This essay is written in response to Ricardo Duchesne. In it Beckwith corrects many errors and in so doing illuminates many aspects of ancient Indo-Europeans and how modern people think about them. It is a very informative piece. ABN
Ricardo Duchesne’s reply to Martin Hewson’s review of his book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (2011), focuses on a number of important points concerning the impact of peoples speaking Indo-European languages in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. However, several of Duchesne’s key assertions need to be modified to accord with the data.
A low-profile case decided Wednesday by the Supreme Court could have big implications for employers’ diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Muldrow v. City of St. Louis was a case about a female police officer who alleged that she was transferred from one department to another because of her sex. She argued that the transfer violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which forbids “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin” discrimination with respect to employment “compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges.”
She lost in the lower court because she could not show that the transfer caused her “significant” harm. The lower court held that the transfer “did not result in a diminution to her title, salary, or benefits” and caused “only minor changes in [her] working conditions.”
A unanimous Supreme Court reversed, holding that any harm—whether significant or insignificant—satisfies Title VII.
…Until Muldrow, cases challenging DEI programs faced the hurdle of having to prove “significant” harm. A judge might say, “Yes, you were discriminated against, but you didn’t really suffer.” To this, Kavanaugh and others would answer “discrimination is harm,” but that claim wouldn’t have gotten you anywhere.
A judge or jury sympathetic to DEI programs could easily say that a black person who was forced to work on certain projects to meet a client’s racial quota hadn’t suffered “significant” harm. Or that an Asian person denied the benefits of a mentorship program given to black employees hadn’t suffered “significant” harm. Or that a white person forced to undergo training telling her to “be less white” hadn’t suffered “significant” harm.
Today, that hurdle is gone. The harm requirement may now be satisfied by anything as simple as discomfort, status, or interest level. Functionally, discrimination alone is all that must now be proved.
That means that anti-DEI lawsuits just got a lot easier.
Ocean waves crashing on the world’s shores emit more PFAS into the air than the world’s industrial polluters, new research has found, raising concerns about environmental contamination and human exposure along coastlines.
The study measured levels of PFAS released from the bubbles that burst when waves crash, spraying aerosols into the air. It found sea spray levels were hundreds of thousands times higher than levels in the water.
The contaminated spray likely affects groundwater, surface water, vegetation, and agricultural products near coastlines that are far from industrial sources of PFAS, said Ian Cousins, a Stockholm University researcher and the study’s lead author.
“There is evidence that the ocean can be an important source [of PFAS air emissions],” Cousins said. “It is definitely impacting the coastline.”
Welcome to the seventh edition of the AI Index report. The 2024 Index is our most comprehensive to date and arrives at an important moment when AI’s influence on society has never been more pronounced. This year, we have broadened our scope to more extensively cover essential trends such as technical advancements in AI, public perceptions of the technology, and the geopolitical dynamics surrounding its development. Featuring more original data than ever before, this edition introduces new estimates on AI training costs, detailed analyses of the responsible AI landscape, and an entirely new chapter dedicated to AI’s impact on science and medicine.
Decent breakdown, no big surprises. AI is getting better and companies are investing way more in it; workers do better when they use it. Data and downloads available at link. ABN
…In 2012, three wealthy men, Bloomberg, hedge fund manager Tom Steyer and former CEO of Goldman Sachs Hank Paulson chipped in $500,000 each to fund a project “making the climate threat feel real, immediate and potentially devastating to the business world”. An early funded report was part-titled ‘Risky Business’ and it focused on RCP8.5 “as the pathway closest to a business-as-usual trajectory”. The pathway was said to be “closest to a future without concerted action to reduce future warming”.
…The “genius” of ‘Risky Business’ was it undertook a “sophisticated campaign” to introduce its methodological ideas into mainstream scientific literature, “where they would take on a life of their own”. In 2016, a paper from the ‘Risky Business’ project was published in the prestigious journal Science featuring the erroneous notion of moving from one RCP (Representative Concentration Pathway) scenario to another. Despite the obvious methodological flaw, notes Pielke, the paper passed peer-review with little or no criticism, and to date has been cited more than 1,100 times. “Hundreds, maybe thousands of papers followed similarly in adopting the same assumption of moving between incommensurate scenarios”, observes Pielke.
Two teen squatters accused of murdering a mom and stuffing her body in a duffel bag at her apartment went on to use her credit card to buy an engagement ring, a court has heard.
Halley Tejada, 19, and Kensly Alston, 18, shuffled into Manhattan Supreme Court on Thursday charged with killing Nadia Vitels, a 52-year-old woman who was found in a duffel bag in her New York City apartment on March 14.
The pair pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder, burglary, robbery, criminal possession, grand larceny and concealment of a human corpse and were remanded in custody.
The medical examiner ruled Vitels’ death a homicide after an autopsy ruled she died from multiple facial fractures, a brain bleed, two broken ribs and blunt-force trauma to the head.
Prosecutors allege that Tejada and Alston broke into Vitels’ apartment on March 10 and stayed there for two days before she returned home with her dog and told them to leave.
Tejada is accused of stomping on her head before hitting her with a frying pan while Alston kicked her body and the pair then wrapped her neck and body with a cord.
This is a very good video. It explains communist ‘devolution’. If you look up devolution on Wikipedia, it sounds kind of good, nothing to worry about. Once you understand what it really means, it’s scary. You will see it everywhere and realize that the planned takeover is all around you and even closer to total success than you may have realized. Note, the main speaker has a Polish accent and a mediocre mic but it improves a few minutes in. Whether the people conquering us through devious policy are communists or not, or what they mean by a term like that are open questions. What is not an open question is: are they using commie techniques and using them very effectively? The answer is YES. This vid will help you see the strategic and tactical details of devolution with vivid nuance. ABN
American Buddhist Net 
