Month: March 2021

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Imagine the 24/7 media outrage machine if Trump or some Republican had muttered nonsense like this or refused to allow media access to detainment facilities. Media now…crickets. The U.S. media is a disgusting joke.

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Say anything. The media will not question Democrats about former policy positions. The U.S. media is a disgusting joke.

Ben Sasse tends to be a preening squish. But he gets some things right.

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Wokeism is a mental disorder. You are no longer allowed to use math or science to solve or prevent crime because doing so focuses light on who the real criminals are. Guess who the criminals are?

Madness Comes for the Mathematicians

Jonathan Marks:

“…Andrea Bertozzi is a distinguished mathematician. A professor of mathematics at UCLA and the author or co-author of over 250 publications, Bertozzi has been elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

She is also now something of a lightning rod, not because of her work on higher-order partial differential equations but because of her work on predictive policing. Bertozzi’s research seeks to “determine where crime is likely to occur in the near future.” Whether predictive policing helps to allocate scarce policing resources better, and whether the data about crime on which any mathematical model must rely reflects racial bias, is a matter of controversy. Like other controversies among academics, this one has been joined in peer-reviewed journals. But even this controversy does not explain the trouble with Bertozzi. The trouble with Bertozzi, her critics allege, is that she is a collaborator. With the cops.

Bertozzi was to deliver the 2021 Noether lecture, jointly sponsored by the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS) to honor “women who have made fundamental and sustained contributions to the mathematical sciences.” Last June, Bertozzi, AWM and AMS agreed to cancel her lecture in light of protests surrounding George Floyd’s death the previous month. AWM apologized for its insensitivity in announcing Bertozzi’s selection during the protests and recognized that it had “ongoing work to do in order to be an organization that fights for social justice.” AWM’s inbox, it seems, had filled up “with well-crafted commentary on the pain that has been caused by algorithmic policing, the insensitivity of the AWM’s timing, and questioning the choice of speaker.”

A few days after AWM’s apology, mathematicians who objected to Bertozzi wrote a public letter that explained their objections and called for a “boycott” on “collaboration with the police.” Even if predictive policing were free of controversy, even if peer-reviewed research were to demonstrate its effectiveness and freedom from bias, “the structural racism and brutality in US policing” compelled these academics to profess that they “do not believe that mathematicians should be collaborating with police departments in this manner.”…”

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How critical is a conservative judiciary? This critical.

The 9th Circuit Says the Right To Bear Arms Does Not Extend Beyond Your Doorstep: According to the dissent, the appeals court “has decided that the Second Amendment does not mean what it says.”

“…The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit today held that the Second Amendment does not guarantee a right to openly carry firearms for self-defense. Combined with a 2016 decision involving concealed firearms, the ruling means that the Second Amendment does not extend beyond the home for residents of the 9th Circuit, which includes Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.

According to the majority opinion by Judge Jay Bybee, history shows that legal restrictions on carrying unconcealed firearms, including virtual bans like Hawaii’s, are the sort of “longstanding prohibitions” that the Supreme Court has suggested the Second Amendment allows. The four dissenters think history shows nothing of the sort.

“The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees ‘the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,'” Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain writes in a blistering dissent joined by Judges Consuelo Callahan, Sandra Ikuta, and Ryan Nelson. “Today, a majority of our court has decided that the Second Amendment does not mean what it says. Instead, the majority holds that while the Second Amendment may guarantee the right to keep a firearm for self-defense within one’s home, it provides no right whatsoever to bear—i.e., to carry—that same firearm for self-defense in any other place….We now become the first and only court of appeals to hold that public carry falls entirely outside the scope of the Amendment’s protections.” The majority’s reasoning, O’Scannlain says, “reduces the right to ‘bear Arms’ to a mere inkblot.”…”

 

Doug Santo