Gas stoves live to light another day

The New Neo Posted on by

Even some Democrats realize that the Biden administration’s war on gas stoves is unpopular:

…[O]ver two dozen Democrats in the House of Representatives joined Republicans to approve an amendment preventing the Department of Energy from implementing strict new regulations on gas stoves that most stoves on the market today would not be able to meet.

People love their gas stoves, which have a number of cooking advantages (full disclosure: nevertheless, I have an electric stove.) The arguments against gas stoves seem remarkably weak in the face of that love.

I will add that the energy-efficient dishwashers sold today are terrible; they seem to take forever to go through their cycle, making a nasty sound as they churn away. And low-flow showerheads and toilets? Don’t get me started.

Are trans murderers on the increase?

The New Neo Posted on by

I saw this today:

Yes, there do appear to be more killers who identify as trans than there used to be – but then, there are also a lot more trans people than there used to be. The increase in numbers may just be reflecting that fact. I think it’s also likely that the pre-existing mental problems and diagnoses of a significant percentage of trans people are the biggest part of what’s driving the violence.

That said, it’s certainly possible that identifying as trans enters the mix at least somewhat. It gives the person an instant victim status and special grievances, fueled by social media – and the rise of social media may also be an important item driving the increase in violence. And then there’s the ingestion of hormones (which may or may not have been taken by the Nashville shooter):

…[T]estosterone itself has long been known to cause increased aggression in men, with one study published in the International Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism in 2012 stating that there is some evidence that testosterone levels are higher in individuals with aggressive behavior, including violent criminals. Some other studies have found that trans men taking testosterone hormones may experience increased aggression, including a 2018 study from The Journal of Sexual Medicine and a 2021 study in Hormones and Behavior.

The Hormones and Behavior paper states that in one of three trans men [that is, biological women] taking testosterone ended up less aggressive during treatment, and that all groups had no changes in aggression at a one-year follow-up. Additionally, an article in the British Medical Journal Open published in 2020 found that aggression may increase during initiation of testosterone treatment, but will return to baseline during long-term testosterone treatment.

There also was this 2021 analysis:

Four out of seven studies reported an increase in aggression-related constructs, while one study reported a decrease. In all studies reporting changes, the follow-up period was less than 12 months, indicating that gender-affirming testosterone therapy could have a short-term impact on aggression-related constructs. However, the available studies carried a risk of bias, which indicates a need for further research.

As well as this one from 2018:

This study demonstrates that during 7 months of continuous gender-affirming hormonal treatment, anger expression and anger arousal control increased in transmen.

Most people who get angry don’t murder anyone, of course, whether the angry person identifies as trans or not. But if the population experiencing the anger increase is large enough, it stands to reason that some will commit violent acts. Again, we simply don’t know – and may never know? – whether the Nashville killer was even taking hormones.

Whatever happened to patriotism?

The New Neo Posted on by

In yesterday’s thread on a poll indicating a steep decline in patriotism in the US, commenter “charles” wrote:

That is one thing that makes polls like this so disheartening; if more and more people believe that love of one’s country and the continuation of that love to be to work/fight for one’s country doesn’t matter then our liberty and future generations’ liberty can be gone. Once gone it is harder work to bring it back than to have worked to keep it alive in the first place.

I remember years ago in graduate school I took a history class as an elective. One day it was very surprising (and very sad) to learn that I, and another student who was an undergrad in our grad level course, were the only ones to believe that patriotism was a good thing. Everyone else in class, including the professor, thought that patriotism was nothing more than jingoism and always – ALWAYS – led to fascism. So, not only did they think patriotism didn’t matter; they believed that it was a bad thing.

In that same thread, commenter “Le Mot Juste” posted a famous (or once-famous) section of a poem by Sir Walter Scott that begins “Breathe there the man, with soul so dead/Who never to himself has said/This is my own, my native land!” And also in that thread there was this observation by commenter “JJ” on traveling and then returning home:

I retired 30 years ago. My wife and I have used our pass travel privileges to see quite a bit of the world. Last count it was 52 countries. We have learned a great deal from our travels. Magnificent geography, different customs, occasionally an ambience you won’t find in the U.S., a sense of history you can’t get from the “new world,” and how truly different and difficult life is for many people in far flung countries…

All that said, we never failed to appreciate coming home to the country we love. We’re not perfect, but our Constitution provides us with a plan to improve, if we follow it. Unfortunately, there are many who don’t like the Constitution because when it’s followed, it is hard to dominate the citizenry. At least that’s the way it looks to me.

People who don’t appreciate the USA need to open their minds to the realities of the world.

All of this reminded me of an old post of mine, which follows in slightly-edited form.

The story “The Man Without a Country” used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book—as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers—that I was assigned in school.

It was exciting compared to Dick and Jane and the rest, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad—and unfair, too—that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that I would guess is rarely or never assigned nowadays to students – au contraire.

Patriotism has gotten a very bad name during the last few decades. I think this feeling gathered more adherents (at least in this country) during the Vietnam era, and certainly the same is true lately. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were thought to have wrought on that continent during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, coupled with a lot more than nationalism itself. But the experience seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.

Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:

If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…

A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which unbridled and amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response at the time, one that many decades later helped lead to the formation of the EU. The waning but still relatively strong nationalism of the US (as shown by the election of Donald Trump, for example) has been seen by those who agree with Mann as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.

But the US is not Nazi Germany or anything like it, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. There’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores or tramples on human rights (like that of the Nazis), but one that embraces and strives for and tries to preserve them here and abroad, keeping in mind that—human nature being what it is—no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but has been a good country nevertheless, always working to be better, with a nationalism that traditionally recognizes that sometimes liberty must be fought for, and that the struggle involves some sacrifice.

So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): …this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: …the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. Those lines from the anthem express a hope that has been fading during the last year in particular. But even though things are looking dim for both liberty and courage these days, it is not over.

When I looked back at my original, longer version of this post, I saw that it was written on Memorial Day in 2005, not that long after I began blogging. Seems longer ago than that. This is another portion of what I wrote then, and although I was describing my post-9/11 thoughts, I think it’s especially appropriate now [updates in brackets]:

I’d known the words to [our national anthem] for [over sixty years], and even had to learn about Francis Scott Key and the circumstances under which he wrote them. But I never really thought much about those words. It was just a song that was difficult to sing, and not as pretty as America the Beautiful or God Bless America (the latter, in those very un-PC days of my youth, we used to sing as we marched out of assembly).

The whole first stanza of the national anthem is a protracted version of a question: does the American flag still wave over the fort? Has the US been successful in the battle? As a child, the answer seemed to me to have been a foregone conclusion–of course it waved, of course the US prevailed in the battle; how could it be otherwise? America rah-rah. America always was the winner. Even our withdrawal from Vietnam, so many years later, seemed to me to be an act of choice. Our very existence as a nation had never for a moment felt threatened.

The only threat I’d ever faced to this country was the nightmarish threat of nuclear war. But that seemed more a threat to the entire planet, to humankind itself, rather than to this country specifically. And so I never really heard or felt the vulnerability and fear expressed in Key’s question, which he asked during the War of 1812, so shortly after the birth of the country itself: does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

But now I heard his doubt, and I felt it, too. I saw quite suddenly that there was no “given” in the existence of this country–its continuance, and its preciousness, began to seem to me to be as important and as precarious as they must have seemed to Key during that night in 1814.

And then other memorized writings came to me as well–the Gettysburg Address, whose words those crabby old teachers of mine had made us memorize in their entirety: and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Here it was again, the sense of the nation as an experiment in democracy and freedom, and inherently special but vulnerable to destruction, an idea I had never until that moment grasped. But now I did, on a visceral level.

We certainly feel the threat now, don’t we?

[NOTE: I will add that in grade school my class was made to memorize the Sir Walter Scott poem. I very much doubt there’s a class today given that assignment.]

Religion and patriotism have gone out of style

The New Neo Posted on by

This explains a lot:

The Monday poll [from the Wall Street Journal] questioned U.S. respondents about the importance of patriotism, religious faith, having children and other traditional U.S. metrics. The poll found that just 39% of Americans say their religious faith is very important to them, and just 38% say patriotism is very important.

The WSJ compared those numbers to the first time it ran the poll in 1998 when 62% of Americans said religion was very important to them, and 70% said patriotism was very important.

What a difference 25 years of leftist indoctrination makes.

Another result of interest in the recent poll: 80% of respondents say the economy is “poor” or “not so good,” and only 15% think it will get better in the next year. That’s quite a level of pessimism, but unfortunately I think it’s justified.

And yet, and yet – when people were asked which statement they agreed with that best described their opinion of the US, 21% chose “Stands above all countries in the world,” and 50% selected, “One of the greatest countries in the world, along with some others.”

Go figure.

How the MSM is framing the Nashville shooting

The New Neo Posted on by

Shooter as victim:

…[T]he new narrative must be maintained. A woman who shot to death six people including three children in cold blood must be recast as a victim of society. We must respect “his” pronouns even as we report “his” murders. We must blame those who truly cause pain in the world: those who disagree with the thought leaders in our legacy media, who know better than all the common sense, biology and tradition in the world.

Recall that the MSM initially cast the Columbine killers as victims of bullying, driven to murder by the torment they had endured from mean classmates. Although that was far from the truth, it was said so often and so early that many people still believe it to have been the case. I have written extensively about the Columbine killers’ actual motivations – as best we can ascertain them – here as well as here.

The media wasn’t motivated so much by politics in writing about Columbine; certainly not directly. I think what was going on with the MSM back then was that bullying was a topic du jour and reporters wanted an easy explanation for Columbine that fit in with that topic and also cast the killers as victims of it. Of course, victim culture – and the denial of something that used to be called “evil” – is part of the leftist ethos, so there was a more subtle leftism operating in the way the media initially framed the Columbine mass murderer narrative.

The leftist orientation of the media has increased exponentially in recent years. As we can easily see in the MSM’s coverage of the Nashville shooting, politics – in particular, identity politics plus leftist antagonism towards believing Christians – shapes the story in the media. This leftist political perspective is typical of the MSM’s coverage of all mass shootings and all killings these days. As Ben Shapiro writes:

The legacy media have a preset narrative machine when it comes to mass shootings. That narrative machine takes into account the identities of the shooter and the victims, and then churns out an explanation for the shooting. White shooter, black victims: systemic racism. Black shooter, white victims: alienation caused by systemic racism. Muslim shooter, gay victims: Christian homophobia.

There’s water in the moon’s glass beads

The New Neo Posted on by

That title sounds to me like the beginning of a poem.

Strange and interesting news:

The moon is strewn with minuscule beads of glass that have formed over billions of years as soil ejected during asteroid impacts cools and falls back to the lunar surface. An analysis of lunar samples delivered to Earth by China’s Chang’e-5 probe has now revealed that those beads contain a substantial amount of water…

The new study suggests that the glass beads could serve as a hidden reservoir, from which water is readily released into the dried-out surface soil during the cool and dark lunar night.

The new study found much more water locked in these beads than previously thought. On top of that, the analysis suggested that a substantial quantity of the liquid accumulates inside those beads within a few years and can be released even more rapidly.

The researchers estimate that up to 600 trillion pounds (270 trillion kilograms) of water may be trapped in the top 40 feet (12 meters) of the lunar surface. The chemical composition of the water in the beads is consistent with the type produced from the interaction with solar wind, as it contains isotopes of hydrogen present in the sun.

When I read the article, the term “glass beads” rang a bell – and the bell was the title of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. When Hesse won the Nobel Prize, that book was especially mentioned, and I remember trying to plow through it during the 60s for that reason. I have almost no recollection of what it’s about, but I found it intensely boring.

But back to the moon’s beads. Here’s how the water might have been created through the action of the solar wind:

While any water is blasted out of the beads by the initial force of impact, they are porous enough to absorb hydrogen delivered by the solar wind.

Hydrogen interacts with oxygen trapped in the glass to create hydroxyl (OH), an ion that can link up with more hydrogen to form water…

Cross sections of five beads revealed more hydroxyl/water was present on the outside of the glass than in the centre.

“The solar wind irradiates the outside of these beads, so you’re basically forming water on the outside and it diffuses in towards the centre.”

I tried to imagine what these beads look like, here’s a photo:

Heather Mac Donald: on dismantling DEI ideology

The New Neo Posted on by

Mac Donald writes about the recent Stanford event at which law students shouted down a conservative judge’s speech, and the school’s DEI officer seemed to take the students’ side:

At 7.02am on March 9th, the morning of Duncan’s planned speech, Associate Dean for DEI, Tirien Steinbach, initiated the first of her two intercessions into the event. She sent an email to the Stanford Law School under the subject line “Today at SLS” intended, she said, to “share [her] office’s goals and roles in this situation”—the “situation” being Duncan’s appearance.

A question immediately presented itself: Why was Steinbach weighing in on Duncan’s speech in the first place? Leave aside for a moment whether or not there are matters which might actually require the involvement of a Stanford DEI administrator. A speech on how the Fifth Circuit interacts jurisprudentially with the Supreme Court would not seem to be one of them. We have grown so accustomed to the intrusion of the diversity bureaucracy into every area of academic life that this oddity may pass unnoticed. It should not so pass, however, since this oddity is, until almost yesterday, without precedent.

Good point.

And here, Mac Donald describes the situation in law schools as it still existed when yours truly attended:

In the mid-20th century, a skeletal crew of administrators dealt with the logistics of class registration and job placement; the rest of the educational enterprise was largely left to the faculty. Classes were large, the ruthlessly unsentimental Socratic method prevailed, and if you needed counseling, you went to the health services. The idea of mobilizing an administrator to psychologically prepare students for the arrival of a federal judge would have been unthinkable.

The idea of preparing us psychologically for much of anything was unthinkable. Law school was a sink or swim proposition.

Yet here was Steinbach weighing in on Duncan’s upcoming appearance without even knowing the details of what he was going to say. And the reason for that intervention is an interlocking set of fictions that currently reign on university campuses: first, that universities discriminate against and “marginalize” certain student groups; second, that such marginalization puts those groups at physical and psychological risk; and third, that their precarious physical and mental status means that ideas can injure them. A designated bureaucracy is therefore needed to protect these vulnerable groups from harm.

Martínez [Stanford’s law school dean] created one such bureaucracy in 2020, during the hysteria that swept college campuses after the George Floyd race riots. She installed Steinbach in the law school’s new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Office the following year.

So the Floyd incident was the catalyst for the explosion of DEI in more and more universities.

The student-services bureaucracy had previously assured the Fed Soc board that members of Stanford’s public-safety department would be nearby and ready to step in if there were a disruption. Having campus security actually in the room would apparently put LGBTQ+ students at further psychological and physical risk. (Yale’s equally delicate law students advanced this claim last year as well.) The campus cops never showed, however. So even if someone had issued the hecklers a warning, which Martínez now says is the prerequisite for discipline, no one would have been available to remove the fractious students.

Flabbergasted by the display of aggressive irrationality, Duncan began posing rhetorical questions to the screaming audience. “Is this a law school?” “You’re supposed to be learning to be lawyers, what court are you going to go into and act like this?” The responses were puzzling. “You just said that this is a law school; there’s no jurisdiction!” “Trigger!” “This is not your court!” Most weirdly, laughter broke out when Duncan asked, “Why do you want to cancel people’s speech?”

Unbeknownst to Duncan, five student-services administrators, including Steinbach, were standing to the side of the podium. After 10 minutes of being yelled at, Duncan asked if an administrator was present. Steinbach stepped forward, introduced herself as an associate dean, and said that she wanted to address Duncan and the students. Confused as to why an administrator would address a speech to him, Duncan repeated his request…

It was [Steinbach] who represented the administration because the DEI office is at the fulcrum of every university function. And the DEI office is at the fulcrum of every university function because everything in a university today bears on identity. There is no independent sphere of thought and knowledge.

Mac Donald gives a detailed account of what Steinbach said. I suggest you go to the link and read it; it certainly wasn’t a defense of free speech. Martinez ended up having Steinbach take a leave of absence, which probably will become permanent. But as Mac Donald writes, it will do little to nothing to end the rule of DEI:

For all [Martinez’s] eloquent defense of free speech and free association, she nonetheless ends up rewarding the hecklers. Stanford will be offering even more programming and events on LGBTQ+ rights in the spring, Martínez announced. It is hard to imagine how much more thorough Stanford’s celebration of LGBTQ+ identity could be. Martínez justifies this sop to the shutdown lobby on the grounds that what motivated the protests was the “desire by students to bring greater attention to discussion [sic] of LGBTQ+ rights.”

That is fanciful. The hecklers were motivated by hatred and censoriousness, period. No one claimed that Duncan needed to be run off campus in order to “bring greater attention to discussion of LGBTQ+ rights.” But even if that had been the motivation, rewarding it now means that the protests worked.

Much much more at the link. But this needs highlighting:

The most astonishing aspect of the Steinbach affair is that it occurred at a law school. The essence of lawyerly work is to represent someone other than oneself—a defendant, a business client, a plaintiff seeking redress. One’s own identity is not at stake. A lawyer is supposed to grapple with legal ideas—the principles behind a statute or constitutional provision, the implications of a contractual clause. Here, too, his identity should be irrelevant. Much of legal work is adversarial; a lawyer confronts strongly opposing viewpoints, the outcome of which moay lead even to the loss of a client’s liberty. A lawyer rebuts those arguments not by claiming to be emotionally wounded by them, but by posing a stronger set of arguments that better accord with reason. Here, yet again, a lawyer’s own identity should not come into play.

A large portion of the Stanford law school student body seems to have no grasp of these truths.

They have no grasp of these truths because these truths have been purposely abandoned, sacrificed to the “higher truths” of leftism and activism. It’s not just the elevation of feelings above all else. The idea is that law school is indoctrination for activist lawyers who will take over the legal system and dismantle the old objectivity, which in their eyes was a fiction anyway, a fiction that served to exploit the downtrodden. In this crusade, it is perfectly okay that lawyers who represent clients the left hates should not be able to serve those clients, or that prosecutors of people on the right should withhold exculpatory evidence, or that speakers like Duncan not be allowed to spread their dangerous ideas. That activism, even more than the students’ precious hurt feelings, is really what’s behind the phenomenon.

Climate science as religion

The New Neo Posted on by

I thought I’d highlight this comment by “Sgt. Joe Friday,” who lists ways in which AGW climate science has become a quasi-religion:

End of the world prophecy? Check. We’ve got 12 years left to save the planet.

Dietary restrictions? Check. Vegetarianism or veganism at the least. Synthetic and/or insect proteins being readied.

A prophet and his/her/xir disciples? Yeah, lots of disciples although I’m still trying to figure out who the prophet is.

Sacred objects? Check. For a while it was the CFL, now I’m not too sure.

A sacred text? Yup. The one Al Gore wrote.

Religious rituals? I suppose, if driving around in your battery powered car, by yourself wearing a face mask counts.

Shaming sinners? Oh yeah, you bet, scolding other people for their climate sins is definitely part of the picture, but if you have enough money and recite the correct pieties (see: John Kerry) you don’t get shamed.

The Nashville school shooter

The New Neo Posted on by

The person who killed six people – three 9-year-olds and three adults – at a Christian school in Nashville has been reported as having identified as transgender. Initially this caused confusion as to whether that meant the shooter was a biological male or a biological female, but it now has been clarified and the shooter was a biological woman. We don’t know whether she was receiving any drugs or hormones for a medical transition, but she was 28 years old.

As is so often the case, the British coverage seems more complete than the US coverage. There is footage of the shooter shattering the locked doors, which were made of glass, and then climbing through. That type of door offers virtually no barrier to an armed person, although it would do two things: delay the shooter’s entrance by a few seconds, and give warning through the sound of gunshots that a dangerous shooter is at the school. Those two things don’t matter much, however, if there is no one at the school who is armed and who encounters the shooter.

Police eventually shot and killed the perpetrator, who was firing at them from a second floor window. The shooter was not behind a locked door, and seems to have been clearly visible.

It also seems quite clear that, in addition to being a terrible mass murder, this was a case of suicide by cop. The shooter had sent a message to a friend that she would be dying that day and “something bad is about to happen. Unlike in some other shootings, this friend took the warning very seriously and alerted authorities in a timely fashion. But the message had been sent to her extremely close to the time of the shooting, and nothing specific was said about any intent to commit mass murder or about a school, and so the friend’s actions were to no avail:

Patton [the friend] said she called the Nashville Davidson County Sheriff’s Office to make them aware of the situation and was instructed to call Nashville’s non-emergency number. By then, MNPD says it was too late.

“After phone calls from friends and Audrey’s name was released as the shooter at Covenant Nashville school, I learned that Audrey was the shooter and that she had reached out to me prior to the shooting,” Patton said. “My heart is with all of the families affected and I’m devastated by what has happened.”

If you go to the link and read the texts and you will see that the suicidal intent is very overt.

A horrific event in all its aspects.

Here is Helen Smith on the subject of female school shooters:

RIP to all the victims.