Stephen Benning

Hi hello!

This is fascism with a side of Lysenkoism!

Hope that helps!

The Republican Party has moved beyond the ordinary political incentives into a total political destruction of the federal administrative state. Opposition might be too mild of a word because it presupposes a willingness to negotiate. Cutting half of the Department of Education in 1 day is the goal.

You know who could have predicted this? Every. Single. Brazilian.

Police brutality and arbitrariness is always followed by ordinary criminals impersonating it.

One of the things that *actually*, *truly* makes America great is NASA. And Trump has slit its throat.

At the DeSantis Everglades detention camp, people with green cards are being held in terrible conditions, with maggots in the food, the lights kept on 24 hours a day, and delayed access to medicine.

One guy had his Bible taken and was told "here there is no right to religion."

YouTube video by ENDEVR Separated at Birth: Twins and Triplets Reunite after Cruel Experiment | ENDEVR Documentary

Thank you for linking to this! After looking that documentary up, I found another, less comprehensive documentary in which those folks were also included that also involved a pair of twins: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmK6...

A Tutorial on Representational Similarity Analysis for Research in Social Cognition | Social Cognition Representational similarity analysis (RSA) is a simple and widely used technique for comparing relationships between diverse types of measures using a common set of elements. For instance, RSA allows researchers to compare brain and behavioral measures of the same set of participants, or response patterns to the same set of stimuli across different conditions. This technique effectively quantifies relationships between complex, high-dimensional measures even when their measurement units are not directly comparable, contributing to its recent popularity. However, existing tutorials focus on neuroscience use cases, limiting their applicability to social cognitive research. In this tutorial, we cover an accessible introduction to RSA, discussing its strengths and limitations compared to other multivariate methods. We provide commented code and functions in R and Python in the context of two examples that showcase different applications of RSA, illustrating its potential to address questions of broad interest to the field of social cognition.

But has some best practices! And you can find them in Social Cognition's special issue (w some other truly useful papers), here with R and python code: guilfordjournals.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

A rogue and a sorcerer hauled cockatrice corpses and their petrified druid companion to get magic items from Badja the bounty giver.

Session 8 saw 3200 XP total as the party toured the rogue's home town after giving his family life-changing gold, eliminating chickens turned cockatrices that petrified the druid, and received a Periapt of Wound Closure after taking the creatures' bodies to the town's bounty giver.

When this Administration fired its diverse generals, tore down websites, censored our language, and corralled migrants. My thought was these are summer soldiers: they think telling the truth about American democracy will make us love it less. Maybe, they should read more Frederick Douglass.

Trump and Miller are intent on building an unaccountable domestic secret police force that would be the world's third-biggest security force by funding levels, after the US and China's *militaries*.

That kind of funding dwarfs its stated purpose, which tells you what its real purpose will be.

You think that vast armed force is going to be used just for immigration?

I doubt it. Watch for ICE duties to expand duties and for ICE to follow the pattern of militarization of police. Also watch it used as secret police against anything anti-ICE.

If you, like me, are confused about the relationship of the "Big Beautiful Bill" to the 2025-2026 Federal budget and its relevance to science funding and other issues, here is a GREAT explainer from my friend Kevin Wilson 🧪@ascbiology.bsky.social

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

🚫 What’s being cut:

– NIH: –$19.5B
– CDC: –$4B
– Cancer research: –$3.1B
– SNAP: –$30B
– Education: –$12B

💰 What’s being funded:

– ICE detention: +$45B
– Tax cuts for the wealthy: +$4.5T over 10 years

This is the trade.

law professors have been unable to understand why people are actually concerned about this case. it’s not about nationwide injunctions per se, it’s about a court that waited until the issue hurt the GOP, and then intervened on behalf of one of the most egregious constitutional violations we’ve seen

SCIMaP - Impacts of Federal Cuts to Science and Medical Research Developed by an interdisciplinary research team, this website shows how funding cuts reduce economic activity and employment nationwide

Very VERY excited to see this addition to the SCIMaP project.
@joshuasweitz.bsky.social @asinclair.bsky.social

BOTTOM LINE: Proposed NIH cuts are estimated to result in ~50b in economic losses and over 200k job losses.

But hey! How are those egg prices??

scienceimpacts.org/fy26

Measure Files for the No Sex Despite Desire measure. Hosted on the Open Science Framework

Nevertheless, this is a good measure to use if you want to understand why people don't have sex. We kept all 109 items for the time being; the measure is available here: osf.io/t7jvx/ I'm proud of this authorship team for making this come together. Qual work was my first grad committee at UNLV. 6/6

Principled Concerns was associated with lower sexual functioning in both men and women; it also correlated negatively w/sociosexual behavior and attitudes and positively with sexual traditionalism. Personal Insecurities correlated with Neuroticism in men and women. Some gender effects emerged. 5/6

Michelle Poston was key in explicating the criterion-related validity of these three factors between men and women. She took what she knew clinically about a lot of the measures we administered and applied that knowledge here in the best scientist-practitioner tradition. 4/6

Three factors emerged: Partner Issues, Personal Insecurities, and Principled Concerns. We took the items that loaded >.40 on those factors in the whole sample & for both men and women, confirming that structure was invariant across genders. It's the first time my lab's published those analyses! 3/6

After a thorough qualitative exploration with 604 undergraduate participants, Taylor Oliver and colleagues wrote 109 items subsumed by the themes that emerged. We examined how those items performed in 712 separate undergraduate participants. 2/6

Humans have sex for myriad reasons, many unrelated to desire. But under what conditions does sexual desire not lead to sex? We investigated reasons college students refrain from sex despite desire and having an attractive, willing partner and relationships between these reasons and other aspects of sexuality and personality. For item generation, 604 participants identified 109 reasons why individuals may refrain from sex despite desire. For construct validation, 712 participants reported the frequency they experienced these reasons on a novel measure. Every reason evidencing discernible gender differences was endorsed more by women. These items largely concentrated in factors of Personal Insecurities and Principled Concerns. No gender differences emerged on the Partner Issues factor. Factors differentially related to sexuality and personality variables. Principled Concerns related negatively to sociosexual behavior and attitudes and positively to sexual traditionalism across genders. Partner Issues positively correlated with sociosexual behavior and desire for women. Personal Insecurities negatively correlated with sociosexual attitudes for men. Principled Concerns related to sexual functioning issues for women. Personal Insecurities and Principled Concerns related to worse sexual functioning for men. Personal Insecurities related to Neuroticism across genders. These results suggest potential directions for therapeutic interventions and further research.

The frequency of sex has been declining worldwide over the past decade or so; why might people choose not to have sex (even before the pandemic)? Our new paper in the Journal of Sex Research strives to answer that question (with 50 gift links): 1/6 www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KMGBS...

As someone who was involved in some of the discussions around this mess, it is as bad as it sounds, maybe even worse. Wiley has gone PCI-hostile based on completely incoherent arguments.

A series of tweets from Politico senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney: BREAKING: A federal judge in Massachusetts (the Reagan-appointed William Young) has declared the Trump administration's cuts to NIH grants — ostensibly over Trump's EOs on gender ideology and DEI — are "illegal" and "void." He's ordering many grants restored. YOUNG: "I am hesitant to draw this conclusion, but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it – that this represents racial discrimination. And discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community. That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out." MORE YOUNG: "It is palpably clear that these directives and the set of terminated grants here also are designed to frustrate, to stop, research that may bear on the health – we’re talking about health here, the health of Americans, of our LGBTQ community. That’s appalling." YOUNG still going: "I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this ... I ask myself, how can this be?" "I have the protection that the founders wrote into the constitution, along with imposing upon me a duty to speak the truth in every case. I try to do that. What if I didn’t have those protections. What if my job was on the line, my profession... Would I have stood up against all this? Would I have said, 'you can’t do this?' You are bearing down on people of color because of their color. The constitution will not permit that." "Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?"

Spitting FIRE holy shit 🔥

I am excited to share that @standupforscience.bsky.social is growing!

We are looking to hire several positions including:
- Event and volunteer coordination
- Copywriting (press releases, emails, website, blogs, some social media)
- Data analytics and research (marketing, not science 😉)

🧵

🚨HUGE SCIENCE WIN ALERT🚨

NIH Grants to be restored en masse!!! Thank you Judge Young for standing up for science!

#StandUpforScience
#SummerFightforScience

It looks like Word may now call this style "Normal", and you may also need to adjust the "Bibliography" style to get references working as expected. My student updated Word today right before our meeting, and I was consternated that I couldn't find the "Default text" style.

Important context for coverage of Sen. Padilla's getting manhandled and cuffed today at DHS Sec Noem's press conference: Padilla is ranking member on the Senate subcommittee that oversees immigration.