Not quite sure this is a good thing

Apparently there is an "anti-woke" beer called "Ultra Right" out there that is in response to the fiasco with Dylan Mulvaney endorsing Bud Light, and while I'm happy to see Anheuser-Busch take it in the shorts for offending their customer base, I am not quite so sure that the conservative movement will benefit in the long run from becoming a major, or even a minor, manufacturer of bad beer.  

Yes, right

Presidential spokes-woman Karine Jean-Pierre is arguing that President Biden is so vigorous, she and other White House staffers are having trouble keeping up with him.  OK, most likely, that statement is "genuine frontier gibberish", but part of me wants to say "Agreed.  Now if you cannot keep up with a senile old man who routinely trips on the stairs, would you do us all a favor and find employment more suitable to your abilities, like wearing a blue vest at the entrance to Wal-Mart?"

Trans rights, or Megan's Listers' opportunity

A judge in Wyoming recently ruled that a lawsuit against a sorority that had admitted a biological male could not proceed, and now it's coming out that....the male's Tinder account indicates he's interested in women, and he's accused of more or less being a peeping Tom.

I think these womens' best opportunity now is to resign their affiliation with the sorority with a continued warning that the admission of biological males does open the door to biological males....who have no interest in actually "transitioning", but want to be there for other purposes.  If I were the legal counsel for the sorority, I'd be raising **** about the matter for liability.  Yes, it's no fun when you're likely to get sued by people for "rejecting trans rights", but to put things in perspective, the portion of the population that is trans (1/300 by the highest estimates I've seen) is quite a bit less than the portion of males who are, or should be, on Megan's List (~1.7 million of 120 million adult males, or ~1:70).

On M-F trans people in women's sports

An Oberlin College Lacrosse coach has spoken up against "trans" men in women's sports, and not surprisingly, has reaped the whirlwind.  The thing that is most shocking here is that lacrosse is not like swimming, track and field, cross country, or other sports where contact between athletes is rare and inconsequential, but is rather one of those sports, like basketball, soccer,and hockey, where contact between a larger and stronger male athlete and a biologically female athlete is common and can be quite injurious.  When your competitors are coming at you 10% faster than you're used to, when they weigh 20% more and are 10% taller, and when the ball is coming at you 25% faster, bad things happen.

It's really the same reason we don't let Little League teams play major league baseball.  It's about fairness first, yes, but equally importantly, it's about safety.

h/t a heroine of mine, Riley Gaines.

A bit more on Title IX investigations

This article examines the questions of whether Title IX investigations are, or are not, legal proceedings where the accused ought to enjoy certain legal protections, and the clear thing here is that many advocates are playing it both ways--they are not legal proceedings when it would give rights to the accused, but they are legal proceedings when it would allow accusers to pursue further redress of grievances.  So it is, more or less, a quasi-legal game of "Calvinball", where one party changes the rules to his benefit, generally when his pet tiger Hobbes starts winning the game.

More importantly, in my view, is the question of what the result is of a Title IX-induced expulsion, and my best guess is that in most cases, the university to which one might transfer would deny admission, at least for a time, to such a student.  So in a very real way, a Title IX expulsion is going to follow a person around in the same way that a criminal conviction will.  The person will be pushed out of any number of career paths--career paths that tend to pay better than those that do not require a college degree.

And in my view, that means that when a student is accused of some sexual mispropriety, legal rights need to apply.  Yes, it will make the process much more expensive and difficult, but quite frankly, that is a feature, not a bug, of the system.

The state of transition therapies

According to the New York Times and National Review, one hospital performing "gender affirming care" (more accurately, "sex denying care") is finding that there was a pattern of rushing patients into hormone therapies and worse, that 16 patients had "de-transitioned", and that the ER was recording an average of one "transgender" patient per day showing up in a crisis situation.

Now if we believe the "official" notion that only 2% of the transgender reconsider, that would indicate about 800 patients, and count me skeptical of that.  So what we have here is:

• Far more than 2% of patients are reconsidering and detransitioning
• The lack of mental health care for the patients is resulting in ER crises or worse
• Mental health professionals at St. Louis Children's Hospital/Washington University Transgender Center are doing a horrible job of observing and addressing real mental health issues.

The conclusions I draw are that the state of Missouri needs to lengthen the statute of limitations for civil suits for hasty transition procedures to 30 years at least, and then to get a serious investigation into this hospital that ought to result, ahem, in the end of a number of careers in mental health.  Let's not forget; body parts in a specimen/biohazard bag do not reattach, and they do not grow back.  I am not ready to end transitioning altogether as a legal practice, but it seriously needs to be reined in.

A point of honor

In an area close to my heart--my wife and I both graduated from Michigan State in East Lansing, and my wife grew up in Charlotte--a federal district court has ruled that the city of East Lansing was wrong to exclude an orchard near Charlotte from the city farmers' market, and this after an apparent series of court losses on the way there.

It strikes me here that while the city council members have the 1st Amendment right to ignore the 1st Amendment, as public servants, they're pledged to honor it, and the fact that they've wasted many thousands of dollars of public funds on a series of lawsuits that any competent lawyer would tell them was futile ought to lead to their resignation and a commitment to repay those legal fees as they can.  

Of course, any city that drags a farmer and his family through seven years of lawsuits to infringe on their religious rights probably doesn't have much honor to begin with, but one can always dream.

Public service announcement

Nutritionally speaking, dark chocolate has some things going for it.  For a ton of calories--600 calories per 100g--you get about 16% of your RDA for protein, 3-12% of many of your key vitamins, and (!!) pretty much your RDA for iron, copper, magnesium, and manganese.  You also get a third of your RDA (in keeping with the calories, really) of phosphorus and zink, and 7-15% of the RDA for potassium, selenium, and calcium.  Plus, the fats in dark chocolate are mostly unsaturated.

God is good, isn't He?

I might start shopping at Target after all

The newspaper of record says that they're doing a "straight white male pride" collection.   The major thing that stops me from shopping there again is that I own that very grill, that very kind of mayonaisse, several hatchets and flannel shirts, and yes, that specific kind of New Balance shoes.  All I'm missing is the C&W album.

Never mind.  I don't trust Target to carry that kind of stuff without ruining it.

A justifiable RICO investigation?

As I read the latest indictment of former President Trump and Ben Shapiro's column on the same, it strikes me that the accusations and the justification for a prosecution are about the same.  The accusation is about trying to win an election through unfair means, and as it uses a legal theory that is novel (to put it mildly), the accusation itself is....an attempt to win an election through unfair means.

I won't be holding my breath on the counter-prosecution to start, but it would be really amusing if it happened.  And justified.

Watch out for spandex?

Now to be fair, this is not a peer reviewed article that clearly links various additives put into polyester with clear harms to human health, but apparently a lot of workout clothes--especially those for women--are showing up with a lot of endocrine disrupters like bisphenol-A, PFAS, and the like.

The hypothesis is that even small doses do enough "endocrine disruption" to do things like cause (or worsen) endometriosis, reduce sperm counts, and cause other reproductive issues.  So apparently a lot of workout clothes are not just tacky, but also might be harmful to current and future generations.

The irony is that the mantra for my kids in cross country is "cotton kills" due to its ability to absorb water, but in reality, the opposite might be closer to the truth.  Pray that I will not become too smug in my love of natural fiber clothing!

Not just inconvenient, but possibly deadly

Imagine you're on a lonely Minnesota or North Dakota highway in your Tesla when it's 20 below, and you find out the hard way that your batteries won't get you to the next town.  Multiple lawsuits now allege that Tesla's range calculation algorithm is giving needlessly rosy estimates of available range until battery capacity is well below 50%.

Now I am not an expert on how to calculate the available charge in a battery, but it strikes me that this is very similar to the age old problem of a gas guage not working well--except you're starting, when it's 20 below, with 150 miles of range instead of 300 or 500.  The government's desire to replace our real car fleet with electrics seems to be running aground on the hard shores of chemistry and physics.

That's a pretty high error rate

The linked article from National Review is a good summary of where the American Academy of Pediatrics is going regarding transgender care, and one of the kickers is that current rates of de-transition are 10-30%.  

Writing as a guy who's worked in statistics and quality for a quarter century, suffice it to say that if I had a process with that rate of Type 1/alpha error, we'd be having daily meetings to get the problem fixed.  And in this case, for those whose bodies have been damaged by hormones, puberty blockers, and surgery, there is no fix.

Doctors, remember that line from Hippocrates; "First, do no harm."  And legislatures, let's remove the statute of limitations for civil actions against those who hastily transition people.  It's a lifelong effect, so it should be a lifelong liability on the part of those doing the procedures.

Missing the point a bit

The University of Michigan has announced that they will have two new scoreboards at the "Big House" that are "120% larger" than the previous ones.  Silly me, I thought that if I wanted to watch a game on TV, I could stay home, eat my own food, and save a bundle of money.  Yes, in a stadium as big as Ann Arbor's, the players "are smaller" due to the sheer size of the edifice--you can be something like 500 feet from the action on the field--but if being super close to the action is your cup of tea, maybe consider a game on a smaller court like tennis, hockey, or basketball?