Police Shooting Brooklyn
(AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)

Two psychologists studied 917 fatal police shootings that occurred in 2015 to try to determine if the race of the officer or the civilian who was shot influenced the shooting. Their analysis found no racial disparities among those shot and killed by police. They then published their findings in a respected, peer-reviewed journal.

But when their work was highlighted and cited (in congressional testimony and in various articles), the fact that the study was done at all became “problematic.” Apparently only studies that produce results that conform to the current conventional wisdom that all cops are racist and that they shoot black people in disproportionate numbers are allowed to be published and cited going forward.

You can imagine the effect the experience of those involved in this debacle will have on the quality of research produced by academia in the future.

My June 3 Journal op-ed quoted the [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] article’s conclusion verbatim. It set off a firestorm at Michigan State. The university’s Graduate Employees Union pressured the MSU press office to apologize for the “harm it caused” by mentioning my article in a newsletter. The union targeted physicist Steve Hsu, who had approved funding for Mr. [Joseph] Cesario’s research. MSU sacked Mr. Hsu from his administrative position. PNAS editorialized that Messrs. Cesario and [David] Johnson had “poorly framed” their article—the one that got through the journal’s three levels of editorial and peer review.

Mr. Cesario told this page that Mr. Hsu’s dismissal could narrow the “kinds of topics people can talk about, or what kinds of conclusions people can come to.” Now he and Mr. Johnson have themselves jeopardized the possibility of politically neutral scholarship. On Monday they retracted their paper. They say they stand behind its conclusion and statistical approach but complain about its “misuse,” specifically mentioning my op-eds.

– Heather Mac Donald in I Cited Their Study, So They Disavowed It

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

124 COMMENTS

  1. “They are so brainwashed by Marxist Leninism… You can throw mountains of real legitimate information at them, you can take them by force to the Soviet Union and show them the gulag and they will still deny reality.” – Yuri Benzmenov

    • True, and there’s plenty of “useful idiots” on the Left. The commies never had adversaries that were so well armed with guns and the truth, with history to back it up.

      • Yes.
        The……. “On Monday they retracted their paper. They say they stand behind its conclusion and statistical approach but complain about its “misuse,” specifically mentioning my op-eds.”. This proves it was written with the explicit intent of “spoon feeding” BS to their “useful idiots”
        When the flawed results in their research were exposed, no defense of their work was presented. Just a cut and run, with the claim the info was “misused” (translation; not being mindlessly recited by the leftard minions).
        Dance monkeys, I command you!

      • I see a new “defunding” movement on the horizon, the defund academia and state financed university movement.If any higher education institution accepts any taxpayer supplied finance they must allow publishing studies that may conflict with the newly established politicaly correct agenda. Most every university used to include “VERITAS” in their motto, now veritas has been eliminated by the new, politicaly correct ,establishment. Embracing knowledge and study is now eliminated. The thought police will prevail.

    • And let’s not forget Trofim Denisovich Lysenko . . . . (If the name doesn’t ring a bell, search it.)

      That’s where US academic research in “soft science” fields like sociology, anthropology, psychology, etc., or just about any liberal arts field, have been heading for decades — search for “Arthur Jensen” and see what happened to him 50 years ago for daring to ask certain questions the left found too uncomfortable.

      But the current hoopla that wants to extend this madness to hard science, and requires that results must conform to a pre-approved worldview (or that certain question cannot be asked or studied at all because doing so might reveal inconvenient facts) means it is no longer science at all.

      And if academic “scientists” are no longer doing actual science, why should we fund their research at all? Let the private sector (where actual results matter) do it.

      • I keep wondering when the rest of the university system is going to turn on the SJWs and “studies” grifters. The hard sciences have historically had a firewall between their research — and more importantly, their funding — and the humanities nutjobs. But the academy is riddled with would-be Lysenkos, and they’re not going to stop until they’re forced to stop.

        • It’s coming and it’s not going to be pretty.

          So called “critical theory” departments have punched well above their weight class for a long time.

          Essentially they were first laughed at privately but eventually such departments garnered enough power through the use of weaponized language that they could take out a professor here or there who “spoke out of school”.

          At first this was generally ignored because physicists and chemists tended not to much care about the topics. But as the “critical theory” departments gained a bit more power they started to force their way into the harder sciences. At this point the used their previous successes to take out those who objected and browbeat the rest into silence.

          However at this point they’ve crossed the Rubicon. They’ve made a grievous error in publicly weaponizing the anti-bias nature of science and math into a new form of invented bias which has now morphed into “STEM is racist”. They even managed a trending hashtag for #DefundSTEM. This was not ignored because they did it under the actual banner of major research universities such as Stanford. That caused some major whiplash, even in people as Progressive as the Weinstein brothers.

          And yet they push farther. But contrary to their own beliefs they are not marching on an undefended Rome. They are marching towards a larger, better equipped set of Legions with extremely smart commanders who are now aware of the threat posed by “critical theory” departments.

          The same is true on a larger societal level but the difference there is that the Left, IMHO, is trying to force a scramble and they know it. On the academic front they’re marching into a meat grinder that they don’t see coming.

        • Ing says: July 10, 2020 at 12:39
          I keep wondering when the rest of the university system is going to turn on the SJWs and “studies” grifters.

          Most universities are far beyond this, socialists/marxists are in full control. The few conservatives that are left must carefully conceal their opinions or they will be drummed out. Thought control in today’s world.

        • Strych the only reason I doubt your assessment is I don’t believe the hard science faction has the cojones to fight back against this new hyper left attack. An example would be the recent letter by left wing authors to reject “cancel culture”. Well, cancel culture then threatened the authors, and the authors rescinded the letter and apologized. I have a feeling the hard sciences will do much the same.

    • The study itself.

      So, my commentary as I read the thing.

      This is a very poorly written study. I’m not even talking about the data yet, the writing is just bad. It is also severely opaque. Who proofed this? This is why English majors exist, to create coherently written pieces. Why didn’t you people hire one, there are enough out there.

      The data sets they are using are… incomplete. Not great. really kind of a bad idea.

      Do they state a null hypothesis? No, no they do not.

      When shooting at a suspect, officers miss more than 60% of the time. Why do we give them guns?

      From their less than ideal data set, they are only using shootings where the officer killed a person. If an officer is shooting at a suspect, they are supposed to be aiming to kill that person. Why didn’t they use all shootings?

      We are now going to use opaque predictive methodology that will not be clear to anyone who doesn’t know something about stats. AND we are going to write about it in a manner that is almost impossible to understand. AND also requires another set of data analysis for which the methodology is… interesting. This will not go wrong at all.

      Good, they finally controlled for something. (higher percentage of minority officers in minority communities, controlling for that ended up changing some racial disparities in their truly unfortunate data set)

      I have doubts about their predictive methodology. It relies on several assumptions that they contradict in earlier sections and nears the realm of “it’s magic, just trust us”. IDEK.

      Summary:

      They ask two questions. 1. Did the race of the officer have an effect on shootings (based on their incomplete data set.) and 2. Did the race of the shot person have an effect on the shootings (based on their incomplete data set and um, interesting, methodology.)

      The answers that should have been taken from the data as they present it (they do say this in their conclusion, but it isn’t what is described in the abstract at the beginning of the article, which is the thing everyone reads. Sigh.) is 1. that officers are equally likely to fatally shoot people regardless of the race of the officer and 2. That officers are most likely to shoot someone who “looks like” the demographic most likely to commit violent crime in their area.

      My analysis:

      I don’t think their data is sufficiently complete and I think their selection of which data to use is also not ideal. The way they asked their original questions and the way the phrased their results doesn’t match. The methodology for this study is pretty esoteric (and possibly not terrible valid), so is the way they reported their results. This is not a study that should have escaped from academic circles.

      Should it be withdrawn because the general population doesn’t understand what it really say and or is trying to do? Probably not. Honestly there are a lot of social science studies out there that don’t really say what a regular person might think they say, it’s just that the general public doesn’t necessarily latch onto some of them. I suspect that the legal field has similar problems where the legal meaning of something and the general meaning of that same phrase don’t mean the same thing or don’t mean what they appear to mean on the surface.

      Should it be withdrawn because it isn’t very good? Possibly. It’s very poorly written and their methodology seems less than ideal.

      I don’t think it’s a great study.

      Conditional probability is expressed mathematically like this:

      P(A | B)

      Which reads: “The probability of A given B.” In other words, in what fraction of the cases where B occurs does A also occur?

      If A means “it rained” and B means “it’s July”, then P(A | B) is the probability of a rainy day in July, or in other words the fraction of days in July that it rains.

      On the other hand, P(B | A) is “the probability of B given A.” For the definitions of A and B from the previous example, that means probability that it’s July if it rained today – the fraction of all rainy days that occur in July.

      Conditional probabilities are related to unconditional ones in an obvious way:

      P(AB) = P(A | B) P(B)

      This says that the probability of A AND B is the (conditional) probability of A given B multiplied by the probability of B.

      But we can also write P(AB) in terms of the second conditional probability, P(B | A):

      P(AB) = P(B | A) P(A)

      Since both ways of calculating P(AB) must agree:

      P(A | B) P(B) = P(B | A) P(A)

      If we know any three of the probabilities in this equation, we can compute the fourth. In particular:

      P(A | B) = P(B | A) P(A) / P(B)

      which is Bayes Theorem.

      In the retracted study, A meant “fatally shot by a police officer”, and B meant either “civilian is minority and officer is minority” or “civilian is minority and officer is non-minority”.

      They claimed to be comparing P(A | B) where the officer is minority with P(A | B) where the officer is not minority.

      But the data they actually had was P(B | A) , which is the probability that a minority shot by the police was shot by a minority/non-minority officer.

      Bayes Theorem would allow them to compute what they wanted from what they had, but only if they also know the other two quantities on the right-hand side: P(A) and P(B). Which they don’t.

      P(A) is the fraction of minority encounters with police (of any race) that result in the minority being fatally shot.

      P(B) is the fraction of minority encounters with police of the race in question (regardless of whether the minority is fatally shot).

      Since P(A) is the same for officers of both races, it’s not strictly necessary to do a relative comparison (it would cancel out if you took the ratio of P(A | B) for minority cops and non-minority cops).

      But if you don’t know P(B) for both categories of police officers, you’re just out of luck.

      In effect it means you have to control for how often minorities encounter officers of the two race categories. The data does not exist so all you could do is make a very uncertain guess.

      • Wow, great points and a lot of thought went into it – I really like your analysis…

        I do have one small point to make. While the bulk of your analysis was factual/logical there is this one point you made that is based on opinion (and I don’t remember this point being made in the study?)

        “When shooting at a suspect, officers miss more than 60% of the time. Why do we give them guns?”

        The first sentence is spot on – factual data

        The second sentence is opinion, and it kind of detracts (for me) from the rest of your statement. I am not trying to be a dick, and definitely not trolling here.. I just think your response is better without that opinion (whether right or wrong, I just don’t feel it has a place in your statement)

      • I hate to pee on your biblical proportional essay but everyday common sense says the vast majority of police officers involved in shootings are generally forced to return fire. The red tape involved for a police officer shooting anyone is extensive and race had better not be a factor. To cook the books and make race an issue is to play the race card for profit in one form or another.
        So there you have it and it leaves mucho space for others to chime in.

      • Do you have a Doctorate in scientific statistics?
        Also, have you had any articles that have been published in international recognized scientific journals that are peer reviewed?

        Additionally, if the above is positive, will you seek to obtain a grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct a non biased meta based research in the area of this critically important area?

        If you will do so I stand ready to make a contribution towards the research.

        • What in the HELL would you know about ‘Scientific Statistics’ or whatever that is?

          Go piss up a rope. Bet you’re good at it.

          • Hey guy,
            Just want the truth to be presented.

            So,
            If you do want the truth ( whatever it may be) related to race and police fatal shootings, then back off the heavy sarcasm since it does little to help.

        • Where did all of these “pinheads” come from? They don’t appear to regular readers/contributers to this or any other “gun” blog. As they are quick to say…”Stay in your own lane”.

      • *extended clap*

        Ignore the shit talkers. If you managed to boil down an entire degree in stats (or anything else) to three paragraphs most of them would still TL;DR it and/or talk shit.

  2. Bears repeating; Appeasers are the people who feed the crocodile hoping he eats them last! There’s no end to it, people. Quit assuming there will be!!!

    • The Party of Science shows disdain for actual science. They only see data as a tool to gain power, which is why they got caught manipulating temperature data.

      • They pretty much manipulate all data. Polls, crime statistics, economics, sports, history, elections, courts… there really isn’t anything the left doesn’t try to manipulate.

        • The UK found that decades a go. No report of crime equals no crime. So people are dissuaded from reporting crime, and crime victims are treated with contempt when they actually try to report crime. And then senior police get six-figure bonuses for reporting year-on-year reductions in crime. Vested interests all round?

    • Sending a scholarly paper to a refereed journal for publication usually (but never always) means that several persnickety colleagues with expertise are going to take it apart looking for errors in fact, description, and methodology. This usually works although occasionally some clangers still slip through. Still, if you go to a library and look through past decades of, say, the American Journal of Sociology you’ll find mostly the kind of high quality articles we think ought to be there. But not now. These poor smucks made the mistake of thinking that real research would be immune from politicization. In this day and age we should be suspicious of any definitive statement that claims to be “science”. Usually, it isn’t backed up by science at all.

    • Always point out the fact that….

      The “Party of Science” believes that “Men get pregnant”.

  5. “I know you think you understand what you thought you probably heard me say, but I’m not quite sure that you understand that what you heard is probably not what I really meant… “. That about cover it?

  6. I hope that study has been archived and is accessible despite it’s retraction.

    There is a lot of research indicating that not only are black people not disproportionately targeted and killed by police, but that actually police are holding back. The data is that based on the rate of criminality in the black demographic they should be shot by police a lot more than they are. And that information is being buried and covered up.

  7. The heresy isn’t that police are less likely to shoot a black than a white suspect. It is that blacks commit more crimes than any other racial group. Data from Chicago bears this out. 77% of the murders are committed by 32% of the population that is black. 15% of the murders occur in 28% of the population is Hispanic even though the Hispanic community has a gang problem. Black gangs are much more violent than even MS-13.

    • I used to think not until I heard about a girl prostitute that shirked her pimp and was skinned waist down and put in a bathtub full of Clorox.

      • Don’t confuse viciousness with indiscriminate. Hispanic gangs rarely inflict collateral damage. Like the Mafia if you don’t mess with them, they don’t mess with you.

  8. The party of science has deemed math racist and brought cancel culture to data.
    We’ll be curing cancer and colonizing space in no time.
    Oh, that’s right, colonizers are bad and medical research is white supremacy so maybe not.
    Well, at least the party of science will still have hexes and spells to cast.

  9. Facts have never mattered to the left. They’ve built an empire on lies. They are owned by rich white men. But they claim the right is rich white men.

    They claim to be working to protect blacks. But they support a very successful margaret sanger planned genocide against the blacks. So successful that the only race in America that has declined in population is the black race.

    All one has to do to debunk their claim of supporting womens rights is to tune into hollywood, an almost 100% complete leftist stronghold, and see the lie for real.

    I used to preach against civil war. I’ve been to war and I’ve seen the horror of a nation collapsing. No more.

    If the left keeps pushing, and I see no willingness to stop on their part, then they have earned the tragedy that is coming to them.

      • They retracted that and said it was a mistake, that it was never supposed to be published. I’m willing to take that at face value.

        Also, I take at face value the fact that that garbage WAS published. And that a significant number of people went to significant effort to create it.

        Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark, good sir Hamlet.

    • They also claim to despise Wall Street and the big corps, yet Wall Street contributed more to Obama and Hillary than the republicans they ran against. Remember how Hillary said she was going to stick it to those nasty hedge fund managers? Literally as she was saying that, her son in law was collecting a fortune in investments as….a hedge fund manager. Were people investing with him because of the brilliant returns? Nope, it was a failed fund that collapsed after Hillary lost. The investors were merely buying influence. And of course the big corps are always busy spouting off those right wing platitudes, aren’t they? Oh my bad, actually they’re always helping to push the latest left wing propaganda. Democrats excel at creating an army of suckers.

    • There is another way that could result in no massive bloodshed….another attempt at secession.

      A peaceful divorce…if it can be said there is such a thing.

      At least start discussing the details and exploring a serious possibility.

      It can’t be worse than the path we are on…probably better in the long run.

      I’m sure there will be several who will post that such a thing is not legal, not possible, and will kill anyone who tries, be called names like traitor ect.

      “The Union is forever!!” They’ll scream

      Only if it can move away from it’s current course. Otherwise, it is as you say.

      • Not that it would ever come to that, but at least the continental red states would be physically connected.

        • Now, if the red states could just keep californicators and other assorted left wing west coasties, Shitcagoans, progressive north easterners out things would be a lot better. It’s not their moving to red states that’s the problem, it’s that they bring their left wing views with them and when they reach a critical mass start running for office and working to bring the same thing to their new state they left their old state for.

      • I don’t think the left will allow it. Power and control makes them wet.

        At this point I see no option but violence. I hope I’m wrong.

        • ^^This, mostly.

          The idea that power mad morons willing to commit genocide to attain said power would just let a major portion of the very people the morons wish to rule peacefully break away is a bad joke.

          This goes one of two ways: Either they’re rounded defeated through ridicule and rejection or there’s blood, a lot of it.

          Recent events, of a widely varying nature, from yesterday and going back over 100 years suggest to me that the latter is becoming more probable than the former.

          This is for all the marbles, and much as I’ve thought our system is elastic enough to contain it without major bloodshed, that requires that neither side really wants blood. At this point I think the Left sees themselves as having no other real choice and so they’re willing to roll the dice.

      • Manse Jolly,

        I will tell you why a peaceful divorce is not possible: Progressives desperately want your stuff — especially your money. Even if Moderates and Conservatives somehow removed themselves from Progressives, Progressives would soon come with force to confiscate Moderate and Conservative assets in the name of “equity” or “justice” or some such nonsense.

        Look at it this way: why work for food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment if you can steal that stuff from someone else and get away with it? Why pay for the consequences of your foolish choices if you can foist those consequences upon someone else? That is the mindset of Progressives.

        As Margaret Thatcher famously said, “The problem with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” When that happens, do you think Progressives (Socialists) will just shrug their shoulders, admit their failure, and start working for their necessities? Nope.

        • This kind of talk is the same as the talk in 1850. The South (where the food and raw materials for production)was not happy that their markets were being manipulated so they couldn’t get ahead. Their costs on manufactured goods rose while the raw material prices went down.
          This is the same now. Middle America(mostly red states) is getting squeezed by the Blue states to lower costs and pay taxes to support the poor that moved there for an easier life.
          The parties have flip flopped, but the issues remain them same.

    • I myself do not want a civil war. A lot of people’s are going to realize just how good we’ve had it if it does happen.

  10. Free speech is dead, suppressed by the “Liberals”… where’s the Fascist “Fact Check”?

  11. “The university’s Graduate Employees Union pressured the MSU press office to apologize for the “harm it caused” by mentioning my article in a newsletter.”

    This is different than any other time before it. You will *not* in any way challenge their political POV.

    A day or so back, TTAG’s own Strych9 (Hands-down one of the smartest of the TTAG commentators) related something interesting – That Leftist Academia was so fed-up with this bullshit, that they were gonna challenge it with “Enough is enough”.

    Well, it happened. …and then it fizzled :

    “150 Top Intellectuals Sign Open Letter Decrying Cancel Culture

    Numerous public figures including Noam Chomsky and Salman Rushdie oppose totalitarian march of ” ideological conformity”.”

    https://summit.news/2020/07/07/150-top-intellectuals-sign-open-letter-decrying-cancel-culture/

    What a relief! The madness will end!

    Eh, not so much it seems :

    “Fearing Cancelation, Public Figures Withdraw Support For Open Letter Decrying Cancel Culture

    Some of the public figures who signed an open letter decrying the rise of cancel culture retracted their support, presumably fearing they too might become a victim of it.”

    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fearing-cancelation-public-figures-withdraw-support-open-letter-decrying-cancel-culture

    What do think will happen if the Leftists go to war and destroy those who signed it?

    Because they will. By any and all means possible, including likely threats against their families, possible arson, you name it.

    This is what we are up against. This is what war looks like. I fear they are willing, able and eager to do whatever it takes.

    Are we?

    • Their cancel culture is literally terrorism.

      terrorism: the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion

      Resort to terrorizing methods as a means of coercion, or the state of fear and submission produced by the prevalence of such methods.

      The act of terrorizing, or state of being terrorized; a mode of government by terror or intimidation.

      • They are following the lead of their ideological masters. Pol Pot and the Taliban. If you don’t like the past, erase it and start again. Year ZERO is coming.

    • Ace of Spades already on this …. here is a just a sample…

      ” The *only reason* you signed this letter is that cancel culture is now eating you. The rough beast you’ve birthed and nursed and fed in your bosom is now turning around and devouring you. And to this I say: Fan-f*cking-tastic. No-one deserves it more than you sorry collection of sanctimonious hacks. Margaret Atwood? Screw you. David Brooks? EABOD. Noam Chomsky? Up yours. David Frum? Eat poo. Todd Gitlin, Steven Pinker, J.K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie, Matthew Yglesias and the rest of you who signed this craven plea to be eaten last? You can all just eff right off.”

      http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=389079

    • While I thank you for the compliment I doubt it’s veracity.

      I should note that my previous comments may have been imprecise. When I say “Academics” I mean that as a sort of negative-slur which I probably didn’t communicate. What I mean is “serious people who work in the academy” which is code for chemists, physicists, astronomers, mathematicians, biologists and the like. Though IMHO the term does include people of other disciplines who are actually serious about intellectual rigor.

      Calling “critical theory” departments and their employees “academics” is, IMO, both a slur towards people of intelligence and an intentional corruption of the language (and we all know how I feel about corruption of language).

      I would point out that none of the people routinely mentioned as signatories to that letter were, under my definition, academics. They’re hacks. Chomsky might have been an academic 30 years ago but he fell off that wagon and “chased the dragon” of confirming his own bias at any cost.

      The real war will be the hard science departments against not the softer sciences (which, honestly are often imprecise but not corrupt) but rather against the “critical theory” departments which wear the cloak of perverted science terminology to insidiously poison the entire well of serious inquiry. They must be stopped and by stopped I mean “completely and utterly destroyed without mercy”.

      This letter, IMHO, represents nothing other than what doesky2 quotes. That quote is both apt and deft. The signatories were never true academics putting truth first. They chased the dragon and now like any opium addict of old they’re going to get the full fury of that beast’s teeth and claws.

      • A fair criticism, and I hope you are right.

        To those ends, “If you strike a King, you had better kill him”, applies.

        The attack must be total, and victory unequivocal. If it fails, we will have some real problems on our hands…

      • “When I say “Academics” I mean that as a sort of negative-slur”

        I like the way you talk. Hmmm

  12. Cancel culture? Cancel higher learning centers. I tool a Intro to Law class at a local college for shits and giggles. It was the best time of my life to be able to run circles around the professor with facts, dates, times, people and places and totally undermine his standing as an expert. By the end of the class, about half the kids in the room would look to me to give them the real lay of the land.

    Spend some time in a college class keeping the professors honest. Best money I have every spent. Better than therapy!

    • I had a technology college lecturer who kept making many mistakes with technology that defied even the proscribed reference material.

      This back in the late 1990s when PCs had IDE to connect drives to the PC. Two devices per channel or connection. He swore blind to get the fastest communication from an optical drive to a hard disk drive was to have them on the same channel. The manual specifically stated IDE could only handle ONE device at a time. So to copy faster from CD to HDD, put the devices on separate channels. He didn’t like it when I stated this and quoted the page of the manual. Probably why this person only gave me a pass instead of the distinction average I had.

      • Down here, the price to audit can be the cost of the class that counts.

        Granted, with the huge classes at the lower levels it’s easy to just blend in, but still…

        • I have never encountered a higher-education institution that wouldn’t allow you to just walk in and enjoy the class. You can even interact with the class.

          In the institutions mind you are not paying for the class, you’re paying for the credits backed by their accreditation. If you aren’t asking for credits and are not disruptive the professors don’t care and neither does the institution. If you really want to follow along you might need the books but if you don’t want a grade assigned one need not pay shit for the class.

          I do this all the time when I’m bored. Take an astronomy class during a period I have off in the afternoon just for funzies. I tell the prof right up front what I’m doing, ask for the book list, and then take the class as if I’m in it but without expecting a grade. If they like teaching the subject they love someone just showing interest.

  13. As a retired academic I can say that most any research that even approaches a social narrative is judged solely on its political content and political content starts with race. Unless the researchers are immersed in and defend the current political culture they will never survive in this toxic environment. The more extreme the idea or result of the study the better so the cravings of the academic soviets can be met. Nothing is more important in the university today than the alignment of political thinking. Diversity of thought, once the mainstay of higher education, is a cover story to maintain government funding.

    If you are a parent you need to know your children are at risk in this environment. Please don’t let a school alone be the only source of their education. You must fully participate in their learning.

    For what it is worth, I did not retire on my own free will. I opposed political correctness.

    • There is so much wrong with education now. My daughter graduated before the “Common Core” crap was adopted here locally. The American history book she had in high school spent more pages on Marylin Monroe than on Lincoln. FDR got a load of good press, and his massive failures were ignored entirely. Needless to say, I spent a great deal of time and effort correcting and supplementing what she got in school, and this is one of the better schools in one of the better counties in my state.

      The local university is better than most, but some of the crap that passes as science is just more leftist dogma, the two environmental science courses she had to take were the absolute worst kind of save the earth nonsense you can imagine and included only leftist dogma dressed up as science.

      • FDR? The guy that interned Japanese-Americans against their will without due process and left Blacks out of New Deal programs because of pressure from the racist Dixie Democrats, and gave us the perpetual IOU ponzi scheme known as Social Security?

    • American education is a swamp.
      Glad my kids got through it w/o going Commie but it took a lot of counter programming and guidance on my part.

      Now I’m working more years to be able to help fund keep the (as of yet) un-born grandkids out of the public school system.

    • “As a retired academic I can say that most any research that even approaches a social narrative is judged solely on its political content and political content starts with race.”

      And this, IMHO, is where the Left recently fucked up hard. They injected a social narrative into the laboratory setting. That’s going to provoke quite a reaction.

      And then they doubled down with “STEM is racist”, a ludicrous and incendiary accusation that has put a bunch of people who previously ignored this on high alert then they followed that with a tripling down with #DefundSTEM, which went wide.

      Now, which department do you think gets bigger government grants? The LGBTQ Studies Department, Women’s Studies, Sociology or Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Engineering?

      Then consider which departments pull in the larger grants plus private money through partnerships with advanced companies looking to leverage their money on advances that make profits? Does Thermo Fisher, Boeing, Lockheed, Abbott, Roche or BD throw a shitload of money at the university for their LGBTQ Studies partnerships? LOL.

      Where are the jobs programs to transition directly from research on a company’s project to working for the company upon graduation in the LGBTQ Studies Department? Or… do these kids end up at the university’s “Career Center”?

      The hard Left just bit the hand that feeds them and the universities are not going to let a “critical theory” department kill a deal for $1,000,000,000 in lab investments over ten years because some feelz got hurt in a department that doesn’t bring in fuck-all for the organization and, honestly, has always been seen as a bit both a bit strange. Now those departments are no longer just an odd curiosity, they’re dangerous to the real cash flow of the institution. That’s not acceptable.

      These departments have been tolerated thus far but they won’t be much longer. They’ll either be put back in their little box or they’ll be eliminated. They’re net losses for most institutions and virtue signalling ain’t worth the losses the universities will incur if they keep indulging the nutbars.

      • “These departments have been tolerated thus far but they won’t be much longer. They’ll either be put back in their little box or they’ll be eliminated.”

        Nice idea, but how are they gonna break the headlock? Those individuals (and their families) will feel the full impact of their Antifa brownshirts. What will have to happen is a lot of them (Antifa) will need their skulls cracked. (Literally, and I know what that means).

        This is why I think you’re a bit naive on this. They are playing for keeps and we will have to respond in kind.

        I just don’t think those that speak out can handle having their homes literally being burned down while they sleep, because they will go that far…

        • Money talks, bullshit walks. SJWs have punched well above their weight class but now they threaten the cash cow and that’s not going to be tolerated.

          You can talk trash to an old school gangster and he doesn’t care because you’re nothing. Threaten the vig and you’re dead.

          I’m sorry, SJWs do not hold the kind of sway that the right-leaning media suggests they do. Outside the Ivy League, Cal-System and Chicago, that is to say “for the huge majority of schools” these departments are trash. If they threaten a big state school’s grant programs or partnerships then the people making the threats will get fucked, hard. The University’s vig on grants is 50-60% and schools that don’t produce don’t get anywhere near the money. Hardcore “rockstar” scientists get huge leeway and they essentially run departments, the departments with money because the “rockstars” are “rockstars” due to the money they bring in.

          Not a single fucking Critical Theory Department has a true “rockstar” with postdocs lined up around the block and tens of millions in grants per year for the University to take half of. Not a fucking one.

          A “rockstar” SJW causes trouble and makes money for themselves off book deals and speaking engagements which the university allows but doesn’t see a dime of. This is why Harvard told Cornel West to lay off the rap music recordings and get his ass back in the classroom. When he thought he was hot shit and told Harvard “No” they fired his him almost immediately.

          Look at all the SJW accolades that guy has and he got canned by Harvard when he fucked with the money. He figured out that he needed to play ball at Princeton, quite obviously because it was made clear to him that Princeton would take him with some conditions, like that he do his fucking job.

  14. This is the reality of Orwellian “Newspeak”, not exactly as Orwell depicted it, but the net effect is the same. Use only “approved” words and phrases. Speak only “approved” ideas, “facts” and opinions. Never dare to disagree with or question what is “approved”. “We choose truth over facts!” – Joe Biden, Iowa State Fair August 2019*.

    Let Joe Biden get elected POTUS and the Democrats {read: Communists} take control of Congress in Nov. 2020, and start learning to choose “Truth” {as decided by the Far-Left} over “Facts” {as determined by scientific inquiry/methods and rational analysis}.

    *https://www.breitbart.com/2020-election/2019/08/09/another-gaffe-joe-biden-says-we-choose-truth-over-facts/

    • “Use only “approved” words and phrases.”

      That’s ‘political correctness in action…

  15. Those of us opposed to these lunatics need to understand that we will not win the battle against the forces of irrationality and evil using ideas. Philosophical debate with these monsters is dead. We are long past that. So-called “conservatives” should have been fighting those skirmishes in the 90s. Right now we need to use the law and the legislature to either cut off funding to these festering pits of evil, or arrest the ringleaders for treason and sedition.

    That is where we are. We need leaders with the balls to stand up to these freaks. But “conservatives” are too busy stuffing their pockets, and “libertarians” to busy polluting the internet with their inane manifestos. Meanwhile, the common Joe is too busy trying to survive, or is entranced by the crap on streaming services.

    It doesn’t look good. The Loony Left will keep pushing it: speech codes, confiscation of assets, re-education camps, backhoes digging trenches. We are getting closer and closer to the brink daily, even hourly.

    • We can’t win with ideas *alone*, but we do need ideas. Great big, shiny, attractive, well-marketed ones.

      We’re in the crappy situation of today not only because normal people failed to smother the changeling in its cradle back in the ’90s, but also because people from all the way from the center to the right STILL refuse to believe that good ideas need good packaging, an army of well-placed, believable evangelists, simple emotional resonance, and a propaganda-like level of coordination if they’re going to saturate the public consciousness.

      That’s how the lunatic left got us here; not with good ideas, but by dominating the market for ideas. Imagine the power that a GOOD idea, based on truth and right, could have if we pursued it with the same organized passion that the Left has put behind their candy-coated poison.

      Yes, as you say, we need to fight back with laws, elections, money, all of it.

      And if we’re able to disrupt the deranged status quo — and when (not if) Clown World devolves into unlivable chaos, we’ll need a ready-made alternative. And if the majority of America doesn’t know what that is, if all they have is what the insane Left has told them about the rest of us, then we still lose.

  16. My opinion? Yeah, I have my own opinion, that doesn’t conform to left or right.

    The Navy taught us, in boot camp, that we are all prejudiced. All of us. Yes, all those lefties who claim that they are not prejudiced – they really are. And, all the righties who claim to be prejudice free – really aren’t.

    Given that we all have prejudices, the issue becomes a question of “How do you deal with your prejudices?”

    I don’t think that all cops deal well with their prejudices. Which, in and of itself is something of a problem. However, the problem is complicated by that “limited immunity” nonsense, as well as the police unions.

    Yeah, maybe only one cop in a thousand is a “bad cop”. But, when a bad cop is identified, the system works to PROTECT HIM, instead of holding him accountable.

    If the police forces in the US suddenly saw the light, and worked hard to eliminate every bad cop and questionable cop, things could only get better. We need to revisit that limited immunity nonsense, and put real limits on that immunity. Then – those unions that actively protect bad cops need to be addressed. Busting them up could only be a good thing. We don’t need any organization that protects criminals in this country.

    I can throw numbers out there – maybe one cop in every 200 is “bad”. Maybe it’s only one cop in every 1500. I would be guessing, just as any of you can guess. The whole thing is, we have to get rid of that bad cop, so the remaining hundreds can do their job properly.

    Anyone who denies that limited immunity and union protection are problems, probably has their head buried in the sand. There really is a problem, and it’s not all the black people’s problem.

    All of that, and prison for profit. Don’t get me started on that subject . . .

    • Yes, police violence is a problem. Every year there is almost a dozen minority people unreservedly killed by the police. Each of them a tragedy.
      But in the country where thousands of minorities get killed by other minorities, is it the problem that deserves all of our attention? Mass protests? Riots? Looting? How’s that going to help?

      Like a mosquito bite on a leg with an open fracture, we have more pressing things to care about.

      • You got that number correct… about a dozen in a country of 350 million+.

        It’s not about tearing down confederate statues, it’s about tearing down America.

  17. Want to see university cancel culture in action? Google “Harvard proctologist fired”. The top proctologist in the nation was sacked over telling an HIV/AIDS+ self-described “activist queer” and leader of Act Out to cease having unprotected anal sex. The patient was repeatedly contracting near fatal infections when the world-reknowned expert advised him his activities would eventually lead to his, the patient’s, death, the patient filed a complaint and organized small but vocal protests outside the doctor’s university office building (which were heralded by the local Fake News outlets.

    Haar-Haar-Haar-Haar-Vaard held a hearing and voted to expel the world’s top expert in the field whom had chaired his department for over a decade. Needless to say the doctor’s other patients were not happy. In addition to losing priviliges at Harvard hospital the Rainbow activist targeted other hospitals the doctor performed surgeries at, they rescinded his privileges too, “no practicing medicine” for you he was told.

    • Someone with a deadly disease is allowed to run around intentionally spreading it while they’re talking about a nationwide law to make everyone wear a face mask. Dems are an absolute clown party.

      • We should be advocating and legislating “lockdowns” for all HIV/AIDS+ individuals I mean “if it saves just one person’s life” it’s worth it right, isn’t that what Democrats keep telling us.

    • You have a civil right to kill someone with your dick. You just can’t use a gun or a knife to do it.
      The sexually liberated invented the term “Condom Police”. And they hate the police.

      • Thanks to the sunken-eyed, hollow-cheeked, sore-ridden, puss-spewing HIV/AIDS+ California State Senator Scott “Chokes On” Weiner of San Fransissyco it’s no longer a crime to KNOWINGLY infect someone with HIV/AIDS, the Democrats backed his bill to a person and the governor signed it into law. Weiner has now introduced a bill to remove homosexuals from the sex offender registry, it too will pass with overwhelming Democrat support.

        • The sexually liberated have always been trying to sexualize children for adults. And encourage sex between 8 and 18 years olds. The NAMBLA group has regularly marched openly with their own banner for decades now in Pride parades. But it was the Log Cabin Republicans who, I watched, got rocks and glass bottle throw at them. At the same pride parades.

      • She said “Stop your killing me”, but she lied. So I tried again in the morning.
        😎

  18. We’ve had selective amnesia, selective outrage, and now we have selective science which gives us preferred facts.

    We used to laugh at communist dictatorships and their lies about productivity, happiness, and advancements.

    Welcome to that world.

  19. The Libertarians, Liberals, the Left, the sexually liberated, the atheists, they are all the same as these academics. They will reject any study that says a father is necessary to raise children. To provide discipline and teach them how to navigate the dangers of society. And teach his children about firearms and how to use them safely. They are happy to replace the father with a government welfare check. And replace his guns with the guns of a big city police department.

    And they replaced private religious welfare with socialist government welfare. Because they hate the private church, more than they hate big government.

    They want “their” form of government, socialist progressive, in the bedrooms of people. Single mothers “caught” with a man in their “gun free zone” government housing project.
    They say “we are prosecuting her for welfare fraud”. No, you put her in jail because she was having “vanilla sex”. And at the same time receiving welfare $$$ from the government.

    Criminals are being created and nurtured in this fatherless environment. And try and find a Libertarian publication that supports Heather McDonald. You will have a difficult time finding one. And just forget about the Liberals and the Leftist rags. They rejected the traditional family structure a very long time ago.

    • I have sympathy for much of what you say but it ends at blanket accusations. Saying that “The Libertarians, Liberals, the Left, the sexually liberated, the atheists, they are ALL the same as these academics” is an absurd and unsupported charge. It seems that you have become so angry that you have become that which you hate. None of those ideologies necessarily reject notion of the nuclear family or reject logic or the scientific method when it is used to argue points they find inconvenient with. Many of them obviously do but I have seen no credible study that indicates that more of them are anti-scientific method than those who are called or call themselves conservatives. Your chosen champion Donald Trump does it all of the time. Not being an idiot you know that is true but appear to choose to ignore it because it is hella inconvenient for you. It sure looks like you embrace identity politics when your emotions demand it. I also just did a search on Reason.com and noted that they published 5 Heather MacDonald articles, had her as a guest blogger, and in January a senior editor wrote an article in support of her and said among other things “Heather Mac Donald is an academic, not a professional provocateur.” The organization she works for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research seems fairly libertarian to me.

    • I know why you keep throwing atheists in there, but I can name you at least 4 right now that are the polar opposite of the scum you’re talking about. Blanket statements chief…

      • Atheist keep saying there is a “separation” between church and state. Show me that in the constitution??
        Most atheists don’t support the 1st amendment to the Bill Of Rights.

  20. If you prove them wrong, you’re racist. Guess I’ve been a racist for 50+ years now. Oh well.

  21. Sit back and enjoy the show. The “Frankenstein Monster” is slowly eating itself. It’s running out of Hosts on the other side. Now it’s turning on it’s Makers. Who are now beginning to see the “Monster” they created. No longer follows the old Ideology. The only question now is who will be left. The Old Guard Liberals or the New Socialist Liberals. The Old Guard is beginning to fear the New Socialist more than they fear the Conservatives. Keep popping the corn. The best it yet to come.

    • “The Old Guard is beginning to fear the New Socialist more than they fear the Conservatives.”

      But you know what r-selected people do when faced with an existential threat, right? Don’t expect them to join conservatives in manning the walls. They’ll save themselves (and tell themselves they’re saving all of us) by turning traitor and opening the gates.

  22. There’s a lesson in here somewhere pertaining to climate ‘science’.

      • You’re kidding yourself if you think academics, knowing they won’t be scrutinized closely because doing so is not politically expedient, aren’t falsifying data to produce “groundbreaking” studies which get their names in journals and further their academic careers. This is not limited to meteorology, though the extent to which it occurs there is so extreme it has spawned an entire subfield in which it can literally ruin your career to publish an inconclusive paper (let alone one with an accepted null hypothesis.) That is not science. That is religion. It’s happening in many hard sciences (genetics, for example) and in every last “soft” science, but none moreso than in climate science, which exists for that sole purpose.

        This is to say nothing of whether climate change is occurring, or of whether it is anthropogenic. You should draw your own conclusions on that. But doing so by taking the word of today’s academic institutions, where publishing that “we didn’t find any warming effects when we looked in this place in this way” is as bad as filling your paper with racial slurs (in terms of its impact on your career prospects,) is just blind dogma.

        • Corrupt achedemics, corrupt politicians, corrupt media and a bunch of brain dead thumb suckers who’ve never heard of the Milankovitch cycles and have no idea that 11,700 years ago it warmed enough for sea level to rise 390 feet.

          These are the people who keep telling me I need to worry about ‘climate change’.

      • Nothing at all.
        Except the fact that those who support the panic narrative get laviah grants and prizes -and those who dare to find any data opposing the official hair on fire craziness get canceled.

      • Writing for Forbes Monday, Mr. Shellenberger — a Time magazine Hero of the Environment and winner of the 2008 Green Book Award — said that on behalf of environmentalists everywhere, “I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years.”

        “Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem,” Shellenberger declares.

        As an Expert Reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public,” he states.

        Check out his book:
        Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

        This guy is the real deal. Read his bio.

  23. Looked for the original study and what I could find of the retraction. Could not find anything beyond snippets in front of paywalls.

    Oh well, nothing to examine, nothgin to review. Guess that one’s a wash.

    • So you didn’t feel compelled to donate to the Wall Street Urinal, either. Soon, the tale will disappear….. just like it never happened !!

      • There is far too much free in the world of news sources to ever be willing to pay for it.

        Also, sometimes my use of a VPN, anti-JAVA Script and anti-tracking browser plug-ins allows me to get inside paywalls. Not this time tho.

    • “So you didn’t feel compelled to donate to the Wall Street Urinal, either. Soon, the tale will disappear….. just like it never happened !!”

      For fuck’s sake you bitch worse than a Leftist. Here it is :

      “By Heather Mac Donald
      July 8, 2020 7:17 pm ET

      The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a peer-reviewed journal that claims to publish “only the highest quality scientific research.” Now, the authors of a 2019 PNAS article are disowning their research simply because I cited it.

      Psychologists Joseph Cesario of Michigan State and David Johnson of the University of Maryland analyzed 917 fatal police shootings of civilians from 2015 to test whether the race of the officer or the civilian predicted fatal police shootings. Neither did. Once “race specific rates of violent crime” are taken into account, the authors found, there are no disparities among those fatally shot by the police. These findings accord with decades of research showing that civilian behavior is the greatest influence on police behavior.

      In September 2019, I cited the article’s finding in congressional testimony. I also referred to it in a City Journal article, in which I noted that two Princeton political scientists, Dean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo, had challenged the study design. Messrs. Cesario and Johnson stood by their findings. Even under the study design proposed by Messrs. Knox and Mummolo, they wrote, there is again “no significant evidence of anti-black disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by the police.”

      My June 3 Journal op-ed quoted the PNAS article’s conclusion verbatim. It set off a firestorm at Michigan State. The university’s Graduate Employees Union pressured the MSU press office to apologize for the “harm it caused” by mentioning my article in a newsletter. The union targeted physicist Steve Hsu, who had approved funding for Mr. Cesario’s research. MSU sacked Mr. Hsu from his administrative position. PNAS editorialized that Messrs. Cesario and Johnson had “poorly framed” their article—the one that got through the journal’s three levels of editorial and peer review.

      Mr. Cesario told this page that Mr. Hsu’s dismissal could narrow the “kinds of topics people can talk about, or what kinds of conclusions people can come to.” Now he and Mr. Johnson have themselves jeopardized the possibility of politically neutral scholarship. On Monday they retracted their paper. They say they stand behind its conclusion and statistical approach but complain about its “misuse,” specifically mentioning my op-eds.

      The authors don’t say how I misused their work. Instead, they attribute to me a position I have never taken: that the “probability of being shot by police did not differ between Black and White Americans.” To the contrary, I have, like them, stressed that racial disparities in policing reflect differences in violent crime rates. The only thing wrong with their article, and my citation of it, is that its conclusion is unacceptable in our current political climate.

      This retraction bodes ill for the development of knowledge. If scientists must disavow their findings because they challenge reigning orthodoxies, then those orthodoxies will prevail even when they are wrong. Political consensus will drive scholarship, and not the reverse. The consequences for the policing debate are particularly dire. Researchers will suppress any results that contravene the narrative about endemic police racism. That narrative is now producing a shocking rise in shootings in American cities. The victims, including toddlers, are almost exclusively black.”

  24. Trump’s current roundtable on Venezuela should be mandatory viewing. If you have the time, please watch it.

  25. “Academics Retract Study That Found No Racial Disparities Among People Shot By Police”

    That’s because it didn’t fit the narrative…

  26. Seems like academic and intellectual cowardice, if not things much worse, run rampant these days.

  27. Two psychologists studied 917 fatal police shootings that occurred in 2015 to try to determine if the race of the officer or the civilian who was shot influenced the shooting. Their analysis found no racial disparities among those shot and killed by police. They then published their findings in a respected, peer-reviewed journal.

    Readers comment: And the name of this journal, and date of the article is?

    • Except that the podcast linked in that article, that Hsu appeared on, was definitely not hosted by a white nationalist. ROTFL

  29. Test post.

    I’ve tried to post a link to the original study several times and the posts don’t show up.

  30. More and more Chinese students choose to study CS major overseas. What are the reasons? Today, the editor of our CS homework writing https://liuxuesavior.com/cs-dai-xie/ is here to give students a brief chat. In response to this phenomenon, the American Association for International Education has done a systematic survey and research, and finally formed the “2016 Open Door Report”. The data shows that the number of CS majors in China in the United States in 2015-2016 has increased by 25% year-on-year The data is amazing. The most important reason why the CS major is so popular is that it has a very high employment rate and excellent development prospects. Because with the continuous development of Internet technology, the talent gap in CS will increase, so it will be very simple to find a job after graduating from CS major. Secondly, according to the estimates on the official website of the US Department of Labor, the demand for CS majors will continue to grow steadily in the future, and the salaries are also very good. It is not difficult to understand why everyone has to learn CS majors.

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