Is the dementia getting worse?

After the Supreme Court ruled 9-0  (6-3, oops) that Biden's student loan forgiveness plan was un-Constitutional, he responds by blaming Republicans.  Say what?  I seem to remember that Sotomayor, Kagan, and Brown-Jackson were all appointed by Democrats.  I seem to remember that the Supreme Court is theoretically apolitical.

So either Biden is playing politics, or his dementia is getting far worse.  OK, most likely is that it's just politics, but you can never be too sure...Mr. President, I'm going to help you out here.  Your executive order was ruled un-Constitutional because....it's un-Constitutional, period.  Take a hint.

An experience relevant to the "trans" debate

While walking the dogs this morning, I realized that an experience I'd had when I was about thirteen might be relevant to the debate over whether minors ought to be allowed to take "transition" drugs and have "transition" surgeries.  

You see, I was having trouble coping--my parents' marriage was blowing up at the time--and thus they decided to take me to the local mental health group to see what they could do.  So we went, and I got interviewed about life goals, and I had a lot of fun having "quarter staff" battles with another young man--we used vinyl covered foam, not sticks of oak or yew, by the way--and then one day, the counselor had a revelation that he shared with me and my parents.

My difficulty was obviously that I was feeling guilty about, ahem, "self-pleasuring", and once I overcame that guilt, my psychological problems would be greatly eased.  Now the fun thing there was that not only was I not performing that particular act, but the counselor also used the technical term, which I didn't understand in the least.  But I smiled and nodded and we went on with life.

It was a mistake on his part, and I to this day do not know whether he ever clued in that a real issue was simply that my parents weren't getting along, and probably also that, as an introvert, I probably show some signs of being on or adjacent to the autistic spectrum.  It could be that he knew darned well what the real issues were, but social rules prevented him from saying that straight up, so he did the next best thing.

But that noted, in the early 1980s, "self-pleasuring guilt" was a very popular theme in mental health, and hence when a counselor couldn't figure out what else was wrong in talk therapy, that diagnosis was used a disproportionate amount of the time.

Fast forward to today, and the popular diagnosis is "gender dysphoria".  So I contemplate the fact that as a somewhat socially maladroit teenager who might be placed "on the spectrum", the "diagnosis du jour" today could well have had some disastrous results.

This is the same kind of thing that I discussed back in 2015 with regards to the use of antidepressants, where a growing body of evidence was indicating that they were being over-prescribed, with, again, disastrous results.  It's hard to see one's own weaknesses, but that's part of the gig when you're getting the big bucks in medicine, I think.

Sad news, or great news.

....but it's been coming for a while.  National Geographic Magazine has laid off its staff writers, which of course means that the eminent yellow magazine is going to have more than a little bit of trouble going forward.

Or perhaps, it can go back to what it used to be.  I'm a collector of old National Geographics, going all the way back into the 1920s, and there was an amateur, "clubby" feel about the magazine--and in doing so, what was found was that these amateurs--generally university graduates from the upper classes--would get into places that a lot of professionals could not.  They also had the knack for taking complex issues and writing about them in such a way that readers didn't necessarily know their biases--really the same way a lot of journalists used to do in general.

And then in the late 1990s, I noticed that this mood was gone.  Replacing this was a general mood "we are going to tell you what to believe", really the same kind of thing that plagues journalism everywhere, the reason that Newsweak sold for $1 (and a bargain at a few bucks less) a while back.

So I was at first sad at this news, but if they play their cards right--re-accessing the wealth of supporters they had a century ago and more--they might be more than readable again.

Oh, this is just too good

Senator John Tester--D- Montana--had his staff request that pictures of the Senator going to the bathroom be kept from the public.  The best part of it is that Tester was using--I am not making this up--a pea field for the purpose.

Well, I guess it would be, wouldn't it?

A sacrifice I'm willing to make

Apparently, Russia is accusing Ukraine of using U.S. mosquitoes to attack their soldiers.  I'm sure that I'm speaking for a lot of my  neighbors and fellow citizens when I say that I'd be glad if we could send a huge portion of 'em to fight Putin.

Paging George Orwell.....

It appears that Johns Hopkins University, in their LGBTQ... documentation, is referring to "women" as "non-men".  Um, yes, women are not men, but I believe George Orwell said something to us about how it was "doubleplusungood" to replace perfectly good words via "Newspeak".

Progressives; again, 1984 was a warning, not a policy recommendation!

Total brilliance....

Somehow I am not surprised that the new Miss San Francisco is transgender, but one thing that I wonder about is how the contestant gets around the old rules that you couldn't have plastic surgery and compete.

Just sayin'.  

It used to be that beauty pageants would set boys' hearts a-fluttering, dreaming of what they might some day wake up next to.  These days, they're going to need to wonder, per Meghan Trainor's All About the Bass, whether that <redacted> is real.

Well said, Elon

I'm not a huge fan of his cars, but Elon Musk gets it exactly right regarding the indictment of Donald Trump for mishandling classified documents.  When it's Hilliary Clinton or Joe Biden, there are no grand juries convened, no searches, no subpoenas, or any such thing.  When it's Trump, no holds are barred.

I don't excuse Trump for what he did, as apparently he more or less admitted that he was retaining documents and daring the DOJ/etc., to obtain them.  But the simple fact is that, by storing documents on an unsecured server and behind a Corvette, Hilliary and Slow Joe posed the risk of much more damage to national security than Trump did by having secured documents in Mar-a-Lago.  If the DOJ can't equitably enforce the law, maybe they need to be replaced by someone who will.

Well, yes

I have to wonder if it's not some kind of setup, but Fox tells us about a progressive woman who wants a man to pay for the first date, open doors, and the like, and is willing to care for and provide for his wife, and is somehow surprised that most men she meets that meets that description are politically conservative.

Yes, it's generally a package deal, and perhaps we ought to ask ourselves why progressive men too often do not want to show these courtesies.  Maybe....for all their progressive virtue-signaling, these men are all about taking advantage of the women they "date" or "hook up" with.

And pray for this woman, as her praise of AA suggests that she's had a rough go of it in life.  Perhaps....at the hands, in part, of some of those "progressive" men.

Paging Sir Walter Scott

Cambridge's department of Anglo-Saxon history decides there is no such thing.  Somehow I'm betting that they're not giving up their tenured positions and ivory tower offices after having confessed to academic fraud for the duration of their academic careers.

Real efficiency of electric trucks

The all-electric F150 has an overall realistic range of 278 miles, which decreases to 210 miles with a 1400 lb load.  Given that it has a 170kW-H battery that most likely weighs in over a ton of weight, what we're saying is that the vehicle is really, really badly designed.

To draw a picture, burning a kG of coal releases about 22MJ of energy, sufficient with 35% efficiency to generate about two kW-H of energy.  It's about 60% carbon, so what we've got is about 1.2kG of carbon dioxide emitted per kW-H, or about 200kG of carbon dioxide emitted per charge.

In contrast, my 1997 GMC (5.7 l V-8, 5 speed manual) has gotten 15mpg with about the same load, which means in that same 210 miles, I'd burn 14 gallons of gasoline and produce 120kG of carbon dioxide.  Even a one ton pickup will, at ~10mpg, burn only 21 gallons and produce only 180kG of carbon dioxide.

Yes, you read it here.  My 26 year old truck with 265,000 miles is more efficient than an electric F150 in terms of carbon emissions as the truck will typically be charged--with coal.  The numbers are better with natural gas generation--about 100kG of carbon dioxide per charge--but even that ignores the ~60,000 lbs of carbon dioxide emissions to make the battery (my estimate).  

Put the electric F150 against a gas powered F150 from today, and the numbers are not even close.  Or, for that matter, against my 2014 GMC Acadia under the same load.  And so I've got to wonder; is the EPA even working these numbers to figure out how bad of an environmental disaster we have on our hands with electric vehicles?

Too true

From the newspaper of record, apparently some Lululemon staffers have been fired for refusing to help criminals loot their store, and executives note that all their products are overpriced crap, nothing worth dying for.

OK, apparently the real reason is that store staffers actually confronted the thieves, and executives are taking the stance that they don't want to be sued because their workers are being killed, so I actually somewhat understand.  But that said, it's a sad world where management fires people because they object to the store being looted.

It's an even sadder world when the guys robbing Lulemon are....male, and apparently were intimidated by a woman in pink tights telling them to get out.  Perhaps part of the sentence for them (they've been caught) is to show the video to the whole prison when they're incarcerated?

And maybe they can wear some of the the tights they stole as their prison uniform--odds are some of them were orange or striped, no?  Hopefully these are from a batch that didn't have such thin fabric that everything underneath is visible.

Happy Pride Month!

You might be surprised that I wrote that, but I am just figuring that in our society today, we ought to do a better job celebrating the seven deadly sins.  So OK, June is Pride Month, so obviously February will be Lust Month, December will be Greed Month, January will be Envy Month (at the envy for other people's Christmas presents), November will be Gluttony Month, July will be Sloth Month, and April (home of Tax Day) will be wrath month.

Not quite sure why everybody would want to celebrate the seven deadly sins, but somehow it seems appropriate in our culture today.