University of Pittsburgh class erupts in laughter when professor claims there is NO difference between male and female skeletons
Anthropologists are usually pretty far Left. It's amazing what a committed Leftist can talk himself into believing. It's close to a mental illness. If blacks believed that the moon is made of green cheese, some white progressives would assert vigorously the cheesiness of our satellite
An anthropology professor at the University of Pittsburgh denied the difference between male and female skeletons to derisive laughter from students during a speaking engagement from college swimming champion Riley Gaines.
Gabby Yearwood is a professor whose research focuses on 'the social constructions of race and racism, masculinity, gender, sex, Black Feminist and Black Queer theory, anthropology of sport and Black Diaspora' according to his bio.
Gaines, a rising star on the conservative speaking circuit, is an advocate to keep student athletes who are born biological males out of women's sports. She spoke at the school recently and posed a question to her audience.
'If you were to dig up a human — two humans — a hundred years from now, both a man and a woman, could you tell the difference strictly off of bones?'
Yearwood responds: 'No' to laughter from the students in the audience, as well as Gaines.
The differences between male and female skeletons
There are notable differences between male and female skeletons, according to experts. 'Males tend to have larger, more robust bones and joint surfaces, and more bone development at muscle attachment sites,' the Smithsonian says.
'However, the pelvis is the best sex-related skeletal indicator, because of distinct features adapted for childbearing.' 'The skull also has features that can indicate sex, though slightly less reliably.'
They note that sex-related differences are not obvious in the bones of pre-pubescent children. However, there are some nuances, especially when it comes to intersex people, those born with a combination of male and female biological traits. About 1.7 percent of babies are born this way, according to Discover Magazine.
In addition, it's been reported that males were often overcounted because scientists would assume all questionable skeletons were male. After 1972, they were classified as 'indeterminate.'
Yearwood doubles down, saying that he's the 'expert in the room' on this issue.
'Have any of you been to anthropological sites? Have any of you studied biological anthropology? I'm just saying, I've got over 150 years of data, I'm just curious as to why I'm being laughed at,' he said.
At one point, Yearwood exclaims: 'I have a PhD!'
The Independent Women's Forum, who posted the clip, wrote: 'This is how far removed the Left is from reality that they must deny basic scientific facts.
'[Gaines] might not have a PhD in anthropology like Professor Yearwood, but she and her teammates know the physical advantages of biological males over females in sport firsthand,' they added.
According to the Smithsonian: 'Males tend to have larger, more robust bones and joint surfaces, and more bone development at muscle attachment sites. However, the pelvis is the best sex-related skeletal indicator, because of distinct features adapted for childbearing.
'The skull also has features that can indicate sex, though slightly less reliably.'
They note that sex-related differences are not obvious in the bones of pre-pubescent children.
Gaines was speaking about her experience competing against transgender women participating on female sports teams after she was forced to go head-to-head with University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas.
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New York progressives are anti-Asian across the board
Because Asians show up blacks by being different in appearance but still economically successful
It’s sure starting to look like New York’s progressives are simply anti-Asian.
Their latest cause célèbre, the “Good Cause Eviction” bill, aims to effectively bring some 2 million apartments in the city alone under a new statewide rent-control regime.
On top of being a sure housing-killer, it’s gotten the city’s Asian community rightfully up in arms.
Strongly represented among the city’s small-landlord community, they see this as yet another oblique attack on them by arrogant, far-off leftists.
Indeed, an association of Chinese landlords, the New York Small Landlords, has been fighting back against prog policies on eviction since the eviction moratorium — disastrous for smaller landlords — was declared in 2020.
But GCE is only the latest in a string of progressives efforts in the city and Albany that have hurt New York’s Asians.
Consider the effort to wreck the Big Apple’s merit-based admissions policies to academically rigorous schools.
The “problem” this aims to correct is precisely that Asian students (many from poorer backgrounds; many the children of immigrants) compete so effectively: 2021 saw them win 54% of freshman seats in selective high schools.
Mayor Bill de Blasio did major damage to the system on his way out of office, banning competitive tests for most “selective school” admissions, but the new administration left it intact in most of the city.
Which leaves Asian-Americans increasingly looking to charters as a way to find excellence in public education.
But the progs hate charters, too: They’re leading the charge against Gov. Kathy Hochul’s bid to allow dozens more charters to open in the city. If the left succeeds, it means no new charters for Asian neighborhoods.
Which explains the recent Asian American parents’ pro-charter rally.
Above all, there’s public safety. The left’s criminal-justice “reforms” helped power a massive rise in anti-Asian hate crimes.
Like the 2022 murders of Michelle Go and Christina Yuna Lee.
When New York’s Asian community raised their voices in response, all they got from the crime lovers in the Legislature and elsewhere was pabulum about “white supremacy” — and a total refusal to budge on the cause of the crimes, i.e. laws that leave murderous thugs free to walk the streets.
It’s no mystery why the left’s policies are so profoundly anti-Asian.
This minority group’s economic and educational attainments blow to smithereens the lies about America being incurably racist that serve as the basis for most progressive policies.
But electoral results — with Asian voters swinging right in the governor’s race and New York’s legislative races — shows that Dems’ policies are driving this key demographic away.
It’s an opportunity for the GOP — and thus for actual democratic rule in the Empire State — if Republicans can only seize it.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/01/democrats-in-new-york-have-a-real-problem-with-asians/
***************************************************New 'Mansion Tax' in L.A. will chase away its target
Death from taxes. That’s what could happen to Los Angeles if the wealthy flee or stay away from the city due to a “mansion tax.” Many will look to greener pastures — dollar green.
“Shark Tank” star Barbara Corcoran agrees. TMZ caught up with the real estate mogul in New York City. “People hate to pay taxes on entrances or exits to their homes,” she told the entertainment news outlet. “They feel like they’re hit upon, taken advantage of.”
Last November, voters passed Measure ULA, which levies a 4-percent tax on homes selling for $5 million or more. It also imposes a 5.5 percent tax on properties that sell for over $10 million, according to the New York Times. The tax goes into effect today — April Fool’s Day.
The monies garnered from the tax are supposed to fund affordable housing in L.A. and help to help alleviate the city’s homeless crisis, according to TMZ. The aptly nicknamed “mansion tax” is projected by some to bring in $1 billion annually. How will those projections be met if a slew of wealthy home seekers shies away from the city to avoid the tax? Nobody wants to be a prisoner in their own home.
Corcoran agrees. “The mansion tax is going to give people more motivation for not moving out or moving in.” Escaping L.A. will be tougher and tougher for the wealthy, and those wanting to avoid a self-imposed prison sentence due to a tax burden will avoid the city like the plague.
It’s not that Corcoran is against helping the homeless; just the opposite. She thinks an affordable housing fund is “more than fair” because “it’s the obligation of people with money to pay for people who don’t have money.”
“But a mansion tax is the wrong way to do this,” Corcoran continued, “it sends tax revenue out of the state. Nobody benefits in the end.” The housing market will be paralyzed and wealthy people will not look to L.A. for a home. They will look to cities and states with more favorable tax laws. Corcoran said she believes many will opt for southern states instead of paradise lost — California.
They should have seen it coming. Beware the ides of March. Last month, wealthy home sellers were cutting prices and making last-minute deals in L.A., trying to beat the clock and unload their properties before the mansion tax kicked in, according to the Times.
The selling frenzy saw luxury brokers like Josh Altman, a regular presence on Bravo’s “Million Dollar Listing,” offering agents a $1 million bonus if they brought a buyer in before April 1 for a seven-bedroom Bel Air estate priced at nearly $28 million. It’s no wonder. The mansion tax has to be paid by the seller.
L.A. is Crazy Town. But it’s not just L.A.
At former President Donald Trump’s recent campaign rally in Waco, Texas, rock legend Ted Nugent kicked off the show with an electric guitar rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner,” according to Newsweek. Some might go so far as to claim it rivaled Jimi Hendrix‘s iconic performance of the same tune at Woodstock in 1969.
Same song, different world views. Hendrix, it is safe to say, was no conservative. Nugent is. He added a few choice words between guitar riffs. “I am a guitar player, I have a couple of demands. Secure my border. I have a couple of really good ideas: give me my tax dollars back. I didn’t authorize killing babies at Planned Parenthood … I want my money back.” Needless to say, the pro-Trump crowd cheered.
Nugent also had some colorful words for the Ukraine war and President Zelenskyy, but I digress. The point is, Nugent is right to demand his tax money back. Taxes are spent on crazy things that many taxpayers find wasteful and repulsive.
For example, scientists from Stanford University spent almost $7 million in funds to construct an artificially intelligent toilet system to study health, according to the New York Post. The researchers say your butt has an individually identifiable “analprint.” The scientists admitted that “[t]o fully reap the benefits of the smart toilet, users must make their peace with a camera that scans their anus.”
And there was some pretty nutty stuff tucked away in the McConnell-Schumer omnibus spending bill. According to the Daily Signal, $575 million was slated for a global health section that allocated funds for “family planning/reproductive health, including in areas where population growth threatens biodiversity or endangered species.” In other words, the plebes are the enemy of the world, and the elites must stop them from breeding.
That’s just the edge of the quagmire. The omnibus bill also included:
$1.5 million to encourage people to eat outdoors in sunny Pasadena, California.
$1.1 million for a solar array in cloudy Kirkland, Washington.
$2 million for B360, a group that promotes dirt-bike culture in Baltimore.
$3 million for the tiny and remote island of St. George, Alaska, for water infrastructure and $2.5 million for harbor improvements, for a total cost of over $82,000 per resident.
$500,000 for a skate park in Rhode Island.
$4.8 million for an environmental impact report on the possible expansion of Chicago’s rail transit system.
$13 million to expand the airport in the tiny city of Abbeville, Alabama.
$4 million for “Soy-Enabled Rural Road Reconstruction” in Iowa.
$2.35 million for the Leahy Center in Vermont, named after state’s Democrat Sen. Patrick Leahy. The member who requested the earmark? Sen. Patrick Leahy.
Funding for a wide array of woke organizations and left-wing activists.
It’s not just L.A. The craziness is spreading from state to state and city to city.
Ted Nugent was right. Your government — local, state and federal — is spending your tax dollars willy-nilly. Are you being represented by your government officials? Or is it all just a tale told by idiots?
In California, taxes such as the mansion tax are scaring away the wealthy. How does scaring away wealth benefit the poor? It doesn’t add up.
Corcoran was right when she told the TMZ reporter the mansion tax is “not good for the country.” Far too many of our politicians are taking advantage of us, rich or not.
Something’s got to give.
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Human rights advocates and bills of rights did nothing to stop goverment abuses during the pandemic
Former UK Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption argued from near the start of the Covid pandemic that what democratic governments were doing to their citizens in the way of lockdowns, mandates, closing businesses, restricting travel and visiting sick relatives, weaponising the police – the list goes on and on – constituted the greatest infringements on civil liberties in the West in the last 300 years. I mention that because from March 2020 I was on the record in this newspaper, in The Spectator Australia and in outlets around the world, arguing precisely the same thing. Now readers can agree or disagree. Likewise, readers might think the costs were worth it for the benefits (though I think not, not with the data out now, including Sweden having the OECD’s lowest cumulative excess deaths from the start of the pandemic to now while we in Australia are currently running at 15-17 per cent excess deaths).
But one thing that is beyond debate is that the self-styled human rights lobby said not a peep about this government heavy-handedness. Nada. Nothing. Zero. Not the usual lawyerly caste that finds rights-infringements everywhere, many of microscopic proportions. Nor any of the eight members of the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) who made not a single condemnatory comment about Dan Andrews’ authoritarianism, about former Prime Minister Morrison’s preventing citizens from leaving their own country, about any of the myriad intrusions into our civil liberties over two years. And for what it’s worth all eight, the President and the seven Commissioners, were appointed by the Coalition – even the so-called Freedom Commissioner. All of them.
I start this article with that background because the AHRC has recently decided to wade yet again into the bill of rights debate in this country. (Did I mention that all eight were appointed by a political party that claims to be overtly against a bill of rights?) Actually, ask around and you learn that the seven Commissioners and President are not unanimous on this initiative. It is mostly being pushed by President Rosalind Coucher. It recycles all the tired and wrong-headed old arguments in favour of handing power via a bill of rights to unelected judges over our elected Parliamentarians; all of them churned out back when Labor was last in power under Rudd-Gillard-Rudd. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. Buy a bill of rights, statutory as well as constitutionalised, and all you are buying is the druthers and policy-preferences of the lawyerly caste from which the judges are chosen. This model even moots social and economic rights. The proposal is as bad as you’d expect under Rudd and Gillard, though possibly your expectations of what AHRC Commissioners appointed by a Liberal/Coalition government might desire would be different from this. (Remember Douglas Murray’s criticism of all anglosphere conservative political parties, that they are congenitally unable to appoint anyone who shares the views of their core voters to anything.)
But here is where it gets galling to the point of rank hypocrisy. In the position paper announcing this initiative and its launch at the law firm Gilbert and Tobin (where else I muse?) the Commission (or perhaps just the President of the AHRC) had the gall to suggest a bill of rights might have helped protect civil liberties during the pandemic. Are you kidding me? First off, look at all anglosphere countries with potent and even constitutionalised bills of rights – so Canada, America, and Britain (with a strong statutory model). There is not one single example anywhere of a bill of rights being used by the judges to lessen or eliminate any of the myriad governmental pandemic inroads on civil liberties. Not one example anywhere! To suggest that a bill of rights would have helped flies directly in the face of what is known in the philosophy of science as ‘the facts’. (There are a few examples in the US of state courts using old-fashioned administrative law principles to say that some executive actions taken during the pandemic were ultra vires or beyond the power of the conferring statute.) That line of attack has a chance because it leaves the elected Parliament with the option of passing a new, more delegatory statute. But in times of panic (especially when the judges are panicking at least as much as anyone else) it is folly to think a bill of rights will help. I repeatedly doled out that advice throughout the pandemic to those against lockdowns who thought a trip to court would be a magic bullet and help. It didn’t in any jurisdiction with a bill of rights.
So this suggestion by the AHRC is as audacious as it is wrong on the facts – ‘during the Covid pandemic, there was a lack of clarity about rights of Australians and how to balance them with public safety measures. A Human Rights Act would have helped navigate those challenges’. No, it would not have helped. What would have helped was an AHRC President who could summon up the courage to speak up about the many inroads on our civil liberties in the way Lord Sumption did in Britain. But instead of the slightest criticism of the police thuggery in Victoria, of the idiocy and heartlessness of many of the pandemic rules, of anything or anyone, we get this after-the-fact attempt at redemption. The problem is that a bill of rights would not have helped (again, see every democratic country on Earth) and meantime it brings it with a massive empowerment of the judiciary and of the lawyerly caste.
This is hypocrisy on steroids I’m afraid. And it’s combined with the tired old prescription of a bill of rights so beloved by the lawyerly left of the Labor Party.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/hypocrisy-on-steroids/ ?
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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