Alise Post Wins Sixth National BMX Championship

St. Cloud,Minnesota native Alise Post, a 2012 Olympian and almost a sure selection for the Rio games, has won her sixth BMX national championship at Oldsmar, Florida.

Koochella Named Track Team of 2015 by USA Cycling

Peer USA Cycling:
The Koochella club was designed to promote women in cycling with a basis in track racing due to its belief that the track scene is one of the best new racer incubators in the sport. Koochella worked this last year with the National Sports Center Velodrome in Minnesota to grow the women’s racing scene. This paid off as the velodrome now houses two robust women’s fields and continues to grow. The club did this by hosting a women’s introductory skills clinic, focusing on rider retention both on and off the team, and by covering race fees for new women racers. Because of all its efforts to volunteer time and money to the local track scene, Koochella was named track club of the year.

Euskal Emakumeen Bira Bad Poster

This poster advertising the April 13-17 Euskal Emakumeen Bira women's road cycling race in the Spanish Basque country irritated the Basque Women's Institute, who considered it to be "sexist". Race organizers pulled the poster so as not to offend the Institute. It's difficult to say what, exactly might be sexist about it. The picture shows 2015 victor Katarzyna Niewiadoma making a moue. So what?

Larry Summers Wants To Eliminate Cash

The elites live on a higher plane than the schlemiels that produce the food they eat, the mansions they live in and the automobiles they are chauffeured about in. So it shouldn't be any surprise when a couple of them say things that are basically incomprehensible to one of us proles. 

Exhibit A. One time Harvard president and secretary of the treasury Larry Summers wants to get rid of the hundred dollar bill, the 500 Euro bill, and, ultimately, all cash, as he explains in this WaPo missive. Ostensibly, the financial genius wants the complete digitilization of money in an effort to stem crime, which according to him, operates on a cash basis with large bills that can't be monitored by government agencies. Many people are already living in a digital financial bubble, their paychecks directly deposited into bank accounts and all but the smallest purchases made by credit and debit cards. The supposed convenience and security of this outweighs any possible drawbacks. Your pixel money is completely safe in the servers of Mega-bank. You just don't need cash, unless you're a cocaine importer. Having tangible money is now become a crime because of technological innovation.


Larry Summers

Exhibit B. President of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, Neel Kashkari, gave a speech Monday on that organization's efforts to find a solution to the "Too Big To Fail" syndrome in the nation's banking community. Remarkably, the wizards that run the country's financial sector admit in public that they don't know what the causes of bank failures are and how those debacles can be prevented. Best of all, the group at the Minny Fed has a form on its website to gather input from interested citizens on just what they should do to prevent another "Great Recession",  minneapolisfed.org. You can't make this stuff up.


Neel Kashkari, President of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank

Female Genital Mutilation

Indonesian women among 200m suffering genital mutilation, says UNICEF report 

 

(From AP)
At least 200 million girls and women in 30 countries are estimated to have undergone female circumcision, half of them in Egypt, Ethiopia and Indonesia, the UN children’s agency said in a report released Thursday night.

 The UNICEF statistical report said the global figure includes nearly 70 million more girls and women than it estimated in 2014. It said this is due to population growth in some countries and new data from Indonesia.

 The UN General Assembly unanimously approved a resolution in December 2012 calling for a global ban on female genital mutilation, a centuries-old practice stemming from the belief that circumcising girls controls women’s sexuality and enhances fertility. One of the targets in the new U.N. goals adopted last September calls for the practice to be eliminated by 2030.


UNICEF statistical expert Claudia Cappa, lead author of the report, said the estimate of 200 million circumcisions comes from household surveys on the prevalence of female genital mutilation, and statistical modeling.
The 30 countries, mainly in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, “have large-scale representative data,” she said.
Cappa said the practice exists in other countries not in the study, where large-scale data was not available, like India, Malaysia, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, as well as in pockets in Australia, North America and Europe where immigrants from countries with a large number of female circumcisions live.

____________________________________

Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, we seldom hear anything about the barbaric and common practice of MALE circumcision.

 
Using these assumptions, we estimate that approximately 30% of the world’s males aged 15 years or older are circumcised (Table 2). Of these, around two thirds (69%) are Muslim (living mainly in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa), 0.8% are Jewish, and 13% are non-Muslim and non-Jewish men living in the United States of America.

This method is likely to underestimate the true prev-

alence of male circumcision, as we have excluded

circumcision among non-Muslim and non-Jewish

men in heavily populated countries such as Brazil,

China, India and Japan where a small proportion of

men are also circumcised, for medical, cultural or

social reasons. If we assume that 5% of men aged

15 years or above who are not included in the coun-

tries or religions above are circumcised, then our

estimate rises to 33%.

World Health Organization

It's wrong to take a knife to the vagina of little girls but just fine to chop off the foreskin of little boys.

Public Opinion Polling

The efforts of the Radio Project conspirators to manipulate the population, spawned the modern pseudoscience of public opinion polling, in order to gain greater control over the methods they were developing.
Today, public opinion polls, like the television news, have been completely integrated into our society. A "scientific survey" of what people are said to think about an issue can be produced in less than twenty-four hours. Some campaigns for high political office are completely shaped by polls; in fact, many politicians try to create issues which are themselves meaningless, but which they know will look good in the polls, purely for the purpose of enhancing their image as "popular." Important policy decisions are made, even before the actual vote of the citizenry or the legislature, by poll results. Newspapers will occasionally write pious editorials calling on people to think for themselves, even as the newspaper's business agent sends a check to the local polling organization.
The idea of "public opinion" is not new, of course. Plato spoke against it in his Republic over two millenia ago; Alexis de Tocqueville wrote at length of its influence over America in the early nineteenth century. But, nobody thought to measure public opinion before the twentieth century, and nobody before the 1930's thought to use those measurements for decision-making.
It is useful to pause and reflect on the whole concept. The belief that public opinion can be a determinant of truth is philosophically insane. It precludes the idea of the rational individual mind. Every individual mind contains the divine spark of reason, and is thus capable of scientific discovery, and understanding the discoveries of others. The individual mind is one of the few things that cannot, therefore, be "averaged." Consider: at the moment of creative discovery, it is possible, if not probable, that the scientist making the discovery is the only person to hold that opinion about nature, whereas everyone else has a different opinion, or no opinion. One can only imagine what a "scientifically-conducted survey" on Kepler's model of the solar system would have been, shortly after he published the Harmony of the World: 2% for, 48% against, 50% no opinion.

Michael Minnicino, The Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness, Winter 1992 issue of Fidelio magazine.  http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/921_frankfurt.html