Women’s Power Index: Find Out Where Women Lead—and Why It Matters

 New data from CFR’s Women’s Power Index tracks countries on their progress toward gender parity in political representation.  

https://www.cfr.org/blog/womens-power-index-find-out-where-women-lead-and-why-it-matters-0

The Women and Foreign Policy program’s most recent update of the “Women’s Power Index” ranks 193 UN member states on their progress toward gender parity in political participation. It analyzes the proportion of women who serve as heads of state or government, in cabinets, in national legislatures, as candidates for national legislatures, and in local government bodies, and visualizes the gender gap in political representation.  

Since the last update in 2021, global progress toward gender parity in political representation has increased by just over 1 point, to 28.5, on the 100-point aggregate scale employed. Seven new countries rose over fifty points in their gender parity score: Australia, Cape Verde, Chile, Germany, Monaco, Senegal, and Serbia. Austria, Namibia, and Portugal have fallen under fifty points. The United States ranks seventy-fifth overall on political gender parity, a decline from its previous rank of forty-third. Iceland rose from third to first place, which was previously held by Costa Rica.  
 

Across the five indicators, progress has continued, albeit unevenly. Since the end of World War II, 75 of the 193 countries have elected a female head of state or government, with the most progress coming in the past two decades. Eleven countries elected their first woman into high office during the 2000s, twenty-five in the 2010s, and eleven thus far in the 2020s. Out of 193 countries: 

• Twenty-six UN member states currently have a female head of state or government – nearly an 18 percent increase from 2021. Two countries (Barbados and Bosnia and Herzegovina) currently have both a woman head of state and head of government. And two countries not recognized by the United Nations, Kosovo and Taiwan, are led by women. 

• Thirteen UN member states have at least 50 percent women in the national cabinet – the same number as in 2021.  

• Six UN member states have at least 50 percent women in the national legislature – a 100 percent increase from 2021.   

The interactive presentation includes the following features: 

• a dynamic global map displaying each country’s indicators for gender parity in representation 

• a searchable list of current female heads of state or government 

• a customizable table to compare data on gender parity from different nations and regions 

• New analysis and research on why women’s political representation and leadership matters 

Worth repeating: The United States ranks seventy-fifth overall on political gender parity, a decline from its previous rank of forty-third.

Not hard to guess why this is happening. What are we going to do about it?

Regarding the origins of COVID: We were probably lied to and why it is important

Some people think that being concerned about the origin of Sars-Cov-2 or COVID-19 is a waste of time. I strongly disagree. Science is about finding and reporting facts and truths, not spinning inconvenient reality into something politically palatable for some people or any government. 

I've come to reassess my July 16 post on the COVID origin for a second time. Initially it seemed we were lied to. Then I reassessed after seeing a different analysis and attributed the early COVID origin story to incomplete knowledge and confusion. Now after looking at additional information, I believe we were lied to and betrayed by high level scientists in the US and Europe, with the knowledge and complicity of the Chinese the US governments.

This story is long and complex. In summary, my current beliefs are:

• It is more likely than not, maybe ~65% chance, that COVID-19 arose from a laboratory research and an accident that allowed the virus to escape, most likely by infecting someone in the lab. It seems less likely that COVID arose from a natural cause such as an infection coming from infected animals in food markets or sources in nature, such as bat guano in caves. Evidence of that possibility lies in the fact that the Wuhan research was conducted under a lower level of biosafety containment level (BSL-2) that research with viruses like this warrant, i.e., at least BSL-3 or maybe BSL-4. Under BSL-2 conditions it is pretty easy for an infectious, airborne virus to get loose from the lab. BSL 1, 2, 3 and 4 containment equipment and protocols are summarized by the CDC here.

• Tony Fauci very probably, maybe ~85% chance, lied under oath** to the US Senate when he falsely claimed the US did not do gain-of-function research (making viruses worse, i.e., more pathogenic and/or more infectious) and did not fund virus research in Wuhan China. The implications of this mendacity is huge in my opinion. Those lies suggest Fauci is hiding something important. The thing he is most likely trying to hide is the implication of the facts that the NIH did fund gain-of-function (GoF) research in the Wuhan lab ($600,000 according to FactCheck.org). Therefore, research funded by US tax dollars could have been the some or all of the source of research leading to COVID-19 and the pandemic. Fauci and other scientists were trying to protect themselves, the NIH, and maybe the reputation of science itself, but in my opinion the cover-up attempt failed.

** Fauci is quoted as saying under oath: 'the NIH has never and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.' In Jan. 2018, the US government restarted GoF research, which had been paused for three years to do a major safety reassessment. The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health commented on the rationale for lifting the GoF research ban:

Those who support such research think that it is necessary to develop strategies to fight rapidly evolving pathogens that pose a threat to public health, such as the flu virus, the viruses causing Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), or Ebola. For instance, some of this so-called “gain-of-function” research—which aims to make germs more contagious, more deadly, or both—has aimed to create viruses that can easily pass between ferrets, so that researchers can understand how those changes occur and potentially how viruses go from infecting animals in the wild to transmitting between humans.

• In Feb 2020, leading researchers published a highly influential paper, entitled The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2, that concluded that COVID-19 did not come from a laboratory or lab accident. Fauci and Francis Collins (head of the NIH) both favored that conclusion and apparently influenced the paper in that direction. That paper ended most debate about the origin for at least a year. There was insufficient evidence to draw that  conclusion. Arguments for remaining concerned about the origin of COVID-19 are valid. This video at ~4:50-7:15 (and later) discusses why the scientists might have lied by excluding a possible lab accident or source and why that untruthfulness is so terribly damaging to science generally and to public trust in government and science.

• In view of the flawed, politics-based conclusion about the origin of COVID in the Feb. 2020 paper, some scientists are now petitioning for that paper to be retracted. The public is invited to sign the petition online at this link. I signed the petition and donated money to the effort. That paper has caused serious irreparable damage, as the video above discusses at length. It needs to be retracted. People should sign the petition, with or without donating money.

• Evidence of US government complicity in a cover-up includes the summary quoted below. This is from a November 2022 webinar on the COVID origin. It is one hour and 41 minutes in length. The bottom line is that journalists have to file lawsuits to force the US government to turn over relevant COVID-related information that is supposed to be legally available under the FOIA. The US government is still stonewalling and breaking the law. I take this as compelling evidence there is an ongoing cover-up to keep the American people disinformed about the COVID origin via lies of omission. The summary comments:

Ms. Emily Kopp, an investigative journalist from US Right to Know (USRTK), has been gaining access to information that the US government and others did not release through dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits. In her presentation, Ms. Kopp repeatedly emphasized that there has been a lack of transparency from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other major actors regarding the high-risk research that has been ongoing in the US and abroad. She voiced her concerns about the credibility and integrity of leading institutions and individuals in the US, concluding, “The public deserves more clarity about the pandemic’s early days.”

Ms. Kopp described the extensive collaboration among labs and organizations in the US and labs in China on world-leading high-risk virology research, much of which had been underwritten by NIH and EcoHealth Alliance. According to Ms. Kopp, more than 1000 documents and progress reports from NIH and EcoHealth have still not been released.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Chair of the 

Lancet COVID-19 Commission

at the webinar

• The mainstream media is mostly failing to report most of this. Maybe that is mostly due to some combination of incompetence, subversion by corporate owners and maybe even some corruption. One needs to look elsewhere for reliable information, e.g., the Webinar shown above that Prof. Sachs led. The source Public comments on how its reporting and the documentary evidence it is based on is being attacked and smeared by some scientists, including Dr. Kristian Andersen, who co-authored the flawed Feb. 2020 paper:

The three of us and Matt Taibbi of Racket spread “conspiracy theories” and engaged in “quote mining” for our Tuesday scoop, “Top Scientists Misled Congress About Covid Origins, Newly Released Emails And Messages Show,” according to Kristian Andersen, the scientist who was the main subject of our article. The only thing his messages revealed, Andersen said, was “Scientists doing science and having private conversations.” (Andersen did not respond to our requests for comment.)

“None of this is surprising — the surprising part is that 'journalists' and others keep falling for the same bullshit,” wrote Andersen.

But his emails and Slack messages show that there was nothing theoretical about his conspiracy to discredit the lab leak hypothesis. Andersen makes clear in his messages that the purpose of the “Proximal Origin” paper was to “disprove,” in his words, the lab leak hypothesis. It was a propaganda exercise, not a scientific one.

The documents that Public and Racket were the first to report on show Andersen and his co-authors, Andrew Rambaut, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry, conspiring — by which we mean they made secret plans to engage in deceptive and unethical behavior and — to spread disinformation. Their conspiracy included coordinating with their “higher-ups” in the US and UK governments to deceive journalists, including a New York Times reporter.  

Our reporting led several people sympathetic to the lab leak hypothesis to demand the release of all the emails and Slack messages. “This calls for more transparency,” tweeted Zeynep Tufecki, a professor at Columbia University and a contributor to the New York Times, “rather than selective, partial releases —especially since the messages imply coordinated efforts for manipulating journalists etc…”

We agree and are thus happy today to release the full cache of Slack messages and emails covering the discussions between Andersen et al. as they wrote their influential “Proximal Origin,” paper, which Anthony Fauci and others in the US government used to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis.  

The messages vindicated researchers like the Broad Center’s Alina Chan, who coauthored a major book, Viral: The Search For Covid’s Origin, with British science journalist Matt Ridley, who Public interviewed for a podcast last month.

Public's links to the information their 

reporting is based on

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for bringing most of the information cited above to my attention.

Bits: Revising inconvenient history; Internet safety; Hunter files an ethics complaint

One thing that most or all authoritarian demagogues feel a need to do is to revise inconvenient history. That helps their dark free speech campaigns to create a false images of themselves as an often persecuted hero who is valiantly protecting the nation and its people from often or usually imagined enemies and threats. These days favored faux threats include immigrants (a long-time favorite), atheism (a millennia long favorite), socialism, tolerant secularism and same-sex marriage. In his run for power in 2024, DeSantis has been a leader in revising inconvenient history. The NYT writes:

After an overhaul to Florida’s African American history standards, Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state’s firebrand governor campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, is facing a barrage of criticism this week from politicians, educators and historians, who called the state’s guidelines a sanitized version of history.

For instance, the standards say that middle schoolers should be instructed that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” — a portrayal that drew wide rebuke.

Slavery developed skills in slaves that could sometimes be applied their personal benefit. Notice the nuanced way the racists worded their subtle lie. Those skills, whatever they might have been (probably not enumerated because there were none), could in some instances, be applied for their personal benefit. Everyone knows that slaves could not do much of anything for their own benefit other than not pissing off their White owners. For example, they could not protect themselves from being raped by horny White Christian slave owners.

In some instances, pigs could fly. See, flying pigs:

________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________

The WaPo writes about a new safety feature that people can turn on to enhance protection from hackers:

Google has an ‘Enhanced Safe Browsing’ feature. Should you use it?

The short answer to the headline: Yes, probably.

I’ll walk you through the downsides, too, including Google knowing more about your web activity. That’s why Google isn’t turning on these extra security measures without your permission.

But if you just want basic advice, turn on Google’s Enhanced Safe Browsing at this link and carry on.  

Google says that if you turn on Enhanced Safe Browsing that’s available for Chrome and Gmail, the company takes extra steps to warn you when you roam onto suspected scammer sites.

I turned it on in view of rising threats from AI-generated hacking and who knows what else is out there trying to screw me and everyone else. 

________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________

Hunter Biden is in a snit. He's mad at MTG for showing his nude pics in the House of Representatives. The Hill writes:

Hunter Biden’s lawyer filed an ethics complaint against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) Friday, requesting that an ethics watchdog “immediately” initiate a review of Greene’s conduct after she showed sexually explicit photos of Biden at a congressional hearing this week.

In a letter to the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), Biden attorney Abbe David Lowell slammed Greene’s actions as “abhorrent behavior that blatantly violates House Ethics rules and standards of official conduct.”

Ethics complaint?? Against me?

Bwahahahaha!! 

Giggles 'n snorts all around!

She'll probably get a promotion for her ethical behavior:
The next Senator from the great state of Georgia!

________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________

Scientists have discovered a two-faced star. One face is made of helium and the other hydrogen. STD writes:

Astronomers “Blown Away” by Weird Two-Faced Star

 

The newfound white dwarf, nicknamed Janus after the two-faced Roman god of transition, was initially discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), an instrument that scans the skies every night from Caltech’s Palomar Observatory near San Diego. Caiazzo had been searching for highly magnetized white dwarfs, such as the object known as ZTF J1901+1458, which she and her team found previously using ZTF. One candidate object stood out for its rapid changes in brightness, so Illaria Caiazzo decided to investigate further with the CHIMERA instrument at Palomar, as well as HiPERCAM on the Gran Telescopio Canarias in Spain’s Canary Islands. Those data confirmed that Janus is rotating on its axis every 15 minutes.

The magnetic fields that Janus generates:

Bits: DJT's trial; Extremists fabricating fake evidence; Extremists ignoring the rule of law

Everybody is reporting that DJT's espionage trial (the Mar-a-Lago documents case) will start on May 20, 2024. The NYT makes these strange comments:

Mr. Trump’s advisers have been blunt that winning the presidency is how he hopes to beat the legal charges he is facing, and he has adopted a strategy of the delaying the trial, which is expected to take several weeks, for as long as possible.

Well, if DJT plans to delay as much as possible, or even more than possible, how on Earth or anywhere else in the universe will that trial last just a couple of weeks? One would expect DJT delay filings upon delay filings to bicker over every possible thing bickerable or not. One would expect that to take months and months before the trial even gets to the merits of the case. 

I'm very confused. I smell a rat in the woodpile and see a snake in the underwear drawer.

________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________

I've been wondering for several years when the radical right authoritarian elites would cross the line and openly fabricate evidence to be used against political enemies in court and elsewhere. Some radical Republicans in congress have clearly crossed that line. The Hill writes:

Republicans Thursday released a copy of an unverified tip to the FBI alleging a scheme to bribe President Biden — a tip that has not been corroborated but is nonetheless fueling GOP investigations into the Biden family.

The FD-1023 form released Thursday details secondhand allegations that Burisma’s CEO and founder Mykola Zlochevsky thought having Hunter Biden on the board could help insulate the company from its problems with the prosecutor, that Zlochevsky sent millions of dollars to President Biden as well as Hunter Biden and that two recordings about the matter exist that involve President Biden.

Those key details in the form are not verified or corroborated.  

Democrats have also released information collected during the first impeachment effort that included a conversation purported to be with Zlochevsky that contradicts the information relayed in the FD-1023 form.  

“These claims have reportedly been scrutinized by the Trump Justice Department, a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, and a full impeachment trial of the former President that centered on these very issues, and over and over again, they have been found to lack credibility,” White House spokesperson Ian Sams said.

 Here we have the radical authoritarian Republican Party smearing political enemies with unverified and uncorroborated allegations of wrongdoing that have been previously investigated and debunked. That fits my definition of fabricating evidence and using it in official proceedings in congress. Grassley and any other participating congressional Republicans should be impeached for treason and jailed for life.

As usual these days, Republican hypocrisy and double standards are shameless and the bad faith is poisonous and blatant. 

________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________

Radical anti-democracy Republican politicians in Alabama continue to defy the courts. One source comments:

Alabama GOP refuses to draw second Black district, 

despite Supreme Court order

Alabama Republicans rejected calls to draw a second majority-Black congressional district this week, instead creating maps that Democrats and advocates say completely ignore a recent ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court.

A federal court ordered the state to redraw its congressional map last year to include two districts where Black voters make up voting-age majorities, “or something quite close to it.” The Supreme Court affirmed the ruling this year, prompting the Legislature to call a special session to redraw the map this week.

But on Friday, the Republican-controlled Legislature is poised to pass a map with just one majority-Black seat.

This exemplifies modern radical right Republican Party elites. They are solidly anti-democratic, openly contemptuous of the rule of law and civil liberties, racist, morally rotted, solidly pro-tyranny and deeply corrupt.

________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________

 

MTG maybe have violated several porn laws when she showed nude pics of Hunter Biden. The New Republic writes:

In her desperation to prove wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene may have sent his nude photos to minors.

To support her argument, she held up poster-size prints of Biden’s nude photos, which were taken off his laptop. Not only were her actions wildly inappropriate—Oversight Chair James Comer did not reprimand her, though—but she may also have violated D.C. revenge porn law.

And now, Greene may have emailed the nudes to minors. The Georgia representative emailed her constituents Wednesday evening claiming she had confirmed Biden was guilty of sex trafficking and tax fraud (she had not). The email included a video that showed his nudes. 

There is no screening for age when signing up for Greene’s email newsletter, so any minors who subscribe—such as for a social studies project or simply to stay up to date—have now received nudes from their congresswoman. If that is the case, then Greene would not only have violated her state’s revenge porn law, but she could also have broken federal laws banning the distribution of obscene material to minors.

Honestly, who can make this stuff up? It has to be real, stupid and malicious as it is. IMHO, the Republican Party is a gigantic mess.

No beginning and no end?

I’m getting some scientific support for my personal view that ours is just one more in an infinite number of universes, or universe iterations.  I.e., which translates into “there has always been something rather than nothing.”

I saw this on another blog:

Link here.

Excerpt:

That theory, which textbooks call inflation, matches all observations to date and is preferred by most cosmologists. But it has conceptual implications that some find disturbing. In most regions of space-time, the rapid expansion would never stop. As a consequence, inflation can’t help but produce a multiverse — a technicolor existence with an infinite variety of pocket universes, one of which we call home. To critics, inflation predicts everything, which means it ultimately predicts nothing. “Inflation doesn’t work as it was intended to work,” said Paul Steinhardt, an architect of inflation who has become one of its most prominent critics.

In recent years, Steinhardt and others have been developing a different story of how our universe came to be. They have revived the idea of a cyclical universe: one that periodically grows and contracts.  They hope to replicate the universe that we see — flat and smooth — without the baggage that comes with a bang.

So, what do you prefer?  [Waiter standing with towel over arm, ready to take your order]

Door #1: Same universe but another iteration (tweaked).

Door #2: Multi universes, and all at the same time.

Door #3: One universe, Big Bang oriented.  That’s it.  Turn out the lights and lock up.

The elusive Door #4: Other (“God did it” … “I really don’t care, I have enough to think about” … “STFU” … Other “other”😉)

Bits: Revising history; Detecting alien intelligence; Breaking the rule of law down

The Daily Beast writes: 

Middle school students in Florida will soon be taught that slavery gave Black people a “personal benefit” because they “developed skills.”

After the Florida Board of Education approved new standards for African American history on Wednesday, high school students will be taught an equally distorted message: that a deadly white mob attack against Black residents of Ocoee, Florida, in 1920 included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

Dozens of Black residents were killed in the massacre, which was perpetrated to stop them from voting.

Apparently fighting back in self-defense when being physically attacked is equivalent to the attackers attacking for no good reason other than racism. The revisionists say that Blacks did commit violence in the incident. Notice the blatant bad faith in the reasoning the radical right racists rely on to defend the indefensible? If the attacked Black people had not tried to defend themselves, there would be no need to revise history by equating the unjustifiable violence of the White attackers with justified violence of the Black defenders.

This exemplifies just how mendacious, bigoted and cynical America's radical right elites have become.

___________________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________________

The ongoing SETI project reports an improved method to detect alien intelligence in the Milky Way galaxy (the original research paper is here). Before this, if a suspected radio signal looked like it was from an an alien source, a radio telescope in Earth would need to go back and listen to the same spot several times to confirm the signal was not from Earth. By looking at radio sources at least 10,000 light years away from Earth, radio signals travelling through space itself are affected in a detectable way. This phenomenon is akin to stars appearing to twinkle due to starlight passing through the atmosphere. Stars viewed from space do not twinkle. Radio waves passing through enough space do twinkle or "scintillate".

In a significant advancement for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have devised a new technique for detecting potential alien radio signals. This technique involves analyzing signals for signs of having traversed interstellar space, thereby ruling out Earth-based radio interference.

Today’s SETI searches largely rely on Earth-based radio telescopes, which are susceptible to terrestrial and satellite radio interference. False signals, which mimic technosignatures from extraterrestrial civilizations, could come from a variety of sources, including Starlink satellites, cellphones, microwaves, and even car engines. This kind of interference has created false hopes since the inception of the first dedicated SETI program in 1960.

Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia

The new method scrutinizes signals for signs of having traversed through interstellar space, hence eliminating the possibility of the signal being mere Earth-based radio interference.

Graduate student Brian Brzycki developed a computer algorithm, available as a Python script, that analyzes the scintillation of narrowband signals and plucks out those that dim and brighten over periods of less than a minute, indicating they’ve passed through the interstellar medium [ISM]. [Earth-based radio signals dim and brighten over periods of more than a minute]

64-meter Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia

The technique will be useful only for signals that originate more than about 10,000 light years from Earth, since a signal must travel through enough of the ISM to exhibit detectable scintillation. Anything originating nearby — the BLC-1 signal, for example, seemed to be coming from our nearest star, Proxima Centauri — would not exhibit this effect.

___________________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________________

 The WaPo writes:

Alabama legislature passes redistricting maps 

that Democrats say defy court order

The Republican-led House and Senate in Alabama approved dueling congressional maps Wednesday that would increase the percentage of Black voters in the state’s 2nd District — but not by enough, Democrats argued, to comply with a federal court order to create two districts in the state with at least close to a majority-Black population.

The legislature is in special session this week following a Supreme Court opinion in June that found lawmakers previously drew districts that unlawfully dilute the political power of its Black residents in violation of the Voting Rights Act. While Black people make up about 27 percent of Alabama’s population, only one of the state’s seven districts is currently majority-Black.

The unanimous three-judge panel of the federal court, which includes two appointees of former president Donald Trump, has given the legislature until Friday to come up with a new map. The two chambers will need to reconcile their plans to meet that deadline.

No matter how many times the courts slap the radical racists down, they refuse to comply with court orders in good faith.

This exemplifies just how authoritarian and brutally cynical toward the rule of law and free and fair elections that America's bigoted radical right elites have become.