Paging Disraeli, or Twain, or....

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" comes to mind as I contemplate this study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.  Why?  Well, I presume the underlying data are accurate, but notice how the data are presented; as  a percentage of total murders, not as a raw number.  

So as a public service, here are the raw numbers.  Approximately 1700 women were murdered by intimate partners in 2021, and approximately 960 1080 men were victims of the same crime-approximately 36% 39% of the total.  For comparison, in 2017, the numbers were approximately 1500 women murdered (13% higher) by intimate partners, and about 700 men were murdered by intimate partners (about 37% 50% higher).  (corrections due to my initial math error)

For comparison's sake, overall population grew by only 2% in this period in our country, so we would infer that the "Violence Against Women Act" is doing a great job of ensuring violence against women--and men.

So why the misleading way of presenting the data?  My hunch is that there is a cultural imperative in the BJS to present domestic violence in the same way the Duluth Model does; as an almost exclusively male phenomenon.  But when we look at the actual data, we see that unless the LGBTQ+ community is doing a huge proportion of intimate partner violence (and we'd need to review some Supreme Court cases, ahem), we must infer that both sexes are likely to commit this particular crime, and our approach is simply not working.

Let's start by taking a look at the actual data a bit more closely.  What portion of the deaths are of spouses?  What portion involve adultery? What portion are unmarried couples?  What portion are of prostitutes and johns?  What portion are "couples for one night"?  

Sometimes, we need to take our blinders off and look at data.

More on the Title IX debacle

   ...from the National Review editorial board. As I noted yesterday, it's not just an attack on women's sports, but on women and men in general, really anyone connected even tangentially with any school receiving federal funding.

A side note here is that this is a big reason why home educators really shouldn't want school vouchers; what the government funds, it controls.  "He who pays the piper calls the tune" and all that.  

Side note from the side note; if indeed social workers are working with the schools to transition children without their parents' knowledge or consent, five will get you ten that they're going to be trying to do this with kids who aren't even in the public schools soon.  Really, as government bureaucrats try to redefine "sex" on behalf of the LGBTQ+++ community, nobody's rights are safe.  

That is, for what it's worth, also what wiser people were saying when Obergefgell vs. Hodges was being decided; that there were clear implications where the protection of same sex mirage by the government would have tremendous implications for the reach of the 1st Amendment.  

Think you're safe? Try again

One of the most important things to remember about the Title IX guidance that has recently become notorious (H/T Riley Gaines) for what it appears to do to college and high school sports is that it's not primarily directed at athletic programs, but at schools in general.

That means that when your daughters go to the bathroom or enter a locker room, the Department of "Education" will in effect be there to make sure that they may be sharing that space with a "trans" person who was born male.  When your daughters get assigned dormitory rooms, they may be assigned with one or more people who have a Y chromosome.  When your daughters go to gym class, they will need to play whatever games are available with whatever men decide they are "trans" in their school.  Oops, sorry your daughter got boxed out by someone 50 lbs heavier and twice as strong in that basketball game and got a concussion!

And when this happens, the guidance more or less says that unless the "trans" person actually sexually harasses others or actually assaults them, they have no recourse.  Keep in mind as well that the category of "indecent exposure" does not count if they're in a bathroom or locker room.

If they object to this on their own behalf, or on behalf of a friend, it is extremely likely that they will become the subject of a Title IX investigation.  What's worth noting as well in this regard is that the Department of "Education" also has decreed that certain protections of the accused--the right to counsel, the right to cross examine witnesses, the right to a trial by jury, the "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" standard for conviction--are not applicable, but the consequences of being expelled from a high school or college can be a lifelong penalty.  

Hopefully the courts will slap this down so hard it makes heads spin at the "DoED", but I don't believe we can just wait on this and depend on them to do the right thing.  Send a note to the President and your legislators and explain why this move is totally contrary to the goal of the 1972 legislation that created Title IX, to create opportunities for women and to protect them from poor treatment and discrimination.

Brilliance from the regulatory state

The new Title IX guidance for colleges and high schools goes, apparently, to about 1500 pages, close to the length of "Obamacare", and a third the length of HIPAA.  So while some are appalled (rightly) that it apparently grants biological males (people with XY chromosomes, for those out there in Rio Linda) access to womens' bathrooms and locker rooms, I'm appalled at the fact that it apparently takes the DoED 1500 pages to discuss a concept that is expressed in only 37 words in the actual law:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, or denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.

Yes, it's appalling that in the "minds" of people trying to "educate" us, "sex" is equivalent to "gender identity", and hopefully the courts will slap them into next week.  It's not as if the common view of "sex" when Title IX was passed by Congress and signed by President Nixon includes "gender identity", after all.  This is another great reason why we want not only jurists, but also bureaucrats, to be legal originalists, remembering what the people who wrote the law were thinking.

Regarding the actual objections, yes, I do think women have a right to determine which males may be allowed to see them naked, as well as which males they are willing to see naked--and vice versa. I guess that makes me a reactionary.

Update: another risk of allowing "trans" men onto womens' teams, and into womens' locker rooms, is that it will destroy mens' sports too.  The trick is that per Title IX, spots in womens' sports need to be proportional to their student population, with an adjustment for the football team.  So if women quit en masse because they don't want to be injured, or because they don't want to see penises in their locker room, or because they don't want to be seen naked by just any male, then those same colleges and universities need to cut mens' sports, too.

We might end up, really, with just football as a sport, which is ironic because football players have, I believe, about the highest rate of sexual assault of athletes overall.  Some win for women!

The horrors of Tavistock

Although I am not a terribly big fan of Harry Potter, I am indebted to J.K. Rowling for her linking on her Twitter feed to the Cass report on the horrors of National Health Service juvenile transition therapies.  More or less, it demonstrates that the science behind juvenile transition therapies is inconclusive at best, and one of the big reasons for that many so-called "doctors" are administering therapies without doing any good tests/assays for gender dysphoria.

Yes, you read that correctly.  Certain "doctors" in the National Health Service are, in effect, saying "Sure, I'll adminster puberty blockers and hormones, or even cut off your breasts or nuts, without figuring out if you've actually got this condition."

I can only imagine that in other areas.  I can imagine someone coming in for blood pressure medications, blood sugar medications, cholesterol medications, colonoscopies, or even open heart surgery, and....the doctors giving that to them without even bringing out a blood pressure cuff, reviewing a patient's medical history, or other diagnostic tools?  Seriously?  Any good medical center would pull that doctor aside and say "knock it off, or we're firing you and going after your medical license."  Or they'd just go directly to the firing and professional discipline stage, as they ought to have known better.

Which is, really, my solution for "doctors" using the "affirmative" model for gender transition therapies.  If we can't simply evict them from the medical profession for life, let's at least make the statute of limitations for criminal and civil cases in this area at least 30 years.

(and yes, this is a bit personal with me, as at least one relative of mine is considering some of these therapies)

If we don't choose to hold these so-called "doctors" accountable by force of law, the sad reality is that the fourth box of freedom will eventually be used by their victims....the cartridge box.  And suffice it to say that if called for a jury for someone who killed the "doctors" who mutilated him, I'd be hard pressed to find reasons to convict.

A final note is that I found this bit of beautiful wisdom by Mrs. Rowling, one I think is worthy of none less than Winston Churchill or Samuel Clemens, when a commenter claimed there was no reality to biological sex.  Put this woman in Parliament, if she'll consent to stand.  I am also personally very glad that all six of my children "chose" to gestate in Mrs. Bubba's womb, too, for obvious reasons.

Yep. I'm still amazed all three of our kids chose to gestate inside me, because I thought it was 50/50 they'd come to term inside one of Neil's testicles. By coincidence, my father never gave birth out of his balls, either. Random luck or ancestral curse? I doubt we'll ever know.

I'm inspired by our leadership

President Biden has apparently claimed that his uncle, an aviator in the Army Air Force in World War Two, was killed and eaten by cannibals in New Guinea.   Now the real story is that the plane crashed into the ocean off the coast, and three crewmen didn't survive that crash, but the wag in me thinks it would really be fun to get into TOTUS ("Teleprompter Of The United States") and see if Biden will claim that his uncle crash-landed in the Avocado Jungle of Death.

(but can Biden actually pronounce "Avocado"?.....)

The horrors of working from home....

On a call at work, my coworker's search history showed up...."cheeseburger soup with Velveeta".   So be very careful what's on your browsing history when you're on meetings!  It could show that your taste buds were shot off in the war.

On the dangers of co-sleeping?

The CDC has published a report on the dangers of infant co-sleeping, noting that between 2/3 and 3/4 of infant "SIDS" deaths occur when the infant is sleeping in an adult bed or with an adult.  Interestingly, though, these numbers are far less than the 4-7000 deaths annually that were stated when my first children were young, and then I decided to take a look and see what percentage of parents sleep with their infant children.

The answer?  81% of infants below 3 months of age, and 63% of infants up to 6 months of age.  In other words, infant co-sleeping deaths are roughly proportional to the rate of infants sharing beds with their parents, and there does not appear to be a significant relative risk to co-sleeping.

It's also remarkable how much SIDS deaths have dropped in the past few decades, from around 7000 annually to 1500 or less.  I'm guessing a huge portion of this is because infants are sleeping on their backs or sides instead of on their stomachs, as used to be customary.  

It doesn't mean we don't need to be careful--there is still a lot of bedding that doesn't need to be there with a child, and certainly it doesn't mean that it's OK to come to bed with a child while intoxicated--but it does mean that we've made tremendous progress, and we're at a point where the things we're looking for are far more subtle than they used to be.

Right

Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares points out that for electric vehicles to be environmentally friendly, the weight of  the battery needs to drop by about half.  The problem with that is that we're already using the lightest metal (lithium) for the battery, and the other major component of a lithium ion battery is nickel or cobalt.  If you look at a periodic table of the elements, you will see that there are no lighter transition metals than nickel and cobalt.

In other words, batteries are rapidly approaching a dead end in terms of energy per weight, and that imposes a dead end for electrics.  

Which really isn't that sad.  When you correct mpg-e values by the efficiency of a power plant--typically an upper bound of about 35%--the 94mpg-e for a Tesla becomes about 31-32mpg, which is only marginally better than a Chevy Malibu or similar midsize car.  Moreover, the Malibu is a hefty 700 lbs lighter than the Tesla Model 3, refuels in five minutes, retails for $15000 less, and battery replacements cost hundreds, not thousands, of dollars.

There are great ways to help the environment, but electric cars are not among them.  The cost in terms of rare earth mining (and accompanying implicit subsidy of Communist China), particulate contamination, heating to be able to charge them north of the Mason-Dixon, and more is far too high.

They have a choice

I've said for years that obstetricians have a choice; they can practice medicine, or they can perform abortions, but not both.  My--and my family's--stance becomes crystal clear as this horror story from the Czech Republic comes to light; a woman came for a basic appointment, and her baby was aborted against her will.   

If a physician has "muscle memory" that will allow him to do things like abortion or transition surgeries, I don't want him anywhere near anyone in my family, period.  Hats off to Catholic and other hospitals who have steadfastly said "not here, buster."

Yes, the Cold War is back....

How so?  There is increasing evidence that the "Havana Syndrome" reported by U.S. and other diplomats working on Russian issues may be orchestrated by the Russian GRU.  Really, this is worse than a lot of things done during the Cold War, as the Soviets would spy on U.S. diplomats, but generally would not attack them physically.