Monthly Archives: February 2025

Chlorinated Water and Cancer Risk

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The New York Post‘s headline screams

Chemical found in US drinking water is linked to 15% higher risk of colorectal cancer, 33% for bladder cancer

The chemical in question is a collection of trihalomethanes (THM)—chloroform, bromodichloromethane, dibromochloromethane, and bromoform—that can form when chlorine reacts with water. Chlorine is routinely added to our nation’s potable water by water producers in order to eliminate bacteria and viruses from our drinking water. Chlorine is very effective at that.

The second paragraph in the Post‘s article lays out the…fear:

A new analysis out of Sweden reports that disinfecting water with chlorine creates chemical byproducts that can increase the risk of bladder cancer by 33% and colorectal cancer by 15%.

What’s the baseline rate of those cancers in the US, though? How big an increase are those 15% and 33% bumps? Those bits of context, critical to understanding the true nature of these risks, are elided by the news outlet.

Here are some data with which to fill in those gaps. According to the American Cancer Society,

[T]he lifetime risk of developing colorectal cancer is about 1 in 24 for men and 1 in 26 for women.

According to the National Cancer Institute,

Approximately 2.2% of men and women will be diagnosed with bladder cancer at some point during their lifetime

Applying the increased risk values to these really quite low baseline probabilities, we get

• likelihood of men getting colorectal cancer rises from 4.2% to 4.8%
• likelihood of women getting colorectal cancer rises from 3.8% to 4.4%
• likelihood of men or women getting bladder cancer rises from 2.2% to 4.2%

Keep in mind the lifetime nature of those risks, which is nicely matched by the lifetime practice we have of drinking chlorinated tap water. Thus, it’s certainly true that these increases are worth watching, especially the bladder cancer risk increase, but these already very low baseline risks remain quite low even with chlorinated water.

Further balancing those risk increases are the enormously reduced risk of infection by serious and debilitating water-borne disease.

Lazy Congress

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This chart, via DOGE, shows the number of regulations that have been written for each law passed by Congress, just since 2010. (Right click on the image and from the drop-down menu choose “Open Image in New Tab” to get a bigger image.)

Go to the link, and mouse over the bars in the graph to get amplifying data beyond the appalling data visible in the image.

This shows how non-specific Congress’ bills are, and yet the President signs them into law. This laziness by Congress and the too-laissez faire attitude of Presidents are unconscionable. Congress needs to write laws to be complete and specific, rather than outsourcing specifity to Executive Branch entities, and Presidents need to veto these too-vague bills.

How to Handle Federal Lands

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Terry Anderson, of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has some thoughts on how best to handle Federal lands, a unaggregated expanse of some 640 million acres, 28% of US land. In their essence, his ideas are to handle those lands in a business-like manner.

…three options: raise the price of goods and services (timber, minerals, visits to national parks), reduce labor costs and liquidate money losers.

He’s right, but those are the second steps that need to be taken, not the first step.

Twenty-eight percent is far too much of American land to be retained by the Federal government. The necessary first step is the transfer of those lands to their respective States.

Anderson’s ideas, fleshed out some in the fulness of his op-ed, does recommend [t]urn[ing] ownership of some federal lands over to the states, but that’s wholly inadequate. The vast majority of those lands should be turned over.

The amount that might be retained by the Federal government, to suggest a percentage for opening discussion, would be less than 5%, and the retention purposes might be limited to protecting some historical and scenic areas for public park use, to finishing cleaning up Superfund sites of their contamination—following which those sites should be returned to the States—to maintaining (and I say expanding) our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to siting military installations, and to setting up, or finishing, nuclear waste storage sites.

The Federal government has no legitimate interest in withholding from State and private use so huge an expanse of our land. Selling it to the States and to private citizens would raise funds for paying down our national debt, too. The modern equivalent of a dollar an acre comes to mind for a suitable sale price—that original one dollar price wasn’t so much for raising money—though it did for that then small Federal budget—than to transfer the land to owners who, by paying for it, would have some incentive to make economic-based use of it.

The retained land then should be managed IAW business principles.

Europe’s Role in Europe

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the EU’s dismay over being dismissed from peace talks among Ukraine, Russia, and the US, there was this bit near the end:

Ukraine’s army today is larger and more capable than the German, French, Italian, and British armies combined. Alongside Russia’s, it is also the only military in the world with a wealth of experience in large-scale modern warfare against a near-peer enemy.

That’s how worthless NATO has become, particularly including those western European nation members. Sure, those nations are nattering on about increasing defense spending. French European Affairs Minister Benjamin Haddad:

The message is clear: it’s time to take our responsibilities, to safeguard our own security.

Well, NSS.

However.

Germany, not atypically, has made those commitments before, and then welched on them. And even those western European nations who did consent to send weapons and money to Ukraine held back on them until the US first sent weapons and money to Ukraine, so timid they have been to act on their own initiative.

It’s time for the US to stand up a separate mutual defense arrangement centered on the eastern European Three Seas Initiative nations—nations which directly front Russia and still remember the devastation caused by the barbarian’s jackboots on their necks. Those nations, too, already are at the European forefront in material and financial support, on a per-GDP basis, for Ukraine’s fight for its existence. And then for us to walk away from NATO, which has been shown to be three years, at least, past its Use By date.

Bonehead Idea

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Some Federal district judges, liberal activist judges for the most part, have issued temporary restraining orders against many of President Donald Trump’s (R) and his DOGE facility’s moves to root out empirically identified fraudulent and abusive spending and to physically downsize the Federal government through terminating Federal employees and eliminated whole agencies—the CFPB, for instance.

As a result of that,

Several House Republicans are preparing articles of impeachment against the federal judges who are blocking some of [those] President Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s key policies.

This is a textbook example of a bonehead idea.

Arizona Republican Congressman Eli Crane and Georgia Republican Congressman Andrew Clyde present the typical arguments for impeachment:

Our case for impeaching Judge Engelmayer is basically that he’s an activist judge trying to stop the Trump administration from executing their, you know, Article 2 powers to make sure that the laws are faithfully executed

and

I’m drafting articles of impeachment for US District Judge John McConnell, Jr. He’s a partisan activist weaponizing our judicial system to stop President Trump’s funding freeze on woke and wasteful government spending. We must end this abusive overreach

respectively.

It’ll be hard enough to prove, even in the House, much less at Senate trial, that these rulings are out of bounds for an Article III judge. Even were these Congressmen able to make the case that these judges, by their rulings, are violating their oaths of office—a certainly impeachable and convictable offense—it’ll be nearly impossible to get the two-thirds vote required for Senate conviction with so many Progressive-Democratic Party Senators in the Senate, given how knee-jerk opposed as they are to anything Trump or Republican.

In the end, these judges’ behaviors will be tacitly codified by the impeachments’ failures in the Senate, as those failures will lend credence to the judges’ naked activism. That would be even worse than the judges’ individual rulings.

The better answer is to exercise patience—something Republicans lack—and see the matters through the courts to the eventual appellate or Supreme Court rulings in their favor that will occur in the large majority of the cases.