Obesity: One of the Many Problems We Refuse to Discuss that is Killing Many of Us.

I'm convinced that misguided empathy running amok is preventing us from dealing with many serious issues, even issues that are killing us. Here's an example: The problem with obesity.

Fifteen years ago, there was a lot of talk about the obesity epidemic. In 2008, Michelle Obama started a government program called “Let’s Move!” that sought to reduce childhood obesity. You might remember the First Lady teaming up with everyone from Beyonce to Big Bird to promote exercise and better eating habits. Unfortunately, the program was largely a failure. And the obesity statistics continued to rise.

74% of Americans today are either obese or overweight. And yet, we’re no longer talking about it. The national conversation around health and weight has turned away from things like good nutrition, weight loss and the importance of physical fitness, and instead adopted phrases like “fat acceptance” and “healthy at any size.” In some circles, there’s even blanket denial that there is anything unhealthy at all about being obese.

Shaming people for being overweight is unequivocally wrong. But in our attempt to not offend, we’ve lost sight of the very real fact that there’s a problem. Americans are heavier than ever, sicker than ever, dying earlier than ever, and it’s all preventable. So today, a conversation with Dr. Casey Means, a Stanford trained physician who left the traditional medical system behind to solve the one problem that she says is going to ruin us all: bad food.

This entire podcast episode hosted by Bari Weiss is riveting, filled with shocking statistics and demoralizing because this is a problem we can solve but won't.

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Today’s 5th Circuit Decision–Netchoice v Ken Paxton–Stuns Big Tech

Today's Netchoice opinion out of the 5th Circuit stuns Big Tech, which claimed that it had a First Amendment right to muzzle viewpoints of users. No you don't, said the Court. An excerpt:

A Texas statute named House Bill 20 generally prohibits large social media platforms from censoring speech based on the viewpoint of its speaker. The platforms urge us to hold that the statute is facially unconstitutional and hence cannot be applied to anyone at any time and under any circumstances.

In urging such sweeping relief, the platforms offer a rather odd inversion of the First Amendment. That Amendment, of course, protects every person’s right to “the freedom of speech.” But the platforms argue that buried somewhere in the person’s enumerated right to free speech lies a corporation’s unenumerated right to muzzle speech.

The implications of the platforms’ argument are staggering. On the platforms’ view, email providers, mobile phone companies, and banks could cancel the accounts of anyone who sends an email, makes a phone call, or spends money in support of a disfavored political party, candidate, or business. What’s worse, the platforms argue that a business can acquire a dominant market position by holding itself out as open to everyone—as Twitter did in championing itself as “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” Blue Br. at 6 & n.4. Then, having cemented itself as the monopolist of “the modern public square,” Packingham v. North Carolina, 137 S. Ct. 1730, 1737 (2017), Twitter unapologetically argues that it could turn around and ban all pro-LGBT speech for no other reason than its employees want to pick on members of that community, Oral Arg. at 22:39–22:52.

Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say. Because the district court held otherwise, we reverse its injunction and remand for further proceedings.

In the meantime, during Congressional testimony, Facebook admits that it has been coordinating with the Whitehouse & CDC to censor FB users' constitutionally protected speech.

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FIRE Files Suit to Address First Amendment Problems with Florida’s “Stop Woke Act”

Once again, FIRE steps up when First Amendment rights are threatened. No matter where someone is on the political spectrum, good intentions are a poor guide to abiding by the First Amendment. This time, the problem is Florida's Stop Woke Act. Excerpt from FIRE's press release:

The First Amendment doesn’t allow Florida law to declare which concepts are too challenging for students and faculty to discuss in a college classroom.

Stop WOKE Act restricts college student and faculty members’ ability to play devil’s advocate, express viewpoints University of South Florida’s First Amendment Forum is the first student group to challenge the law in court TAMPA, Fla., Sept. 6, 2022 — To protect free speech, the government must censor. That’s the absurd argument put forth by Florida lawmakers in the controversial “Stop WOKE Act.”

The law suppresses viewpoints disfavored by Florida lawmakers, threatens tens of millions of dollars in annual funding for universities that don’t crack down on faculty who “promote” an opinion on a government blacklist, and encourages people to report other Americans to government authorities if they “advance” those views — all in the name of “individual freedom.”

Today, a professor and student group from the University of South Florida sued to protect professors’ ability to teach and students’ ability to learn. The lawsuit, filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, alleges that the higher education provisions of Florida’s “Individual Freedom” law (dubbed the “Stop WOKE Act” by its proponents), impermissibly chill free expression and promote unconstitutional censorship on the state’s college campuses.

“Without the freedom to engage in vigorous and robust debate about important issues and contentious concepts, a college education is just an exercise in memorizing facts and repeating government-approved viewpoints,” said FIRE attorney Adam Steinbaugh. “That’s not freedom or education.”

The Stop WOKE Act, passed on an exclusively party-line vote and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis on April 22, prohibits “instruction” on eight specific “concepts” related to “race, color, national origin, or sex”that may run counter to government officials’ notions of “freedom.” For example, the bill unlawfully restricts discussions of advantages or disadvantages of a particular race or sex; whether individuals are unconsciously biased based on race or sex; and whether certain virtues — including “merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness” — are racist.

But in restricting which ideas may be considered in a college classroom, Florida’s political leaders ran headlong into the First Amendment.

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Dysfunctional Conversation at Colleges, By the Numbers.

New report by FIRE and the news is not good:

More than three in five students (63%) expressed worry about damaging their reputation because of someone misunderstanding what they have said or done, and just over one in five (21%) reported that they feel a lot of pressure to avoid discussing controversial topics in their classes.

Twenty-two percent reported that they often self-censor. Roughly three in five students reported they would feel discomfort publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial topic or expressing an unpopular opinion to their peers on a social media account tied to their name.

At this link, you can download FIRE's brand new report.

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The NYT Excoriates BYU for Racial Slurs that Might or Might Not have Occurred During a Volleyball Game

Jesse Singal digs into this storiybut, more importantly, into the way the New York Times has once again committed journalistic malpractice. Our media outlets have turned into two competing teams that act like churches. It's as if we are relying on churches to provide us with factual accuracy regarding their respective dogmas:

In light of all this, it’s interesting to read the rest of the Times story and examine which information Patel did and didn’t include. There is no sign he (or the other two staffers who worked on the story) contacted any other member of either team or its coaching staff, or anyone in attendance at the game, or anyone who wasn’t in a leadership, issuing-an-official-statement position at BYU. In the age of ubiquitous social media and gigabytes of video being posted from every live event every second, I bet Patel and his colleague could have contacted at least two dozen individuals in attendance with about an hour of work, if only to get some color about what the atmosphere was like in the student section supposedly hurling these slurs. . . .

As of now, the Cougar Chronicle’s version of this story is better, more complete, and more accurate than The New York (freaking) Times’, in part because it didn’t treat the accusation as automatically true. Rather, the reporters did some reporting. All these days later, the Times story remains up, treating the maximalist account of this incident as more or less settled fact, spreading misinformation, without an update or follow-up article in sight.

This is reason number 2,342,392,398 why I don’t trust journalists who insist that the way forward for journalism is to intentionally stray further from the ideals of objectivity. While few will say it quite so bluntly, in practice, the idea seems to be that because in the past certain groups and claims weren’t given the benefit of the doubt, now they should reflexively be believed, with little need for due diligence.

I can’t emphasize enough how basic the stuff the Times failed to do here used to be: As a journalist, you should always have a tiny but insistent voice nipping at the back of your mind, demanding (to the extent possible) a bit more skepticism, a bit more independent confirmation, and so on. If you think things through journalistically, the fact that BYU hurriedly issued statements denouncing the racism shouldn’t be seen as proof it actually occurred, because of course the institution has its own goals and it wouldn’t look good for it to do anything but issue an abject apology.

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