Pun Salad

Reality:

And only slightly modified by Mr. Ramirez (I recommend clicking on it to get to a big beautiful version):

Not that it matters, but I assume Trump will be changing some of the portraits and busts.

Also of note:

• To be fair, it was justifiable homicide. Jeff Maurer continues to take on the loons on his own side: Activists Continue to Murder Left-Wing Thought. He provides clips of John Oliver (on a show called "Last Week Tonight") and Jen Psaki (on a show called … well, I don't know what the show is called, it's on MSNBC) using the same phrasing to advocate for "trans women" being on female sports teams: “no evidence that trans women in sports threaten safety or fairness”.

  Jeff (I call him Jeff) traces this back to "a document called “Transgender Athletes: A Research-Informed Fact Sheet” from the University of Kansas’ Center for LGBTQ+ Research & Advocacy." He shows this 2017 "fact sheet" misrepresented the research behind the specific claim. And furthermore:

  The University of Kansas’ “Research-Informed Fact Sheet” is quite a piece of work. Almost all of its links are dead. One of the academic resources it cites is this “fact sheet” from the ACLU, which was the subject of a rim-rattling social media dunk fest a while back, because it included obvious non-facts like “FACT: Trans girls are girls.” and “FACT: Trans people belong on the same teams as other students.” The Kansas document also prominently features a pull quote from a professor who — whoa, coincidence alert! — teaches at the University of Kansas! That professor, Kyle Velte, specializes in research on transgender issues, and I would put the odds that Kyle Velte wrote this fact sheet and cited herself as an expert without acknowledging that she is the author of the fact sheet at around 99.999999999999999%.

  In short: This is joke scholarship designed to trick people. This is like when the religious right used to dig up some crackpot professor who would argue that evolution can’t be true because kangaroos are too rad, and that Jesus buried all those fossils as a prank. The contention that there is “no evidence” that physiology confers an advantage in sports — despite the fact that there is extensive research measuring differences in sports performance between men and women and that this obvious reality underlies the very existence of women’s sports — isn’t an argument so much as a dare. Activists are spouting bullshit and daring you to admit that you know what they’re saying isn’t true.

  Jeff's closing comment:

  Many activists have falsely asserted that a robust scientific consensus supports their views on trans women in sports and youth gender medicine, and they’re clearly hoping that that lie is repeated by the credulous and/or obsequious. They’ve had some success. But when people with influence repeat those lies to an American public who clearly aren’t buying, they do further damage to our already-degraded institutions. Which plays into the hands of people who are determined to burn our institutions down.

  Although they probably believe they're being "compassionate", Psaki, Oliver, etc. are probably overall harming trans people.

• Now that the election's over… Jim Geraghty notes Biden’s Wishy-Washy Support for Ukraine Reaches Its Final Months.

  I don’t love the Biden administration waiting until after the election to make this move, or the announcement that “President Biden has committed to making sure that every dollar we have at our disposal will be pushed out the door between now and January 20,” as secretary of state Antony Blinken put it on November 13.

  First, all this stuff they’re sending is long overdue. Second, it makes it look like these were long-planned moves that had to be hidden from the electorate, lest they make people less inclined to vote for the president’s party. An incumbent administration’s foreign policy and decision-making after Election Day shouldn’t look all that different than it looked before Election Day.

  But that would imply that their policies were principled, not simply politically expedient.

• When you've lost Ars Technica… Beth Mole has some advice to help mend self-inflicted wounds: Trust in scientists hasn’t recovered from COVID. Some humility could help.

  Scientists could win back trust lost during the COVID-19 pandemic if they just showed a little intellectual humility, according to a study published Monday in Nature Human Behavior.

  It's no secret that scientists—and the science generally—took a hit during the health crisis. Public confidence in scientists fell from 87 percent in April 2000 to a low of 73 percent in October 2023, according to survey data from the Pew Research Center. And the latest Pew data released last week suggests it will be an uphill battle to regain what was lost, with confidence in scientists only rebounding three percentage points, to 76 percent in a poll from October.

  So I guess the science is settled: scientists shouldn't be so arrogant in claiming the science is settled.

  Surprisingly, Dr. "I am the Science" Fauci goes unmentioned in the article.

• Also unmentioned: Laura Helmuth Jesse Singal tells her story at Reason: How Scientific American's Departing Editor Helped Degrade Science.

  Earlier this week, Laura Helmuth resigned as editor in chief of Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. "I've decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor in chief," she wrote on Bluesky. "I'm going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching), but for now I'd like to share a very small sample of the work I've been so proud to support (thread)."

  Helmuth may in fact have been itching to spend more time bird watching—who wouldn't be?—but it seems likely that her departure was precipitated by a bilious Bluesky rant she posted after Donald Trump was reelected.

  In it, she accused her generation, Generation X, of being "full of fucking fascists," complained about how sexist and racist her home state of Indiana was, and so on.

  "Fuck them to the moon and back," she said of the dumb high school bullies supposedly celebrating Trump's victory.

  Ms. Helmuth is, from what I can find using the Google, in her mid-50s. And still working out those high school traumas.

• Another thing to abolish. Emma Camp finds a tempting target: Abolish Federal Student Loans.

  When it was created in 1965, the federal student loan program was pitched as a way to make college accessible for Americans who couldn't afford to pay tuition out of pocket. The program would supposedly rocket millions into the middle class by helping them obtain college degrees.

  Instead, easily accessible loans led to skyrocketing tuition—and gave schools an incentive to create low-value programs accepting students unlikely to graduate, all to absorb government money.

  At this point, there are more than $1.6 trillion in outstanding federal loans. The Biden administration has turned to student loan forgiveness to solve the problem, but that's an ineffective Band-Aid for this giant hemorrhage—one that gives colleges no reason to lower their prices or stop exploiting high-risk students.

  Uncle Stupid should get out of the loan business altogether. If they had more print pages in the magazine: the Export-Import Bank, Freddie Mac, … (But the Small Business Administration is on their list and will be showing up here at some point.)

Recently on the book blog: