Diana Carillo shares an incident in Trump’s America:

A few friends and I went to Saint Marc’s in Huntington Beach today. My sister and my friend were seated first and the waiter asked them for their “proof of residency” when they ordered a drink. My friend in disbelief repeated what he said and his response was “yeah, I need to make sure you’re from here before I serve you.” Not knowing that this happened to them, my friend and I were then seated and he returned to the table and asked us for our “proof of residency.” After fully digesting what he said, we all got up and left to speak to the manager. For a few seconds I thought maybe he was being a smart ass or joking but the fact that he said “I need to make sure you’re from here before I serve you” was completely unacceptable. How many others has he said this to? I hope this employee is reprimanded for his actions. No establishment should tolerate discriminatory actions from their employees. PLEASE SHARE WITH YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS!

It has 1,541 shares to date.

Originally a comment by Claire on Decline.

The US’s leading position in scientific research is what brought me to this country in the first place. I did my postdoctoral training at the NIH, and when I moved on to a faculty position, the recent years of tight budgets were a concern. As the Atlantic reporter notes, the funding lines have been very tight for many years. The leading research grant mentioned is called the R01, and it’s true that the average age of a first R01 awardee has been climbing for years too.

What is not appreciated is that because about 80% of extramural funding is already committed for grants awarded in previous years (the R01 is typically a 4 or 5 year grant, other mechanisms are also often multi-year affairs), so by slashing NIH’s budget so dramatically, it basically means no new grants will be funded and existing grants may even have to be cut.

There are other knock on effects of tighter funding. Every hour I spend writing grant applications is an hour not spent doing actual science or writing up work I’ve already done. I submitted a dozen grant applications last year. I’ll probably submit at least that many or more this year. And I’m one of the lucky ones, my university doesn’t require that I cover any proportion of my salary until I get tenure. Many of my friends are supposed to cover anywhere from 30-75% of their salary within 3 years of being hired. That’s always got the potential to be stressful, but in the current funding climate, it’s actively pushing good researchers out of academia and into the arms of industry. Nothing wrong with industry, but they don’t do a lot of the basic research that underpins each field.

If the NIH is unable to make any new grants over the next few years, it’s hard to overstate what a disaster that is. Private foundations and public charities cannot pick up the slack. Training programs that get cut are hard to restart because the infrastructure and the expertise goes away. And once training programs vanish, the jobs they supplied a trained workforce for has to recruit from other countries. Except if the Trump administration also cuts immigration, then maybe those posts will just go unfilled.

Some people may think that what I and my fellow scientists do is so removed from their everyday life that making our lives harder won’t affect them. I guarantee that it will. It might not be obvious, at least at first. But as the US falls behind in scientific research in all disciplines, a new powerhouse will emerge. And businesses who rely on that basic research for their applied research, may decide it’s easier to just move to whichever country comes out on top.

It turns out she wasn’t wasting police time after all.

A teenager who was found dead with her throat slit months after reporting her ex-boyfriend to police was issued with a fine for wasting police time, a murder trial has heard.

The body of Shana Grice, 19, was discovered in her bedroom in Portslade, East Sussex, following an attack last August. An attempt had been made to start a fire in two separate areas of her flat.

Her former boyfriend, Michael Lane, 27, is standing trial for her murder, which he denies.

She’d gone back to a previous boyfriend, Ashley Cooke.

She told police Lane was stalking her in February 2016, after he allegedly hid outside her house, left unwanted flowers and a note that read “Shona will always cheat on you” on Mr Cooke’s car.

One month later, Ms Grice reported that Lane had assaulted her, but he denied the allegation and provided texts that suggested she wanted to be in a relationship with him.

The court heard that Ms Grice was then charged with “having caused wasteful employment of police by making a false report” because she failed to disclose that Lane was her on-off boyfriend, and was issued with a fixed-penalty notice.

Lane stole her keys and broke into her house to watch her sleep, but the police said no big deal.

Then she turned up dead with her throat slashed.

Massive cuts to federal funding of science research? Not really such a great idea.

For about a decade, stagnant funding at the NIH was considered a serious impediment to scientific progress. Now, scientists say they are facing something much worse.

I asked more than a dozen scientists—across a wide range of disciplines, with affiliations to private schools, public schools, and private foundations—and their concern about the proposed budget was resounding. The consequences of such a dramatic reduction in public spending on science and medicine would be deadly, they told me. More than one person said that losing public funding on this scale would dramatically lower the country’s global scientific standing. One doctor said he believed Trump’s proposal, if passed, would set off a lost generation in American science.

But we’ll have a much much much bigger military than anyone else. That’s all that counts, right? Power, force, strength, violence?

And what happens to all the crucial basic science without billionaire backing—the kind of research with wide-ranging applications that can dramatically enhance human understanding of the world?  NIH funding is spread across all disciplines, several scientists reminded me, whereas private funding tends to be driven by the personal preferences of investors.

…

[I]n a privately-funded system, investor interest dictates the kind of science that’s pursued in the first place.

“Put simply, privatization will mean that more ‘sexy,’ ‘hot’ science will be funded, and we will miss important discoveries since most breakthroughs are based on years and decades of baby steps,” said Kelly Cosgrove, an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale University. “The hare will win, the tortoise will lose, and America will not be scientifically great.”

America’s enduring scientific greatness rests largely on the scientists of the future. And relying on private funding poses an additional problem for supporting people early in their careers. The squeeze on public funding in recent years has posed a similar concern, as young scientists are getting a smaller share of key publicly-funded research grants, according to a 2014 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1983, about 18 percent of scientists who received the NIH’s leading research grant were 36 years old or younger. In 2010, just 3 percent of them were. Today, more than twice as many such grants go to scientists who are over 65 years old compared with people under 36—a reversal from just 15 years ago, according to the report.

The proposed NIH cuts “would bring American biomedical science to a halt and forever shut out a generation of young scientists,” said Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. “It would take a decade for us to recover and move the world’s center of science to the U.S. from China, Germany, and Singapore, where investments are now robust.”

But we’ll always have college football.

Because it made me laugh until I couldn’t see.

Lucy, outnumbered by cats. pic.twitter.com/2J8x9dbnNz

— Cherie Priest, Allegedly (@cmpriest) March 17, 2017

Another bit of nonsense from the far-right trolls:

It has shown up on Irish trivia Facebook pages, in Scientific American magazine, and on white nationalist message boards: the little-known story of the Irish slaves who built America, who are sometimes said to have outnumbered and been treated worse than slaves from Africa.

But it’s not true.

Historians say the idea of Irish slaves is based on a misreading of history and that the distortion is often politically motivated. Far-right memes have taken off online and are used as racist barbs against African-Americans. “The Irish were slaves, too,” the memes often say. “We got over it, so why can’t you?”

Got over it? Oh really? So there’s no such thing as Irish nationalism, and no sense of grievance to go with it? Ha.

A small group of Irish and American scholars has spent years pushing back on the false history. Last year, 82 Irish scholars and writers signed an open letter denouncing the Irish slave myth and asking publications to stop mentioning it. Some complied, removing or revising articles that referenced the false claims, but the letter’s impact was limited.

The myth is based in confusion about the indenture system, which was plenty bad enough but still wasn’t comparable to slavery.

“I’m not saying it was pleasant or anything — it was the opposite — but it was a completely different category from slavery,” said Liam Hogan, a research librarian in Ireland who has spearheaded the debunking effort. “It was a transitory state.”

The legal differences between indentured servitude and chattel slavery were profound, according to Matthew Reilly, an archaeologist who studies Barbados. Unlike slaves, servants were considered legally human. Their servitude was based on a contract that limited their service to a finite period of time, usually about seven years, in exchange for passage to the colonies. They did not pass their unfree status on to descendants.

Indenture was a contract; slavery was not.

The memes sometimes pop up in apolitical settings, like history trivia websites, but their recent spread has mirrored escalating racial and political tension in the United States, Mr. Hogan said. Central to the memes is the notion that historians and the media are covering up the truth. He said he has received death threats from Americans for his work.

“These memes are the No. 1 derailment people use when they talk about the slave trade,” he said. “Look in any race-related or slavery-related news story from the last two years and someone will mention it in the comments.”

Ugh. God I get sick of trolls.

They often hijack specific atrocities committed against black slaves and substitute Irish people for the actual victims. A favorite event to use is the 1781 Zong massacre, in which over 130 African slaves were thrown to their deaths off a slave ship.

InfoWars, the far-right conspiracy site favored by President Trump, is one site that has falsely claimed Irish people were the victims of the Zong massacre, whose death toll it inflated by adding a zero to the end.

Also, the Zongs helped Obama tapp Trump’s phone. They’re bad (or sick) hombres.

The white slavery narrative has long been a staple of the far right, but it became specifically Irish after the 2000 publication of “To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland,” a book by the late journalist Sean O’Callaghan, which Mr. Hogan and others have said was shoddily researched. It received positive reviews in Ireland, however, and was widely read there.

In America, the book connected the white slave narrative to an influential ethnic group of over 34 million people, many of whom had been raised on stories of Irish rebellion against Britain and tales of anti-Irish bias in America at the turn of the 20th century. From there, it took off.

As bullshit so often does.

Hadley Freeman cautiously utters a few words of agreement with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and even with Jenni Murray, though in Murray’s case she is naturally careful to include some contempt too. One mustn’t let women old enough to be one’s mother seem to be just as clever and alert as oneself.

Should you be struggling with a gift idea for that special person in your life, here’s a suggestion: how about a home DNA kit? These are all the rage in America, I recently read in the New York Times, with 3m sold by ancestry.com alone in the past five years. At last, Americans can find out how Irish they actually are.

On the one hand, this makes sense: identity is the hot issue of our age. On the other, it makes no sense at all, because your identity is, we keep being told, whatever you want it to be.

Well, we do and we don’t. We keep being told that about certain identities, and we also keep being told it doesn’t apply to certain other identities. It’s a huge – and ludicrous – generalization which gets deployed for some purposes and hastily bundled out of sight for others.

Nowhere is the discussion about identity more passionately felt than within the transgender movement. If you feel you are a woman, you are a woman is the rule, although some women are querying this. Last week, the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was asked by Channel 4’s Cathy Newman whether trans women are “real women”. “My feeling is trans women are trans women,” Adichie replied, a response not so much tautological as almost palindromic. “I don’t think it’s a good thing to conflate everything into one.”

This was a clearer way of saying what Jenni Murray had written in an article that clumsily argued trans women are not “real women”.

Neatly done, the sting in the tail. Murray is old enough to be Freeman’s mother, therefore she’s clumsy. Murray mustn’t be allowed to get away with too much, not at her age.

The fear of being on the wrong side of history is a strong persuader, and it was clearly behind much of the reaction to the news that the BBC had slapped down Murray. Instead of crying foul at the broadcaster’s palpably nervy excuse that their presenters must remain “impartial on controversial topics” (while having no problem with Gary Lineker sharing his political views), female commentators gave Murray a kicking. Let all women be women, was the verdict.

That last sentence is rather “clumsy,” if you like. “Let all women be women” – well duh. What she meant must be “Let all people who identify as women be women.”

Yet no one is asking why more women than men are raising objections here. Perhaps people think this is just what women are like: uniquely catty. Lifelong feminists, especially older ones, who express any reservations about eliding the experiences of trans and cis women are dismissed as bigoted ol’ bitches – and maybe some are.

Oh, don’t be shy. Call them bigoted ol’ cunts, and then say that maybe some are.

But then she drops the ol’ bitches routine and says things that will call down the Eumenides on her.

But there are real ethical issues here, and they overwhelmingly affect women.

Sport is one obvious example. Male-born bodies have had different testosterone levels and muscle distribution from female ones. No one knows what the solution is but pretending there isn’t a difference is ridiculous.

Is it really true that no one knows what the solution is? Isn’t it rather that suggesting solutions is impermissible?

Then there are prisons. It’s easy to cheer on Chelsea Manning, but Ian Huntley – who now reportedly wishes to be known as Lian Huntley and be transferred to a women’s prison – is a tougher sell. Should a man with a history of crimes against women and girls really be in a female prison?

And Ian Huntley is just one of several. There’s something of a trend of male prisoners or defendants with histories of violence suddenly “identifying as” women.

In January, it was reported that the British Medical Association advised that instead of referring to “expectant mothers”, health providers should talk about the less exclusionary “pregnant people”. Some young feminists are even asking if it’s OK to use the words “female” and “woman” – yet men are not being urged to avoid mentioning their gender. Is it any wonder some women are calling bullshit?

Oh look, here come the Kindly Ones now, brandishing their machetes.

We all need a little refreshment.

Gnu Atheism:

Useful.