Saturday Miscellany

First, the United States Supreme Court tried out a new game this week: who is the dumbest justice?

The case came from Tennessee. The Biden administration and the ACLU were arguing that Tennessee did not have the right to ban child mutilation. That is, to ban puberty blockers and other forms of surgical intervention applied to children. 

Justice Sonya Sotomayor, who no one has mistaken for a towering intellect, opined that the risks attendant on mutilating children, poisoning their bodies with cross sex hormones, was analogous to the risks of taking aspirin.

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, a notable radical leftist thinker, once opined that Sotomayor does not know nearly as much as she thinks she knows. For once Tribe was right.

Anyway, another diversity hire, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argued that prohibiting children to be mutilated was analogous to banning interracial marriage between consenting adults. When it comes to stupid, Jackson was certainly competitive.

Apparently, these justices missed out on class the day they explained analogies.

Who do you think is dumber? It’s the question for today.

Second, she’s not on the Supreme Court so she could not enter in the stupidity derby, but no contest would be fair without mention of the dumbest of them all. That would be Joy Reid at failing MSNBC.

When she heard the arguments about transgender children, Reid went all Nazi. To her warped and twisted mind, the people who wanted to deny children the chance to have their bodies mutilated were-- take a deep breath-- Nazis. 

That’s right, mutilating children makes you an anti-Nazi. 

And you were wondering how the country got to be so stupid.

Third, Wesley Yang attempted to put a more positive spin on the debacle:

People want to say that the Sotomayor and Brown were stupid and that may be true. But whether it is or not, it is definitely true that any attempt to defend the transgender movement invariably makes its defenders stupid. The kindergarten propaganda version of the dogma is the only version.

Fourth, I have been following the story of pandemic-era learning loss for years now. I noted, with many others, that shutting down schools would damage children’s minds, especially children from lower income homes.

Now, we have more evidence of the damage done to American children. From Joanne Jacobs:

U.S. students' math scores fell sharply between 2019 and 2023 for fourth- and eighth-graders, according to new results from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, known as TIMSS….

While high achievers held their own, low-performing students lost the most, widening achievement gaps.

Jacobs is cautious about drawing a conclusion, but the evidence points in only one direction:

It's not clear whether school closures, which lasted longer in the U.S. than in Europe or Asia, led to more learning loss. But one of the countries that raised achievement, Sweden, didn't close elementary schools or mandate masks. TIMSS now ranks Sweden 14th in math achievement, while the U.S. is ranked 24th.

Fifth, meanwhile on the transmania front a young woman is suing the head of transmania at UCLA. Next stop will be making it all a crime. 

Considering that proponents of child mutilation pretend that it is a harmless procedure, we offer Billboard Chris’s summary of the treatments that were imposed on one Clementine:

I’m at UCLA and I just met Clementine, who recently detransitioned. When she was 12, Johanna Olson-Kennedy at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles put her on puberty blockers. 

At 13, she was put on testosterone. At only 14 years of age, she was given a double mastectomy! 

Clementine had suffered sexual abuse, and that was the source of great trauma, and is why she didn’t want to be a girl. Johanna Olson-Kennedy didn’t care about that. Within 30 minutes of her first appointment she was told she needed to go on puberty blockers, or she might kill herself. Her parents were told they could have a dead daughter or a live son. 

This is standard practice at gender clinics. The only way they can justify this child abuse is to say that kids will die if they don’t do it. Testosterone caused psychosis so Clementine went off it at 17. She has now just turned 20, and can probably never have kids. She’s trying to get reconstructive surgery but insurance companies only want to pay for destruction of children’s bodies, not reconstruction. I hope Clementine sues, and helps to bring down this industry, but mostly I’m incredibly thankful for her bravery in speaking up. If you don’t believe this is happening. please listen to her story.

Sixth, I seem to recall that Ben Shapiro offered the following analysis during the Obamacare debate. He said that, of the three most desirable qualities-- universal, high quality, affordable-- you can choose two, but you cannot have three.

An astute analysis. Now that we all have Obamacare, how is it working out? Apparently, not very well. 

Matt Wolking explains that more and more Americans are dissatisfied with the care provided. The survey was performed by Gallup:

Gallup: "Americans' positive rating of the quality of healthcare in the U.S. is now at its lowest point in Gallup’s trend dating back to 2001. "The current 44% of U.S. adults who say the quality of healthcare is excellent (11%) or good (33%) is down by a total of 10 percentage points since 2020 after steadily eroding each year."

Seventh, just in case you were wondering why our society is so fractured, why people have lost their sense of civility and decorum, examine some of the reactions to the assassination of United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson. Kat Rosenfield reports for The Free Press that more than a few people, rather than criticize the health insurance business or even the government interference in the process, are perfectly happy to see people address their problems by public execution.

The online reaction has been extremely gleeful and extremely dark: “My thoughts and prayers are on hold pending prior authorization,” reads one representative (and massively upvoted) comment on a New York Times Facebook story about the murder.

 Taylor Lorenz, recently of The Washington Post, wrote, “and they wonder why we want these executives dead” on Bluesky before cross-posting the name and photo of Blue Cross Blue Shield CEO Kim Keck to her accounts on multiple platforms (along with a cheeky suggestion that her followers engage in “very peaceful letter writing campaigns” against murderous insurance execs).

In a viral X post, Columbia University professor Anthony Zenkus—whose profile describes him as an “anti-violence” “trauma expert”—quipped, “Today, we mourn the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down. . . wait, I’m sorry—today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.”

Yolonda Wilson, an associate professor who teaches a course on “Law and Morality” at St. Louis University, said she was “not rejoicing” in the brutal murder of this father of two—even as she implied he deserved it. “I’m not sad about it, either,” she added. “Chickens come home to roost.”

So, some people, normally the ones who are whining about losing democracy, are happy to promote violence as a solution to grievances.

Eighth, it’s all over for male authors. More and more of the publishing industry is female. For some strange reason they seem to be prejudiced against male authors:

78% of staffers and 59% executives in the publishing industry are female.

This phenomenon reported on in stories like NPR’s “Women Now Dominate the Book Business” and “Women Are Now Publishing More Books Than Men” (which describe it as a sign of progress) helps shed light on another phenomenon that the media has been rubbing its head over in articles like The Atlantic’s “How Gen Z Came to See Books as a Waste of Time” and Psychology Today’s “Why Aren’t College Students Reading?”

While there’s always been a gender reading gap, by 2018, 44% of girls loved to read, while only 24% of boys did. One study found that adult women were reading 39% more than men did.

Ninth, do you want to save the whales? I am sure that you do. But, do you also want to save the dolphins? I certainly hope that you do. 

Save them from what, you might ask. Well, a certain group of dolphins has been shown to have a drug problem. Specifically, they have a fentanyl problem.

Newsmax reports:

Americans aren't the only mammals being afflicted by the illegal drug trade as traces of fentanyl have been found in bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico.

Now our nature loving environmentalist cohort can take up arms against drug trafficking. If it were just about killing people, they would not much care. But, now that it has been snuffing out dolphins, it’s time to take up arms. 

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.