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.

Say what?

If you want a great reason to enact revenue tariffs to rein in the abuses of international shipping, the sad case of the collision of the container ship Dali ought to give you a good one.  It appears that the ship had been having major electrical issues for a while, but the owners decided to go to sea anyways.   

Interestingly, the ship has redundant power generation capacity with four diesel generators and a bow thruster, so what apparently went on is that whatever electronics control those generators had difficulties.  Redundant, but not redundant enough, and it suggests that ship safety needs to go a step closer to what we're trying to do with airliner safety--but maybe failing there with Boeing these days, of course.  

(sad to say, we have some suggestion that the intestinal fortitude of some regulators and inspectors needs an upgrade as well....from personal experience doing quality and reliability work, it can be hard to be the guy saying "no" to people who are several pay grades above you)

On the light side, I'd suggest sending the Dali to the Kerch strait and see if it can do the same trick again.  Slava Ukraini!

Good luck with that

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says that if "his conditions are met", he'll stop illegal immigration.  Those conditions?  Amnesty for illegals here, $20 billion in annual subsidies, and an end to sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba.  Of course, left unsaid is that if ten or twenty million illegals get green cards, that's going to put the demand to leave Mexico through the roof.  Lopez Obrador can more more stop illegal immigration to the U.S. than he can control the cartels that are destroying his country, if even he wants to.

My counter-proposal would be continued sanctions against the countries that have stolen billions of dollars in assets from U.S. citizens and companies, no annual subsidies, and a 5% revenue tariff on all goods coming from Mexico, with the funds obtained to be used to install and maintain a robust border wall and drug interdiction, along with robust punishment of the coyotes who are driving the illegal immigrant and drug trades while raping countless thousands of illegal immigrants in the process.

Let's check it out

After a terrorist attack in Moscow, it was somewhat natural at this point to suspect someone from Ukraine, but of course, the accused gets to talk back, and boy howdy,  does Mykhailo Podolyak, speaker for President Zelensky, lay it out.  If his sources are correct, basically every security system was turned off to allow this to happen.

One thing Mr. Podolyak didn't mention; the building had sprinklers, but went up in flames as if the pipes were filled with oil.  As with so much out of Moscow, I smell a rat here.  Hopefully the Russian people catch on to the particular rat I'm thinking about and stomp him.

This one should get some "corrective action"

In Livonia, Michigan, a 12 year old boy ordered a "virgin daiquiri", but was served the alcoholic version instead.  Despite the fact that the young man only drank part of it, he apparently woke up with a splitting hangover.  How so?  Well, the daiquiri is one of many sweetened drinks with a typical alcohol content below 20% that does not "burn" as it goes down.  

I can see a couple of corrective actions here, one for the family, and a few for the restaurant.  For the family, it's probably a good idea to not order the "virgin" type of drink, because somebody back in the bar is going to eventually get confused and include the booze.

For the restaurant, there are two major corrective actions.  First of all, give the drink another name so the wait-staff doesn't confuse it with the alcoholic version, and second, take a very close look at how strong the bartenders are making them.  To get to the level of excessive drinking that would cause a hangover, a 75-100 lb boy of that age would need 3-4 shots of rum in the drink.  Given that the lad didn't drink the whole thing, that means most likely 5 shots of rum  (or more) was in the drink, which is over twice the strength of a standard daiquiri.

And that means that the "Outhouse Steakback" was squandering a fair amount of money on extra rum (at least if it wasn't total rotgut stuff), and was also risking having patrons hitting the roads with a couple of sheets to the wind.  Four to five drinks gets a 210 lb man (like myself) to the legal limit for driving, and....let's be honest....the daiquiri is very often a woman's drink.  A woman of 140 lbs is going to be at about twice the legal limit with that dose of alcohol.

I'm all for the responsible use of alcohol, but quite frankly, this isn't it.  Hopefully the family and the restaurant learn their lessons before someone gets seriously hurt.  Getting to know lawyers (and the police) on a professional basis is no fun.

Happy Spring

My second daughter made sure that she sang this song when she was visiting Honduras, and saw a large flock of the winged vermin in a church square, much to the horror of her boyfriend.  Her boyfriend's father, when told, noted that he had thought he was usually the weird one in the room....

Happy Spring!

 

Side note; this podcast/videocast says a lot of things about how young women are all too often "aging like milk."  If you've got teen daughters, they might be blessed by this.  I've personally seen some putting way too much effort into their appearance this way.

A thought on "trans rights"

As a former competitive runner, the things that occurred to me first regarding "trans" competitors in women's sport are:

• That larger, stronger men will take opportunities and podium places away from women.  Only about 2-3% of the performance differences between men and women are due to testosterone; about 10-30% difference remains.
• That larger, stronger men will injure female competitors due to size & strength.
• That people who are not trans at all will use the "opened" locker rooms to harass and violate female competitors.
• That spectators will not buy tickets to, in effect, watch "men in drag".  Part of the attraction of women's sports is that it is a woman doing the sport, after all.

Expending on the third point, it strikes me that when MTF trans people in various stages of transition are allowed into women's locker rooms--or FTM trans people in men's locker rooms--what is implicitly being told to the "cisgender" residents of those locker rooms is that they no longer have a right to decide which naked individuals of the opposite gender they might see, and that they also no longer have a right to decide which individuals of the opposite gender might see them naked.

Put differently, "trans" activists are in effect telling us that if the perpetrator is trans, "flashing" or being a "peeping tom" is no longer a crime if the crime occurs in a bathroom or locker room.  One might wonder whether every flasher or peeping tom whose name is rightly on Megan's List ought to have his crime downgraded to "mere" indecent exposure if this precedent holds.

Makes sense to me

As I contemplate the firing of head basketball coach Juwan Howard at that school in Ann Arbor, I am compelled to remember the inauspicious way he started his tenure; by suggesting that the school re-hang banners that were taken down because the school had been forced to vacate all of its wins because their athletes were taking payments from boosters.

Hail to the Cheaters, I guess.  But more seriously, Howard's tenure at Michigan was a mess, and he threw away a golden chance to rebuild their basketball program.  The alumni network and support of fans at Michigan has few rivals in the NCAA, and hence it really takes some doing to end up 8-24.  

A Dying Nation?

Apparently, the number of disabled males in Russia has risen by over half a million men, including 290 thousand men of age 18-30.  Now part of this could be ordinary industrial accidents, and part of it could be young men deliberately injuring themselves to avoid military service, but all in all, it indicates that (yikes) Ukrainian estimates of dead and maimed Russian soldiers are somewhat conservative.  

Definition of beauty

 The lovely lady above is Faye Schulman, a Jewish member of the Resistance against the Nazis during World War Two.  She apparently survived the war (with a bullet wound) and had a loving family with children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.  Want to learn more?  See here. 

I love the camoflage of the fur coat she's wearing, and am personally curious about how she apparently got hold of a Thompson submachine gun.  Might have been a cast-off from the Red Army, which didn't like them much.

Definition of Chutzpah

Christine Blasey Ford, having seen all of her eyewitnesses deny her version of events, and having been found to have lied about a fear of flying under oath, and having been found to have lied about why her house has two front doors, writes a book in which she claims that Justice Brett Kavanaugh is not an honest person.  

Although obviously Anita Hill got away with about the same thing regarding Justice Thomas, I would still hesitate to accuse one of the nation's most eminent lawyers of such things when my own accusations against them had been thoroughly thrashed on national TV.  It would seem to be a quick way to end up on the left side of the courtroom in a civil or criminal libel action.

An insider speaks up

Now as a Spartan, I should either hate Nick Saban because he took his talents away from East Lansing, or perhaps I should note that the man could really have been successful if he'd stayed, but this interview by CNN is something I really like to see.  More or less, though Saban can be said to have benefited from a lot of the power politics of college football, he enunciates a traditional view of college athletics and sportsball, that it's not just about winning games, but also about developing young men into functional adults.

Lots of work to do there to achieve that, as the current system seems to be weighted on the side of big money programs more than it ever has been.  We won't be able to go back to true amateurism, and haven't been there in my lifetime, really, but we can hopefully get away from a system that all too often sends young men and women out into the world without a meaningful degree, but with Cadillac tastes and horrendously sinful habits from the experience of college sportsball.  

Sad, but true

The newspaper of record notes that it is hard for Hamas fighters to abstain from raping infidels during Ramadan.   OK, this is technically a joke, but after last October 7, they all deserve it richly, and it reminds me of something I learned about T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. "Lawrence of Arabia") after watching the epic movie; one of the things he noticed and experienced is that both Ottoman and Arab men were prone to homosexual activity, just as American soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan noticed a century later....

I hate to say it, but I'm seeing a pattern here.

A modest proposal for dealing with "trans" athletes in women's sports

The sad reality is that it would still take up a roster spot that ought to be held by a woman, but the NHL tradition of the "enforcer" comes to mind when contemplating "trans-women" participating in womens' soccer, basketball, hockey, and the like.  The "enforcer", ideally a starting safety for the football team or a power forward, would stay on the JV team unless the varsity team was playing against a team with a trans player, and would only take the pitch/court when a "trans" player was out there.  His only job would be to stymie and isolate the trans player so that the girls could actually play.  

And yes, if the trans person hurt one of the ladies, the enforcer might be called upon to commit a couple of hard fouls or hard picks.  

Some study on "trans" issues

I do not have the time to go through all the footnotes and track down all of the references this paper refers to, but it's a very interesting summary of the state of transgender "medicine".  One interesting thing I learned is that a lot of the "innovators" in this area have some very troubling connections, including the fact that after performing an early sex reassignment surgery, Dr. Erwin Gohrbandt did pioneering, and criminal, hypothermia work.

In Dachau.

All in all, the sense I get from reading this is that first of all, those "doctors" engaged in this enterprise are not paying nearly enough attention to the likelihood that "trans" identity is merely a symptom of deeper underlying mental health problems.  Going a bit more broadly, I'm not sure that a  lot of mental health practicioners understand this, either. 

Other observations; the document has a fair number of reports from transition "doctors" of detransitioning, which indicates that the real numbers for regret are probably a lot higher than advocates of transition surgeries would like to admit.  The document also has a fair amount of evidence that these "doctors" are doing some "interesting" things to get things paid for by insurance (i.e. insurance fraud), that many practicioners are rubber stamping requests for surgery on minors, that many practicioners are fudging required wait times, and a lot more.

Looks like my comments about the state of psychology were, if anything, very optimistic and over-gracious to a broader scope of medical professionals, and they need to grasp a very basic principle;body parts in the specimen bag do not grow back, and they do not reattach.  So you want to make for darned sure that it's the right path before you amputate.

Imbecilical moments in marketing

Doritos, apparently having learned nothing from the Dylan Mulvaney/Bug Light fiasco, has hired (and gratefully fired) a trans "influencer" who has admitted in public to tendencies of pedophilia.  And who, quite frankly, has a serious case of the uglies by any (male or female) standard.

Weird me, I'd thought that it's better to do marketing with people whose lives one might like to emulate, and I would at least hope that the proportion of hideously ugly pedophiles who are willing to admit that in public is small.  

The bright side of this is that hopefully Doritos is helping traditional Spanish food culture by showing their product to be morally, as well as nutritionally, bankrupt.

A dish for Festa Della Donna; Chili Verde

    In preparation for the Festa Della Donna, I made some carne asada with a dollop of chili verde last weekend.  Let's just say it wasn't a good weekend for weight loss, and both recipes are courtesy of a coworker of mine from Sonora state.  ("Il Dioses de la carne")

The carne asada was straightforward; take chuck steak sliced 1/2-3/4" thick, marinate with salt & pepper and lime juice for about a day prior to cooking.  Grill over a smoky mesquite fire until it's done to your taste, allow to rest 10 minutes, slice, and serve.

The chili verde also involves the grill.  Take 2-4 medium tomatillos, 2 jalapeno or serrano peppers (remove seeds unless you're a glutton for punishment), half an onion, and half a bulb of garlic.  Throw vegetables on a grill, grill until lightly charred, and then blend them together with half a tsp of salt.  Enjoy the burn on your lips and in your eyes.

On the light side, with two four daughters now married, we realized that if we help our sons-in-law celebrate Festa Della Donna correctly, we could soon be celebrating Festa Della Nonna (grandmother's festival).

Festa Della Donna

Or, as it's called far less elegantly in English, "International Women's Day".  Now I'm going to say something you might not have expected; despite the apparent feminism of the day, I'm thinking that this March 8, we'd do well to celebrate it.  Let's buy the ladies in our life a mimosa (either the flower or the drink or both, really), cheer for womens' sports (Will Thomas, you're not invited), and celebrate real femininity.

And guys, don't worry about the imbalance--Pi Day and Festa Bistecca e Pompino (again using Italian for obvious reasons) are coming up on the 14th.  Or maybe, just maybe, celebrating real feminity is a way to encourage the belle donne in our lives to celebrate real masculinity.

Great commentary on "America First" and isolationism

Jay Nordlinger notes that, as ssensible people have known for centuries, sometimes the world doesn't leave you alone, and foreign policy must go beyond a mere assertion of short term interests of a country. All the more true as more and more nations have the ability to lob a ballistic missile to the opposite end of the planet.

Which is why I donated $51.80 to Ukrainian relief in honor of Ksenia Karolina, a Russian-American ballerina imprisoned by Putin for donating that amount to Razom.  Suggest that you do the same.  Every bit of help to make Ukraine liveable and prosperous is another nail in Putin's coffin.  May he reside there soon.

More great moments in injustice

The city of Houston has apparently suspended 260,000 criminal cases in the past eight years because  of a lack of personnel.  Scary thing in the first regard is that this is only 10% of criminal cases in Houston in this time, meaning that about 300,000 crimes occur annually there, and scarier yet that these cases are "suspended", meaning that whichever victims (say up to thirty thousand families) are involved do not get justice, and also scary because innocent men and women still have the axe of justice hanging over their head, because the case is not dismissed, but rather suspended.

But you can always find Officer Friendly doing traffic patrol.  Priorities, I guess.

Great moments in environmentalism

The state of Colorado is apparently banning the use of gasoline powered lawn equipment on public property, an initiative sponsored by the "environmentally mindless" people at "COPIRG".   As a former Colorado resident, I remember COPIRG well.  One day, they sent some people canvassing in a beat up Subaru with visible emissions....on a "red air quality" (smog) day when they could have simply taken the bus.  

Oh well, given that a lot of power in Colorado is generated using coal, I guess this fits what COPIRG has always done, mess up the air quality while preening about as if they're cleaning things up.  Sigh.

On another note, it makes sense that this "influencer" lives near the royal family, as I've noted for a while that the royals often lack a pleasure I get to enjoy all the time; the comfort of a well broken in piece of clothing.  Seriously, 500 pairs of shoes for over a hundred grand?  I calculated, even worse, that you'd need something like 100 linear feet of wall space to store all those shoes.  So unless one wants to look at nothing but sneakers in one's house, we're talking a bigger house just to house all those stinkies.

So my hearty "Bronx Cheer" to the environmentalists of the week, COPIRG and Miss Nyame.  

Horrors of Injustice

Here in Minnesota, we had a recent case where a man, implicated in a (statutory?) rape of a 14 year old girl, barricaded himself in a home with (his?) seven children and killed two police officers and a paramedic.  The suspect is deceased, but thankfully none of his children are physically hurt.  

That noted, what's of note in my mind is that while the suspect's record is not remarkable--a misdemeanor disorderly conduct conviction, some traffic convictions (also misdemeanors), and a 2007 felony assault conviction--there is an interesting pattern of "what was not done?" that merits discussion.  Specifically, at least two women requested protection orders after being involved with him since 2013, a reality that a judge honored when he refused to restore the man's firearm rights, but an interesting question comes to mind:

Did the judge look up the man's criminal history and ask the applicants for protection orders whether the man owned or possessed firearms, and did anyone visit afterwards if a positive answer was given?

I've done a bit of thinking about what is to be done about under-investigation of allegations, which of course benefits the guilty and hurts the innocent, and how to persuade the criminal justice system to take investigation seriously.  I can think it might have to do with:

• Jurors might refuse to convict based on very thin investigations.
• Defense lawyers might point out a thin investigation as evidence the prosecution hadn't done its job per Brady v. Maryland and Kyles v. Whitley.
• Prosecutors might say the same to the police when cases are handed over.
• Judges might rebuke prosecutors who bring thinly sourced cases to court.
• The state might impose audits of cases to make sure cases are getting adequate investigation.

But all in all, I can hardly imagine a better argument for good investigations than this:

If the police and prosecutors do not insist on sound investigations, the failure to punish the guilty and acquit the innocent may periodically get police officers and other first responders killed.

Might be better than a law requiring audits.  I still favor periodic audits, but there might be something even better.

A mocking term for Russia's President?

        A protester in Paris has referred to Vladimir Putin as "Poutine".  For the uninitiated, poutine is a French/French Canadian dish of cheese curds and brown gravy on top of French fries.

 

I don't personally see what poutine ever did to deserve being associated with Putin, but the sentiment is interesting.  Perhaps because poutine is linked to heart disease?

Seriously, my condolences to the loved ones of Alexei Navalny, almost certainly murdered at the orders of Vladimir Putin Poutine.  May Mr. Putin soon get his ticket to Hell.  Putin delenda est!

Annals of injustice

This article caught my eye, as it illustrates a way authorities can really make the process of investigation and trial into a punishment that probably never would be implemented by a jury.  More or less, 40 states allow the state to recover legal fees paid on behalf of a poor defendant, and those who are not able to repay face various sanctions like losing drivers' licenses and the ability to register a vehicle.  

And since a person who cannot legally drive really cannot legally work, a person who is accused has a choice between debtor's prison and a life of criminality.  I do believe that Charles Dickens wrote something about that, as did Victor Hugo.  We may be creating career criminals by our approach to legal aid for the poor.

Worse yet, for crimes less than (and maybe including) murder, the police do not do a thorough job of investigating.  A 2017 Star-Tribune report found that only 20% of rape allegations got a good basic investigation, but 26% of them were referred to the prosecutor.  One in four people whose cases are referred to a prosecutor are referred on the basis of a paper-thin investigation.  

Now let's think of this in light of investigators' responsibilities from Brady v. Maryland and Kyles v. Whitley--to seek out and provide exculpatory (exonerating) evidence.  Probably the easiest way to avoid these responsibilities is to never collect the evidence in the first place.  "Oopsie.  We put our guys with forensics degrees out on traffic patrol, so they really don't have time to interview rape victims and potential witnesses. Sorry about that!"

Wealthy defendants can get around this by hiring their own investigators to do the investigations the police do not do.  The rest of us?  Not so much.  Again, it's a choice between a ruinous plea and ruinous debt.  

So what should be done?  My take is that the government needs to do (with private help) what businesses do; audits.  Something along the lines of ISO9001, really, where an auditor would come by once a year, take a number of files from the police and the prosecutor's office, and examine them to see if basic standards are met.  If they're not, corrective action (like taking Officer Friendly off traffic patrol and having him do investigations) would be required, and the next audit would use a much larger sample.

Ideally, any government auditors (who often get stymied, if my reading of the federal government is accurate) would be augmented by conscientious policemen, prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys, pushing back at inadequate investigations by saying "This case was not investigated per basic standards--let's start from the beginning."

A country that needs to be de-Nazified

Russia, of course, as Vladimir Putin has apparently just blamed Poland for being invaded in 1939.   Pro tip for Mr. Putin; if you're basically quoting Hitler in an interview, you can ST*U forever about trying to "de-Nazify" other countries.  You're the problem, buddy.  It fits, of course, with Russia's support of Iran, which of course earnestly desires a new Holocaust.  Somehow I am reminded of the "Prayer for the Tsar" from Fiddler on the Roof:  "Lord, bless and keep the Tsar....far away from us!".  With friends like Mr. Putin, Jews (and the rest of the world) don't need any enemies.

And a pro tip for Mr. Tucker; if you cannot figure out that your interviewee is sympathetically endorsing Hitler's foreign policy, and you don't call him on it, please don't call yourself a journalist.  Stenographer, maybe, but definitely not a "journalist". 

This one will be fun to watch

Hawaii's Supreme Court argues that the "spirit of aloha" overrides the Second Amendment of the Constitution, as well as decisions like Heller, MacDonald, and the like.  My response is first that I'd expect that the Supreme Court will slap them down by at least a 6-3 margin (hopefully 9-0) under the Supremacy Clause, and that it's a pity that the Supreme Court doesn't have authority to administer a "Spirit of Disbarment" to Hawaii's "justices" and Attorney General.  There are things in the law that can reasonably be debated, but the Supremacy Clause is really not among them, and those who argue or rule otherwise really ought to removed altogether, and permanently, from the practice of law.

Babylon Bee gets it wrong

...by claiming that a last stand against Biden ought to be at the Alamo.  My thought, given Biden's well-known difficulties climbing the steps on and off Air Force One and elsewhere, is that it ought to be a place with steps.  It would be impenetrable by the Biden team.

That, or there ought to be a voice activated door that Biden can open by voicing a coherent sentence.

And what can they do?

Mexican authorities are rejoicing over a court decision that claims that the "Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act" does not apply to guns which end up in foreign nations.  Now I'm not an expert on the PLCAA, but it does strike me that since all gun manufacturers must sell through FFL holders, regulated by the BATFE, responsibility for preventing those guns from getting into Mexico lies primarily with...

the federal government of the United States.  It is also unclear what gun makers can do, given that they really have no control over the training and dispositions of gun dealers, nor is it clear that gun dealers can spot someone who intends to resell the gun.  They could remove "scary looking guns" from their catalogs, but those are some of the most popular for purchase by U.S. buyers who have no intention of letting them leave the country.  

And not surprisingly, all three judges are Democratic appointees.  I'm looking for this one to be overturned on appeal and either an en banc review, or in the Supreme Court.  If you doubt that it matters who you vote for, read the decision.  It's appalling, right down to spelling errors.

Just wondering...

Apparently the Russian legislature, the Duma (say it in Yiddish, it fits), is considering a law to confiscate the property of anyone who discredits the Russian military.   Beyond the obvious point that the Ukrainian army might be cheerfully saying "Molon Labe" to the Russians, it strikes me that if you want to confiscate the property of someone who's discredited the Russian military or spread false information about it, I'd start with Vladimir Putin, Sergey Lavrov, Pravda-Moscow, Izvestia, and of course the entire general staff of the Russian Army.

OK, yes, that's probably not how such a law would be interpreted or enforced, but the fact remains that if you want someone who's discredited the Russian military, there are plenty of guilty parties now collecting paychecks from the Russian government.  Have at it.

And an inadvertent confession

Apparently the big hitch for a contract extension for Michigan concussion-ball coach Jim Harbaugh is that he wants immunity from issues related to NCAA investigations, of which there are  currently two.  One is minor--a meal provided to a recruit in violation of rules--and the other is the sign-stealing issue, which I see as major.

Given that Michigan has been investigated for the recruiting violations before, and Harbaugh was not punished for that, I'm guessing that this is an inadvertent confession by Harbaugh that yes, he was in the thick of it for sign stealing.  At any rate, I can't bring myself to believe that he and his defensive coordinator didn't notice that the defense was in the right place an incredible portion of the time, quite a bit higher than when he was watching film as a QB for the Wolverines, as a QB for the Bears, Ravens, Colts, and Chargers, and as a coach for the Raiders, U. of San Diego, Stanford, the 49ers, and then back again at Michigan.  You don't get to the top of the NFL and the top of the college game by missing these things when watching film, to put it mildly.

What's the significance?  Well, in his first six years at Michigan, he was 49-23 (68% wins), and in the past three years, the Wolverines are 37-3 (92.5% wins).  Two of the three losses were in bowl games, where of course the season for the opponent would be complete before Connor Stalions could visit.

It's not perfect proof, but I think the data are suggesting very strongly that without the sign stealing, the Wolverines would have kept up their pattern of losing to Ohio State and even Michigan State, and in their bowl games.  In other words, it's a pretty big deal. 

More on those electric vehicles

In Chicago, scores of Teslas are left cold and inoperable because, surprise surprise, Arrhenius acceleration is a law of chemistry and physics, and it takes a lot longer to charge, and you get a lot less useful range, when it's cold out.  Bonus, for those who are concerned about the environment, is that it takes a lot more energy to charge the battery because so much of the energy is used to keep the battery warm while charging.  So more or less, the efficiency of your Tesla goes down by half to three quarters when it's 20 below.

In contrast, my real cars, powered by readily available gasoline, start at 20 below with no problem (even the 1997 GMC with 270,000 miles), and they only lose about 20% of their mileage at that temperature.  Who would have thought that a 26 year old 5.7 liter (350 CID) V-8 would be the ecologically sound alternative to a Tesla?

Besides me, of course.  And other people who can actually do math and science.

Breathtaking stupidity from the NCAA

 The President of the NCAA is saying that nobody can say that the University of Michigan didn't earn their "national championship" fair and square.  OK, let's give it a try:

The cheating Michigan Wolverines didn't win their championship fair and square, since in the past couple of years, they've been caught with recruiting violations and stealing signs from their opponents in violation of NCAA rules.

One would figure that the president of the NCAA would have enough self-awareness to realize that a lot of people would assume that a program subject to multiple rules investigations might not have won fair and square, but apparently not.  So I think we can dispense with the notion that the NCAA is about "student"-athletes who might know how to think.

 But that said, college football is dying to me in many ways.  Is this a sport, or a competition to see who can have the most tattoos?  Is this an amateur sport, or are championships going to be determined by the amount to which corporations and alumni sponsor their team's athletes?  It's never been pure as the driven snow--the 1987 MSU Spartans that I cheered on to the Rose Bowl had a lot of players on the muscle juice, and a few of them were arrested for very real crimes--but the mercenary spirit of the game seems to have grown exponentially since I was a young pup.  It's pretty sad, really.

Why I am not Orthodox

Georgian Orthodox church has icon of Joseph Stalin defaced.   Um, they honored the atheistic mass murderer of tens of millions of his own people....why?

Pro tip; if you're venerating atheists who've killed millions of innocents, it's time to find a new church that treats genocide as the sin that it is.  Yikes.

In similar news, this article refers to the "Leningrad military district", although St. Petersburg/Petrograd has had its original name since 1991.  Let's do the math; with Putin, it certainly appears that Communism is trying to make a comeback.  Let's hope and pray that that comeback is every bit as successful as the Bee Gees in the early 1980s.

Now here's a really bad idea

A children's hospital in Cincinnati is teaching their staff to lie and hide the fact that they're starting gender transition therapies with children from their parents.  This is a spectacularly bad idea, because smart parents can look up the names of the staff with whom their children are interacting and make a good guess about what's going on, and furthermore, the best thing that can happen is that families will start to assume, rightly, that any staff involved with gender disphoria will be lying to them.  Smart parents also will make certain conclusions when they get the bill, but not the explanation of services, or receive an explanation of services that makes no sense.  That is, ahem, billing fraud, which can be a felony.

The worst thing that can happen is something that I'm predicting will happen; angry parents are going to visit the clinic and prevent further violence against their children with a 100-230 grain dose of cooper clad lead administered to the center of mass on some of the staff.

No doubt that gender disphoria is not an easy thing to handle, and those who have it have a horrendous rate of suicide attempts--40% by some accounts.  But saying "we'll go ahead and hide what we're doing from everybody involved" simply serves to destroy the credibility of medical professionals in an age when the response to COVID, sometimes in a way that will lead to severe violence.

Just let them do it

There has been a degree of hullaballoo (technical term) over the attempts, often successful, of "Satanists" to put their "monuments" in places like state and federal Capitol buildings, consisting to a great degree of "artwork" which resembles little more than some of the artwork you'll see on some science fiction books and at Renaissance fairs.  

So apart from whether they really believe in pagan gods, or if they're just atheists and agnostics seeking to make fun of Christians, what they're doing is showing that they're doofii.  Who am I to stop them?  Let them do it!

Shoot, shovel, and shut up

Jeff Jacoby makes the case that the Endangered Species Act has ironically created an incentive not to save endangered species, but rather to eliminate them as soon as possible--to shoot, shovel, and shut up.  The number of endangered species has gone up by a factor of 12, 11 species have gone extinct, and only 57 have recovered--and those mostly resulting from the DDT ban and the Clean Water Act, which required certain wetlands to be preserved, helping many bird species to recover.

It's long past time to take Congress by the lapels, shake them well, and tell them "Don't 'just do something', think through the economic consequences before you act!".   Just like the Violence Against Women Act appears to have resulted in more violence against women, and just like federal supports of electric vehicles are creating many billions of dollars of bricks in winter, apparently the Endangered Species Act is creating a lot of dead and even extinct animals.

Heckuva job, Congress.  Again, think it through first.

How bad is it?

I've basically assumed that the degradation of performance of electric batteries in things like electric cars and buses is pretty much just Arrhenius acceleration, but this article about electric buses in Scandinavia being parked because they could not run at all at -34C (about -30F) indicates that what is afoot is not just deceleration of production of electricity, but rather a phase change that  makes them into extremely expensive "bricks".  Oops.

And it gets that cold pretty often here in Minnesota and Wisconsin....sorry, Tesla owners, you've been had.

California makes the joke reality

One of my favorite California jokes involves a man on the plane to LA, moving because of a job transfer, sad because he thinks the state is totally different from others, thinking of the gangs, the earthquakes, the landslides, the wildfires, waste on the sidewalks, and of course a loon (donated by Minnesota?) in Sacramento locking the place up while having parties at "The French Laundry" (not to mention any names...).  This man is blessed--for a moment--by another man who tells him that when he finds a nice place to live with a nice school district and a nice neighborhood with good neighbors, he'll find that California is just like any other place, just with better weather.

The man then says "Say, Bob, thanks for the encouragement--by the way, can you tell me what you do for a living?"

Bob's answer; "I'm the tailgunner on a bread truck."

And recently, a gang in Compton made my joke a reality by driving an SUV into a Hispanic bakery and looting it.  Hundreds of people thought it was a good idea to commit felony breaking & entering, destruction of property, and more.....for panecitos?  And judging by their faces, they were neighbors of those who owned and worked at the bakery.  You want to pull them aside and say "hey, if you want to have nice things, you can't be doing this."

Or more bluntly, the bread truck seriously needs a tailgunner.

Clarification: I've had and enjoyed panecitos from a local Mexican bakery.  I just prefer to purchase them rather than risk jail time by destroying the bakery and stealing them.  

Pro tip; "Arrhenius acceleration"

Minnesota cities are apparently learning the hard way that the batteries on electric buses do not work well in cold temperatures.   That's the bad news, but the worse news is that Duluth's low temperature today is only 24F, and in the real part of winter, Duluth routinely sees -40F.  So those buses are pretty much out of operation until April.  What a shame that the state of Minnesota doesn't have a first class university system with engineering schools where experts in the matter could inform transit officials of the ugly reality of thermal (Arrhenius) acceleration and its impact on batteries.  For that matter, an ordinary city bus with a "mere" 50 gallon tank can go about twice as far and refuel in five minutes.  So why anyone thought this was a good idea is beyond me.

Oh, wait....really, the ability of human beings to look past the obvious is quite amazing.  In other such news, here's a fascinating article by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that is remarkable for something it shows, and even more remarkable that the researchers don't really comment on how remarkable it is.  Take a look at the graph in the "highlights" section of the first page, and you should notice two remarkable things.

First, in 1976, nearly as many men were murdered by their spouses/lovers as were women.  Given that violent crime is generally speaking about an 80-90/% male phenomenon, it is really remarkable that women in the mid-1970s were just about as murderous as were men.  Perhaps we ought to blame disco for this?  But note; only passing interest is paid to this by the DOJ, presumably because it interrupts the narrative of "blame the male."

Next, from 1976 to 1997 or so, the rate of "androcide" plunges by about two thirds, and again, the DOJ does not offer any hypotheses as to why this might be.  To me, this is appalling, since if we understood what went on, we might be able to replicate it and save hundreds of lives annually.

But that noted, my hunch is that we're not going to be able to replicate it.  If you look at history, the big thing that was happening in family law in the 1970s was that states were adopting no fault divorce, as lawyers around the country had noticed that perjury was rampant in divorce cases as spouses desperate to get out of bad marriages were accusing their spouses of adultery, abandonment, and abuse.  It's also at this time that most states got out of the alimony business, reducing the "cash haul" for divorcees.

And so my hunch is that the big reason that androcide rates dropped--and femicide to a degree as well--is that a fair number of men who were "married to crazy" suddenly could afford to divorce crazy without financial ruin, and the conditions that were leading to androcide were defused.  This is certainly something I can glean from my (no kidding) reading of mid 1980s era "Ms. Magazine", where the writers and editors complained vociferously about how men who were divorcing their wives were making out like bandits, and compared to at fault divorce with alimony, they certainly were.  Also worth noting is that women might have been less likely to "divorce crazy" because of financial vulnerability--something the feminists would also have told us at the time.

And unfortunately, the men (and women) who divorced crazy are now dying off, so it's going to be hard to interview them and figure out "how did you come to realize that your marriage was not just bad, but dangerous?". 

Worse yet, when I looked up intimate partner murders in 2017, I found about 1500 men and 700 women had been murdered by a spouse or lover.  That's an increase of about 15% for femicide and 40% for androcide, which means that femicide is more or less keeping pace with population growth, and androcide is going along at twice the rate of population growth.  We might somewhat bitterly joke that the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 has achieved its goal of promoting violence against women and men alike.

More seriously, I think these statistics reflect the fact that intimate relationships are uniquely difficult because the heart is involved, as well as shared assets, and (e.g. "you and me 4-ever") partners also have the innate assumption of permanence.  Couple that with the fact that only 10% of intimate partner murders are preceded by recent violence, and you're going to see it's a hard nut to crack--and that the nutcracker we're using now is basically made of balsa wood.