After reading that a few times

..I have no freakin’ idea what the idiot is saying.

From “Cal Poly Professor Argues Squirrels Are Subjected to Racially-Charged Media Bias”:

Given that the shift in tree squirrel demographics is a relatively recent phenomenon, this case presents a unique opportunity to question and retheorize the ontological given of ‘otherness’ that manifests, in part, through a politics whereby animal food choices ‘[come] to stand in for both compliance and resistance to the dominant forces in [human] culture’. I, therefore, juxtapose feminist posthumanist theories and feminist food studies scholarship to demonstrate how eastern fox squirrels are subjected to gendered, racialized, and speciesist thinking in the popular news media as a result of their feeding/eating practices, their unique and unfixed spatial arrangements in the greater Los Angeles region, and the western, modernist human frame through which humans interpret these actions.
— “When ‘Angelino’ squirrels don’t eat nuts: a feminist posthumanist politics of consumption across southern California,” Teresa Lloro-Bidart

I dunno. It could be another Sokal hoax, but s/he/zi/it is in Kalifornia.

Added: OK, I checked the Cal Poly Pomona web site, and this ditz is on staff there, and does “focus” ” on exploring and understanding human-animal relationships in educational spaces, with a particular focus on feminist posthumanist and ecofeminist theories.” So it’s possible she wrote this drivel, and that she is serious. But dear Bog, it looks like something generated by a leftist random jargon generator.

-psst- NO menstruation app is going to work for them.

You can wish as hard as you want, but objective reality isn’t going to change your chromosomes to suit your insanity.

Period tracking apps failing users in basic ways, study finds
Other users complained that the iconography used in the apps assumed that a woman’s sexual partner would be male, failing to account for those in same sex relationships, and also assume all users identify as female, which excludes transgender users or those with non-binary gender identities. (emphasis added-cb)

Seriously. They expect guys in drag to menstruate.

Oh. And yes:

The research was funded by the Intel Science and Technology Center for Pervasive Computing, the University of Washington, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the National Science Foundation.

That is your tax dollars at work.

If they’ll give me a couple hundred thousand dollars, I’ll tell ’em exactly why period tracking app don’t work for “women” with XY chromosome sets.

What could possibly go wrong?

Cougars could save lives by lowering vehicle collisions with deer
A team of researchers has for the first time begun to quantify the economic and social impact of bringing back large carnivores. Using cougars and their value in reducing deer-vehicle collisions as a case study, the researchers found that within 30 years of cougars recolonizing the Eastern U.S., large cats could thin deer populations and reduce vehicle collisions by 22 percent — each year preventing five human fatalities, 680 injuries and avoiding costs of $50 million.

Might I suggest California as the initial test area?

But I saw it on TV

As seen at WUWT:

Quote of the Week- Mann parodies science: ‘we don’t need no stinking data’
“What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues is that these tools that we’ve spent years developing increasingly are unnecessary because we can see climate change, the impacts of climate change, now, playing out in real time, on our television screens, in the 24-hour news cycle.”

-psst- Mann, you do know those aren’t documentaries you’re watching on the SyFy channel, right?

Weather BS

This Is the Year’s Weirdest Weather Moment Yet
It’s been a bizarre winter, and Wednesday might just bring the weirdest moment yet: It could be as warm as 40 degrees at the North Pole.

I don’t think so. Current conditions for the North Pole shows 6 below zero (21 degrees F) and 13 m/s (29 MPH). Scroll down, and you’ll see temperatures are forecasted to drop from there.

More likely this Newser nitwit, aided and abetted by Discovery.com clickbait, confused the North Pole with North Pole, Alaska, which isn’t particularly close to 90N: 42 degrees F.

Climate change, my ass.

Bovine Excrement

Most heavily-armed states in America
1. Wyoming

Wyoming has the highest number of registered guns per capita of any state in America. For every 1,000 residents, there are 195.7 guns, about three times the rate of second-place D.C. That’s 114,052 registered firearms in a state with a population of only 582,658 people.

Since Wyoming doesn’t register firearms, I tend to doubt that number. In fact…

That number — of registered, no less — firearms looks awfully familiar.

Yep. That bogus article, whose author thinks “Firearms are defined by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives as a destructive device, machine gun, silencer, short-barreled rifle, short-barreled shotgun and any other weapon capable of being concealed on the person which a shot can be discharged.” lives on. Sort of like Kellerman’s “studies”.

Gun-grabber ‘science’

Study Says Concealed Carry Permits Don’t Affect Crime
Supporters insist that allowing people to legally carry concealed handguns reduces crime, but that has not been the result in at least four states that have tried it, including Texas, according to a newly published academic study led by a Texas A&M researcher.

No, it doesn’t:

Researchers used two sources of data from 1998 to 2010: concealed handgun license information and arrest data from Uniform Crime Reports, which the FBI compiles nationwide to gauge arrests for serious crimes including homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft and arson. (emphasis added-cb)

See what they did there? Instead of comparing violent crime rates to CCW licensing, they looked at only arrests for violent crimes. That allows them to ignore the fact that crime rates are the lowest in decades.

All they proved is that CCW licensing doesn’t make cops any better at finding and arresting perps. That’s actually a point for the RKBA side, since anti-CCW panic-mongers always shriek that CCW will bring back the Wild West. Apparently it doesn’t, or they’d have found a jump in concealed carriers being arrested.

Heard about that “gun culture” survey?

Take it with a 150 pound grain of salt:

YouGov invited 11 471 potential participants, out of which 5392 (47.0%) started the survey and eventually 4622 (40.3%) completed the survey. Using the 4622 participants, propensity score matching with 2010 American Community Survey sample with selection within strata by weighted sampling with replacements was performed to obtain a nationally representative population. Out of the 4622 respondents, 4000 were matched and identified to be nationally representative. This study was performed using the 4000 respondents who were identified as a nationally representative cohort.

Translation:
“We based this on a survey that tried to reach 11,471 participants. Significantly more than half told us to piss off. Of those that started the survey, another 770 told us to shove it when the questions were too intrusive. That left us with 40% of the planned population. But 1,600+ of those answers didn’t suit our agenda, so we threw them out. We cherry-picked a mere 4,000 that we arbitrarily decided met our preconceived notions.”

Seriously, when was the last time you told an anonymous pollster, who knew where you lived, how many guns you own?

So based on that BS methodology, they determined that New Hampshire of all places has a mere 14.4% firearms ownership rate. In my area more than 15% of the homes had private shooting ranges (probably a third to a half; the rest shot at their neighbors’ ranges). I suspect gun ownership is somewhat higher than 14.4%. Although the Nashua Tree Streets might be even higher.

For those who doubt the evil intent of the study authors:

[Bindu Kalesan, lead author] is an unpaid Vice-President of Gun Violence Survivors Foundation…

And the footnotes reference the victim-disarming Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and the Brady Campaign.