January 12, 1967, Dr. James Bedford became the first person to be cryonically preserved with intent of future resuscitation.
Cryogenic preservation for future revival of brain and somatic function has been a concept often used in science fiction, such as in the 1966 grade B horror film The Frozen Dead and the 1976 novel A World Out of Time — the latter in which author Larry Niven dubs the recipients of such treatment “corpsicles.”
“Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is terminating major DEI programs, effective immediately — including for hiring, training and picking suppliers,” reports Axios.
“Meta said it was changing course because the ‘legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing,’ per a memo by Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources.”
And yes, changing is indeed what the legal landscape is: “Meta is not alone,” explains Techcrunch: “Microsoft and Zoom have also rolled back their DEI efforts. Lawsuits have emerged against programs that were targeted toward the Black and Latino communities.”
Behind all this is a landmark Supreme Court decision of June 29, 2023, Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard. That decision seemed to put the kibosh on what we used to call “reverse discrimination” at least in college acceptance policies regarding students of various races. The whole apparatus of student enrollment and fixation on race had been acceptable in the past to make up, for a time, for past discriminatory behavior based on animus against whites. But Justice Roberts saw no “going back to normal” in Harvard’s admissions policies: “Harvard concedes that its race-based ad- missions program has no end point. . . . And it acknowledges that the way it thinks about the use of race in its admissions process ‘is the same now as it was’ nearly 50 years ago. . . . In short, there is no reason to believe that respondents will — even acting in good faith — comply with the Equal Protection Clause any time soon.” So the court ruled against Harvard.
Much more recently, however, is the big news relating to sex and/or gender aspect of the DEI agenda: “A federal judge in Kentucky blocked the Biden administration’s attempt to redefine sex in Title IX as ‘gender identity,’ striking down the change nationwide,” according to Fox News’s Ryan Gaydos. “The U.S. District Court Eastern District of Kentucky Northern Division made the ruling in Cardona v. Tennessee on Thursday.”
This cover’s the inclusive aspect of DEI, where men [biological human males] were to be required to be allowed in women’s restrooms and locker rooms if they said they were (or somehow dressed up o “identified as” women. “The court’s order is resounding victory for the protection of girls’ privacy in locker rooms and showers, and for the freedom to speak biologically-accurate pronouns,” tweeted Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti. “The court’s ruling is yet another repudiation of the Biden administration’s relentless push to impose a radical gender ideology through unconstitutional and illegal rulemaking.”
And with the re-election of President Donald Trump, the Democrats’ favored “minorities” and “marginalized” policy has hit upon hard times. So the major corporations are blowing with the wind.
Even MacDonald’s is moving against DEI.
I accept this idea of democracy. I am all for trying it out. It must be a good thing if everybody praises it like that. If our government has been willing to go to war and sacrifice billions of dollars and millions of men for the idea I think that I ought to give the thing a trial. The only thing that keeps me from pitching head long into this thing is the presence of numerous Jim Crow laws on the statute books of the nation. I am crazy about the idea of Democracy. I want to see how it feels.
Zora Neale Hurston, “Crazy for This Democracy,” Negro Digest (December 1945).
On January 11, 1571, the freedom of religion was granted to Austrian nobility.
Two years earlier, the first recorded lottery in England was held.
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the eleventh day of the first month of 1759, the first American life insurance company was incorporated.
On January 11, 1935, Amelia Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California.
On this date in 2003, Illinois Governor George Ryan commuted the death sentences of 167 prisoners on Illinois’s death row based on the Jon Burge torture/duress scandal.
Applicants no longer need to pass a test that asks basic questions about English and math and other subjects in order to get the job. Why not? Because formal confirmation of basic skills is an obstacle. New Jersey needs more teachers. Remove obstacle, get more teachers. Simple addition.
Schools have other ways to determine whether applicants have the basic skills they need in order to teach those skills. But the reason for scrapping the test is evidently to ensure that deficiency in these skills, as such, won’t prevent you from being hired.
My alternative plan: accelerate free-market reforms of education, school choice, so we don’t have to “rely on” illiterate, innumerate, government-foisted “teachers.”
In 1983, when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, he instituted a competency test that, according to a 1985 Washington Post story, ten percent of the state’s public school teachers flunked. More than one-third of teachers in the state’s worst county failed this basic test.
One reason that poor and minority communities had such poor outcomes was that many of their teachers were illiterate and couldn’t do math. If you asked my fifth-grade math teacher, a product of that system, what is the sum of two plus two, she’d have had to look it up.
I survived. I now know that two plus two make eleventy. But I would not want any of today’s students to undergo the same so-called instruction.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146.
On January 10, 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense.
You can read this classic on this site’s library.
Popularizers of science seem to have gone downhill these days. Or perhaps it’s just a few of the most visible ones who are so vile.
In their own day, Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov espoused some lamentable left-wing views and advanced some dubious propositions as they explained the universe to nonscientists. But you could listen to, read, and enjoy them.
Neither ever suggested, not even once, that persons who disagreed with him on a scientific question might reasonably be incarcerated therefore — inasmuch as the disagreement impaired his quality of life “as a public citizen.” (An argument any totalitarian might use to rationalize violating innocent persons’ rights.)
But Bill Nye, “the science guy,” has expressed the greatest possible sympathy with the proposition that it might be okay to imprison scientists who disagree with him about climate, human impact on climate, or the advisability of trying to centrally plan climate.
In 2016, when asked about a proposal to imprison “climate skeptics,” Nye said that “extreme doubt about climate change is affecting my qualify of life as a public citizen. That there is a chilling effect on scientists who are in extreme doubt about climate change, I think that is good.”
People don’t do their best thinking with a gun pointed at them, Nye guy. That is not good.
Note: it’s the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Not the Presidential Medal of Craven Censorship.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you’d have to destroy the universe first and then government offices.
Karel Čapek, The Absolute at Large (1921).
On January 9, 1793, Jean-Pierre Blanchard became the first person to fly in a balloon in the United States.
Precisely 13 decades later, Juan de la Cierva y Codorníu, 1st Count of la Cierva, made the first autogyro flight.