“The moment you’re embarrassed to be a part of the Dutch Team, because a biological man is playing in the women’s team, it’s time to go,” Zijlstra wrote in the past, according to Andrew Holleran of The Spun “I have tried to accept this, but I can not condone or justify this.
“I think that with sports there has to be an equal and level playing field which is to be used and accepted in good faith. After all, we have worked so hard to be relevant and competitive in this sport.”
De Graaf also explained her decision in the post.
“At some point you have to make decisions if something goes against your feelings,” De Graff wrote. “You have to do what feels right for you. Hence my decision to also leave the Dutch team.”
Buying a house in the United States is considerably more expensive than renting right now, and the real estate market is expected to stay that way for at least the next five years, according to a new analysis.
The analysis out Thursday from CBRE, a firm that tracks real estate prices, shows the average monthly payment on a new apartment lease in the U.S. is $2,165. The average monthly payment on a mortgage for a new home is $2,997, meaning it costs households, on average, 38% more to buy than to rent, according to the analysis.
Notably, the gap between buying and renting will continue to be a big hurdle for aspiring homeowners for at least five years, the analysis found — mortgage payments are still expected to cost 11% more than rent in the year 2030.
Higher mortgage rates and a nationwide housing shortage are key factors behind persistently high home prices, according to the CBRE report. The report estimates there is a shortage of 3.8 million housing units in the U.S., mainly in single-family homes and smaller multi-unit dwellings.
Of course, even though renting is cheaper in terms of monthly expense, you will pay it forever and never own anything. Buying a home is still the #1 way that most families build wealth. That’s what they want you to rent and build their wealth.
Why wouldn’t young people be less happy? We are constantly telling them that we are destroying the environment, they are the wrong gender, everyone is racist, and they will never be able to get ahead against systemic forces.
Meanwhile, in Biden’s economy, they can’t afford to buy a house, their rent is skyrocketing, and they can’t afford groceries.
Add to that that young people are more likely to be buried in their phones and social media without having real, human relationships.
Yup. I buy it.
The United States has fallen eight spots and is no longer in the top 20 happiest countries in the world, falling behind countries like Canada, Israel, Kuwait, Lithuania and the United Arab Emirates, according to the 2024 World Happiness Report released by Gallup and its partners.
[….]
One of the main reasons for the United States dropping out of the top 20 is the overall unhappiness of younger people, according to the report.
“For the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, happiness has decreased in all age groups, but especially for the young, so much so that the young are now, in 2021-2023, the least happy age group,” according to the new report. “This is a big change from 2006-2010, when the young were happier than those in the midlife groups, and about as happy as those aged 60 and over. For the young, the happiness drop was about three-quarters of a point, and greater for females than males.”
The 2024 World Happiness Report goes on to explain another reason for such a heavy drop is the widespread concern about an “emerging epidemic of loneliness, and about the consequences of loneliness for mental and physical health.”
“Although overall levels of loneliness are not unduly high in global terms, there is a significantly different pattern across the generations,” the report says. “Loneliness is almost twice as high among the Millennials than among those born before 1965. Millennials also feel less socially supported than Boomers in those countries, another place in which these countries look different from the rest of the world. This is despite the fact that actual social connections are much more frequent for Millennials than Boomers, and about as frequent as for Generation X.”
Hmmmm… First we hear that little Whitewater is facing a crime wave with social services being overwhelmed by illegal aliens. Now we see that Wausau is being overwhelmed by homeless people. It’s almost as if we have an open border and illegal aliens are finding their way to communities throughout the country.
The Wausau Police Department is requesting an additional two officers as part of a team approach to working with homeless residents, as the number of people without permanent housing surged considerably over the past three months.
“The speed at which unhoused individuals are coming into our community scares me,” he said.
[…]
In his February presentation, Barnes said city workers are shoveling human fecal material from downtown parking ramps on a regular basis.
[…]
Barnes said the homeless situation in Wausau is making policing complicated and reducing the amount of policing that the rest of our community “that pay taxes to have a quality police force” is getting.
Interesting research from the Badger Institute about EV buying behavior. Short version… EV sales are growing, but are still a tiny percentage of overall vehicle purchases. King Oil is still the most affordable, environmentally friendly, and reliable fuel type for vehicles in most situations.
In 2022, the divorce rate was 2.4 per 1,000 people. Although that isn’t the lowest it has ever been – in 2021, it was 2.3 – it continues a downward trend, according to the data.
By comparison, the rate of divorces in 2000 was 4 per 1,000, which means the current rate is a big decline from two decades earlier.
Being stuck in a home together during lockdown forced a lot of couples to face problems in their relationship head-on, Nelson said. That might have caused additional strife, or it could have helped them lay better groundwork for a stable future, she added.
Changes over the past two decades may also have helped. Therapy has become more normalized, roles in marriages have become more flexible, and people are more used to talking openly about how they want their marriages to work, Nelson said.
Biden’s Black supporters, who make up about a fifth of his political base, were considerably less likely than his white backers to respond in the poll that they were voting to stop Trump, 37% to 65%.
Black Democrats were also less likely than white Democrats to say they were worried about a presidential candidate stealing an election or partisan state legislatures overturning its results. Black voters in the U.S. have skewed heavily Democratic for decades.
ATLANTA (AP) — Former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines was among more than a dozen college athletes who filed a lawsuit against the NCAA on Thursday, accusing it of violating their Title IX rights by allowing Lia Thomas to compete at the national championships in 2022.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, details the shock Gaines and other swimmers felt when they learned they would have to share a locker room with Thomas at the championships in Atlanta. It documents a number of races they swam in with Thomas, including the 200-yard final in which Thomas and Gaines tied for fifth but Thomas, not Gaines, was handed the fifth-place trophy.
Good for the district for continuing to fight for kids, parent, and families against the groomers. If a child breaks a finger or cusses out another child, the parents should be notified. If the child is having an identity crisis replete with severe mental distress, the parents should be notified.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A Southern California school district sued by the state has updated its policy requiring staff to notify parents that a student is using a different pronoun or bathroom designated for another gender and now will only mention that a child has requested a change to their student records.
The Chino Valley Unified School District board approved the updated policy on Thursday as the district fights a lawsuit filed by Democratic state Attorney General Rob Bonta, who called the original policy discriminatory. Bonta’s office did not respond to email requests for comment on the policy changes.
The policy maintains part of the original rule requiring staff to notify parents within three days of their child requesting any changes to their “official or unofficial records,” although it does not specify what that would include. All references to gender identification changes have been removed from the policy.
LGBTQ+ advocates said the new mandate is simply a legal loophole to repackage the same policy that continues to violate the rights of students.
“They’re just broadening the scope so that they don’t obviously single that population out,” said Kristi Hirst, who co-founded the public education advocacy group Our Schools USA. “But the intent behind it, in my opinion, is no different.”
Although the total number of infections nationwide may seem small, it bears noting that before the COVID pandemic, the annual number of measles infections across the US had been gaining momentum (1,274 cases documented in 2019). This underscores the salutary effect the efforts undertaken to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the first two years of the pandemic had on the spread of the highly contagious measles. In 2020, only 13 individuals developed measles across eight jurisdictions. In 2021, there were 49 measles infections and in 2022 a total of 121 measles cases, in large part due to a community outbreak in central Ohio, with 85 locally acquired measles cases. And in 2023, there were 58 across 20 jurisdictions. At the current pace, 2024 may be the largest measles outbreak experienced in the US during the COVID pandemic.
The current trends show the dangers posed by the government’s abdication of the responsibility to maintain an actively engaged public health infrastructure. This has led to the promotion of anti-scientific misinformation campaigns by reactionary and fascistic groups who are downplaying the dangers posed by respiratory infections, leading to a decline in childhood immunization and resurgence of disease, specifically measles.
Two points. First, I don’t disagree that the decline in childhood vaccinations is real. It is. It is measurable. However, we must realize why vaccination rates are down. For the better part of three years, the public health system in our nation flat our lied to us. They bullied us. They demonized us. They ridiculed us. They lied straight to our faces and then tried to put us in jail when we asked questions. Justifiably, they lost our trust and forced thinking people to question everything they say. If public health “experts” are looking for a cause for the decline in vaccination rates, they can look in the mirror.
Second, ignored in the news reports is the human wave of unvaccinated people flooding across our border. You cannot introduce millions – yes, MILLIONS – of unvaccinated, unwell people into our communities and not expect the diseases they carry to spread. What is the Mealses vaccination rate among the illegal alien population? I guarantee that it’s much, much lower than for legal immigrants and citizens.
Chaos has engulfed a controversial West End play which is selling tickets for ‘black-only’ nights after one of the two dates vanished from its website.
Slave Play which is being held at the Noel Coward Theatre later this year has come under fire after announcing it will have two performances aimed at an ‘all-black-identifying audience’ that is ‘free from the white gaze’.
Producers, who say they want to ‘increase accessibility to theatre’, had said it would hold these performances on July 17 and September 17, with tickets being sold for as much £125.
However, the latter of these has vanished from the show’s website, with potential buyers given no option to buy tickets for a show on September 17, and no performance being listed for this date.
The people behind the show have said they are now ‘carefully considering’ how to incorporate the ‘black out’ nights as part of its run and insisted ‘no-one will be prevented or precluded from attending any performance’.
[…]
‘The idea of a Black Out night is to say this is a night that we are specifically inviting black people to fill up the space, to feel safe with a lot of other black people in a place where they often do not feel safe.’
Incidentally, I’ve gone to shows in London’s West End and New York’s Broadway in the past eight months and both audiences had a lot of black folks in them. They had a lot of black folks and white folks all enjoying a show together. I challenge their premise.
Not a bad statement. I hope the reality matches the sentiment. I’m pessimistic that it will.
In a memo Tuesday evening, Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the company’s artificial intelligence mistakes, which led to Google taking its Gemini image-generation feature offline for further testing.
“I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard). I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong.”
“Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts. No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.”
“Our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That’s why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging AI products.”
“We’ll be driving a clear set of actions, including structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming, and technical recommendations. We are looking across all of this and will make the necessary changes.”
“Even as we learn from what went wrong here, we should also build on the product and technical announcements we’ve made in AI over the last several weeks. That includes some foundational advances in our underlying models e.g. our 1 million long-context window breakthrough and our open models, both of which have been well received.”
“We know what it takes to create great products that are used and beloved by billions of people and businesses, and with our infrastructure and research expertise we have an incredible springboard for the AI wave. Let’s focus on what matters most: building helpful products that are deserving of our users’ trust.”
Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters is standing by policies affecting the transgender community in state schools following the death of 16-year-old Nex Benedict, which has resulted in increasing calls for his removal from office.
“To make sure that all individuals are safe in a school, we want every student to be protected, we want every student to be successful,” Walters told ABC News in an interview Tuesday. “That also means we’re not going to lie to students. And we’re not going to push a gender ideology.”
However, an open letter is calling for Walters’ immediate removal from office for, the letter claims, “fostering a culture of violence and hate against the 2SLGBTQI+ community in Oklahoma schools.” The letter is signed by about 350 local, state, and national organizations, including GLAAD, Human Rights Campaign, Oklahomans for Equality and more.
What are Walters’ “radical” views? Pretty much what a majority of people currently believe and what was almost universally accepted as truth just a few years ago.
Walters said he believes there are only two genders and that those are based on the sex someone is “assigned at birth.”
[…]
“When you are born, you have a gender: you either have an XX chromosome or an XY chromosome,” Walters said. “We’ve seen radical leftists who’ve tried to create this idea of gender fluidity, which frankly, it confuses students, and causes all kinds of chaos in the classroom and chaos with families.”
[…]
“What we see here is an effort from the left to lie about the death of this child to push an agenda and to try to push us off of our positions and our stances,” Walters told ABC News. “We’re not going to back down to that. we’re going to continue to move the state forward and education.”
Bearing in mind that the trigger to this latest kerfuffle was the death of a kid whose cause is not yet known. What we do know is that it was not a direct result of bullying or violence at school. It was most likely a drug overdose or unrelated medical issue, but we’re waiting on the autopsy results.
Authorities are awaiting the full results of the autopsy and toxicology reports for more insight into the circumstances surrounding the teen’s death. The state medical examiner’s office will determine the final cause and manner of death.
IOW, Walters is 100% correct. The leftists are using the lie about a dead kid to bully a school district into ideological submission.
After pulling its artificial intelligence image generation tool on Thursday due to a string of controversies, Google plans to relaunch the product soon, according to Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.
Google introduced the image generator earlier this month through Gemini, the company’s main suite of AI models. The tool allows users to enter prompts to create an image. Over the past week, users discovered historical inaccuracies and questionable responses, which have circulated widely on social media.
“We have taken the feature offline while we fix that,” Hassabis said Monday during a panel at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona. “We are hoping to have that back online very shortly in the next couple of weeks, few weeks.” He added that the product was not “working the way we intended.”
[…]
When asked for a “historically accurate depiction of a medieval British king,” the model generated another racially diverse set of images, including one of a woman ruler, screenshots show. Users reported similar outcomes when they asked for images of the U.S. founding fathers, an 18th-century king of France, a German couple in the 1800s and more. The model showed an image of Asian men in response to a query about Google’s own founders, users reported.
On a recent episode of Caleb Hammer’s YouTube show, Financial Audit, Abigail admitted the student loan she took out wasn’t necessary. “I don’t need to use them like I use them, I know that,” she said.
“You’re borrowing from the government, potentially from taxpayers,” Hammer responded. “You’re going about this in such an irresponsible way and your actions are showing that you just don’t give a s–t.”
However, according to a recent survey, Abigail isn’t alone in her addiction to spending money or misallocating funds.
35% of American Gen Z’s surveyed by Credit Karma admitted to “doom spending,” which it described as a pattern of compulsive spending (think: clothing or high-end skincare products) that helped people cope with anxieties about the economy and world affairs.
Abigail seemed to be on a similar path when she appeared on Financial Audit.
Her college is relatively close to where she lives and is, as Hammer described, “insanely cheap.” Nevertheless, she managed to accumulate $11,000 in student loans — all of which were allocated to fund her lifestyle choices.
In addition, she has $8,000 in auto loans for a car she admitted she didn’t need to buy in the first place.
She also has thousands of dollars in credit card debt, which could have been avoided because her cost of living is lower than the national average. She currently lives with her parents and doesn’t pay for groceries or utilities.
When Hammer asked Abigail if she’d “just given up” she said “probably.”
She added, “That’s been my problem for the past few years: knowing I’m hurting myself and just not doing anything about it. I just feel like I don’t have any self-esteem.”
This story has been interesting to watch unfold. The original narrative was that trans kid died after fight with other students in evil red-state Oklahoma. It was spun as an example of intolerance of trans people by redneck Republicans or something. Now we learn more… First, we learn that the trans kid was the aggressor.
In the video from the hospital the day of the altercation, Nex explains to an officer that the girls had been picking on them and their friends because of the way they dressed. Nex claims that in the bathroom the girls said “something like: why do they laugh like that,” referring to Nex and their friends.
“And so I went up there and I poured water on them, and then all three of them came at me,” Nex tells the officer while reclining in a hospital bed.
Not that a squirt of water justifies a physical attack, but Nex did transition the altercation from verbal to physical.
Next, when the mom called 911, she thought it might be a head injury from the fight that caused Nex’s eventual death. This is the narrative that the media ran with despite no other diagnosis other than raw speculation by an untrained observer.
In the 911 call on Feb. 8, Nex’s mother, Sue Benedict, expressed concern about a head injury as she described Nex’s symptoms.
Nex’s mother told the Independent that the bullying Nex had faced came amid state legislative policies that targeted the transgender and nonbinary communities.
Later we learn that the autopsy revealed that the death was not the result of a head injury from the fight.
While the two-week-old warrant states that police were seeking evidence in a felony murder, the department has since said Benedict’s death was not a result of injuries suffered in the fight, based on the preliminary results of the autopsy.
The police department, which didn’t respond to multiple messages sent Friday, has said it won’t comment further on the teen’s cause of death until toxicology and other autopsy results are completed.
Now neither the police nor the family are commenting on the actual cause of death. The police are correct and should not comment until they know for sure. The family can be given some leeway in their grief, I suppose, but they continue to use their dead kid as part of the trans agenda.
What we do know for sure is that this kid got into a minor fight at school in which he was a mutual combatant and later died of unrelated causes. It is the adults who are elevating this kid’s tragic death to use in ideological warfare to advance trans ideology.
In a recent survey conducted by a panel of experts specializing in the American presidency, President Biden was ranked the 14th-best president, while his likely 2024 presidential opponent former President Trump found himself at the very bottom of the list.
[…]
Biden was placed ahead of Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan and Ulysses S. Grant. Former President Obama was ranked No. 7, eight spots higher than when the experts were polled last year.
Really? I would even put Obama ahead of Biden. Certainly Reagan and Grant. Wilson was a raving eugenist, but even he had some good qualities. Frankly, any ranking that doesn’t have Coolidge in the top 5 is invalid.
The 2022 child-parent relationship lawsuit filed by Walli Carranza raises multiple concerns about Moreno, who at the time was referred to as Jeffrey. Carranza alleges Moreno was diagnosed multiple times with schizophrenia and had said she was not taking prescribed medications or following treatment recommendations made by her psychiatrist.
Walli Carranza said Moreno had “a history of constantly erratic, paranoid, stalking and mendacious behavior and was diagnosed as exhibiting Munchausen and Munchausen by proxy signs and symptoms.” Munchausen syndrome is when someone fakes illness, abuse or other hardship to gain sympathy or aid. By proxy means they took on someone else’s misfortune as their own.
[…]
“(Moreno) has been investigated four times by Child Protective Services for child abuse and neglect and was found by them to have intentionally harmed her child on at least two occasions,” the suit states.
Bulletproof vests, ammunition, plastic bottles filled with unknown substances, antisemitic books and a white mask that read “Free Gaza Trump” were pulled from the Conroe home of the suspected Lakewood Church shooter, records show.
[…]
Officers also found a book titled “All Remainers are Neo-Nazis.” It’s unclear what the book is referring to, but the term remainers is often used in the United Kingdom to describe people who voted for the country to stay in the European Union. Seven handmade poster signs were found in a trash can, but the warrant does not indicate what they said.
[…]
Conroe police have responded to more than 20 calls since 2019 tied to the address where Moreno lived, records show. The calls ranged in severity from neighbors reporting strange interactions with the woman to one who said Moreno tried to hit her with her vehicle.
