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SAVE THE DATES for Open Access Week 2020

 — Organisation: Open Access Australasia — 

July/August 2020 Newsletter

 — Organisation: Open Access Australasia — 

‘How Open Access Suddenly Became the Norm’

 — Organisation: Open Access Australasia — 

May/June 2020 Newsletter

 — Organisation: Open Access Australasia — 

April 2020 Newsletter

 — Organisation: Open Access Australasia — 

March 2020 Newsletter

 — Organisation: Open Access Australasia — 

February 2020 Newsletter

 — Organisation: Open Access Australasia — 

December 2019 Newsletter

 — Organisation: Open Access Australasia — 

DEI and the CIA

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — 

Under the best of circumstances, it is difficult for any intelligence service to collect, analyze, and produce actionable, predictive data for a nation’s leadership. This task is made considerably harder when lockstep adherence to a fringe political ideology is imposed upon the workforce tasked with carrying out this challenging mission. Unfortunately, this is the situation the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community are in: to America’s detriment, their leadership enthusiastically imposed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion ideology upon their employees.

To underscore how deeply DEI has metastasized inside the host, in a recent enlightening and publicly available statement, the CIA’s Chief DEI officer said there are three criteria by which an intelligence officer can be promoted at America’s most important foreign intelligence service. Only one of them is related to mission impact. The others are a rather vague “corporate mindset”—and DEI.

Of the three, adherence to the cant of DEI is the most important; those who do not vocally and unreservedly support it are denied promotions and meaningful assignments. Like rallies held by authoritarian regimes, you do not want to be the first to stop clapping at the approved, serial pronouncements.

Black Sheep

 — Author: Zoe "Doc Impossible" Wendler — 

Trump Issues New Threats Amid Dem Betrayals

 — Publication: Assigned Media — 
 

While congressional Democrats and our outgoing Democratic president throw the trans community under the bus, president-elect Donald Trump threatens to nearly outlaw our existence.

A Texas City, Once at the Center of Anti-Trans Efforts, Now Offers Hope

 — Publication: Assigned Media — 
 

After previously passing legislation offering “bounties” on trans people using bathrooms not matching their gender assigned at birth, Odessa deems the ordinance unenforceable.

12/23/2024 Market Update

 — Organisation: Applied MMT — 

Cass vs France

 — Publication: Assigned Media — 
 

The French Society of Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetology commissioned its own version of the Cass Review, unsurprisingly it almost completely contradicts Cass.

When America Celebrated Christmas from Orbit

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — 

The year 1968 was not all roses for America. We found ourselves in a seemingly endless stalemate in Vietnam, where the death toll approached 40,000 U.S. troops. Growing opposition to the war caused the incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, to decline to run for re-election. Assassins’ bullets cut down civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Riots tore through Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other great American cities. The economy was plagued by rising inflation. The Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia.

But on Christmas Eve, from a most unexpected place, America and the free world received a bit of good cheer. It came in the form of a broadcast to the largest global television audience to date.

The story starts with President John F. Kennedy’s speech to a special joint session of Congress several years before, in May 1961, in which he announced that it was “time for a great new American Enterprise.” This enterprise would be to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth before the decade was out. JFK did not mince words about the purpose of this costly and risky venture: it was to help “win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny.”

How Fascism Came

 — Author: Chris Hedges — 

These Two Cities Used to be the Same

 — Publication: Not Just Bikes — 

Memorable Moments in the History of Strong Towns

 — Organisation: Strong Towns — 

Every Dollar Counts: The Top 5 Liberty Street Economics Posts of 2024

 — Organisation: Federal Reserve Bank of New York — Publication: Liberty Street Economics — 

High prices and rising debt put pressure on household budgets this year, so it’s little wonder that the most-read Liberty Street Economics posts of 2024 dealt with issues of financial stress: rising delinquency rates on credit cards and auto loans, the surge in grocery prices, and the spread of “buy now, pay later” plans. Another top-five post echoed this theme in an international context: Could the U.S. dollar itself be under stress as central banks seemingly turn to other reserve currencies? Read on for details on the year’s most popular posts.

Renters thousands of dollars worse off this Christmas

 — Organisation: Everybody's Home — 

Shocking new analysis reveals that renters in some of Australia’s capital cities are thousands of dollars worse off this Christmas, with annual rents up to $3,600 higher than a year ago.

Everybody’s Home has analysed SQM Research weekly asking rents data, which has shown the alarming annual rise in rents (December 2023 to December 2024) that is smashing Australians in capital cities.

The analysis shows renters in capital cities are paying an average of $1,593 more annually to rent a house compared to last year, while people in units are paying an additional $1,084.

Adelaide renters living in units have copped the biggest annual surge, paying $3,634 extra this year, followed by Perth renters in houses who are paying an additional $2,985.

Chris Hedges on MOATS: Catastrophe for the Palestinians and the Region

 — Author: Chris Hedges — 

Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Reviving New College

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — 

On May 19, 2023, the graduation speaker at New College of Florida, Dr. Scott Atlas, walked up to the podium to begin his remarks. The sun was just beginning to set over Sarasota Bay, off which the campus is located, and guests were seated near the water under a large white tent. Behind Dr. Atlas on an elevated stage, faculty and administration wore their academic regalia. The event looked like many college commencements taking place around the nation that spring. However, when Dr. Atlas had accepted the invitation to speak from me, the recently appointed interim president, we had both known it would be anything but typical.

Shortly after Dr. Atlas began his remarks, yells from the audience of “Murderer!” and “Go f*** yourself!” would result in police entering the crowd to stand quietly, scanning the rows. A chorus of boos and jeers continued throughout Dr. Atlas’s 16-minute speech. He stoically read from his script, stopping rarely, except once toward the end, when many of the several hundred in the audience stood up, turned their backs on him, and chanted, “Wrap it up!” for more than a minute, forcing him to pause as the noise became overwhelming.

TWIBS: Golfing Gods Say No More Trans Girls

 — Publication: Assigned Media — 
 

The latest entry in an unofficial Assigned Media series: What sport have trans women been arbitrarily banned from this week? This time, it’s golf! That most athletic of sports, as we all know, in which trans women must clearly have a profound and unfair advantage!

Anatomy of the Bank Runs in March 2023

 — Organisation: Federal Reserve Bank of New York — Publication: Liberty Street Economics — 

Strong Towns Gift Guide: DOT Decoder

 — Organisation: Strong Towns — 

Bye-bye 2024, I won't miss you.

 — Author: danah boyd — 
Bye-bye 2024, I won't miss you.

Well, it's been one heck of a year. ::shaking head:: Although I love getting those end-of-year postcards from folks, I've never managed to make them. Instead of recounting my familial adventures and emotional trials and tribulations, I thought I could at least step back and reflect on some professional endeavors over the last year, many of which I did a lousy job of sharing when they happened. 

1. I wrote three papers this year that I'm quite proud of. 

"Statistical Imaginaries, State Legitimacy: Grappling with the Arrangements Underpinning Quantification in the US Census" is an analysis of four technical changes that the Census Bureau made / attempted to make in the last few decades: imputation, adjustment, swapping, differential privacy. Jayshree Sarathy and I examine the controversies around them with an eye towards why their complexity and visibility mattered.  This is an extension of our earlier work on differential perspectives. 

The Anti-Care Playbook

 — Publication: Assigned Media — 
 

The Washington Post goes the way many other media organizations have gone, following an increasingly familiar playbook to attempt to restrict trans healthcare.

The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast—December 2024

 — Organisation: Federal Reserve Bank of New York — Publication: Liberty Street Economics — 

Make Europe Great Again

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — 

My advice to President Trump on how to deal with the mess in Ukraine is simple: you should pull the plug on the Biden Administration’s flailing European peanut gallery. Your friends and allies in Europe want to shoulder the burden of their own defense, but they don’t want to pour money down the drain and risk World War III in Ukraine. Get an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, a war which no sane European wants to fight, and let the sovereigntist parties of the New Right mop up the globalist Left. They believe in their countries and will fight to protect them, unlike the Brussels liberals cowering behind the skirts of Mother America.

Ending the war won’t happen without an agreement to keep Ukraine neutral and out of NATO. The Deep State will try to convince you that NATO can’t afford to back down on eventual Ukraine membership, and that Russia is bleeding out and ready to fold. But the opposite is true: Europe’s willingness to defend itself depends on a revival of nationalism and the ascent of the sovereigntist parties on the Right. Freeze the fighting and deliver a political victory to European patriots whose watchword is “Make Europe Great Again.”

History shows IBR modeling is simply wrong

 — Publication: City Observatory — 

Highway department’s are selling multi-billion dollar highway widening projects based on flawed traffic projections.

The projections prepared for the predecessor of the proposed $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project predicted traffic would grow 1.3 percent per year after 2005.  In reality, traffic across the I-5 bridges has increased by only about 0.1 percent per year since then (and at its pre-Covid peak, had increased only 0.3 percent per year).

Actual I-5 traffic levels are more than 30,000 vehicles per day below the levels forecast for 2024 in the Columbia River Crossing EIS.  Rather than increasing by 30,000 vehicles, I-5 weekday traffic has only increased by 3,000 vehicles in 18 years.

Inaccurate and biased traffic models are a misleading and even fraudulent basis for multi-billion dollar spending decisions.

Claims that we need widen I-5 between Portland and Vancouver are based on projections from traffic models. The best evidence of how well a traffic model works is how accurate its predictions have been.  By that standard, we already know that the traffic models developed for the Interstate Bridge Project are simply wrong and untrustworthy.

The Week Observed, November 9, 2024

 — Publication: City Observatory — 

What City Observatory Did This Week

IBR Traffic Forecasts Violate Portland Region’s Climate Commitments.  Portland’s adopted Regional Transportation Plan commits the Metro area to reduce total vehicle miles traveled by 12 percent over the next twenty-five years. But the traffic forecasts used to justify the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project call for more than a 25 percent increase in driving over that same time period.

 

The RTP is required under state law to plan for a reduction in VMT per capita; the RTP is the way that regional and local governments show they comply with these state climate requirements.  But the IBR planning is predicated on a world where we drive much more and not any less.

Projects like the IBR are required by state and federal law to be consistent with the adopted Regional Transportation Plan, but they are being planned for traffic levels that flatly violate that plan and state requirements.

IBR: Planning for a world that no longer exists

 — Publication: City Observatory — 

The Interstate Bridge Project’s traffic projections pretend that the massive shift to “work-from-home” never happened

The IBR traffic projections rely almost entirely on pre-Covid-pandemic data, and ignore the dramatic change in travel patterns.

Traffic on  I-5 is still 7 percent below pre-pandemic levels, according to Oregon DOT data

Traffic on the I-5 bridge is lower today that the purported 2005 baseline for the Columbia River Crossing project (135,000 vehicles per day).

Post-covid travel analyses have shown a permanent shift toward lower growth in vehicle miles traveled.

It’s a violation of NEPA to ignore scientific evidence that travel patterns have shifted and spend $7.5 billion on a project for a world that no longer exists.

The Interstate Bridge Replacement project’s traffic and revenue forecasts appear to be built on increasingly shaky ground. New data from multiple transportation agencies shows that post-pandemic travel patterns have dramatically diverged from pre-pandemic trends, calling into question the fundamental assumptions underlying the multi-billion dollar project.  Traffic is now lower, and growing more slowly than prior to the pandemic, contrary to the assumptions built into IBR traffic projections.

IBR’s DSEIS uses the least accurate forecast

 — Publication: City Observatory — 

Oregon and Washington have commissioned not just one forecast of future traffic levels on I-5 and I-205, but three different forecasts.

IBR officials are clinging to the one forecast that is the least accurate, and most error-prone, and have chosen to ignore two more accurate forecasts.

IBR relies on Metro’s Kate Model, which has an error factor of 14.5 percent and which over-estimates I-5 traffic by almost 20 percent.

IBR’s DSEIS makes no mention of the Stantec Level 2 forecast (with an error factor of 2.5 percent), or the CDM Smith Investment Grade Forecast (with an error factor of 0.8 to 2.5 percent).

The two states have paid $1.5 million for the CDM Smith Forecast and nearly $800,000 for the Stantec Level 2 Forecast.

Using a less accurate forecast and ignoring or suppressing more accurate forecasts in the EIS violates the National Environmental Policy Act.

IBR contradicts region’s climate commitments

 — Publication: City Observatory — 

IBR Traffic Forecasts Violate Portland Region’s Climate Commitments

Portland’s adopted Regional Transportation Plan commits the Metro area to reduce total vehicle miles traveled by 12 percent over the next twenty-five years.

But the traffic forecasts used to justify the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project call for more than a 25 percent increase in driving over that same time period

The RTP is required under state law to plan for a reduction in VMT per capita; the RTP is the way that regional and local governments show they comply with these state climate requirements

But the IBR planning is predicated on a world where we drive much more and not any less.

Projects like the IBR are required by state and federal law to be consistent with the adopted Regional Transportation Plan, but they are being planned for traffic levels that flatly violate that plan and state requirements.

The Week Observed, November 1, 2024

 — Publication: City Observatory — 
What City Observatory Did This Week There’s a critical flaw in the planning of the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge project: Metro’s Kate travel demand model is wildly inflating I-5 traffic numbers. The model claims 164,050

Needless purposes: How IBR violates NEPA

 — Publication: City Observatory — 

The $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project’s two-decade old “Purpose and Need” statement is simply wrong, and provides an invalid basis for the project’s required Environmental Impact Statement.

Contrary to claims by project proponents, the “Purpose and Need” statement isn’t chiseled in stone, rather it is required to be evolve to reflect reality and better information.  Yet IBR is relying on a 2005 purpose and need statement that rests on exaggerated traffic forecasts that have been proven wrong.

The IBR’s 2005 Purpose and Need Statement (still forms the basis for the 2024 SDEIS) claimed the I-5 needed to accommodate 1.7 percent more vehicles each year.  In reality, traffic growth has been less than a fifth of that amount, 0.3 percent from 2005 to 2019.

For decades, highway builders have been pushing a “predict and provide” paradigm, pretending that we needed to plan for an ever-increasing flood of vehicle traffic, and threatening gridlock if highways weren’t expanded.  But these self-serving predictions have consistently proven wrong.

Law and policy require that the “Purpose and Need” statement be reasonable, and not drawn so narrowly as to exclude alternatives, and that the statement evolve over time as conditions change. But IBR is using, nearly unchanged, a two-decade old statement that falsely claims that I-5 must accommodate ever greater traffic.

Metro’s Kate Model: 25,000 phantom cars a day on the I-5 bridge

 — Publication: City Observatory — 

How can we trust Metro’s model to predict the future, when it can’t even match the present?

Metro’s Kate travel demand model, used to plan the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge, includes 25,000 phantom cars per day in its base year estimates.

The existing I-5 bridges over the Columbia River carried 138,800 vehicles on an average weekday in 2019, according to ODOT’s official traffic count data.

But not according to Metro’s Kate traffic model:  Kate claims the I-5 bridges carried 164,050 vehicles  in 2019

The difference shows Metro’s model isn’t accurate:  It can’t even replicate current conditions

And yet we’re expected to believe this same model can accurately predict traffic levels decades into the future?

This exaggeration is key to false claims about the severity of current and likely future traffic conditions, and is an illegal basis for the project’s federally required environmental analysis.

IBR traffic modeling violates professional standards and federal rules

 — Publication: City Observatory — 

Traffic modeling is guided by a series of professional and administrative guidelines.  In the case of the proposed $7.5 Interstate Bridge Replacement Project, IBR and Metro modelers did not follow or violated these guidelines in many ways as they prepared their traffic demand modeling.  IBR modelers:

  • Didn’t assess accuracy of their previous modeling
  • Failed to calibrate their models to observed traffic levels
  • Failed to accurately account for capacity constraints
  • Ignored other models and more accurate data that contradicted their conclusions
  • Failed to exhibit scientific integrity
  • Failed to document their data and methods
  • Failed to commission an independent review of their analysis

Each of these errors constitutes a violation of professional standards for traffic forecasting, and invalidates the claims made the the IBR Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement.

Cooking the Books: How IBR used “Post-Processing” to alter the Metro Model

 — Publication: City Observatory — 

To hear project officials tell it, traffic projections emerge from the immaculate and objective Metro “Kate” traffic model

But in reality, IBR traffic projections are not the outputs of the Kate travel demand model.  Instead, IBR consultants have altered the Metro numbers, something the label “post-processing.”

But what they’ve done, doesn’t meet the professional standards for post-processing—they cooked the books.

Post-processing of Kate’s estimates isn’t needed because Kate produces detailed, daily and hourly estimates for the I-5 bridges

IBR made contradictory, and unexplained adjustments to Kate predictions: moving thousands of daily vehicles from I-5 to I-205, and hundreds of peak hour vehicles from I-205 to I-5.

IBR consultants failed to follow the accepted and required practice of fully documenting their so-called “post-processing” calculations

IBR traffic estimates can’t be replicated using the post-processing steps described in the DSEIS

The Interstate Bridge Replacement project has been caught fudging its traffic numbers. While IBR officials repeatedly claimed their traffic forecasts came directly from Metro’s supposedly authoritative regional travel model, internal documents reveal IBR consultants secretly altered these numbers without proper documentation or justification.

Hello world!

 — Publication: City Observatory — 

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

Trump’s New Jacksonian Era

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — 

President Donald Trump’s electoral victory makes him an anomaly in the annals of U.S. history—not only for winning non-consecutive terms, which no one has accomplished since Grover Cleveland over a century ago, but also for surviving multiple assassination attempts and becoming the first elected president convicted of felony crimes.  

Whether or not the convictions are justified, prognosticators have rightly called his win one of the greatest comebacks ever in American politics—greater even than Richard Nixon’s rise from the ashes after losing to John F. Kennedy in 1960.  

Unlike in 2016, when he failed to clinch the popular vote but won the Electoral College, Trump outpaced Kamala Harris by nearly 2.5 million votes, making gains among racial, gender, age, and geographic demographics with whom Democrats typically have excelled, particularly blacks, Latinos, and blue-collar workers.