…. in the opinion of American pregnant people.
“Rates of Prenatal Cannabis Use Among Pregnant [People] Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (JAMA):
Considered an essential business in California, cannabis retailers remained open during the pandemic with record sales in 2020. We used data from Kaiser Permanente Northern California (KPNC), a large integrated health care delivery system with universal screening for prenatal cannabis use to test the hypothesis that rates of prenatal cannabis use increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of 100 005 pregnancies (95 412 [people]), 26% were Asian or Pacific Islander; 7%, Black; 28%, Hispanic; 34%, non-Hispanic White; and 5%, other, unknown, or multiracial. The patients were a mean age of 31 years (median, 31 years).
… In the ITS analysis, we found that prenatal cannabis use increased by 25% (95% CI, 12%-40%; Table) during the pandemic over prenatal cannabis use during the 15 months before the pandemic.
Note that I have edited the title and a portion of the text to remove offensive language that is inconsistent with #Science and CDC Guidelines.
Related:
- “Anti-Transgender Legislation—A Public Health Concern for Transgender Youth” (also JAMA): “Policies that prohibit physicians from providing transition-related health services to youth may exacerbate the stressors that contribute to transgender health disparities. … If guided by research, compassionate health care policy and practice can solve this public health concern.”
All the big, liberal cities in America (but especially Seattle, WA) report very high rates of anxiety to the U.S. Census Bureau. Well, with all that anxiety, you need lots of weed and alcohol to calm down if you don’t want to ask your doctor for something stronger like Xanax or Klonopin. My -ex was addicted to Xanax in Chicago and for about six months she popped them like candy while thinking about how terrible the Patriarchy was. Coming off that was a real chore, and of course, a lot of folks just keep the Xanax and Klonopin and augment it with the marijuana and alcohol. When combined you get lots of interesting things going on.
“In a survey conducted Sept. 29 to Oct. 11, 54.5% of the adult population of King, Pierce and Snohomish counties — that’s roughly 1.8 million people — said they felt “nervous, anxious or on edge” for at least several days during the past two weeks. That’s the highest percentage among the 15 largest U.S. metro areas.”
Check out the map! I think the federal government should declare most major American cities “Mental Health Disaster Zones” and start giving away free marijuana to everyone who needs it.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/stressed-out-in-seattle-were-the-most-anxious-major-metro-in-the-u-s-new-census-data-shows/
A lot of these people are *not happy* !! We know big cities are the FUTURE! Our response to the Pandemic and Climate Change demand it.
https://www.cityleadership.harvard.edu/
Of course, when you raise increasingly stupid people with terrible education in an increasingly dog-eat-dog competitive world, you’re going to have lots of folks who just can’t cope because they don’t know anything and can’t compete with the people in China and India and Korea and everywhere else. You can’t stop giving them drugs and encouraging them to use drugs because that would be cruel! So I don’t really see any way out of it, because the whole state of California wants to make everyone stupider and more equal. At least Gavin Newsom has financial interest in a winery, so his business will be booming, even after he leaves office on his own.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/us/california-math-curriculum-guidelines.html
>>>
The idiocy of having math teachers lead discussions on social justice instead of teaching black children how to do math will ensure that black children never receive the tools they need to succeed.
The only cause being truly advanced here is the cause of employment for progressive consultants.
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@Anonymous: What’s really almost diabolical about what California is attempting to do by eliminating gifted categories and tracking for math students is that all of those people know how patently *false* it is. You know how patently false it is. Anyone who has been to college, especially engineering schools, knows how patently false it is.
I was at a very good university during the late 1980s and early 1990s and one of my closest friends was a guy who was double majoring in math/physics as an undergraduate, taking advanced graduate level courses in pure mathematics as an adjuvant. I had always been “good” in math compared to my peers in high school. This guy and a few of his friends were extraterrestrials. We were the same age, we had similar interests and tastes otherwise, but he was so much better at math that he could finish your sentences for you discussing a math problem (and a lot of other things). Jim was the smartest person I’ve ever known.
There just wasn’t any doubt – there couldn’t be any – that the parts of his brain that worked with mathematical reasoning just worked BETTER. It was like a race between Carl Lewis and your Cousin Ernie. Unless he breaks the tendons in both legs, Carl Lewis is going to WIN. This applied to both his inductive and deductive reasoning skills. He was just FASTER. He retained more, he saw it better, and he had better mathematical intuition, and it wasn’t just practice. He was gifted.
The son a bitch is a LAWYER now! 🙂
Alex: How much does the cutting back of rigorous math education in California schools matter in the Internet age? Can’t children who are more interested in math (or whose parents are making them study math) find online resources at whatever level is appropriate?
California’s schools were pretty much the worst in the nation as of 2013 (see scatter plot in https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/upshot/surprise-florida-and-texas-excel-in-math-and-reading-scores.html ). Parents who care should have moved away a long time ago!
@Anonymous: And I’m not trying to make our host’s head swell any bigger ( http://philip.greenspun.com/personal/narc-today-89.pdf? ), but when I first read his blog (Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists) https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/ his various books, travelogues and photo equipment reviews, I felt the same way about him. I know I’m pretty smart, I was tested, all my friends think I’m smart. I don’t usually hurt myself with hand tools, I can RTFM, and once in a while I “have my moments.” But look at the difference in the volume and the quality. I’m not on the same level.
I know the difference between myself and someone like Philg. He’s smarter than I am, by quite a bit! That doesn’t make me feel terrible about myself, and he’s not a snob! There are some professors I respect that I’ve felt the same way about. I’m glad when I can score a point as member of the Junior Varsity team, and he keeps me sharp.
This insanity that nobody is any better than anyone else in math or any other of a million different ways is pure crazytalk.
Alex: Thanks for the kind words, but if I’m actually smart in any practical sense, why didn’t I mine a ton of Bitcoin 10 years ago?
@Philg: I think it matters. In-class instruction by highly qualified instructors teaching good students is a tremendously enriching experience. I took a full year of Organic Chemistry from a professor at that school over a summer. We digested the entire textbook in something like 10 weeks, and he was just head and shoulders above many other professors I had encountered. The course was about 150 students and we *LEARNED* organic chemistry. He had a way of introducing, contextualizing, explaining and placing the material in context that was just incomparable. The quality of online instruction varies widely. I think it will do teachers and students a big disservice. I’ve looked at various online math materials and they vary tremendously. I still believe that the student in the classroom with the dedicated instructor is a very good way to teach students.
Alex: Californians have had fair warning about what to expect from their state government. And there was a recent vote in which a majority of Californians affirmed their support for the current system (lockdowns, school closures, rule by covidcrats, focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, etc.). Isn’t the only reasonable conclusion that Californians like the way that things are set up? Courts have held that it is constitutional nationwide to run schools for the benefit of unionized teachers (e.g., who can’t be fired even if they are ineffective at teaching), so you can’t say that California children, who were unable to vote for the current system due to being under 18, are being deprived of a recognized U.S. right.
There are plenty of states that take a more traditional approach to education, including for math and science. Why isn’t it okay for Californians to run things as they see fit and for people who don’t like it to move to, e.g., Texas (as Elon Musk has recently done!). https://www.dallasisd.org/Page/56901 shows that the Dallas school system has a full range of options for above-average learners. (They also have a “temporary” mask requirement that will be in place until all of the commitments made at UN climate conferences are actually implemented?)
As noted in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/04/06/relocation-to-florida-for-a-family-with-school-age-children/ , one of the great things about the U.S. is that people can sort themselves into a state that fits.
@Philg: Bitcoin? I ask myself the same question. I thought about it! I had the ability to do it! I “understood” it. For some reason I wasn’t interested in it that I have yet to precisely pin down. I think I thought it was a gimmick, it just struck me as nerds playing with nerd toys for the sake of doing something esoteric that nobody could really explain well. It was more a matter of taste, in other words, than intellect per se. I kept thinking about various efforts at various times across the early United States where placed struck and printed their own currencies, which all eventually disappeared for one reason or another. And I had soured on some aspects of tech. as well. I listened to all these talking heads on television giving these banal descriptions of Blockchain and thought: “This is a fool’s game” to some extent. So it was more a matter of saying: “I don’t like that!” as a kid, when you’ve never tried it.
Addendum: As the secretary to the Dean of a Law School, my boss was as pretty sharp cookie. She was a very intelligent woman with a fast and serious mind, a formidable intellect who was learning Hebrew in addition to being the activist Dean of a law school, no small undertaking that. Well, I differed with her on some important subjects and we’d get into little arguments some times. She’d say something while we were working in private, usually later at night, when it was just the two of us in the office. She was always working late because she was a micromanager and had a lot of plates in the air.
Anyway, she’d say something a little to pedantic from time to time and I would gently object, “Yes, but there’s also X, Y and Z that you’re not really considering here.” And she would get a little angry at me and say: “Don’t confuse me with the facts, Alex.” So I also know the difference between “intellectual debate” and “ideology.” Learned it from one of the best.
@Philg: That’s true, Californians know what to expect from their state government and legislature to some extent. But all of them cannot move very easily if they object but effectively get steamrolled by the people who are pushing the agenda. It’s one thing to say that people can move, but I know myself right now that I don’t have that alternative. I would love to move out of Massachusetts but there’s no way that I can even consider it right now.
I think California has the largest public school system in the country. They’re well-known as coveting their status as a “bellweather progressive” state, like Massachusetts to a smaller degree. They are free to enact this absurd stuff but they’re not doing it just for the sake of California – they want to influence the rest of the country, because they have the most schools, the most teachers, they publish most of the school textbooks, and they have a lot of influence beyond California’s state borders.
The fact that so many people in California are resisting this change tells me that not only do a sizeable portion of Californians disagree with it, they don’t see any reason they should pick up and leave because a bunch of ideologically-driven knuckleheads decide to damage their children’s education. And a lot of them cannot leave, and they know that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDAlifCmd8w
I don’t know. Beyond that, I just have an aversion to watching a handful of people do something stupid to millions of others. It’s like watching someone harm themselves and doing nothing about it. Maybe that’s old-fashioned morality.
@Philg: And by the way, I think it’s great that you exercised your options and got the heck out of MA and moved to Florida! If I was in your position, I would have done the same thing. But there’s also a time to stand and fight, not flee. Massachusetts is a supermajority (D) state with de facto one-party rule. California is not quite there yet. I think the people in CA who are objecting to this and decide to stand and fight deserve our support if we agree with them.
Alex: What’s your evidence that “so many people in California are resisting this change”? I would be shocked if it is more than 1% of the parents who object in a public manner. As noted above, Americans previously meekly accepted the idea that, unlike workers in almost any other area of U.S. society, their kids’ public schoolteachers should be immune to evaluation on the basis of performance at their jobs: “Well, it is a shame if 25 children don’t learn anything for a whole year because their teacher is lazy and incompetent, but why would we want to change the system?”
I don’t have hard numbers, but I trust the New York Times when they say:
“Even in heavily Democratic California — a state with six million public school students and an outsize influence on textbook publishing nationwide — the draft guidelines encountered scathing criticism, with charges that the framework would inject “woke” politics into a subject that is supposed to be practical and precise….People will really go to battle for maths to stay the same,” said Jo Boaler, a professor of education at Stanford University who is working on the revision.”
and…
“An open letter signed by hundreds of Californians working in science and technology described the draft as “an endless river of new pedagogical fads that effectively distort and displace actual math.”
They also mention Tucker Carlson and Fox News, which I never watch so I wouldn’t know. I don’t think I’ve seen more than 10 minutes of Tucker in the past 10 years. But I trust the New York Times when they quote Divya Chhabra:
“Divya Chhabra, a middle school math teacher in Dublin, Calif., said the state should focus more on the quality of instruction by finding or training more certified, experienced teachers.
Without that, she said, students with potential would quickly fall behind, and it would only hurt them further to take away options for advanced learning. “I feel so bad for these students,” she said. “We are cutting the legs of the students to make them equal to those who are not doing well in math.”
In other words, I am a secondary source but I trust the New York Times regarding the level of resistance the proposal is encountering, because the New York Times tells the truth.
And why wouldn’t I trust the New York Times? On the fourth, they wrote:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/nyregion/stephen-sweeney-durr-nj-election.html
“Yet Mr. Sweeney, the State Senate president and a Democrat, was ousted in a shocking political upset by Mr. Durr, a Republican, as voters opted for a political unknown in a result that immediately rattled the political moorings of the state.”
“…it was Mr. Sweeney’s loss that was perhaps best emblematic of the predicament.”
“The Associated Press called the race on Thursday morning,”
“But the surprising defeat of Mr. Sweeney”
And so on and so forth. However, Sweeney has not conceded and has recently claimed that 12,000 votes (in approximately a 64,000 vote race) have recently been *discovered* in an unnamed county in New Jersey. Out of the blue! They have just shown up out of NOWHERE!
The truth changes, but the New York Times will always be there to bring us the Current Truth, just like Harvard University and the CDC. I trust them implicitly in their role.
California, land of over 40,000,000 million people, had 95 412 pregnancies resulting in 100,005 births, that how this double number should be interpreted? Sad, very small number of births and probably small segments of the population account for larger slices of new births.
No, 95,412 life forms formerly known as “women”, now officially known as “birthing people” or “bodies with vaginas”, had 100,005 pregnancies (so some of them were pregnant twice over the duration of the study).
I think in general the technocrats want to automate everything and reduce the number of people. So we get measures like active conversion therapy to 2SLGBTQQIA+, keeping house prices high, destruction of the middle class, drugging people with Xanax and Cannabis, new state religions and the destruction of families. All of these reduce birth rates.
Until robots can pluck grapes, import low skilled immigrants (sorry could not resist! :-)) to do the work.
While pregnant people are, one hopes, experiencing the healing power of essential marijuana throughout California, the number of births covered by this paper is at one hospital chain (i.e., it is not the total for the state).
Thanks Philip, of course from one hospital system, I overlooked that. Based on https://data.chhs.ca.gov/dataset/test-cdph-statewide-live-birth-profiles/resource/9ac9a3a1-a6f4-4683-af1e-89b6b220ed57 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_California only White births collapsed in California (in my estimate to below of 1.5 births per women, Black births are at less then 2 children per woman and Hispanic births at 2.5 births per women. Apparently Californian government thinks it is important to track population by skin color and by whether someones predecessors considered Spanish native tang or not.
Also there are large net migrant outflows form California according to the Wikipedia article.
I guess there are not enough promiscuous dentists in California to have out of marriage sex in California, pinging one of major topics on this blog.
LSI: Angelina Jolie notwithstanding, the biggest child support profiteer in California may actually be the state itself. See https://calmatters.org/projects/california-keeps-millions-in-child-support-while-parents-drown-in-debt/ for how child support collections by the state are the flip side of the state’s lavish welfare system.
Why aren’t there more plaintiffs targeting high-income defendants in California? Maybe it is the poor quality of math education! See https://worldstar.com/video.php?v=wshhamgwYljP7HbL1xlN for a professor’s lecture on this subject.
As noted in http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Introduction , surveys of Americans have revealed that most are ignorant regarding the basics of family law (and therefore the profit opportunity). “law professor Lynn Baker and psychology professor Robert Emery surveyed 137 young Virginians who had applied for marriage licenses. Answers to questions regarding divorce law were correct only 60 percent of the time:” and “We conducted our own research in this area with 33 in-person interviews in Harvard Square. Interviewees had been in Massachusetts for at least five years and had at least a bachelor’s degree (60 percent had an advanced degree, including one person with a law degree and one person in law school). Interviewees ranged in age from 28 to 74 with a median of 44. The male/female ratio was 40/60. Their median estimate of the maximum child support obtainable from a one-night encounter with a very wealthy very high-income person was $1750 per month (correct answer: unlimited and dependent on the judge, but certainly at least $8,000 per month). The licensed lawyer estimated $1500 per month, less than half of the official guideline amount for a defendant earning $250,000 per year. The median estimate of the maximum age through which child support could be obtained was 19.4 (correct answer: 23). Forty-five percent of surveyed citizens incorrectly believed that child support had to be spent on a child’s actual expenses (including the law student, but not the licensed lawyer). Sixty-four percent of surveyed citizens incorrectly believed that Massachusetts statutes and customs favored 50/50 shared parenting. Seventy-one percent of surveyed citizens incorrectly believed that, when both parents had similar incomes, obtaining custody of a child and collecting child support under the guidelines would not be profitable.”
How many American newspaper articles did you see that reported on the $2.5 million in tax-free cash received by Hunter Biden’s plaintiff? (A reader dug that number out of a Daily Mail article.)
OT Phil you’ve blogged on this science says you were right.
https://www.nationandstate.com/2021/10/19/denmark-reveals-cost-of-non-western-immigration-5-billion-per-year/
Thanks, GB. I don’t believe that this calculation can be correct. The ones that I have seen never account for the cost of building infrastructure to accommodate new arrivals (a topic covered in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/04/12/how-much-would-an-immigrant-have-to-earn-to-defray-the-cost-of-added-infrastructure/ ). I can’t read https://fm.dk/media/25228/indvandreres-nettobidrag-til-de-offentlige-finanser-i-2018.pdf (in Danish) but https://sputniknews.com/20211018/denmark-says-non-western-immigration-cost-state-nearly-5-billion-per-year-1089998506.html says it includes “immigration and welfare benefits received by immigrants and included state expenditures on healthcare, child care, education, and culture.” So the $13,000 per migrant per year ($52,000 for a family of four) is consistent with U.S. headline spending (about $60,000 per household in 2013; see https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/america-spent-enough-on-federal-welfare-last-year-to-send-60-000-to-each-household-in-poverty ), but nobody seems to be looking at the impact on costs to build schools, roads, water/sewer, power grid, etc. (I estimated about $250,000 per person in the infrastructure post and, as in the U.S., Denmark seems to have chain migration (“family reunification”), so multiply by 6 for each new “primary” migrant who shows up?)