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GOP leaders justify the voter suppression measures by arguing that they are needed to crack down on fraud and to restore the public's faith that US elections are fair. But multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no widespread electoral fraud in 2020.

The Georgia bill is only one example of GOP efforts in multiple states -- including many crucial electoral battlegrounds -- to hold back a diverse demographic tide in cities that favor Democrats, which critics see as an attempt to cement minority rule in the United States.

Georgia Republicans also lost two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the 50-50 chamber on the basis of huge Black turnout in runoff elections in January.close dialogSign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Please enter above Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.You're on the list for CNN'sCNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1245919 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1245919 *//* custom css from creative 47804 */@-ms-keyframes bx-anim-1245919-spin { from {

"This should be marked as Exhibit A in making the case that discriminatory voter suppression is alive and well, and makes clear why we need federal voting rights legislation to stop these laws in their tracks," Hewitt said. "We stand ready to take action and protect the fundamental right to vote through the courts."

as a remnant of the Jim Crow era that institutionalized racism and hinted that he could ultimately back abolishing the Senate filibuster to get the Democrats' House-passed bill through the chamber. But Biden declined to reveal his strategy for getting the voting rights bill into law.

Georgia's action threw a political grenade into the debate over a Washington campaign by many Democrats to abolish Senate supermajority rules that Republicans could use to block their sweeping election bill, known as the For the People Act.

In a statement to CNN, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who defied Trump's pleas in a telephone call to find votes to overturn Biden's victory, said he would still stand up for voter freedoms but did not criticize the law."In implementing this law, I will ensure that no eligible Georgia voter is hindered in exercising their right to vote, and I will continue to further secure our elections so that every Georgian can have confidence in the results of our elections," Raffensperger said

"As the FBI continue to round up seditionists who spilled blood to defend a lie about our elections, Republican state leaders willfully undermine democracy by giving themselves authority to overturn results they do not like," Abrams said in a statement. "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights as we continue to fight against these blatantly unconstitutional efforts that are nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."

Black voters hampered by the restrictions of voting in urban areas have often found themselves lining up for hours to vote in inclement weather. The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.

Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.

Republican state lawmakers rushed through a broad law Thursday making it harder to vote that disproportionately targets Democratic and Black voters

The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy

The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.

"What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden

Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.

Georgia Republicans also lost two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the 50-50 chamber on the basis of huge Black turnout in runoff elections in January.close dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.//assets.bounceexchang

After leaving office, Trump demanded that Republican state legislatures pass laws to ban mail-in voting and to prevent courts from weighing in on electoral disputes.

the former President has made the acceptance of his false conspiracy theories about voter fraud in 2020 a litmus test for Republican candidates

Iowa has already passed a measure to limit absentee balloting and voting hours. Texas is taking steps to cut voting hours and absentee balloting in big Democratic cities like Houston. New voting laws are being pushed by Republicans in another swing state Trump lost, Arizona.

GOP leaders justify the voter suppression measures by arguing that they are needed to crack down on fraud and to restore the public's faith that US elections are fair. But multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no widespread electoral fraud in 2020.

voter mistrust was largely fueled by Trump's blatantly false claims

Georgia's action threw a political grenade into the debate over a Washington campaign by many Democrats to abolish Senate supermajority rules that Republicans could use to block their sweeping election bill, known as the For the People Act.

The drama in the Georgia Legislature unfolded as Biden condemned restrictive state legislation as a remnant of the Jim Crow era that institutionalized racism and hinted that he could ultimately back abolishing the Senate filibuster to get the Democrats' House-passed bill through the chamber.

The law allows any Georgian to make unlimited challenges to voter registrations, and, incredibly, makes it a misdemeanor crime for anyone to offer food and water to voters stuck in long lines to cast ballots.

The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.

The Georgia law was quickly signed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who incurred the wrath of Trump last year for refusing to play along with his attempt to override Biden's victory by 12,000 votes in the state, which was confirmed by several audits.

"In implementing this law, I will ensure that no eligible Georgia voter is hindered in exercising their right to vote, and I will continue to further secure our elections so that every Georgian can have confidence in the results of our elections," Raffensperger said.

Kemp is up for reelection in 2022 and could face Democrat Stacey Abrams, a former state lawmaker and prominent voting rights advocate

"As the FBI continue to round up seditionists who spilled blood to defend a lie about our elections, Republican state leaders willfully undermine democracy by giving themselves authority to overturn results they do not like," Abrams said in a statement. "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights as we continue to fight against these blatantly unconstitutional efforts that are nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."

the measure directly targeted voters of color who took part in record numbers in the 2020 election.

The For the People Act awaiting action in the Senate would create automatic voter registration nationwide and restore portions of the Voting Rights Act that were gutted by the Supreme Court. It would also strengthen mail-in voting and permit early voting across the country, while taking steps to cut wait times at the polls.

North Korea test fired a new type of missile, known as the Pukguksong-2, into the sea early last month, and has said it will continue to launch new strategic weapons.

"The launches are clearly in violation of Security Council resolutions. It is an extremely dangerous action,"

"Not only Pukguksong-2 but newer independent strategic weapons will fly high vigorously in the sky off the ground as long as the United States and the puppet regime are going ahead with their nuclear threat to us and an exercise for invasion war against the North," North Korea's Rodong Sinmun newspaper, the mouthpiece of the ruling Workers' Party said in a commentary last week.

Comparing genomes, scientists concluded that today’s humans outside Africa carry an average of 2.5 percent Neanderthal DNA, and that people from parts of Oceania also carry about 5 percent Denisovan DNA. A study published in November found that Southeast Asians carry about 1 percent Denisovan DNA in addition to their Neanderthal genes.

as few as six couplings all those tens of thousands of years ago might have led to the current level of ancient immune alleles.

This means that our modern era, since H. floresiensis died out, is the only time in the four-million-year human history that just one type of human has been alive,

Were they romantic couplings? More likely they were aggressive acts between competing human groups, Dr. Stringer said. For a model, he pointed to modern hunter-gatherer groups that display aggressive behavior among tribes.

The value of the interbreeding shows up in the immune system, Dr. Parham’s analysis suggests. The Neanderthals and Denisovans had lived in Europe and Asia for many thousands of years before modern humans showed up and had developed ways to fight the diseases there

When modern humans mated with them, they got an injection of helpful genetic immune material, so useful that it remains in the genome today. This suggests that modern humans needed the archaic DNA to survive. The downside of archaic immune material is that it may be responsible for autoimmune diseases like diabetes, arthritis and multiple sclerosis, Dr. Parham said, stressing that these are preliminary results.

little is known about the Denisovans — the only remains so far are the pinky bone and the tooth, and there are no artifacts like tools. Dr. Reich and others suggest that they were once scattered widely across Asia, from the cold northern cave to the tropical south. The evidence is that modern populations in Oceania, including aboriginal Australians, carry Denisovan genes.

these cerebral gratifications are brief and ultimately unsatisfying

His thirst for understanding can never be satisfied: Each moment of knowing gives rise to a new moment of not-knowing.

The other characters in this smart, timely and highly entertaining novel all have their own troubles with, for lack of a more specific term, technology

This is the shadow under which we operate. What is all this convenience and quick-fix distraction doing to people, to families, to society? Is it bringing people together or driving us apart? Are we using it, or is it using us?

Donny’s company is experimenting with an algorithm that allows people to play out alternative virtual-reality scenarios from their pasts — their “multiverses”

He makes Amy his guinea pig, using intimate details about her that his indiscreet mother has shared with him. Her would-be lives spin out in front of her.

What if? These fictional scenarios are utterly convincing and fill us with as much confusion, fear and longing as they do Amy. “It’s like nostalgia, only a billion times worse,”

As the book gathers itself toward its conclusion, the crises that strike the family are all too non-virtual. Their machines cannot help them. We can play out multiple scenarios, dream multiple fantasies, write multiple stories in our heads, but in the end we have only one — complicated, imperfect, hard-to-face — reality.

“Range,” by David Epstein. It’s a powerful argument that generalists perform better than specialists.

People who specialize in one thing succeed early, but then they slide back to mediocrity as their minds rigidify.

People who transition between multiple careers when they are young end up ahead over time because they can take knowledge in one domain and apply it to another.

A tech entrepreneur who is 50 is twice as likely to start a superstar company than one who is 30, because he or she has a broader range of experience. A survey of the fastest-growing tech start-ups found that the average age of the founder was 45.

For most people, creativity is precisely the ability to pursue multiple interests at once, and then bring them together in new ways

Furthermore, living a great life is more important than producing great work. A life devoted to one thing is a stunted life, while a pluralistic life is an abundant one

A better definition of success is living within the tension of multiple commitments and trying to make them mutually enhancing

You join communities that are different from one another. You gain wisdom by entering into different kinds of consciousness. You find freedom at the borderlands between your communities.

while we’re learning to preach a gospel of openness and diversity, we’re mostly not living it. In the realm of public life, many live as monads, within the small circles of one specialty, one code, no greatness.

News of the outreach comes as lawmakers and key US allies are eagerly awaiting details about Biden's North Korea policy, which they expect will be announced publicly in the coming weeks when the administration has completed a policy review, according to multiple sources familiar with the internal discussions.

the administration has consulted with former government officials with experience in North Korea policy, including some officials from the Trump administration,

The official did not provide further details of what the outreach entailed but noted the administration has been conducting its interagency review of the United States' policy towards North Korea, "including evaluation of all available options to address the increasing threat posed by North Korea to its neighbors and the broader international community."

The Biden administration launched a behind-the-scenes push last month to reach out to North Korea through multiple channels, a senior administration official has told CNN, but thus far Pyongyang has been unresponsive.

Multiple officers have been injured with at least one transported to the hospital, multiple sources tell CNN.

Smoke grenades were used on the Senate side of the Capitol, as police work to clear the building of rioters. Windows on the west side of the Senate have been broken, and hundreds of officers are amassing on the first floor of the building.

The stunning display of insurrection was the first time the US Capitol had been overrun since the British attacked and burned the building in August of 1814, during the War of 1812, according to Samuel Holliday, director of scholarship and operations with the US Capitol Historical Society.

The shocking scene was met with less police force than many of the Black Lives Matter protests that rolled across the country in the wake of George Floyd's killing at the hands of Minneapolis police officers last year.

Flash bangs could be heard near the steps of the Capitol as smoke filled the air. In some instances officers could be seen deploying pepper spray. Tear gas was deployed, but it's not clear whether by protesters or police, and people wiped tears from their eyes while coughing.

Congressional leaders were being evacuated from the Capitol complex just before 5 p.m. ET and were set to be taken to Fort McNair

A woman is dead after being shot in the chest on the Capitol grounds, DC police confirmed to CNN. More information on the shooting was not immediately available and a police spokesperson said additional details will come later.

The official said DC National Guard was not anticipating to be used to protect federal facilities, and the Trump administration had decided earlier this week that would be the task of civilian law enforcement, the official said.

Lawmakers began returning to the Capitol after the building was secured and made it clear that they intended to resume their intended business

Federal and local law enforcement responded to reports of possible pipe bombs in multiple locations in Washington, DC, according to a federal law enforcement official. It's unclear if the devices are real or a hoax, but they're being treated as real.

The Democratic National Committee was also evacuated after a suspicious package was being investigated nearby, a Democratic source familiar with the matter told CNN.

I’d been talking with DiAngelo for a year when Floyd was killed, and with other antiracism teachers for almost as long. Demand has recently spiked throughout the field, though the clamor had already been building, particularly since the election of Donald Trump

As their teaching becomes more and more widespread, antiracism educators are shaping the language that gets spoken — and the lessons being learned — about race in America.

“I will not coddle your comfort,” she went on. She gestured crisply with her hands. “I’m going to name and admit to things white people rarely name and admit.” Scattered Black listeners called out encouragement. Then she specified the predominant demographic in the packed house: white progressives. “I know you. Oh, white progressives are my specialty. Because I am a white progressive.” She paced tightly on the stage. “And I have a racist worldview.”

“White supremacy — yes, it includes extremists or neo-Nazis, but it is also a highly descriptive sociological term for the society we live in, a society in which white people are elevated as the ideal for humanity, and everyone else is a deficient version.” And Black people, she said, are cast as the most deficient. “There is something profoundly anti-Black in this culture.”

But was I being fragile? Was I being defensive or just trying to share something more personal, intimate and complex than DiAngelo’s all-encompassing sociological perspective? She taught, throughout the afternoon, that the impulse to individualize is in itself a white trait, a way to play down the societal racism all white people have thoroughly absorbed.

At some point after our answers, DiAngelo poked fun at the myriad ways that white people “credential” themselves as not-racist. I winced. I hadn’t meant to imply that I was anywhere close to free of racism, yet was I “credentialing”?

the pattern she first termed “white fragility” in an academic article in 2011: the propensity of white people to fend off suggestions of racism, whether by absurd denials (“I don’t see color”) or by overly emotional displays of defensiveness or solidarity (DiAngelo’s book has a chapter titled “White Women’s Tears” and subtitled “But you are my sister, and I share your pain!”) or by varieties of the personal history I’d provided.

White fragility, in DiAngelo’s formulation, is far from weakness. It is “weaponized.” Its evasions are actually a liberal white arsenal, a means of protecting a frail moral ego, defending a righteous self-image and, ultimately, perpetuating racial hierarchies, because what goes unexamined will never be upended

One “unnamed logic of Whiteness,” she wrote with her frequent co-author, the education professor Ozlem Sensoy, in a 2017 paper published in The Harvard Educational Review, “is the presumed neutrality of White European Enlightenment epistemology.”

she returned to white supremacy and how she had been imbued with it since birth. “When my mother was pregnant with me, who delivered me in the hospital — who owned the hospital? And who came in that night and mopped the floor?” She paused so we could picture the complexions of those people. Systemic racism, she announced, is “embedded in our cultural definitions of what is normal, what is correct, what is professionalism, what is intelligence, what is beautiful, what is valuable.”

“I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious,” one of the discipline’s influential thinkers, Peggy McIntosh, a researcher at the Wellesley Centers for Women, has written. “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear and blank checks.”

Borrowing from feminist scholarship and critical race theory, whiteness studies challenges the very nature of knowledge, asking whether what we define as scientific research and scholarly rigor, and what we venerate as objectivity, can be ways of excluding alternate perspectives and preserving white dominance

the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s casting of white actors as Asians in a production of “The Mikado.” “That changed my life,” she said. The phrase “white fragility” went viral, and requests to speak started to soar; she expanded the article into a book and during the year preceding Covid-19 gave eight to 10 presentations a month, sometimes pro bono but mostly at up to $15,000 per event.

For almost everyone, she assumes, there is a mingling of motives, a wish for easy affirmation (“they can say they heard Robin DiAngelo speak”) and a measure of moral hunger.

Moore drew all eyes back to him and pronounced, “The cause of racial disparities is racism. If I show you data that’s about race, we need to be talking about racism. Don’t get caught up in detours.” He wasn’t referring to racism’s legacy. He meant that current systemic racism is the explanation for devastating differences in learning, that the prevailing white culture will not permit Black kids to succeed in school.

The theme of what white culture does not allow, of white society’s not only supreme but also almost-absolute power, is common to today’s antiracism teaching and runs throughout Singleton’s and DiAngelo’s programs

unning slightly beneath or openly on the surface of DiAngelo’s and Singleton’s teaching is a set of related ideas about the essence and elements of white culture

if we were white and happened to be sitting beside someone of color, we were forbidden to ask the person of color to speak first. It might be good policy, mostly, for white people to do more listening than talking, but, she said with knowing humor, it could also be a subtle way to avoid blunders, maintain a mask of sensitivity and stay comfortable. She wanted the white audience members to feel as uncomfortable as possible.

For DiAngelo, the elements include the “ideology of individualism,” which insists that meritocracy is mostly real, that hard work and talent will be justly rewarded. White culture, for her, is all about habits of oppressive thought that are taken for granted and rarely perceived, let alone questioned

The modern university, it says, “with its ‘experts’ and its privileging of particular forms of knowledge over others (e.g., written over oral, history over memory, rationalism over wisdom)” has “validated and elevated positivistic, White Eurocentric knowledge over non-White, Indigenous and non-European knowledges.”

the idea of a society rigged at its intellectual core underpins her lessons.

There is the myth of meritocracy. And valuing “written communication over other forms,” he told me, is “a hallmark of whiteness,” which leads to the denigration of Black children in school. Another “hallmark” is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.” He said, “There’s this whole group of people who are named the scientists. That’s where you get into this whole idea that if it’s not codified in scientific thought that it can’t be valid.”

“This is a good way of dismissing people. And this,” he continued, shifting forward thousands of years, “is one of the challenges in the diversity-equity-inclusion space; folks keep asking for data. How do you quantify, in a way that is scientific — numbers and that kind of thing — what people feel when they’re feeling marginalized?”

Moore directed us to a page in our training booklets: a list of white values. Along with “ ‘The King’s English’ rules,” “objective, rational, linear thinking” and “quantitative emphasis,” there was “work before play,” “plan for future” and “adherence to rigid time schedules.”

They’ve just refined their analysis, with the help of two Princeton researchers, Chelsey Clark and Roni Porat. “As the study quality goes up,” Paluck told me, “the effect size dwindles.”

Dobbin’s research shows that the numbers of women or people of color in management do not increase with most anti-bias education. “There just isn’t much evidence that you can do anything to change either explicit or implicit bias in a half-day session,” Dobbin warns. “Stereotypes are too ingrained.”

he noted that new research that he’s revising for publication suggests that anti-bias training can backfire, with adverse effects especially on Black people, perhaps, he speculated, because training, whether consciously or subconsciously, “activates stereotypes.”

When we spoke again in June, he emphasized an additional finding from his data: the likelihood of backlash “if people feel that they’re being forced to go to diversity training to conform with social norms or laws.”

Donald Green, a professor of political science at Columbia, and Betsy Levy Paluck, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, have analyzed almost 1,000 studies of programs to lessen prejudice, from racism to homophobia, in situations from workplaces to laboratory settings. “We currently do not know whether a wide range of programs and policies tend to work on average,

She replied that if a criterion “consistently and measurably leads to certain people” being excluded, then we have to “challenge” the criterion. “It’s the outcome,” she emphasized; the result indicated the racism.

Another critique has been aimed at DiAngelo, as her book sales have skyrocketed. From both sides of the political divide, she has been accused of peddling racial reductionism by branding all white people as supremacist

Chislett filed suit in October against Carranza and the department. At least five other high-level, white D.O.E. executives have filed similar suits or won settlements from the city over the past 14 months. The trainings lie at the heart of their claims.

Chislett eventually wound up demoted from the leadership of A.P. for All, and her suit argues that the trainings created a workplace filled with antiwhite distrust and discrimination

whatever the merits of Chislett’s lawsuit and the counteraccusations against her, she is also concerned about something larger. “It’s absurd,” she said about much of the training she’s been through. “The city has tens of millions invested in A.P. for All, so my team can give kids access to A.P. classes and help them prepare for A.P. exams that will help them get college degrees, and we’re all supposed to think that writing and data are white values? How do all these people not see how inconsistent this is?”

I talked with DiAngelo, Singleton, Amante-Jackson and Kendi about the possible problem. If the aim is to dismantle white supremacy, to redistribute power and influence, I asked them in various forms, do the messages of today’s antiracism training risk undermining the goal by depicting an overwhelmingly rigged society in which white people control nearly all the outcomes, by inculcating the idea that the traditional skills needed to succeed in school and in the upper levels of the workplace are somehow inherently white, by spreading the notion that teachers shouldn’t expect traditional skills as much from their Black students, by unwittingly teaching white people that Black people require allowances, warrant extraordinary empathy and can’t really shape their own destinies?

With DiAngelo, my worries led us to discuss her Harvard Educational Review paper, which cited “rationalism” as a white criterion for hiring, a white qualification that should be reconsidered

Shouldn’t we be hiring faculty, I asked her, who fully possess, prize and can impart strong reasoning skills to students, because students will need these abilities as a requirement for high-paying, high-status jobs?

I pulled us away from the metaphorical, giving the example of corporate law as a lucrative profession in which being hired depends on acute reasoning.

Moore expounded that white culture is obsessed with “mechanical time” — clock time — and punishes students for lateness. This, he said, is but one example of how whiteness undercuts Black kids. “The problems come when we say this way of being is the way to be.” In school and on into the working world, he lectured, tremendous harm is done by the pervasive rule that Black children and adults must “bend to whiteness, in substance, style and format.”

he said abruptly, “Capitalism is so bound up with racism. I avoid critiquing capitalism — I don’t need to give people reasons to dismiss me. But capitalism is dependent on inequality, on an underclass. If the model is profit over everything else, you’re not going to look at your policies to see what is most racially equitable.”

I was asking about whether her thinking is conducive to helping Black people displace white people on high rungs and achieve something much closer to equality in our badly flawed worl

it seemed that she, even as she gave workshops on the brutal hierarchies of here and now, was entertaining an alternate and even revolutionary reality. She talked about top law firms hiring for “resiliency and compassion.”

Singleton spoke along similar lines. I asked whether guiding administrators and teachers to put less value, in the classroom, on capacities like written communication and linear thinking might result in leaving Black kids less ready for college and competition in the labor market. “If you hold that white people are always going to be in charge of everything,” he said, “then that makes sense.”

He invoked, instead, a journey toward “a new world, a world, first and foremost, where we have elevated the consciousness, where we pay attention to the human being.” The new world, he continued, would be a place where we aren’t “armed to distrust, to be isolated, to hate,” a place where we “actually love.”

I reread “How to Be an Antiracist.” “Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” he writes. “They were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one day die together from unnatural causes.”

“I think Americans need to decide whether this is a multicultural nation or not,” he said. “If Americans decide that it is, what that means is we’re going to have multiple cultural standards and multiple perspectives. It creates a scenario in which we would have to have multiple understandings of what achievement is and what qualifications are. That is part of the problem. We haven’t decided, as a country, even among progressives and liberals, whether we desire a multicultural nation or a unicultural nation.”

Ron Ferguson, a Black economist, faculty member at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative, is a political liberal who gets impatient with such thinking about conventional standards and qualifications

“The cost,” he told me in January, “is underemphasizing excellence and performance and the need to develop competitive prowess.” With a soft, rueful laugh, he said I wouldn’t find many economists sincerely taking part in the kind of workshops I was writing about

“When the same group of people keeps winning over and over again,” he added, summarizing the logic of the trainers, “it’s like the game must be rigged.” He didn’t reject a degree of rigging, but said, “I tend to go more quickly to the question of how can we get prepared better to just play the game.”

But, he suggested, “in this moment we’re at risk of giving short shrift to dealing with qualifications. You can try to be competitive by equipping yourself to run the race that’s already scheduled, or you can try to change the race. There may be some things about the race I’d like to change, but my priority is to get people prepared to run the race that’s already scheduled.”

DiAngelo hopes that her consciousness raising is at least having a ripple effect, contributing to a societal shift in norms. “You’re watching network TV, and they’re saying ‘systemic racism’ — that it’s in the lexicon is kind of incredible,” she said. So was the fact that “young people understand and use language like ‘white supremacy.’”

We need a culture where a person who resists speaking up against racism is uncomfortable, and right this moment it looks like we’re in that culture.”

In the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Teixeira told friends that he saw a storm gathering. “He was afraid they would target White people,” his friend said. “He had told me quite a few times he thought they need to be prepared for a revolution.” The friend said Teixeira spoke approvingly of Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager who shot three people, two fatally, during protests that summer in Kenosha, Wis., claiming that he had acted in self-defense

Teixeira wanted his online companions, many of them teenage boys, to “be prepared for things the government might do, reinforcing to them that the government was lying to them,”

Teixeira asserted that “lots of FBI agents were found to have sympathized with the Jan 6 rioters,” and he said naive members of the intelligence community, of which he was technically a part, had been “cucked.” He referred to mainstream press as “zogshit,” appropriating a popular white-supremacist slur for the “Zionist Occupied Government.” Friends said that during live video chats, Teixeira expounded on baseless accusations of shadowy, sinister control by Jewish and liberal elites, as well as corrupt law enforcement authorities.

Already united by their love of guns and their Orthodox Christian faith, two members of Thug Shaker Central said their nascent political beliefs became hardened and more polarized during the isolation of the pandemic. Unable to see their local friends in person, the young members spent their entire days in front of screens and came under the influence of outsize online figures like Teixeira. Some on the server saw him as an older brother — others, friends said, like a father figure.

In interviews, some of the members struggled to explain worldviews that had developed largely online, and expressed remorse. Several admitted they had become radicalized during the pandemic and were influenced by Teixeira, whose own politics seemed animated by social grievances and an obsession with guns.

The members may have sensed they were treading into dangerous political waters, even before leaked classified documents started circulating. During video chats, some hid their faces behind masks, fearful of being publicly identified with a group of self-professed bigots, Teixeira’s close friend said.

The interest in video games and conservative politics was accompanied by an acute obsession with violence, the friend said. “He would send me a video of someone getting killed, ISIS executions, mass shootings, war videos. People would screen-share it, and he would laugh very loudly and be very happy to watch these things with everyone else. He absolutely enjoyed gore.”

After he enlisted in the U.S. Air National Guard in September 2019, Teixeira also feared that his own racist and violent statements would jeopardize his chances of getting a security clearance. “He was worried something from Discord would come up during his interview,” said the friend, who met him when the application was still pending. Teixeira changed his online handle to an innocuous version of his surname and became “less active” in the community for a time, the friend added, in an effort not to create more incriminating evidence.

But Teixeira already had an offline record that arguably should have raised concerns for the officials who approved his security clearance. In March 2018, Teixeira was suspended from his high school “when a classmate overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats,” according to a Justice Department filing last month that argued Teixeira should remain in jail while he faces charges under the Espionage Act stemming from his alleged leaks.

Teixeira’s close friend, who knew him after he had graduated high school, said he had confessed to wanting to take a gun to school and carry out a shooting.

“He had told me multiple times about when he was younger, his desire to shoot up his school,” the friend said. “He hated his school.”

“To my knowledge, he never hurt anyone physically, but he absolutely talked about it pretty often,” the friend added. Other friends confirmed Teixeira talked about attacking his school, but they said they didn’t take his threats seriously.

The YouTuber added that Discord deleted the civil-discussion channel on April 24 after “multiple members” received notices from the company.

Teixeira’s gaming and political cultures overlapped, the friend observed. “Once you start getting into the more niche video games, a lot of those communities are much more conservative. I think he found a small place where his views got echoed back to him and made them worse.”

The Post obtained previously unpublished screenshots from the server and recordings of members playing games together. Racist and antisemitic language flowed through the community, as did hostility for gay and transgender people, whom Teixeira deemed “degenerate.” The line between sarcasm and genuine belief became increasingly blurred. On video calls, users held up a finger, jokingly imitating members of ISIS. In their rooms were flags associated with Christian nationalism and white power.

Friends may not have taken seriously Teixeira’s threats against his high school. But he voiced approval of some shooters, particularly when they targeted people of different races and faiths. Teixeira was especially impressed by a gunman’s rampage at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, which left 51 people dead and 4o injured. “He was very happy that those people died,” the friend said, because they were Muslim. The shooter live-streamed his massacre as though he were in a video game.

“He was very against gun control. And so he would talk about wanting to kill ATF agents or when ATF agents would show up to his house, like theoretically preparing your house so that they would die in some strange trap.”

In arguing that Teixeira should remain in jail while he faces charges, federal prosecutors pointed to his threats of violence in high school. But among online communities whose members hold “more extremist conservative views,” the friend said, “it’s really common to joke about killing government agents like that, so it never seemed worrying to me.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency wants people in storm-affected areas to remember that generators can cause carbon monoxide poisoning or fires.Generators should never be operated inside or adjacent to a building, enclosed area or open windows.According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission: "One generator produces as much CO as hundreds of cars. It can incapacitate and kill consumers within minutes."Six people in Louisiana died of carbon monoxide poisoning from generators in the days following Hurricane Ida in August, according to the state health department.

Girl in Wheelchair Rescued From 'Wizard of Oz' HouseOne of the seven people reported injured in Arabi, a community adjacent to New Orleans, was a girl in a wheelchair who was rescued from a house that the tornado lifted off its foundation and dropped in the middle of the road, nola.com reported.

How to Help Victims in LouisianaThe United Way of Southeast Louisiana is taking public donations for its Tornado Relief Fund, with all proceeds earmarked for immediate relief efforts and long-term rebuilding.“Nearly two thirds of households in the affected areas of St. Bernard and Orleans parishes don’t earn enough to save for disasters and many are still recovering from Hurricane Ida’s impacts,” Michael Williamson, UWSELA President and CEO, said in a news release. Cash donations as well as supplies including diapers, baby formula and toiletries are needed. Details on how to contribute can be found here.

Damage Reported in 12 Mississippi CountiesHomes were damaged in a dozen Mississippi counties as the storms moved through Tuesday, according to the state's emergency management agency. At least two people were injured – one in Holmes County, to the north of Jackson, and one to the south in Copiah County.The update said severe weather, tornadoes, hail, damaging winds and flash flooding all impacted parts of the state, with multiple reports of fallen trees across roads and power lines.

Power Outages Linger in Several AreasSome 14,000 homes and businesses are without power in Louisiana and Mississippi as of about 10:15 a.m. CDT, according to PowerOutage.us.Most of the Louisiana outages are in Orleans and St. Bernard parishes. In Mississippi, most of them are in the central part of the state. More than 19,000 outages are being reported in Texas.

There were at times more than 100,000 contractors in Iraq, including nearly 50,000 "soldiers," many making $1,000 a day, far more than active-duty military, with the money coming from American taxpayers. Conveniently for politicians, if these "soldiers" died, they were not counted in the official death toll of Americans killed in the war.

If multiple public functions are privatized, or partially privatized, government employees have huge incentives to curry favor with potential private employers by granting them rich contracts or consulting fees, and then subsequently getting jobs paying multiples of their government salaries -- or just giving nice perks to one's former colleagues and friends who left for the private sector

Antigovernment ideologues demonize government and government employees, cutting their pay and their programs and finding other ways to undercut them. That makes recruiting top-flight people much more difficult, especially in areas such as computer science or engineering. Government responds not by providing incentives to recruit and keep the best and brightest, but by going through the back door of privatizing and letting private firms pay far more to do essentially the same work.

“Because China’s SSBNs [nuclear missile submarines] are in the South China Sea, the US navy will try to send spy ships in there and get close to the SSBNs. China’s navy hates that and will try to push them away,” Wu said.

Warheads and missiles would be put together and handed over to the navy, allowing a nuclear weapon to be launched much faster if such a decision was taken. The start of Chinese missile patrols could further destabilise the already tense strategic standoff with the US in the South China Sea.

China has been working on ballistic missile submarine technology for more than three decades, but actual deployment has been put off by technical failures, institutional rivalry and policy d

Behind the ominous warnings is growing concern in the People’s Liberation army that China’s relatively small nuclear arsenal (estimated at 260 warheads compared with 7,000 each for the US and Russia), made up mostly of land-based missiles, is increasingly vulnerable to a devastating first strike, by either nuclear or conventional weapon

The decision to deploy Thaad anti-ballistic interceptors in South Korea was taken after North Korea’s fourth nuclear test, and the stated mission of the truck-launched interceptors is to shield the south from missile attack.

China is developing a similar missile but officials in Beijing fear that the Chinese nuclear arsenal is so small it could be almost completely wiped out without notice, with the few missiles launched in reprisal being destroyed in mid-air by US missile defences.

There seems to have been some discussion of moving to a “launch on warning” policy, to fire Chinese weapons before incoming missiles land and destroy them. That appears to be a minority view, however

The core aim is to have a second strike capacity that is “survivable” and “penetrative”. Submarines, on patrol in the ocean depths, fulfil the first requirement, they say.

Partly to help penetrate US missile defences, China has in recent months also started putting multiple warheads on its largest missile, the DF-5, another development that has set alarm bells ringing in the Pentagon, where some analysts view it as the first step towards a massive nuclear armament drive aimed at obliterating the US arsenal.

Evidence for China’s more “relaxed” approach is the length of time it took to deploy multiple warheads, two decades after developing the necessary technology. China has similarly taken decades to deploy nuclear missile submarines.

The slow pace has not just been for practical reasons. China’s guiding principle has been to have a capacity for “minimum means of reprisal” while minimising the chance of accidental or unauthorised launch.

However, to follow the British Royal Navy model – in which each Trident submarine commander has a signed letter from the prime minister in his safe, to open in the event of a strike on London – would entail a huge leap in the alert status of the Chinese nuclear arsenal, and a similarly huge delegation of responsibility to one of the armed forces.

It’s more time than people spend reading (19 minutes); participating in sports or exercise (17 minutes); or social events (four minutes). It’s almost as much time as people spend eating and drinking (1.07 hours).

the average time people spend on Facebook has gone up — from around 40 minutes in 2014 — even as the number of monthly active users has surged. And that’s just the average. Some users must be spending many hours a day on the site,

Time is the best measure of engagement, and engagement correlates with advertising effectiveness. Time also increases the supply of impressions that Facebook can sell, which brings in more revenue (a 52 percent increase last quarter to $5.4 billion).

time has become the holy grail of digital media.

And time enables Facebook to learn more about its users — their habits and interests — and thus better target its ads. The result is a powerful network effect that competitors will be hard pressed to match.

the only one that comes close is Alphabet’s YouTube, where users spent an average of 17 minutes a day on the site. That’s less than half the 35 minutes a day users spent on Facebook

Users spent an average of nine minutes on all of Yahoo’s sites, two minutes on LinkedIn and just one minute on Twitter

People spending the most time on Facebook also tend to fall into the prized 18-to-34 demographic sought by advertisers.

“You hear a narrative that young people are fleeing Facebook. The data show that’s just not true. Younger users have a wider appetite for social media, and they spend a lot of time on multiple networks. But they spend more time on Facebook by a wide margin.”

What aren’t Facebook users doing during the 50 minutes they spend there? Is it possibly interfering with work (and productivity), or, in the case of young people, studying and reading?

While the Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys nearly every conceivable time-occupying activity (even fencing and spelunking), it doesn’t specifically tally the time spent on social media, both because the activity may have multiple purposes — both work and leisure — and because people often do it at the same time they are ostensibly engaged in other activities

The closest category would be “computer use for leisure,” which has grown from eight minutes in 2006, when the bureau began collecting the data, to 14 minutes in 2014, the most recent survey. Or perhaps it would be “socializing and communicating with others,” which slipped from 40 minutes to 38 minutes.

But time spent on most leisure activities hasn’t changed much in those eight years of the bureau’s surveys. Time spent reading dropped from an average of 22 minutes to 19 minutes. Watching television and movies increased from 2.57 hours to 2.8. Average time spent working declined from 3.4 hours to 3.25. (Those hours seem low because much of the population, which includes both young people and the elderly, does not work.)

The bureau’s numbers, since they cover the entire population, may be too broad to capture important shifts among important demographic groups

ComScore reported that television viewing (both live and recorded) dropped 2 percent last year, and it said younger viewers in particular are abandoning traditional live television. People ages 18-34 spent just 47 percent of their viewing time on television screens, and 40 percent on mobile devices.

Among those 55 and older, 70 percent of their viewing time was on television, according to comScore. So among young people, much social media time may be coming at the expense of traditional television.

comScore’s data suggests that people are spending on average just six to seven minutes a day using social media on their work computers. “I don’t think Facebook is displacing other activity,” he said. “People use it during downtime during the course of their day, in the elevator, or while commuting, or waiting.

Facebook, naturally, is busy cooking up ways to get us to spend even more time on the platform

A crucial initiative is improving its News Feed, tailoring it more precisely to the needs and interests of its users, based on how long people spend reading particular posts. For people who demonstrate a preference for video, more video will appear near the top of their news feed. The more time people spend on Facebook, the more data they will generate about themselves, and the better the company will get at the task.

That is a small fraction of the approximately 500 dead and 3,000 wounded that Iraqi forces suffered in their push to secure the eastern half of the city during an earlier, 100-day offensive.

the Iraqi strategy has been to mount an attack on multiple axes to present the militants with more problems than they can handle. But the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has responded at times by concentrating its firepower on what it believes to be the Iraqis’ main line of attack.

humans are not necessarily ideal graders: they provide an average of only three minutes of attention per essa

We are talking here about providing a very rough kind of measurement, the assignment of a single summary score on, say, a seventh grader’s essay

“A few years back, almost all states evaluated writing at multiple grade levels, requiring students to actually write,” says Mark D. Shermis, dean of the college of education at the University of Akron in Ohio. “But a few, citing cost considerations, have either switched back to multiple-choice format to evaluate or have dropped writing evaluation altogether.”

As statistical models for automated essay scoring are refined, Professor Shermis says, the current $2 or $3 cost of grading each one with humans could be virtually eliminated, at least theoretically.

the cost of commercial essay-grading software is now $10 to $20 a student per year. But as the technology improves and the costs drop, he expects that it will be incorporated into the word processing software that all students use

As essay-scoring software becomes more sophisticated, it could be put to classroom use for any type of writing assignment throughout the school year, not just in an end-of-year assessment. Instead of the teacher filling the essay with the markings that flag problems, the software could do so. The software could also effortlessly supply full explanations and practice exercises that address the problems — and grade those, too.

“Providing students with instant feedback about grammar, punctuation, word choice and sentence structure will lead to more writing assignments,” Mr. Vander Ark says, “and allow teachers to focus on higher-order skills.”

When sophisticated essay-evaluation software is built into word processing software, Mr. Vander Ark predicts “an order-of-magnitude increase in the amount of writing across the curriculum.”

the essay-scoring software that he and his teammates developed uses relatively small data sets and ordinary PCs — so the additional infrastructure cost for schools could be nil.

the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation sponsored a competition to see how well algorithms submitted by professional data scientists and amateur statistics wizards could predict the scores assigned by human graders. The winners were announced last month — and the predictive algorithms were eerily accurate.

wanted to create a neutral and fair platform to assess the various claims of the vendors. It turns out the claims are not hype.”

When you click to show the list of people who “liked” a post, you probably think you’re getting a list of people who expressed positive sentiment toward a particular combination of sentences. But computationally, what you’re getting is slightly different. “Show me a list of the people who liked a Facebook post” is actually a command more like “Display a list of FirstName and LastName for usernames where the flag LikedThisPost = True.” There are a lot of assumptions built in there.

There’s the assumption that the username corresponds to a single real person, which is not always true—people have multiple Facebook accounts, and some accounts have multiple people posting to them, and some accounts are fake

There’s the assumption that the agent that clicked the like button is the same person referred to by the username—not necessarily true. People often forget to log out of their Facebook accounts on desktops and laptops, or use other people’s phones to browse social media

A like button is merely a tool. Humans use tools in breathtakingly creative ways—this is one of the many exciting and inspiring things about social uses of technology. However, the meaning a person imparts to an action on a social-media platform does not always correspond to the actual intent. In real-life social interactions, nuance is everything. On social media, where that nuance is obscured, we ought to be hyper-critical about the ethical ramifications of using social media data for real-world judgments.

For the kid listed in a gang database, it can be unclear how to get out of it. In the world of human interaction, we accept change through behavior: the addict can redeem himself by getting clean, or the habitual interrupter can redeem himself by not interrupting. We accept behavior change. But in the database world, unless someone has permission to delete or amend a database record, no such change is possible

The National Gang Center, in its list of gang-related legislation, shows only 12 states with policies that specifically address gang databases. Most deny the public access to the information in these databases. Only a few of these twelve mention regular purging of information, and some specifically say that a person cannot even find out if they have a record in the database

. “The last time that the gang unit purged its files, however, was in 1993—approximately 4 years before this study was conducted,” he wrote. “One clerk who is responsible for data entry and dissemination estimated, ‘At a minimum, 400 to 500 gang members would be deleted off the gang list today if we went through the files.

n predict what book I want to buy next, hasn’t this problem already been solved?” The answer is inevitably no. When computer scientists were building the Internet in the late 1990s, there weren’t any widely adopted or established ethical guidelines because we were building these systems for the first time in human history.

We also need to acknowledge that computer systems are not a panacea. “Your program really does stink, and the sooner you get used to the idea, the better,” writes Nathan S. Borenstein in Programming as if People Mattered. “The inadequacies of your software are simply a reflection of your frail, shortsighted, and limited human nature. Every program ever built is doomed to eventual obsolescence.” We need to put people before programs, and if programs don’t reflect our human values, we need to change the code. And if programmers can’t write code that is fair and just, we should consider relying on people instead of programs.

If American law enforcement is going to go deeper into the brave new world of data-driven policing, we need to create systems that have human values embedded in them. If our technological systems are entrapping innocent citizens or tampering with the presumption of innocence, should they be used?

I agree entirely that this should have gone to trial and realize that, statistically, nearly everything reviewed by a grand jury does. I agree that the fact Wilson will never even face charges is a mark of shame on the legal system. But I don’t get the sense that the people who are furious about this, whatever their race, are clamoring for a trial they’ll never see; it seems to me they’re clamoring for a conviction they feel they’ve been cheated out of.

Maybe lethal force wasn’t necessary, but science has proven that Brown turned and moved back toward Wilson (at least 20 feet) and was not shot from behind. There was undeniably an altercation at/inside the police cruiser. Does the fact that one man is alive and one is dead skew the way those facts are interpreted? Absolutely. But there exist certain physical certainties that strongly suggest this was not cold-blooded murder.

there is an interminable, sometimes slight, sometimes massive burden that comes with Blackness that you seem wholly oblivious to. That 12 year old that was shot in Cleveland was sitting on a swing playing with a fake gun. Two things happened due purely to his Blackness: police were called and he was murdered. Full stop. The Black man shot in the stairwell of his building in NYC for just existing while Black because a cop got scared. And that’s just since Monday.

Clive Bundy assails and threatens federal officers and gets invited on Fox News. Eric Frein plans and carries out an attack on state trooper barracks, killing one and seriously wounding another – again brought in alive. Ted Nugent scares the shit out of me with his racism, misogyny, anti-government and gun-humping ways, but yet he’s a hero to many White people and no one seems to have shot him yet either. White people have feared, reviled and vilified Blackness since they first laid eyes upon us. The codification and justification of our enslavement, disenfranchisement and murder is beyond primordial; it is part and parcel of what has made America and the Western world. Ferguson is just another eruption in this racist legacy and reality.

on of your readers claimed that, at most, Brown was guilty of petit theft, which is a misdemeanor. This is incorrect. Brown not only stole from the convenience store, he assaulted the business owner who tried to stop him from stealing. This assault escalated Brown’s theft to a strong-arm robbery, which is a second-degree felony in the State of Missouri. And it was Brown’s commission of this felony that began the chain of events that led to his death. He had nobody but himself to blame for that – not Officer Wilson, not the prosecutor, and not racism.

The discovery reinforced an idea that was emerging at the time: that there was not a single line of early humans, but multiple lineages. It was already known that three other species were living in Africa around the same time: H. habilis, H. erectus and Paranthropus boisei. H. rudolfensis added to this diversity.

Later finds from Koobi Fora suggest that the three Homo species coexisted between 1.78 and 1.98 million years ago.

H. erectus are thought to be our direct ancestors. They were the first hominins to migrate out of Africa, spreading into Europe and Asia.

but a 2013 study suggested that H. erectus had evolved the ability to throw.

This may have given H. erectus the drive they needed to become more social.There is some evidence that they shared information and worked in teams.

In the summer of 2015, researchers announced the discovery of the oldest known stone tools, dating to 3.3 million years ago. It had been assumed that only Homo species could make stone tools, but the tools were older than any known Homo fossils, suggesting that older species like A. afarensis or K. platyops could also make stone tools.

a 3.2-million-year-old fossil Australopithecus afarensis, nicknamed "Lucy". Lucy's species was immediately hailed as a key contender for our direct ancestor.

There was a single lineage descending from apes through to Lucy, "and then out pops our immediate ancestors". To her, that did not make

sense.

Her team found fossils on the western shore of lake that demonstrated there was "diversity at the age of Lucy".

A. anamensis. This was the oldest species known from Lake Turkana, having lived about four million years ago.

another new species called Kenyanthropus platyopus, or "flat-faced man". This species lived 3.5 million years ago, when other members of Lucy's species also roamed.

"the common ancestor" of Homo, and largely killed off the idea that humans evolved on a single line.

The earliest known Acheulean hand-axes were discovered near Lake Turkana in 2011. They are 1.76 million years old and were probably made by H. erectus.

There was thought to be a "substantial link between the emergence of humans (Homo) and the emergence of technology", says de la Torre, but it now seems this is not necessarily true.

Lake Turkana has played a pivotal role in our understanding of human evolution. But that is not to say the area was particularly significant for the early humans themselves.

Lake Turkana was simply an ideal place for fossils to be preserved, says Spoor. "That doesn't mean human evolution doesn't happen everywhere else in Africa."

It allows us to see multiple species that lived millions of years apart, and compare them.

Boston Runaway Train: Operator May Have Tied Cord to Throttle, Source Says

The six-car train on Boston's Red Line left the Braintree Station without an operator just after 6 a.m. Thursday, according to Stephanie Pollack of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.

"The investigation is ongoing but we do believe this was an isolated incident," Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker said today during a news conference. "One that likely required an individual to make multiple mistakes for this to take place."

"We are confident that this was an isolated incident where a single individual appears to have made multiple errors."

The operator remains on administrative leave, said Pollack, adding that, “If the investigation finds that a prohibited act occurred, this is grounds for termination.”

"We are reminding our work force ... that they are not permitted to in any way keep that throttle ... from operating the way it is intended," Pollack added.

Pollack said the incident was an "unacceptable breach of responsibility to keep our riders safe. We failed our passengers. Something happened that should not have been able to happen.”

But no serious scientist claims “total certainty” about the future of climate, just a range of increasingly alarming probabilities; no one is demanding “abrupt and expensive” changes in public policy, just an intensification of efforts long underway with increasingly reliable and affordable new technologies; and, yes, treating your opponents as evil morons is rarely a good political strategy

The same blather can be found in this week’s column by Jonah Goldberg, lamenting Max Boot’s sudden volte-face on the issue. Jonah has a point about Boot’s somewhat too instant makeover into a resistance icon (I’ve made it myself), but on the substance of climate change, what defense of the American right does Goldberg have? Zippo. He argues that “there are a lot of different views on climate change on the right.” I find that about as convincing as the argument that there are a lot of different views on race among Harvard’s faculty.

More to the point, the hypothesis of carbon-created climate change doesn’t just have “some legitimate science” on its side, as Goldberg puts it, but a completely overwhelming majority of the science

You should, of course, retain some skepticism always. It’s possible, for example, that natural selection may be replaced as the core scientific consensus about how life on Earth evolved. Possible. But do we have to express skepticism every time new science based on that hypothesis emerges

The kicker, of course, is that the current GOP is not just skeptical of climate science and dragging its feet on doing anything about climate change. It is actively pursuing policies aimed at intensifying environmental devastation. Trump’s EPA is attempting to gut the regulation of carbon; it has tried to sabotage the only most prominent global agreement on the matter; it celebrates carbon-based energy and rhapsodizes about coal; it has slapped a 30 percent tariff on solar panels; its tax reform hurt solar and wind investment

Inaction because of uncertainty only makes sense if the threat is distant and not too calamitous. But when there’s a chance of it being truly catastrophic, and the evidence in its favor keeps strengthening, a sane person adjusts

A conservative person — someone attuned to risk — will take out insurance, in case the worst happens.

Why is every other government on Earth committed to tackling this (rhetorically at least) and every other center-right party on Earth taking this very seriously? (Check out this page about environmental policy in the British Conservative party — aimed getting to zero carbon emissions by 2050 — and see if you even recognize the debate on the right in the U.S.)

I honestly can’t see how the science of this can be right or left. It’s either our best working hypothesis or not.

For allegedly intelligent conservatives like Stephens and Goldberg to devote energy toward climate skepticism while turning a blind eye to vigorous Republican climate vandalism is, quite simply contemptible. I am not reading their minds here. I’m reading their columns. On this question — as on fiscal policy — they’re not skeptics or conservatives; they are dogmatists, sophists, and enablers of environmental vandalism. They reveal Republicanism’s calculated assault on the next generations — piling them with unimaginable debt and environmental chaos. This isn’t the cultural conservatism of Burke; it’s the selfish nihilism of Rand.

a quote. It was the first time a major global leader spoke to the U.N. on the question: “It is life itself — human life, the innumerable species of our planet — that we wantonly destroy. It is life itself that we must battle to preserve … The danger of global warming is as yet unseen but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices so we may not live at the expense of future generations. That prospect is a new factor in human affairs. It is comparable in its implications to the discovery of how to split the atom, indeed its results could be even more far-reaching … We should always remember that free markets are a means to an end. They would defeat their object if by their output they did more damage to the quality of life through pollution than the well-being they achieve by the production of goods and services.”

That leader also made a core moral argument: “No generation has a freehold on this Earth; all we have is a life tenancy with a full repairing lease.

Those words were Margaret Thatcher’s in 1989. She devoted her entire U.N. speech to conservation and climate change. If the subject was real enough in 1989 to make sacrifices and changes, how much more so almost 30 years later?

The difference between Thatcher and today’s Republicans is quite a simple one. She believed in science (indeed was trained as a scientist). She grasped the moral dimensions of the stewardship of the Earth from one generation to another. She did not engage in the cowardice of sophists. And unlike these tools and fools on today’s American right, she was a conservative.

The real question, it seems to me, is therefore an almost philosophical one: Do these exceptions prove or disprove a general rule?

I’d argue that, by and large, they prove it

The number of people with a mismatch between chromosomes and hormones, or with ambiguous genitalia, is surpassingly small. Well under one percent is a useful estimate.

Similarly with a transgender identity: It absolutely exists but is also very rare — some estimates put it at around 0.7 percent of the population

Does this mean that general assumptions about most people being either male or female and heterosexual and cisgendered are misplaced or even offensive? Hardly. I’m gay but usually assume that everyone I meet is straight until I know otherwise

Gay men and lesbians who have unambiguous male and female sex organs and identity but an attraction to their own sex are also pretty rare (whatever we’d like to think). Maybe 2 to 5 percent, with some outliers

And I don’t mind the hetero assumption applying to me either. It’s a reasonable statistical inference, not bigotry. And I can always set them, er, straight.

My preferred adjective for sex and gender is bimodal, rather than binary. What bimodal means is that there are two distinct and primary modes with some variations between them

Think of it as two big mountains representing, in sex matters, well over 95 percent of humans, with a long, low valley between them, representing the remaining percent.

Everyone is equally human. But clearly the human experience of sex is one thing for almost everyone and a different thing for a few.

Do we infer from this that we need to junk the categories of male and female altogether, as many critical gender theorists argue? That seems insane to me

These two modes actually define the entire landscape of sex (the exceptions are incomprehensible without them), and the bimodal distribution is quite obviously a function of reproductive strategy (if we were all gay, or intersex, we’d cease to exist as a species before too long)

Ditto the transgender experience: Does the fact that less than one percent of humans feel psychologically at odds with their biological sex mean that biological sex really doesn’t exist and needs to be defined away entirely? Or does it underline just how deep the connection between sex and gender almost always is?

We are not a threat to straights; we’re a complement. Transgender people do not threaten the categories of male and female; they pay, in some ways, homage to them.

On the left, there’s too much defensiveness about being in a minority

But being in a minority — even a tiny one — need not be demoralizing, if we have self-confidence. I’d argue it can lead, through struggle and challenge, to a more deeply examined self — and to a resilience that can only be earned and is no one else’s to give.

And the fact that this society is run overwhelmingly on heterosexual lines makes sense to me, given their overwhelming majority. As long as the government does not actively persecute or enable the persecution of a minority, who cares

It’s stupid to pretend they are entirely normal, because it gives the concept of normality too much power over us. Their abnormality is a neutral thing, like left-handedness: a fact, not a judgment. And why on earth should we feel defensive about that?

But what surprised me was the positive response to a single, minor point I made about intersectionality.

In some ways, I argued, the intersectional move on the hard left is a good thing — because it complicates things. It’s no longer enough just to consider race, for example, as a signifier of oppression without also considering gender or orientation or gender identity, national origin, immigrant status, etc. When society is made up entirely of various intersecting oppressions, as the social-justice left believes, it’s vital not to leave any potential grievance out.

By the same token, of course, an oppressor can also be identified in multiple, intersectional ways

It can get very complicated very fast.

Let’s push this to its logical conclusion. Let’s pile on identity after identity for any individual person; place her in multiple, overlapping oppression dynamics, victim and victimizer, oppressor and oppressed; map her class, race, region, religion, marital status, politics, nationality, language, disability, attractiveness, body weight, and any other form of identity you can

After a while, with any individual’s multifaceted past, present, and future, you will end up in this multicultural world with countless unique combinations of endless identities in a near-infinite loop of victim and victimizer.

You will, in fact, end up with … an individual human being!

In the end, all totalizing ideologies disappear up their own assholes. With intersectionality, we have now entered the lower colon