Category Archives: regulation

A Woke…or Something…State Judge

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A Montana State district judge, Shane Vannatta, is having trouble with reality. He has ruled a law, AN ACT GENERALLY REVISING THE LAWS TO PROVIDE A COMMON DEFINITION FOR THE WORD “SEX” WHEN REFERRING TO A HUMAN unconstitutional because

the bill’s title did not adequately explain whether the word “sex” referred to gender or sexual intercourse and that it did not indicate the words “male” and “female” would be defined in the body of the bill.

Never mind that bill titles typically do not themselves include glossaries or references to glossaries. His plaint that “sex” was unclear in its intended subject in the present title is simply disingenuous since the title explicitly states “when referring to a human”—and does not suggest, even by tenuous innuendo, “when referring to human sex practices.”

Never mind, either that the law’s first paragraph and that paragraph’s first two subparagraphs provide precisely the definitions of interest:

Section 1. Section 1-1-201, MCA, is amended to read:
“1-1-201. Terms of wide applicability. (1) Unless the context requires otherwise, the following definitions apply in the Montana Code Annotated:
(a) “Female” means a member of the human species who, under normal development, has XX chromosomes and produces or would produce relatively large, relatively immobile gametes, or eggs, during her life cycle and has a reproductive and endocrine system oriented around the production of those gametes. An individual who would otherwise fall within this definition, but for a biological or genetic condition, is female.
(b) “Male” means a member of the human species who, under normal development, has XY chromosomes and produces or would produce small, mobile gametes, or sperm, during his life cycle and has a reproductive and endocrine system oriented around the production of those gametes. An individual who would otherwise fall within this definition, but for a biological or genetic condition, is male.

Apparently, Vannatta’s law school training didn’t include a literacy test, nor did it train him in extending his attention span. For the good of the State, especially for the good of Montana’s citizens, he needs to be removed from the bench until he corrects those deficiencies.

How Many?

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The FBI says it has identified a characteristic common to sites of active shooter shootings.

…open spaces—which include roads, neighborhoods, parks, and outdoor venues—are the places where victims are most likely to be targeted.

There’s one other characteristic, not fully addressed in the FBI’s report, that’s well worth consideration. How many of those locations were defenseless, whether because laws barred firearms from the areas or because the relevant business owner—mall owner or theater owner, for instance—lawfully posted his locale as barring firearms? The report did address this, but only tangentially, with this single remark, captioning a single chart:

Of the 48 incidents in 2023, four involved civilian intervention where a civilian intervened or attempted to intervene, resulting in two civilian casualties.

Across all 48 of the 2023 active shooter events, there were 105 killed, and 139 injured. Subtract off the two casualties where civilians responded in the time frame before the cops could arrive—naively allocating the two to one death and one injury—and that works out to an average of 2-3 deaths per defenseless event and 3-4 injuries per defenseless event.

Clearly armed patrons already on scene reduced the casualty rate by filling the gap between the onset of the event and the arrival of the second first responders. But the wannabe gun controllers would rather sacrifice the Left’s “if it saves one life” mantra in favor of their obsession with disarming all of us.

 

The FBI’s report can be read here.

Should be Easy

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The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a Biden administration suit against Tennessee over whether that State can restrict medical treatments for transgender minors.

[T]he court said it would hear the Biden administration’s challenge to a Tennessee law that bans gender-transition care, such as medications that can delay the onset of puberty and hormones that can cause physical changes such as the development of facial hair or breasts.

Leave aside the question of whether there is such a thing as “transgender minors.” There is, but they’re exceedingly rare, and those cases are easily identified by physiological factors like stunted development of physical sexual characteristics that are consistent with the child’s DNA-determined sex, or excessive development of physical sexual characteristics that are contrary to the child’s DNA-determined sex.

The Court’s ruling in the Tennessee case should be a short, sweet one-pager: Yes, the State can restrict medical treatments for transgender minors.

What would be nearly as bad as ruling against Tennessee would be the Court expanding on that simple Yes by writing limits—minimum or maximum—to the State’s authority to restrict. Limits on the authority to restrict are themselves political decisions that must be left to the political branches of our Federal government—Congress and the President, or Congress overriding a veto—and to the State governments individually.

One More Reason…

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The Environmental Protection Agency is turning more and more into a Progressive-Democratic Party agenda protection agency and less and less devoted to protecting our environment. Recall that the EPA has been busily using some of its Inflation Reduction Act funding allocation to fund an outfit backing anti-Israel protests. It turns out that the EPA is using another tranche of its IRA allocation to fund groups that oppose immigration enforcement. The EPA received $3 billion for Environmental and Climate Justice block grants.

Here’s what the EPA is doing with those dollars:

EPA tapped Fordham University as a grantmaker to distribute $50 million, in collaboration with the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) and the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice (NJAIJ).

Aside from those agencies having nothing to do with climate, as the WSJ‘s editors note (I note, also, that climate is only peripherally related to the EPA’s environment DOC), the NYIC (at the least) sees its immigration role as one of defunding and getting rid of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

This is just one more reason to abolish the EPA altogether and return its personnel, from Secretary on down to the janitors, to the private sector.

We do need an agency of some sort to protect the environment, but not this one, which is so badly damaged that it cannot be rehabilitated. The replacement needn’t be a huge and sprawling agency devoted to pseudo-science (atmospheric CO2 is more pollutant than plant food?), and so what’s used for the EPA’s budget needn’t be so monstrously huge, either. The difference could even be used to pay down some small part of the debt the Progressive-Democratic Party has been inflicting on our federal government.

This is Why

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Leave aside the minor fact that embryos differentiate into boys and girls in important ways that are irreversible at any time later in life.

This table, which compares some swimming times of American high school boys with those of the world’s adult women, makes plain the utter insanity of letting post-pubescent biological males compete in biological girls’ sports, purely from a simple competitiveness standpoint.

It’s important to note that US high school boys still swim in yards, while the world’s adult women swim in meters. The original table was pulled from Powerline because many commenters emphasized that distance discrepancy.

Here, though, are some of the women’s times converted for distances in yards:

50 meters Freestyle vs 54.7 yards (50m): women’s world record time shortened to 50 yards swum: 21.64 seconds, a nearly 12% difference favoring the boys

100 meters Back vs 109.4 yards: women’s world record time shortened to 100 yards: 52.51 seconds, a nearly 15% difference favoring the boys

400 meters Free Relay vs 437.4 yards: women’s world record time shortened to 400 yards: 3.18 minutes, a nearly 10% difference favoring the boys

As is plain, shortening the women’s swimming distances to match the high school boys’ distances (and assuming the 9%-ish shorter distance would shorten the women’s times only linearly), US high school boys still swim much faster than the adult women of the world.

 

h/t Powerline