Saturday, January 22, 2022



Men and women's brains really do work differently! Scientists find 1,000 genes that are more active in one gender than the other, making males sexually assertive and females more maternally protective

Everybody knew this once. It is only feminists who doubt it

It's often said that men and women's brains work so differently that one sex is from Venus and the other is from Mars. Well now a new study supports this hypothesis after finding 1,000 genes that are much more active in one gender than the other.

It looked into how male and female mouse brains differ by probing areas that are known to program 'rating, dating, mating and hating' behaviours.

The behaviours — for example, male mice's quick determination of a stranger's sex, females' receptivity to mating, and maternal protectiveness — help the animals reproduce and their offspring survive.

These differences are also likely reflected in the brains of men and women, the researchers from Stanford Medicine said.

A separate study by a team from the University of Pennsylvania scanned the brains of 900 men, women and children aged eight to 22. From the scans they were able to create a complete road map of the connections in each of their brains, called their connectome.

All connectomes are based on a common set of wiring between the regions of the brain, such as connecting the region which deals with speech to that which processes hearing, giving a fixed frame of reference for researchers.

But the team found subtle differences in how brains were wired in men and women.

The maps show that men's brains may be hardwired for better special awareness and motor skills, while connections in women's brains are wired to give them an edge in memory and social cognition.

The findings could help to shed light on brain diseases and behavioural conditions which progress faster in one sex than the other.

Analysing tissue that was extracted from these brain structures, the scientists found more than 1,000 genes that are substantially more active in the brains of one sex versus the other.

'Using these genes as entry points, we've identified specific groups of brain cells that orchestrate specific sex-typical behaviours,' said study author, Nirao Shah, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences and of neurobiology.

Sex-typical social behaviours have been built into animals' brains over millions of years of evolution. Male mice, for example, quickly distinguish the sex of strangers infringing on what they've deemed their turf. If the intruder is another male, they immediately attack it. If it's a female, they initiate a whirlwind courtship.

Female mice exhibit maternal rather than territorial aggression, attacking anything that threatens their pups. They're vastly more inclined than males to guard their youngsters and retrieve any that stray. Their willingness to mate varies powerfully depending on the stage of their cycle.

'These primal behaviours are essential to survival and reproduction, and they're largely instinctive,' Shah said.

'If you need to learn how to mate or fight once the situation arises, it's probably already too late. 'The evidence is pretty clear that the brain isn't purely a blank slate just waiting around to be shaped by environmental influences.'

Some of the genes the researchers discovered are also established risk factors for brain disorders that are more common in one or the other sex, they said.

Of 207 genes already known as high risk for autism spectrum disorder, which is four times as common in men as in women, the researchers identified 39 as being more active in the brains of one or the other sex: 29 in males, 10 in females.

They also identified genes linked to Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis, both of which tend to afflict women more than men, as being more activated among female mice.

The researchers believe that males need some genes to be working harder, and females need other genes to be working harder — and that a mutation in a gene that needs high activation may do more damage than a mutation in a gene that's just sitting around.

The study also pinpointed more than 600 differences in gene-activation levels between females in different phases of their estrous cycle. In women, this is referred to as the menstrual cycle, but female mice don't menstruate.

'To find, within these four tiny brain structures, several hundred genes whose activity levels depend only on the female's cycle stage was completely surprising,' said Shah, who has devoted his career to understanding how sex hormones regulate sex-typical behaviours.

The brain structures the researchers focused on are shared among mammals, including humans.

'Mice aren't humans,' Shah said. 'But it's reasonable to expect that analogous brain cell types will be shown to play roles in our sex-typical social behaviours.'

He added: 'The frequency of migraines, epileptic seizures and psychiatric disorders can vary during the menstrual cycle,' Shah said.

'Our findings of gene activation differences across the cycle suggest a biological basis for this variation.'

Previous attempts to find gene-activation differences between male and female rodent brain cells have come up with only about 100 of them — seemingly too few, the researchers believe, to generate the numerous profound differences in known instinctual behaviour.

'We wound up finding about 10 times that many, not to mention the 600 genes whose activity levels in females vary with the stage of the cycle,' Shah said.

'In all, these add up to a solid 6 per cent of a mouse's genes being regulated by sex or stage of the cycle.'

************************************************

Hate crimes in NYC skyrocket: Attacks on Asians up 343% and Hispanics up 700% from 2020 to 2021

We are not told the skin color of the attackers but I don't suppose we need to be told

Hate crimes surged a shocking 96 percent in the Big Apple throughout 2021, new data from the NYPD has revealed, as Manhattan's woke DA announced on Friday that he'll be expanding the hate crimes unit to address radically motivated attacks.

Asian hate crimes skyrocketed 343 percent from 2020 to 2021 as the pandemic rattled on, with 133 Asian Americans experiencing terrifying and dangerous experiences of discrimination, according to the new data, which was first reported by Fox News.

Hispanic hate crimes were also up a staggering 700 percent last year with a total of eight people being harassed or harmed in 2021, up from one in 2020.

Overall, the City That Never Sleeps city saw a 96 percent increase in bias crimes throughout 2021, as more and more New Yorkers are being attacked in the streets, pushed onto subway tracks, and harassed for their gender, race and religion.

A total of 538 hate crimes occurred throughout 2021, compared to 275 in 2020.

Only three categories declined in the number of attacks: African Americans, generalized religion and other, the data show. It is not clear what is considered 'other.'

Despite 'religious' hate crimes decreasing overall, Muslims and Jews did see an increase of 180 and 54 percent from 2020 to 2021, respectively.

African Americans saw an 11 percent decrease in bias crimes against them, with the NYPD reporting 33 attacks, down from 37. Caucasian Americans saw a 100 percent increase, but the total number of attacks remains one of the lowest, with only 20 attacks.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, 48 - who recently found himself in hot water after downgrading many crimes and claiming that 'prison is a last resort' - is now saying his office will expand the hate crimes unit, created in 2018, to help address the increase in radically motivated attacks.

'Our [Asian American and Pacific Islander] brothers and sisters have been spit upon, coughed at, told to go back home. In my office we are deepening our capacity,' he said on Friday.

'We're expanding our hate crimes unit so that we can give these cases the resources that they deserve.'

Bragg, the first black man to hold his position, said on Friday that he would be expanding resources by partnering with local communities to 'strengthen our community ties,' but commended the existing 'small' hate crimes team for having 'great leadership.'

************************************************

All criminals are welcome appears to be the policy of the New York district attorney

With the departure of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and the election of Eric Adams, a Democrat who at least rhetorically voiced support for the police and law and order, some hoped that worrying crime trends in New York City would be reversed.

The early signs aren’t promising.

Newly-elected Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg released a “day 1 memo” highlighting how various crimes—some quite serious—will no longer be prosecuted under his leadership.

One of the crimes his office won’t prosecute is armed robberies of businesses. Suspects in those cases who make off with less than $1,000 in stolen goods will now be charged with the lesser crime of petty larceny, a misdemeanor.

Among the other crimes his office will no longer prosecute are resisting arrest, fare beating, prostitution, and trespassing. Basically, the only criminals who will now face serious jail time are murderers.

It gets worse.

“Even when Bragg does intend to seek jail sentences, the penalties will not be stiff,” wrote Seth Barron at City Journal. “Bragg says that the maximum sentence sought for any offense will be 20 years, and that his office will never seek life without parole. If 20 years is the maximum sentence for the worst offenses, expect a severe discount on sentences for other offenses across the board.”

If these policies seem familiar, that’s because they mirror a path charted by other radical, left-wing district attorneys across the country, like Chesa Boudin in San Francisco and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia.

These district attorneys have made policing nearly impossible, as even in the cases when an already stretched thin and beleaguered police force is able to arrest criminals, they are very soon put back out on the street.

Things aren’t working out well in those cities. Violent crime is soaring, and other types of crime—Like mass retail looting—are also on the upswing.

The situation is so terrible in San Francisco that Mayor London Breed, who defunded the police, recently called for an end to the “reign of criminals and the city,” and announced that the city would pursue more aggressive policing.

We’ll see if they follow through.

The problem remains that whatever the mayor and police department do to clean up criminality, those measures can be easily undermined by an out-of-control district attorney who simply refuses to bring criminals to justice in the name of social justice.

That’s what may soon happen in New York.

Like many big, blue metropolitan areas, New York has been hit with a massive surge in violent crime since the summer of 2020. Yet, despite the trend, New York has generally been safer than other cities, thanks to the crime fighting policies of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and others who cleaned up Gotham in the 1990s.

It seems many have forgotten the lessons of the very recent past.

The New York district attorney said that his policies were meant to “marry fairness and safety.” But given the details of his memo, it’s clear this marriage is a sham.

Some prominent New York leaders expressed concern with Bragg’s memo.

The New York Police Department’s newly appointed police commissioner Keechant Sewell said she thought they could put public safety at risk.

“I have studied these policies and I am very concerned about the implications to your safety as police officers, the safety of the public and justice for the victims,” she wrote in an email to police officers.

Should anyone be surprised though? Bragg ran on an explicitly progressive message. He is just carrying progressive ideas about defunding the police and “restorative justice” through to their logical conclusions.

The evidence is already coming in that criminals are learning that they have the keys to the city, and there’s little the justice system will now do about it.

A New York Post report on Wednesday highlighted a case in which Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Jay Weiner told an ex-convict being charged with misdemeanor petit larceny that his case “two weeks ago would have been charged as a robbery,” and that he was “lucky” that he wouldn’t face a long prison sentence.

The man, who had a lengthy criminal record, threatened a drug store owner with a knife and allegedly stole thousands of dollars in items.

Naturally, he didn’t show up to his follow-up court appearance after being released without having to post cash bail. New York abolished bail for minor crimes in 2019. Not great when almost all crimes are now considered minor crimes.

As a recent Wall Street Journal editorial’s headline noted, the new district attorney’s policies will make New York a “sanctuary city for crime.”

It’s not exactly a wild prediction to say that other hardened criminals in the city will likely realize that today can be their lucky day, too.

Unfortunately, this is not just a problem for New Yorkers or people living in cities with other radical district attorneys and irresponsible political leaders. Our cities becoming hives of violence and criminality will affect everyone. Like an infected wound, the lawlessness will allow criminality to spread as more dangerous people are let out on the street to act with impunity.

The progress this country made on crime in the last few decades will very soon evaporate and we will have to go through the arduous process of setting things right.

We all pay when progressive fantasies about restorative justice and crime become reality, and reality comes back to slug us all in the face.

***********************************************

Biden is failing because he abandoned his mandate

by Jeff Jacoby

I WAS WRONG about Joe Biden.

In his inaugural address a year ago this week, Biden pledged to pour his "whole soul" into "bringing America together" and "uniting our people." He urged Americans — sincerely, I believed — to "see each other not as adversaries but as neighbors," to "treat each other with dignity and respect," and to "join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature."

Far more than any previous president, Biden emphasized unity at his inauguration; it was the core and quintessence of his first speech as the nation's chief executive. True, nearly all presidents talk about bringing Americans together and rising above partisanship, but it seemed to me that Biden really meant it. I thought so for two reasons:

First, it was what he had campaigned on. Biden's most important message as a candidate for president was that he was no Donald Trump, stoking anger, demonizing critics, and widening the political rift. Rather, Biden said, he would bring to the White House his experience of working with legislators of both parties and fashioning compromises to get things done. With the possible exception of his vow to "shut down" the coronavirus, Biden's central promise was that he would be the political healer America needed — a "president who doesn't divide us but unites us . . . who appeals not to the worst of us but to the best." During the home stretch of the 2020 election, that was Biden's closing pitch to the electorate: not a policy agenda but a commitment to lead Americans in freeing themselves "from the forces of division . . . that pull us apart, hold us down, and hold us back."

Second, in the days following his election, Biden not only kept stressing the need to achieve cooperation, unity, and less ferocious political discourse, but also explicitly identified that as his mandate. "Now that the campaign is over," asked the president-elect, "what is our mandate?" His answer: "Americans have called on us to marshal the forces of decency and the forces of fairness. . . . Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end — here and now."

That was exactly right, not just as moral sentiment but as hard-headed political analysis. Voters had elected Biden by a comfortable margin in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, even though a solid majority, 56 percent, said they were better off than they had been before Trump's election. On the issues, more Americans agreed with Trump than with Biden. It was his character that cost Trump the election. His obnoxious, bellicose, divisive, unpresidential behavior — that was what most of the nation wanted no more of. Biden's mandate was clear: to not be Trump and to usher in a period of reconciliation.

Given the centrifugal forces invariably unleashed by politics in a society as evenly divided between two parties as America is these days, maybe that was always a pipe dream. But Biden never tried.

Hardly had the fine words of his inaugural address receded in the rearview mirror than his commitment to healing and peacemaking faded. Soon it became clear that the new president had yielded to the temptation to push the sweeping, expensive, transformational agenda championed by his party's left-wing base — vast new spending measures, statehood for the District of Columbia, a student debt bailout, higher corporate taxes, a major expansion of the welfare state, and much of the radical Green New Deal. Biden was "a proud moderate during his three and a half decades as a senator, but he has fallen in firmly with the progressives as president," concluded The Atlantic in September. And the further leftward he moved, the more intolerant his rhetoric became.

With his "voting rights" speech in Georgia last week, Biden hit an atrocious low. The president who a year ago had beseeched Americans to see those with whom they disagree "not as adversaries but as neighbors," to "stop the shouting and lower the temperature," loudly slammed 52 senators who won't back his call to blow up the filibuster and pass his party's aggressive election bills as "domestic enemies" and acolytes of George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Jefferson Davis. His language was so unhinged and intemperate that even his ally Dick Durbin, the Democratic Senate majority whip, deplored it.

At the one-year mark of his presidency, Biden is failing utterly at the singular task he set himself: to bring the nation together. In a new Quinnipiac poll, a plurality of Americans (49 percent) say that he is doing more to divide the country than unite it. Fully 64 percent of respondents in a CBS News-YouGov survey released Sunday say the word "unifying" cannot be applied to Biden's presidency. The president's failure is reflected in his own unpopularity: Just 33 percent of the public approve of the job he is doing, while 53 percent disapprove. I really expected better of the man. My bad.

*****************************************************

M&M’s unveils new ‘progressive’ characters

M&M’s has unveiled a “progressive” overhaul of its iconic characters to better represent themes such as female empowerment.

The Mars-owned chocolate brand revealed the new look and feel of its multi-coloured, anthropomorphised characters Thursday, saying it was “on a mission to create a world where everyone feels they belong”.

“As an iconic brand that’s been around for over 80 years, it’s really important that we’re evolving over time as well, and one of the most powerful ways we can do that is through our beloved characters,” M&M’s global vice president Jane Hwang told Cheddar News.

“We’ve done a deep look at them both inside as well as out, in terms of reflecting new looks, personalities and backstories.”

The Green M&M has ditched her high-heeled boots for sneakers, and will “better reflect empowerment and confidence and be known for more than just her shoes”.

“You’re going to see Green and Brown together being a supporting force for women who are throwing shine and not shade,” Ms Hwang said.

Orange, meanwhile, will suffer from anxiety issues to better reflect young people.

“You’ll also Orange really embrace his true self, worries and all, and not be afraid to express it,” she said.

“We actually know Orange as the most relatable of the characters in the crew based on some conversations we’ve had with gen Z, which we know is the most anxious generation.”

The M&M’s website includes new “profiles” for the characters – Yellow, Red, Orange, Brown, Blue and Green.

“Which M&M’s character are you?” it reads. “The world needs all colours. Which one do you add to the mix?”

Green’s bio says her “best quality” is “being a hypewoman for my friends”.

“I think we all win when we see more women in leading roles, so I’m happy to take on the part of supportive friend when they succeed,” it says.

Ms Hwang said M&M’s would also be using a wider colour palette in its branding, and would be placing more emphasis on the ampersand in its name.

“It’s a distinctive element of the M&M’s logo that connects the two Ms together, and it’s really a signal of our belief as a brand that we are better together,” she said.

Reaction on social media was mixed. “I will no longer be buying M&M’s. I’ve had enough of this woke nonsense,” one Twitter user wrote.

“Nobody asked for this. Especially women who have loved the Green M&M for years. Bring back the boots!” another said.

****************************************

My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

*****************************************

No comments: