The University of Michigan announced on Thursday that it has eliminated diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements from its faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure processes. Some university community members celebrated the decision to scrap the DEI statements, which individuals were asked to provide to demonstrate what they’ve done and plan to do to advance such policies. They said the statements were used as ideological litmus tests and enforced intellectual conformity. “I applaud the provost for ending the practice of requiring diversity statements,” said Sarah Hubbard, one of the regents on the eight-person board overseeing the university. “This policy change removes a barrier to diversity of thought on campus by eliminating the ideological litmus test.” Provost Laurie McCauley announced the decision on Thursday after forming a faculty committee to review the use of diversity statements. “Critics of diversity statements perceive them as expressions of personal identity traits, support of specific ideology or opinions on socially-relevant issues, and serve as a ‘litmus test’ of whether a faculty member’s views are politically acceptable,” the committee stated in a report. “Thus, as currently enacted, diversity statements have the potential to limit viewpoints and reduce diversity of thought among faculty members.” While the University of Michigan Board of Regents is set to meet on Thursday, Hubbard says she doesn’t expect it to address any other DEI issues at this time. CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE The University of Michigan’s decision follows the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s announcement over the summer that it would discontinue using DEI statements in the hiring process. “Requests for a statement on diversity will no longer be part of applications for any faculty positions at MIT,” one MIT representative said at the time. “My goals are to tap into the full scope of human talent, to bring the very best to MIT, and to make sure they thrive once here,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said. “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.” Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences also announced this summer that it would discontinue the use of diversity statements in its hiring process.

The European Space Agency reported that an asteroid headed for Earth earlier this week, leaving a fire trail behind. According to a post on X, the asteroid was small and likely harmless. It would produce a “nice fireball in the sky over northern Siberia.” The ESA shared an update later in the day, saying it discovered the asteroid “roughly 12 hours ago” as it made its way into Earth’s atmosphere. Incoming!A small asteroid has just been spotted on a collision course with Earth. At around ~70 cm in diameter, the impact will be harmless, likely producing a nice fireball in the sky over northern Siberia around seven hours from now at ~16:15 +/- 05 min UTC (17:15 +/-5 min… pic.twitter.com/ie9yj0FHfB— European Space Agency (@esa) December 3, 2024 The Asteroid Intrigued Many People An ESA follower shared, “THAT IS IMPRESSIVE!! WITH ALL THE SPACE DEBRIS THEY WERE ABLE TO PICK THAT LITTLE BUGGER UP IS TRUUUUUULY IMPRESSIVE!!” Many agreed. Like this person, “Amazing how this is all calculated & discovered in such a short time.” This person hoped to see this from the sky. “Would love to see this while flying a plane.” Lots of spectators caught it https://t.co/1BqPQuQSid— Richard Moissl (@Richard_M_F) December 3, 2024 But this person wondered if it was truly something otherworldly. “Are you sure it’s not a spacecraft from an alien world? Please do warn us in advance if it attempts to soft land or tries to abduct any humans…” Later, NASA Asteroid Watch shared the excitement on X. “At 11:14am EST, a very small (<1m) #asteroid will impact Earth’s atmosphere and create a harmless fireball over eastern Russia’s Olyokminsky District. The asteroid was first observed with the University of Arizona’s Bok telescope by the  @NASA funded Catalina Sky Survey and Spacewatch. The impact prediction was made by the Scout system at @NASAJPL’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).” Richard Moissl shared a compilation of videos on X. According to NASA, we actually see asteroids hit Earth every day. “Every day, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons of dust and sand-sized particles. About once a year, an automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth’s atmosphere, creates an impressive fireball, and burns up before reaching the surface.” You can find This story’s featured image here. The post Fireball Shoots Over Siberia In Stunning Footage appeared first on InspireMore.

'crypto capital of the planet'

'Potential to limit viewpoints'

Partly, it's our legacy of Protestant civility

A post on X claims to show aerial gunfire in South Korea as a result of President Yoon Suk Yeol declaring martial law. Breaking ?: South Korea president declares emergency martial law, says measure necessary to protect country from North’s “communist forces.” pic.twitter.com/jS3os5nVrW — AG (@AGCast4) December 3, 2024 Verdict: False The footage is from […]

'Clearly that was politically motivated'

The post Catster Photo Contest: Cats of the Week Winners (December 5, 2024) by Catster Editorial Team appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com. Click to Skip Ahead Winner Silliest Cutest Most Dignified Most Expressive Best Action Shot Sleepiest Enter Your Cat This Week’s Winner   Name: Remi Breed: Neblung Fun Fact: She loves noodles and snuggling! Silliest Name: Toffee Breed: European Domestic Cat Fun Fact: She has pink and black toe beans and eyeliner on one eye Cutest Name: Nubia Maybelline Rivera Breed: American short/medium hair tabby Fun Fact: Nubia loves climbing Christmas trees, nibbling my fingers and standing on my laptop while I do my homework Most Dignified Name: Jeff Breed: Ragdoll Fun Fact: Jeff is the floofiest floof who ever floofed. Most Expressive Name: Penny Breed: N/A Fun Fact: Penny was comfortably sleeping on her servants chest. This was her face when he moved her next to him instead of on him. Best Action Shot Name: Pumpkin Breed: American longhair Fun Fact: Pumpkin is 10 years old and always manages to have the fluffiest coat in town! She is a super sweet lap cat that will always beg for food:) Sleepiest Name: Baby Boy Breed: Tuxedo Fun Fact: he’s the worlds snuggliest baby. he has to sleep under the covers, tucked in, and with his head on a pillow right next to mommy. Enter Your Cat Submit your kitty for a chance to be featured! Click here This article is a part of our Weekly Photo Contest View our previous week’s winners here: November 28, 2024 Click here to view our full list of past winners The post Catster Photo Contest: Cats of the Week Winners (December 5, 2024) by Catster Editorial Team appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Lower Decks How the Other Half Lives — Star Trek: Lower Decks: “Upper Decks” By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on December 5, 2024 Credit: Paramount+ Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Paramount+ In its final season, Star Trek: The Next Generation did a unique episode that examined what life was like for the lower ranks on the Starship Enterprise. The whole episode was from the POV of the “lower decks” crew, including a nurse, a security guard, an engineer, and a pilot. It was a nice change-of-pace, seeing how a typical Star Trek episode would look like from the people working under the senior officers. The episode, of course, was “Lower Decks,” and besides being one of the best Trek tales, it also inspired the Lower Decks animated series. By way of bringing everything full circle, LD in its final season is doing a unique episode that examines what life is like for the senior staff of the Starship Cerritos. Unlike the senior staff of the Enterprise in the TNG episode from thirty years ago, the main stars of LD only appear at the very beginning and the very end of the show. Instead, we focus on Freeman, Ransom, Shaxs, Billups, and T’Ana, each of whom has their own storyline to play out, some of which cross over with each other. Each opens with the characters providing a log. (Naturally, T’Ana’s starts with, “Chief medical officer’s fucking log…”) Freeman is followed around by Stevens dealing with all the silly minutiae of being a captain, starting with a staff meeting and continuing to a bunch of very dull-but-important duties. Ransom is supervising four other lower-decks personnel, who are bringing a Bughoon on board—basically a space armadillo—for study. A Grazerite, who works for Starfleet as an ecologist, comes on board to study the Bughoons. Unfortunately, things go wrong when they discover too late that the Bughoons have a natural cloaking ability. Well, in truth, things go wrong sooner than that, as two of the ensigns working on the project are with Beta Shift and the other two are Delta Shift, and they do not get along. Credit: Paramount+ Throughout this part of the plot, Ransom is regularly giving dull speeches and telling stupid stories and also finding excuses to work out—then he takes a nap. Eventually, it comes out that he’s doing that on purpose to unite the squabbling ensigns by giving them a common enemy in Ransom. (One of the ensigns discovers his secret, but promises the commander that she won’t tell anyone. No one would believe that he was that smart anyhow…) I’m enjoying the way they’ve developed Ransom as something a bit more than the jock dudebro we were first introduced to, and this episode puts that all together nicely, showing how much of the jock dudebro is a front for an actual talented officer. Billups and one of his engineers spend the entire episode dealing with a cascading crisis in engineering as various juryrigged repairs that Billups has done. This is pretty much every technobabble crisis and solution in Trek history in a single plot thread, and it’s hilarious just to see it all in one place like this, and Billups handling all with his usual nerdy calm. My only disappointment with this end of the plot is that it’s not particular to Billups. Aside from a brief mention of a broken-down repair having possibly happened while his mother was visiting, so he messed it up, there’s no real reference to Billups’ backstory as part of the royal family on the RenFaire planet. My disappointment is mostly borne of my unreserved love for Hysperia, which is my single favorite thing that LD has given the Trek universe, and I really really really want to see more of it. What we got was fun, though, and also, hilariously, completely disconnected from every other plot. T’Ana has been told to work on her bedside manner, specifically with regards to pain management. T’Ana herself has an absurdly high pain tolerance, and she obviously has been having trouble remembering that her patients don’t feel the same way. Her completely insane solution is to cause herself lots and lots of pain. In contrast to Billups’ plot, T’Ana’s is 100% about this particular character, in all her foul-mouthed glory. Shaxs comes closest to having a serious plotline, as he periodically suffers from PTSD regarding his past as part of the Bajoran Resistance. He sees a hallucination of himself as a resistance fighter as well as tons of Cardassians he’s killed. The solution is for him to meditate and to have his astral form beat the shit out of the hallucination, because of course it is. Credit: Paramount+ Some of the plotlines start to collide when it’s revealed that the ecologist isn’t a Grazerite after all, but a Clicket in disguise. They plan to take over the ship so they can finally get some respect, as apparently they are never remembered. Indeed, Freeman doesn’t remember who they are, at first. She didn’t when the Clickets were brought up in the security briefing earlier… The Clickets go after the senior staff, which doesn’t go as well as hoped, as T’Ana is in a pain-induced frenzy and Shaxs is in full beat-the-shit-out-of-people mode, plus one of the ways the ensigns serving under Ransom bond is to take out the Clickets attacking the first officer. Freeman then remembers an important detail about the Clickets from the briefing: they hate being complimented. So she drives them off by saying nice things about them. Unable to stand it, the Clickets retreat. In the end, Freeman is concerned that she’ll have to put off her planned comm conversation with her husband—today’s their anniversary—but then Admiral Freeman himself shows up. Turns out that he and Stevens worked out a surprise visit and a romantic anniversary dinner on the holodeck. And in the end, Boimler, Mariner, Tendi, Rutherford, and T’Lyn—who were off-duty—enter the bar having totally missed all of this. It’s hilarious. One of the things I’ve loved about the way Trek has developed is the shift away from the Enterprise’s uniqueness. Up until Deep Space Nine debuted in 1993, Trek was all about “these are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise,” and there was a feeling that all the cool stuff happened to the crew of the Big E. Lots of tie-in fiction magnified this issue by establishing that the Enterprise crew were the absolute best at everything and the top authorities in their respective fields and that they single-handedly saved everything. With DS9 coming along, that changed, and soon it became clear that dealing with all kinds of crazy-ass shit isn’t just something that happens to ships called Enterprise, but happens all over the damn place. LD is at its best when it’s having fun with existing Trek tropes and taking them to their absurdist extreme, and this is one of their best examples of that. It’s summed up perfectly in the end when Freeman tells her husband what her day has been like—engineering crises, alien invaders, Shaxs fighting his personal demons, and so on—and the admiral expresses relief that it was just a normal day… Credit: Paramount+ Random thoughts Freeman is saved from the Clickets initially by Ensign Barnes, who is established in the morning briefing as having suffered from a virus that both evolved and devolved her, which is a delightful riff on the Trek series’ rather idiotic understanding of how evolution works in so many episodes (e.g., TNG’s “Genesis,” Voyager’s “Distant Origin” and “Threshold,” and Enterprise’s “Dear Doctor”). According to T’Ana, Barnes could read minds but also was afraid of fire. (T’Ana sedated her by thinking about a candle.) Barnes is in the process of recovering from the virus, so she still has a Cro-Magnon unibrow, but she apparently can still play the Sousaphone, as she does a concert for the captain. Later, she uses her cavewoman strength—and her Sousaphone—to subdue the Clickets. The absolute funniest thing in this episode is when Billups reports that the Cordry rocks have been replenished. Finally we have an explanation for those pebbles that get thrown all over the place when the ship takes damage even though one doesn’t usually see, um, rocks on a starship. According to Billups, the non-centrosymmetry of the Cordry rocks disrupt the charge leptons in the isolinear pathways of the main deflector. So glad to have that cleared up… Nothing for Kayshon beyond a single moment where he speaks in Tamarian metaphor. I was hoping he’d get one of the plotlines, but no. This was a way to expand on his character in a manner that several people speculated about in the comments a couple weeks ago, but which the show itself can’t really be arsed to do. Boimler’s almost starting to have an actual beard. Almost.[end-mark] The post How the Other Half Lives — <i>Star Trek: Lower Decks</i>: “Upper Decks” appeared first on Reactor.

When President George W. Bush stood in front of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20, 2005, and gave his second inaugural address, as this column has noted before, he argued that maintaining freedom in the United States would require spreading freedom all around the world. “We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion,” Bush declared. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” “So, it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” he said. As Bush said these words, the United States had already been at war in Afghanistan for more than three years. Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader behind the 9/11 attacks, had already fled to Pakistan, and the Taliban regime that had given al-Qaida sanctuary had been removed from power. Sixteen years after Bush’s second inaugural address, President Joe Biden was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2021. That August, Biden withdrew the last U.S. military forces from Afghanistan—but not before an ISIS-Khorasan suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. service members outside the Kabul airport. The Taliban, who retook control of Afghanistan that year, have been unable to defeat the ISIS-K terrorists who remain there. Since the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the Defense Department has engaged in what it calls Operation Enduring Sentinel. Last week, the lead inspector general for this operation released his latest quarterly report, which covered the period from July 1 through Sept. 30 of this year. “The mission of Operation Enduring Sentinel,” said this report, “is to contain terrorist threats emanating from Afghanistan and to protect the homeland by maintaining pressure on those threats.” So, how are things going in Afghanistan? Bush’s vision for spreading democracy and ending tyranny has not been achieved. It has especially failed Afghan women. “On August 21, the Taliban issued a new morality edict to govern personal conduct,” said the inspector general’s report. “The edict includes a requirement that women wear clothing that covers their entire body, bans their voices being heard in public, and further restricts their movement without a male relative.” Men are also targeted by this Taliban directive. “The edict also requires men to grow beards, bans drivers from playing music, and restricts the media from publishing images of people,” said the inspector general’s report. So, what happens if a woman walks down the street with her head uncovered while talking to a friend? Or a clean-shaven man drives by in a car while listening to music? “The Taliban Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice enforces this edict through verbal warnings, confiscation of property, and confinement,” said the inspector general’s support. “While enforcement of this new morality edict is not yet widespread,” said the report, “civil society and human rights activists say the new edict has increased fear and uncertainty among Afghans throughout the country.” As in 2001, the primary U.S. strategic interest in dealing with Afghanistan today is not in promoting democracy there but in protecting Americans. “The U.S. Government’s most critical enduring interest in Afghanistan is ensuring that Afghanistan can never again be a launching pad for terrorist attacks against the United States, and to look after the well-being of U.S. citizens detained in Afghanistan,” said the report. ISIS-K is now the primary terrorist group using Afghanistan as its base of operations. “According to the Defense Intelligence Agency, ISIS-K maintains the intent and capability to conduct attacks outside its traditional area of operations in South Asia,” said the inspector general’s report. “A July 19 U.N. Security Council report stated that the threat posed by ISIS-K has grown, as have threat levels in Europe and other areas,” said the report. ISIS-K, it said, “remains the most serious threat in the region projecting terror beyond Afghanistan.” The State Department, the report also said, “issued more than 33,000 Afghan Special Immigrant Visas in FY 2024, including more than 9,000 during the quarter.” During Biden’s time in office, there has also been a significant increase in the number of “inadmissible” Afghans showing up at the U.S.-Mexico border. “The Department of Homeland Security,” said the inspector general’s report, “reported that Customs and Border Protection encountered 68 Afghan ‘inadmissible noncitizens’ at the U.S. Southwest Border Ports of Entry in FY 2022, 342 in FY 2023, and 1,893 non-admissible Afghans in FY 2024.” Did any ISIS terrorists cross the border illegally between the ports of entry in FY 2024? The possibility that some did is one reason the Trump administration needs to follow through on its commitments to enforce the immigration laws and secure our border. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Biden’s Open Border and the ISIS-K Threat appeared first on The Daily Signal.