Where tenure should end

An anthropology professor claims, absolutely falsely, that there are no ways of determining whether a skeleton is male or female.   Now in the article, swimmer Riley Gaines is incorrect about men having an extra rib, but she is 100% correct that anthropologists have been differentiating male from female skeletons based on pelvic structure for over a century.  It's also well known to doctors.

And my take on this matter is that if a professor says something that demonstrably false in what is supposed to be his area of specialty, that's cause for his employer to revoke tenure.  There is academic freedom, yes, and then there is "I'm going to deny the differences in bone density, head size and shape, femur and humerus length, and the sciatic notch and auricular surface differences between men and women."

And if one falls in that category, yes, one is not competent to teach anthropology at any level.  

Make it a mockery

Canadian powerlifting coach, struck by the fact that he (yes, he) could, without any therapy on his part, and without shaving his beard, compete as a woman, shatters a transgender woman's bench press record.  Wasn't even close; he did 167kG (360+ lbs), while the old record was 270.  

To add salt to the wound, the "trans" lifter had raised the ire of "cis-gender" athletes by asking why it was that women don't do bench press like men.  Um, lack of male shoulders, bone structure, musculature, and testosterone, maybe?

I don't know that I'm capable of predicting the future, but I dare say that the "trans" movement into women's sport is stalling.  Between real women getting hurt by trans athletes in sports like basketball and volleyball, real women not getting chances to win, the intrusion of "Megan's List" candidates into locker rooms, and finally the preference of women's athletics fans to actually see a female form competing, I think the pushback will be, and should be, fierce.

No easy solutions here; without testosterone, "trans" athletes are going to have trouble competing as men, and they greatly want to be accepted as women.  But that said, we have women only spaces for the reasons I've enunciated and more, and "there isn't a category that fits us" doesn't mean "you get to blow up the women's category."

A Russian decision I can get behind?

Maybe, at least.  Some are arguing that the insane Russian/Wagner Group drive to take Bakhmut, a drive which has so far cost tens of thousands of Russian lives, is in effect a bid to discredit Wagner head Prigozhin from any designs on the power structure in Moscow.  Exactly how this would help, or hurt, Prigozhin's friend Putina is not clear to me.

All in all, though, in any civilized country, destroying tens of thousands of lives in an attempt to get a person sidelined from politics ought to be a criminal offense.  This is why, really, Ukraine fights.

An interesting comment on human nutrition

Runner's World has put together an article trying to quantify the portion of one's diet that should consist of highly processed foods--not just the classic white flour, refined sugar, and the like, but also packaged snacks, energy gels, and even protein bars.

Now wait?  Protein bars?  Yes, and here's why.  When protein is extracted from other sources--whether from whey/dairy, peas, beans, or other sources--what is done is to take the protein with as little of the "other stuff" as possible.  Now those who like protein bars would say it's a good thing that they're reducing the amount of carbohydrates in their food (advocates of the Mediterranean diet might disagree), but the kicker here is what else is disposed of with the carbohydrates.

You see, bran is just a long chain carbohydrate, so it stands to reason that as you get rid of carbs, you get rid of fiber and all the cool nutrients that are in that fiber--vitamins and minerals especially, as the bran and such is where the precursors to chlorophyll are stored for when the seed sprouts into a plant.  And so even when the "end result" in terms of "macros" seems right, many of these refined protein sources are in fact fairly depleted foods.

Why is this significant?  It goes back to something I remember thinking when talking with friends who were excellent womens' distance runners; they were going to skinless chicken and turkey breast for protein, and then wondered why their red blood cells were in effect turning pink.  Poultry breast is an excellent source of protein, but does not have the iron of beef, pork, or even beans or poultry legs.

And so I wonder if a lot of our "healthy diet advice" is really leading people to adopt a fairly "depleted" diet, and is thus actually making things worse for a lot of otherwise healthy-eating people.  It's one thing to ease off the SAD, but if we simply exchange high carbohydrate refined foods for high protein refined foods, we aren't doing ourselves many favors.

On turnaround experts and specialized executives

Over the course of my career, I've interacted with a fair number of coworkers who clue in to the fact that certain executives are brought in for very specific purposes.  Some are (shudder) turnaround artists, some are there to milk the last penny of revenue and profit from aging capital, and more.  Well, I had the opportunity to talk with a man yesterday who apparently is a psychologist whose company goes a few steps beyond "Strengths Finder" and Gallup testing to help select executives for these specific purposes. 

We had a nice talk, and he was gratified to see that his take on the executives of my company was shared by myself, but one thing that struck me was that if I had this man's skills in psychology, and I were asked to select an executive to be the proverbial "Chainsaw Al Dunlap", I'd have to say "no, thank you, doing so involves too much cruelty to ordinary workers."

Now I don't know whether this man has the exact same perspective as I or not--I'm guessing he has at least some moral code given some of what he told me--but it is nonetheless sobering to think that there is a group of people out there whose specific job is to do this kind of things, and might not have that moral guide.  It reminds me of the time when a former company let a lot of people go, and people were openly wondering who was going to "go postal".  At some point, someone needs to tell elites "this is way too far."

Additional thought: it strikes me that one of the key issues we've got going here is that if an executive is significantly or mostly responsible for managing changes in business, locking in a specific set of psychological profiles for one short term goal is going to be one of the most harmful things for a business that I can thinkof.

And a fake foreign minister

Check it out here; Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov gets laughed at as he claims that Russia was invaded by Ukraine.  OK, propriety and all, but one is almost disappointed that something more blunt was not said, and (Google translate) in Russian.

Fake chocolate....

.....and apparently endorsed by a fake woman.   I would boycott Hershey for this, but quite frankly, I've been boycotting Hershey for many years for the crime of making inferior products.  Somehow this all seems to fit together.

On another note, this beatdown of a teacher's aide suggests that a lot of schools could do little better than to have a convocation discussing a return to the student discipline policies of the past--and to exclude "students" with multiple cases of assault and battery, as the perpetrator here had.  In related news, a majority of Ontario teachers report being assaulted due to their "soft on disruptive kids" policies there.