*House [of Representatives] holds Trump ally Steve Bannon in criminal contempt of Congress.*

I am relieved that the House did not shrink from this confrontation, because the trumpets believe they can get away with anything by bluffing.

Hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators marched in Sudan.

This shows that the people are not on the side of the protesters that want a coup. But even though the military don't have enough support to make a coup look like "back by public demand", they still might have a coup.

*Ivory poaching has led to evolution of tuskless elephants, study finds.*

MIT invited climate scientist Dorian Abbot to give a talk, then uninvited him under pressure from a mob who disapprove of some of his political views.

I support affirmative action. Experiments show that judging individuals' scientific work is systematically biased by racism and sexism, and they affect people's chances in other ways too. Affirmative action is a way of trying to counteract those effects.

At the same time, I defend freedom of speech, including the freedom to state views that disagree with yours or mine. It is wrong to exile people from the scientific community over of their views about affirmative action, or other issues. Universities should resist attempts to force people into conformity by bullying dissenters. No one in a university is entitled to be "protected" from encountering expression of "inappropriate" views. If you don't like them, argue with them.

What about "citational justice"? It stands to reason that racism and sexism will affect how much any particular person's work gets cited, since it affects how people judge that work. Some kind of "citational affirmative action" could be a good countermeasure, but it needs to be limited, just as affirmative action in admissions is.

Perhaps, "when we cite A, let's also cite B or C."

The article linked to above displays the New York Times' usual symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I object to bigotry, and normally I decline to link to articles which promote it. But I make exceptions for some important articles. Usually, they are articles that give important information about racism or the fight to eliminate racism. This article gives important information about the threat to the freedom to maintain heterodox views about anything that many people want to censor.

Some congresscritters always treat proposals to help the non-rich as dangerous traps to be avoided. Strangely, they don't say the same about military plans.