Banning Gas Stoves is Now a Priority for Some

The federal government is considering a ban on gas stoves.

Three points.

1. They will need to pry my gas stove from my cold dead hands.

2. Do you really want to shut down all the restaurants that use gas to cook, including my favorite little stir fry take-out place at the end of my block.

3. If you are REALLY worried about particulates, don't read Sam Harris' article about the dangers of fireplaces (link in the comments). Here's an excerpt:

It seems to me that many nonbelievers have forgotten—or never knew—what it is like to suffer an unhappy collision with scientific rationality. We are open to good evidence and sound argument as a matter of principle, and are generally willing to follow wherever they may lead. Certain of us have made careers out of bemoaning the failure of religious people to adopt this same attitude.

However, I recently stumbled upon an example of secular intransigence that may give readers a sense of how religious people feel when their beliefs are criticized. It’s not a perfect analogy, as you will see, but the rigorous research I’ve conducted at dinner parties suggests that it is worth thinking about. We can call the phenomenon “the fireplace delusion.” . . .

Here is what we know from a scientific point of view: There is no amount of wood smoke that is good to breathe. It is at least as bad for you as cigarette smoke, and probably much worse. (One study found it to be 30 times more potent a carcinogen.) The smoke from an ordinary wood fire contains hundreds of compounds known to be carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratogenic, and irritating to the respiratory system. Most of the particles generated by burning wood are smaller than one micron—a size believed to be most damaging to our lungs. In fact, these particles are so fine that they can evade our mucociliary defenses and travel directly into the bloodstream, posing a risk to the heart. Particles this size also resist gravitational settling, remaining airborne for weeks at a time.

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Some of the Costs of the U.S. “Wars on Terror”

In the U.S., we tend to think mostly about our own losses, our own wounded and dead. The costs we inflict on other people with our war machine are estimated in Jacob Crosse's article: "Two decades of US “war on terror” responsible for displacing at least 37 million people and killing up to 12 million." An excerpt:

A staggering new report coauthored by Professor David Vine at the Watson Institute at Brown University conservatively estimates that 37 million people, equivalent to the entire population of Canada, have been forced to flee their home country, or have become internally displaced within it by nearly two decades of unending US imperialist war. The analysis, published by the Costs of War Project, sought to quantify for the first time the number of people displaced by the United States military operations since President George W. Bush declared a “global war on terror” in September 2001 following the still unexplained attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon.

Professor Vine and his coauthors note that the 37 million estimated displaced is a “very conservative estimate,” with the real number of people displaced since September 2001, “closer to 48-59 million.” That is as much as, or more than, all of the displaced persons in World War II and therefore more than any other war in the last century. It is difficult to articulate the levels of misery, poverty, hardship, strife, pain and death visited upon entire societies and endured by millions of people.

The latest Costs of War report focused on eight countries that have been subjected to major US military operations: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

. . . The authors estimate that 9.2 million people in Iraq and 7.1 million in Syria have been displaced respectively, in both cases roughly 37 percent of the prewar population. . . .Somalia, where US forces have been operating since 2002, has the highest percentage of displaced persons with 46 percent of the country or nearly 4.2 million people displaced.

Throughout the “war on terror,” the authors estimate between 770,000 and 801,000 civilians and combatants on all sides have died in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen since US forces began military operations in those countries. The number of “indirect deaths,” that is, those who weren’t confirmed killed by military weaponry, but died due to lack of healthcare, infrastructure, or food as a result of US military operations, embargoes and blockades may exceed 3.1 million, although the authors noted that credible estimates range in excess of 12 million.

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Ibram Kendi’s Confession

I sometimes think back to 2021, when Ibram Kendi unwittingly self-destructed. The episode was described by Professor of Political Science and author Wilfred Reilly at FAIR:

On October 29, the newly minted MacArthur “genius” posted the results of a widely discussed survey project on Twitter, saying simply: “More than a third of white students lied (about their race) on their college applications.” Kendi went on to claim that about half of the students who chose dishonesty falsely identified themselves as Native American—presumably to benefit from affirmative action programs—and that “more than three-fourths” of all students who lied about their racial background were accepted to colleges they applied to. As any academic should, Kendi duly linked his source, which I also provide here.

The backlash to Kendi’s comments was immediate, and, frankly, rather predictable. As Oliver Traldi details for Quillette, and as Jerry Coyne does for the popular blog Why Evolution Is True, conservative and heterodox intellectuals pointed out that Kendi’s claim about white students seeking to benefit from affirmative action logically debunks the main thesis of his scholarly work. Founder and former editor of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald not only questioned the objective accuracy of Kendi’s data, but also noted that his argument “negates every core contention about American society on which his career is based.” Journalist Alex Griswold described Kendi as having “blown up his life’s work,” noting that Kendi would “have to delete” his tweet, which, in fact, he did.

Reilly is the author of an excellent book of topics we should be discussing regarding social justice: Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About (2020).

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Stanford University Attempts to Dismantle Harmful Language

Stanford University has launched an initiative to protect us from harmful language. This language is so incredibly harmful that after the link to the website started getting passed around, Stanford shut down public access. Now only Stanford students will get to know the language that purportedly harms all of us.

Heather Heying had been poking around at the Stanford website that was designed to protect her (and me and you and everyone else) from certain terrible words and phrases, but before she could finish reviewing the website, Stanford closed off public access. Here's some of the information that Heather can report at her website, Natural Selections:

Finally, I grabbed a single screenshot of one of the recommendations on the site before access was restricted4. Here it is:

[More . . . ]

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Prevalence of Gender Ideology and the Placebo Effect

Is the nearly vertical upward spike in reported cases of gender transition due, in part, to the placebo effect? Leor Sapir Reports at City Journal,  "The Placebo Is the Point: A new paper highlights the fundamental bias in the world of “gender-affirming” research."

A paper published last month in the Archives of Sexual Behavior makes an important point about the environment in which “gender-affirming” drugs and surgeries are offered to minors. Positive outcomes from hormonal interventions, argues psychiatrist Alison Clayton, the article’s author, may be attributable to placebo effects generated by clinical encounters and the social context in which they take place, rather than to the underlying psychotropic effects of the drugs themselves.

Clayton’s basic intuition makes sense. If you take a teenager in emotional distress and tell her that drug X will solve her problems, while treatment Y will make them worse, and then bring her to a clinical setting where medical professionals repeat that message, it should come as no surprise that the teenager experiences emotional relief when you give her X, or distress when you give her Y—regardless of the psychotropic effects of X. The patient may regard the giving of X symbolically as adults listening to her and empathizing with her inner turmoil. “The ‘Hawthorne effect,’” writes Clayton, “describes the phenomenon where clinical trial patients’ improvements may occur because they are being observed and given special attention. A patient who is part of a study, receiving special attention, and with motivated clinicians, who are invested in the benefits of the treatment under study, is likely to have higher expectations of therapeutic benefits.”

It is indeed the case that promoters of “gender-affirming care” have created what Clayton calls “a perfect storm for the placebo effect.” In the left-of-center media, puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones and (less frequently) surgeries are hailed as “medically necessary” and suicide-preventing measures for teens in distress, supposedly over having been wrongly “assigned” their sex at birth. Skeptics of these interventions are denounced as cruel deniers of life-saving medicine to youth at high risk of suicide. Meantime, alternatives to drugs and surgeries (e.g., psychotherapy) are denigrated as harmful “conversion therapy,” setting the stage for a nocebo (harmful) effect on those who receive psychotherapy but not drugs.

From the viewpoint of those who have become intensely interested in treating dysphoria medically (rather than the "watch and see" method), many have uttered the phrase "Munchausen syndrome by proxy," which is "a mental illness and a form of child abuse. The caretaker of a child, most often a mother, either makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms to make it look like the child is sick."

 Biologist Colin Wright has been observing various parent groups. His observations give credence to that concern.

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