life innocent life by saying getting an uninterrupted education for women (and not men), and you isolate gay persons rights into lobbyist groups… you see a conundrum in the following:
- “If homosexuality is really genetic, we may soon be able to tell if a fetus is predisposed to homosexuality, in which case many parents might choose to abort it. Will gay rights activists continue to support abortion rights if this occurs?”
Gay Patriot notes the story by how an activist responds to this mother:
…Maya Dillard Smith said her young daughters felt unsafe when their bathroom was invaded by women with penises.
A transgender activist, a biological male who goes by the name Cheryl Courtney-Evans, responded to the resignation by calling Dillard Smith “lazy,” “ill-educated,” and a “b–ch” who needs to sit down and “STFU.”
Powerline responds to that derogatory response by the tolerant leftist social justice warrior:
…Actually, Dillard Smith is well educated. She earned a degree in economics from Berkeley and a master’s degree at Harvard.
She’s also a liberal Democrat. And until she resigned, she was one of the youngest ACLU directors in the nation and one of only three African-Americans employed by the ACLU in that role….
Consensus Papers Disected
In a discussion with a person online about “consensus,” he list some retorts proving his point. I do not have time to refute everything he posts. So I will onle dea with his first link:
This example of a good study is the biggest joke ever. A total of 77 climatologists replied. Seventy-five agreed. Here is the graphic representing this survey: 
Larry Bell asks this of that “consensus” survey:
By Larry Bell
- So where did that famous “consensus” claim that “98% of all scientists believe in global warming” come from? It originated from an endlessly reported 2009 American Geophysical Union (AGU) survey consisting of an intentionally brief two-minute, two question online survey sent to 10,257 earth scientists by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Of the about 3.000 who responded, 82% answered “yes” to the second question, which like the first, most people I know would also have agreed with.
- Then of those, only a small subset, just 77 who had been successful in getting more than half of their papers recently accepted by peer-reviewed climate science journals, were considered in their survey statistic. That “98% all scientists” referred to a laughably puny number of 75 of those 77 who answered “yes”.
That anything-but-scientific survey asked two questions. The first: “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?” Few would be expected to dispute this…the planet began thawing out of the “Little Ice Age” in the middle 19th century, predating the Industrial Revolution. (That was the coldest period since the last real Ice Age ended roughly 10,000 years ago.) - The second question asked: “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?” So what constitutes “significant”? Does “changing” include both cooling and warming… and for both “better” and “worse”? And which contributions…does this include land use changes, such as agriculture and deforestation?
(FORBES)
By the way, from that FORBES article I really liked this part:
Consider the National Academy of Sciences for example. In 2007, Congress appropriated $5,856,000 for NAS to complete a climate change study. The organization subsequently sold its conclusions in three separate report sections at $44 per download.
[….]
What scientific understanding breakthrough did that big taxpayer-financed budget buy? Namely that the Earth’s temperature has risen over the past 100 years, and that human activities have resulted in a steady atmospheric CO2 increase. This is hardly new information, and few scientists are likely to challenge either of these assertions, which essentially prove no link between the two observations. All professional scientists recognize that correlation does not establish causation.
Two things. LOT’S of money is involved in “proving” global warming. Which is unlike the skeptics monetary situation. Also, take note that the jump in logic is connecting Man’s CO2 to rising temperatures. By doing so, politicians get the power to get more power (legislate over peoples actions as well as businesses), and it allows these same politicians to tax people to fund their coffers, and then to pay for more studies. And round-and-round we go. Dr. Richard Lindzen observes that these people are really saying that “…regardless of evidence the answer is predetermined. If government wants carbon control, that is the answer that the Academies will provide.”
Larry Elder Hits Hillary Over the Head with Emails
This is the segment after Larry Elder played this Chris Wallace interview: