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Shareholders who recoil at the specter of self-described human rights activists partnering with corporations to promote “gender transition” surgeries had the opportunity to make their voices heard Thursday at Dell Technologies Inc.’s annual shareholder meeting. But their efforts against the radical LGBTQ agenda fell short. A shareholder proposal asking Dell’s board of directors to list “any recipient of material donations from the company”—not including employee matching gifts—was voted down, according to the company’s official tally. The final results of the vote most likely won’t be available until this week, when Dell files a what’s called an 8-K form with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Shareholders advancing the proposal wanted Dell Technologies to come clean about any financial donations it is making to charitable organizations that take extreme political, social, or environmental positions unrelated to the company’s core business. Several months ago, Best Buy Co. Inc. agreed to abandon its explicit support for LGBTQ groups in response to pressure from conservative shareholder activists. More on that later. At Dell, as at many American companies and brands, such donations have flowed to LGBT activist groups that many shareholders believe jeopardize children by promoting transgender treatments and are irrelevant to the company’s bottom line. The Free Enterprise Project, which is committed to combating what it describes as the “woke takeover of American corporate life” was responsible for crafting the shareholder proposal. The measure claims that Dell has numerous partnerships with groups that “promote the practice of gender transition surgeries on minors and evangelize gender theory to minors.” Dell shareholders who supported the proposal argued that the company’s involvement with “radical gender theory activists” distracts from its core mission of making and personal computers and related products. “At a minimum these companies have a fiduciary responsibility to not risk shareholder value for political activism that is not necessary,” Ethan Peck, an associate with the Free Enterprise Project, says in an interview with The Daily Signal. “Though companies shouldn’t be funding anything that’s not politically neutral, if they’re going to, then they must provide objective, neutral research and proof showing why funding this specific type of radicalism is in the best interest of shareholders. They don’t produce any of that.” The Dell shareholder proposal highlighted how other companies and brands courting LGBTQ consumers such as Bud Light, Target, and Disney experienced sharp drops in their revenue and stock value after engaging in “overtly political and divisive partnerships.” So which LGBT activist groups most concern Dell shareholders who object to the corporation’s political activism? The proposal identifies several, including the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington-based nonprofit with more than $46 million in revenues that established a “Corporate Equality Index” designed to measure how well companies accommodate its LGBTQ rights agenda. But should companies take HRC’s index seriously? Operating under the guise of human rights and equality, it has committed itself to an LBGTQ+ agenda that encompasses the genital mutilation of young children, the separation of children from parents, unsafe environments for women in gender-neutral bathrooms, the destruction of women’s sports, and censorship over the use of personal pronouns. “It’s very Orwellian what they are doing because it has nothing to do with human rights or equality,” Peck says in the interview. “Instead, they are forcing companies to adopt and convey a radical political agenda that most people, and therefore most shareholders, are opposed to.” Looking ahead to upcoming shareholder meetings, Peck says he expects the Free Enterprise Project to maintain a heavy focus on corporate spending and any commitments to policy stances that undermine company officers’ fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. The Human Rights Campaign, for instance, has been burrowing into classroom settings with guides and documents promoting “in-school transitions” that explains to parents how teachers can make it easier for a child to accept his or her own sterilization. That’s one reason why free market activists see, as they put it in the rejected Dell shareholder proposal, “contentious and vast disagreement between radical gender theory activists and the general public [that] has nothing to do with Dell making and selling computer products.” The Free Enterprise Project was launched in 2007 as an initiative of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a Washington-based free-market think tank. Although progress has been slow going, Peck says, his group is playing the “long game.” In March, the Free Enterprise Project reached an agreement with Best Buy, the multinational retailer of consumer electronics, in which the corporation agreed to cease funding LGBTQ activist groups if the project agreed in return to withdraw a proposal similar to the one presented to Dell shareholders. Emails between Peck and Best Buy officials submerged within an SEC filing became the focus of NBC News reports that solicited comments from Best Buy. “NBC would not have known where to look to find those emails in the SEC filing —which were irrelevant to that filing—unless someone pointed it out to them,” Peck tells The Daily Signal. A spokesperson for Best Buy told NBC that the retailer hasn’t made any changes in how it donates to LBGTQ groups. However, the agreement dated March 22, 2024, in the form of a letter from Best Buy to Peck, makes it clear that Best Buy did in fact agree to a new review process designed to weed out donations to groups that take extreme positions. “The fact that we did persuade a corporation to stop giving to radical organizations is a win in my book,” Peck says of Best Buy. “Despite what they say in public, that’s the agreement, they signed it, and that’s supposed to be the company policy unless they breach their agreement.” The post Shareholder Activists Challenge Corporate Support for LGBTQ Policies That Harm Children appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Biden: My Debate Performance Was Actually Popular With Undecided Voters

More than one in four people in the US have blue eyes. In the UK, it’s three out of every seven; in the Netherlands, it’s three out of five, and in Iceland, it’s three out of every four. Depending on where you live, it’s a very popular ocular color to have.But that’s kind of weird, isn’t it? Blue isn’t exactly a ubiquitous color in nature – even those creatures you’re thinking about right now, like certain insects and fish, aren’t really blue, they’re just exploiting physics to make you think they are. In mammals, the cerulean hue is even rarer: there’s the blue whale, we suppose, and a fair few monkey butts, but no animal has naturally blue fur, or hair. So why would blue eyes be a thing?Well, here’s the secret: they’re not.The myth of blue eyesSeriously. Blue eyes don’t exist. “Blue eye color is determined by melanin, and melanin is actually brown by nature,” explained licensed optometrist Gary Heiting in an article for eye care website All About Vision.“Brown melanin is the only pigment that exists in the eye; there is no pigment for hazel or green – or blue,” he wrote. “Eyes only appear to be these colors because of the way light strikes the layers of the iris and reflects back toward the viewer.”Yeah, it turns out that when someone compares their beau’s blue eyes to the hue of the open seas or sky, they may not just be bein’ all poetical. They might be invoking the romance of physics instead.“In the animal kingdom there are many examples in which the observed color is the result of optical phenomena such as light scattering, interference or diffraction by microscopic structures present in the tissues,” explains George Britton in The Biochemistry of Natural Pigments. “The most familiar example of this effect is the blue of the sky,” he writes.If you’ve ever wondered why the sky is blue – and let’s be honest, we all have at some point – here’s a crash course that’ll make your nearest physicist wince: imagine Ant-Man running an obstacle course.No, honestly, bear with us. Say he starts off attempting the race at his insect-size: he’ll get to the first barrier – say, those little tires you have to hop in and out of – and be completely stymied. He’ll just bounce off and stay back near the start line.So, he grows a bit. Now he’s the size of a toddler, and he can make it past the tires – but once he hits the mini hurdles, he’s still too small. He’s foiled again.Not one to back away from a challenge, he ups his size again, until he can pass the hurdles without a problem. But then, he comes to a wall. He’s only the size of Paul Rudd, he can’t get over that – he bounces off again, stopped once more from reaching the end.Finally, he decides screw it, and grows to his Giant-Man size. Well, this is great: he’s big enough to step over everything and go straight to the finish line. Race won.That’s basically what’s going on when light from the sun comes down to our planet. While it’s in space, where there is, for all intents and purposes, nothing around to get in its way, the light is white – which is a misleading color for it to be, really, since it’s the result of all the different colors possible composed together. Once it enters our atmosphere, however, things get messy: there’s all kinds of microscopic particles of dust and gas and suchlike in the air, and the light starts getting scattered in all directions.And the smaller the wavelength of light, the more likely it is to get caught up bouncing around up there. Colors at the bottom of the visible light spectrum – that is, the reds and oranges – are like Giant-Man: too big to be concerned with tiny dust motes, and so hurtle on down to get absorbed by the ground. But the smallest wavelengths – the blues and violets – get stuck bouncing around in the sky, making it appear to be the cool tone we all know.“Very small particles, smaller in diameter than the wavelength of red or yellow light, will reflect or scatter more of the short-wave than of the long-wave components of white light,” Britton summarizes. “Colors produced in this way are known as structural colors.”Now, if you want to be persnickety about it (and we read the comment sections, so we know that you do) the phenomenon that makes the sky appear blue and the phenomenon that makes your irises appear blue are two different effects – Rayleigh scattering and Tyndall scattering, respectively. But frankly, they’re the same dang thing; the distinction between the two is not in what’s going on, but in the size and location of the particles the light is being bounced off.“Most non-iridescent blue colors in animals are Tyndall blues,” Britton notes. “[The] blue color of human eyes is due to the scattering of white light by minute protein particles in the iris.”Green eyes, and hazel, are a result of the same scattering effect – but in those cases, there’s slightly more melanin in the iris, so the light is absorbed or reflected in different ways. That’s also why eye color can seem to “change” based on nearby lighting: “It’s an interaction between the amount of melanin and the architecture of the iris itself,” Heiting told CNN. “It’s a very complex architecture.”The same effect is responsible for the blue color of many birds, Britton adds, whose feathers feature incredibly tiny air-filled membrane pockets that scatter the light away. But in all these cases, clarifies Britton, “no blue pigment can be isolated from the tissues.” In other words: your baby blues? They’re just a trick of the light.The ancestor of blue eyesIn humanity’s collective family tree, some branches loom larger than others. The one labeled “Genghis Khan”, for example, is thick enough to cover around one in 200 men alive today; more than a fifth of Irish fellas can claim to be descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages – even though the man may well have never existed; and technically, every European has Charlemagne lurking somewhere in their lineage.All of these dudes left an impressive impact on the world’s genetic makeup – but there’s one person in the history books who outbred them all. And who was it, you ask? Well… we don’t know. Unlike old Genghis and Charlemagne, this individual lived so long ago that there’s no way we could know their name or even when and where they came from to any degree better than “probably the Near East like 40 or 50,000 years ago.”But we do know one thing: they had blue eyes – and nobody else did.“Originally, we all had brown eyes,” Hans Eiberg, a professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen, said back in 2008. “But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a ‘switch,’ which literally ‘turned off’ the ability to produce brown eyes.”Now, we know what you’re thinking – how did the team know that only one ancestor was responsible for all these different blue eyes? Well, here’s the thing: what Eiberg and his colleagues had discovered wasn’t just that the aquatic hue is the result of a mutated OCA2 gene – it was far more definitive than that.“[Blue-eyed people] have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA,” Eiberg explained. “From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor.”It’s the only known way to produce blue eyes – for comparison, there’s at least eight different gene mutations that are responsible for red hair – and it’s quite specific. The “switch” that Eiberg referred to couldn’t simply switch the gene from “on” to “off” – that would result in full-on albinism. Instead, it had to be “diluted”, he explained, limiting its ability to produce the brown pigment to such an extent that the eyes looked blue.And the weirdest part of all? Apart from looking a bit interesting, the mutation that gives blue eyes seems to be pretty useless. It’s not like the evolution of paler skin and lactose tolerance, both of which allowed residents of more northerly latitudes to absorb more vitamin D – it appears to be neutral, evolutionarily speaking. A fluke.“It simply shows that nature is constantly shuffling the human genome,” Eiberg said, “creating a genetic cocktail of human chromosomes and trying out different changes as it does so.”An earlier version of this article was published in January 2024.

Despite its name, the mammoth was not the largest Pleistocene land animal. That status goes to its relative, the straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), which, due to weighing up to 13 tonnes, was twice the size of a modern African elephant and lived across Asia and Europe until around 100,000 years ago. Anthropologists have sought evidence that Neanderthals hunted Palaeoloxodon, maybe even to extinction, but evidence has been ambiguous until a recent discovery that could change the way we envisage our nearest extinct relatives’ social structures.For around 700,000 years, Palaeoloxodon is thought to have survived ice ages in southern Europe and the Middle East, expanding its range into central Europe during interglacials. Their enormous size means the adults at least were probably more threatened by lack of food than by predators, until they ran into one that could wield weapons and work in teams.Although Neanderthals’ toolmaking skills gave them the capacity to take on Palaeoloxodon, that alone doesn’t prove they did. Fighting a rampaging beast that size would have been a terrifying experience, even with spears, and might not have been worth it if most of the meat would need to be left behind. However, in a recent study, a team led by Professor Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser of the MONREPOS Archaeological Research Center have pointed to abundant cutmarks on bones as proof elephant was part of the Neanderthal diet.The evidence comes from the Neumark-Nord 1 site near Halle, Germany, where 3,122 bones, tusks, and teeth – thought to come from more than 70 straight-tusked elephants – have been found, dating to around 125,000 years ago. Gaudzinski-Windheuser and co-authors found signs of cutmarks on many of these bones that could only come from stone tools being used to slice off meat.Although scavenging on elephants that died in other ways might leave the same marks as butchering those that had been hunted, the concentration of so many bones in one place makes that unlikely. Moreover, the bones overwhelmingly came from fully grown individuals - unlikely targets for even the most daring saber-toothed felines of the day, and something that couldn’t have arisen randomly. It seems these Neanderthals preferred to tackle bulls that weighed twice as much as the largest African elephants, but were probably solitary, than tackle herds of females and babies.The authors calculate it would have taken several days for a team of Neanderthals working together to cut up such a beast, let alone to process it all. Since neither humans, nor our mushroom-loving relatives, can survive on meat alone (whatever Jordan Peterson tells you), it would have taken an extended family of 25 three months to eat it all.Unless the hunters went to all that trouble only to waste most of the meal, the authors believe this indicates at least some Neanderthals lived in larger groups than previously imagined. The paper proposes they were either stationary for substantial periods, with the skills to dry or freeze the meat, or multiple tribes came together for a period to dig traps and feast for weeks on the reward. Such events would have greatly facilitated cultural exchange.A population staying in one place and gathering vegetables to accompany their roast elephant could have changed the local environment more than has been thought.This doesn’t mean elephant hunting was universal among Neanderthals. “It is increasingly clear that Neanderthals were not a monolith and, unsurprisingly, had a full arsenal of adaptive behaviors that allowed them to succeed in the diverse ecosystems of Eurasia for over 200,000 years,” the University of Tübingen’s Dr Britt Starkovich, who was not involved in the research, said in an accompanying perspective. The find also shifts perspectives on numerous other sites where bones of mammoths (half the size of Palaeoloxodon) and even smaller rhinoceroses, were found intermingled with Neanderthal tools. Speculation that Neanderthals just scavenged these large animals seems less likely in light of this discovery. The paper is published in Science Advances.An earlier version of this article was published in February 2023.

Even after his disastrously doddering debate performance Thursday night, President Joe Biden still has his fans on public television. Friday’s edition of Amanpour & Co., which airs originally on CNN International, stitched together various thin defenses of the Biden presidency and condemnations of Donald Trump, while host Christiane Amanpour’s anti-Trump partisanship was even more ham-handed than usual. The original version actually broke into the hour-long coverage for 20-something minutes of a live Biden campaign rally in North Carolina. Notice how Amanpour tried to counteract Biden’s undeniably pathetic debate performance in every line from her introduction onward, while hailing CNN’s hopelessly slanted media fact-checks as utter truth, after Biden threw a big post-debate hint in the media’s direction at a campaign rally. Host, Christiane Amanpour: ….In a televised presidential debate, optics are everything, but the devil is also in the detail. Last night, a fumbling Joe Biden faced a serial liar, Donald Trump, in the first live debate. Today, Democrats are in damage-control mode and Republicans are jubilant. But speaking to supporters in North Carolina after the debate, President Biden appeared unfazed. President Joe Biden: The choice in this election is simple. Donald Trump will destroy this democracy; I will defend it…Did you see Trump last night? My guess he said, I mean this sincerely, a new record for the most lies told in a single debate. Amanpour took the bait: And he's right! According to CNN's fact-check, Donald Trump was responsible for more than three times the number of falsehoods than Biden….America now faces a choice -- a visibly aging man who failed to live up to that moment, or an authoritarian-leaning convicted felon, facing even more courtroom trials ahead…. Amanpour talked to Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, and Marc Lotter, director of strategic communications for Trump’s 2020 campaign. She wasn’t done with the slanted fact-checking, asking Lotter to respond to a clip of CNN’s fact-checking reporter Daniel Dale on “the staggering number of false claims from Former President Trump. On first count, [CNN Anchor Erin Burnett], I counted at least 30, 30 false claims.” Of course, Amanpour ignored Biden’s own whoppers, like his claim he’s not in favor of late-term abortions, even though the 2020 Democratic Party platform has no restrictions on abortion; falsely stating the border patrol union endorsed him, falsely claiming no terrorists were infiltrating America under his watch and that no U.S. soldiers were killed during his term, or that Trump told Americans to drink bleach to cure Covid. Amanpour continued smugly: But listen, 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists have warned that a second Trump term would reignite inflation. They say Joe Biden's economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump's. Also, as you know, Marc, and I'm sure you've been reading these, he, Donald Trump, had a meeting with executives just in the last few days, and they said remarkably meandering, couldn't keep a straight thought and was all over the map. And it's also been pointed out by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld at Yale that not a single person among Forbes 100 CEOs has donated to Trump's campaign. So, these are facts. How does that, Marc, make him better on the economy? What a strange argument against a Republican, that not enough greedy CEOs are financing his campaign! Lotter retorted ably: "Well, the Nobel laureates were wrong when they predicted that he was going to ruin the economy in 2016, 2017. I put their value about the same as I do with the 51 intelligence officers that lied to cover [sic] the Hunter Biden laptop story." Note: The PBS version has been edited. The original CNNI version pre-empted itself for live coverage of a Biden campaign rally in North Carolina, which left Amanpour enthusiastic afterward, according to the CNN transcript: “That is what you call rallying the troops. That is a redo.”