Tag Archives: regulation

Cynicism…

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…is alive and well in California. This is illustrated by the California Interscholastic Federation’s decision to increase the number of girls eligible to participate in State high school athletic tournaments while continuing to allow biological males—boys—to participate in those same girls’ tournaments.

[A]ny biological female student-athlete who would have earned the next qualifying mark for one of their Section’s automatic qualifying entries in the CIF State meet, and did not achieve the CIF State at-large mark in the finals at their Section meet, was extended an opportunity to participate in the 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships[.]

Tl;dr translation: any girl who lost to a boy in an earlier stage of the competition will be granted the opportunity to compete and lose again to the same boy in the next stage.

The cynicism is made explicit by this remark by California’s Progressive-Democrat Gavin Newsom’s spokesperson Izzy Gardon:

CIF’s proposed pilot is a reasonable, respectful way to navigate a complex issue without compromising competitive fairness—a model worth pursuing.

No. There’s nothing respectful, reasonable, or fair in allowing boys to participate in girls’ sports.

A Two-Edged…Coin

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A baby with a rare genetic disorder that’s often fatal has been cured, probably, by a newly developed targeted gene therapy.

Thanks to decades of research, gene sequencing rapidly identified KJ’s disorder.

An overnight success that was years in the making. Then there’s this:

Doctors at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania medical school then raced to design a gene-editing therapy using CRISPR technology to correct the defective gene. …
This process ordinarily take[s] years, though doctors in collaboration with several biotech firms were able to do it within weeks. The Food and Drug Administration also rushed to approve the treatment.

Then the overnight part was itself rushed. We may be seeing the effects of rushing genetic- or RNA-centered therapies with the conflicting reports of a number of the Wuhan Virus mRNA-based vaccines. We’ll learn more about the efficacy of KJ’s gene-editing treatment over the course of his lifetime and whether other genetic-related disorders develop as he ages, particularly as his body passes through the hefty disruption of its hormonal development as it grows into adulthood.

My larger concern, though, is this. This sort of gene-editing to cure genetic diseases also can be harnessed to cure “ordinary” and “normal” genetic complements in efforts to develop “better” babies—stronger, smarter, immune to this or that, or just attempts to “improve” humans.

The disease-curing/preventing advantages of gene treatment are huge and well worth pursuing. But in parallel with that, there need to be serious and draconian controls put on the techniques in order to control (that genie is out of the molecular bottle; it won’t ever be perfectly controlled) and mitigate misuses of the technique—beginning with clear definitions of “misuses” and “better.”

Is the Question Irrelevant for Children?

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Toothpaste manufacturers put fluoride in their toothpaste and market that as good for tooth health. They also recommend, through their toothpaste labeling among other pathways, to use only “pea-sized” dabs for children under six and “rice-sized” dabs for children under three.

Associated with all of that are concerns that too much fluoride can negatively impact IQ scores. My question: are fluoride and the question of IQ impact really relevant for children?

For one thing, those tiny dabs are extremely hard to dole out in any consistent fashion, especially as children are taught to brush their own teeth (and to apply their own toothpaste to their brushes), and it’s easy to err by adding increasingly larger dabs.

For the more important thing, though, children’s teeth are impermanent and start to fall out and be replaced with adult, permanent teeth around six and a little older. Maybe the answer, at least regarding children, is to duck the question altogether and use non-flouridated toothpaste for these. At that age, the important task is to train them in tooth hygiene and regular brushing. Any toothpaste adequate to the task of cleaning teeth would serve.

Another Misleading Claim

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This one by a Progressive-Democrat: California’s Alex Padilla. In his Tuesday letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, he wrote regarding Republicans’ musings about overruling the Senate’s Parliamentarian on the matter of California’s legal right to set its own emissions standards (itself a misleading claim, since what’s in question is whether California, or any State, can set emissions standards more stringent than the Federal government’s),

Republicans are now considering overruling Ms MacDonough, essentially going nuclear and throwing out the rule book in order to get their way.
…
If they can ignore the parliamentarian on this….

This is so broadly misleading as to approach being deliberately false. Far from ignoring the Parliamentarian, Republicans would be taking her eminently seriously and following Senate rules regarding her ruling, whether voting to overturn it or the Senate’s presiding officer overruling it.

Of course, Padilla knows this; he’s merely demonstrating, with his distortion, why it’s next to impossible to deal with members of his party.

Why Not Both?

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Emma Waters and Dr Marguerite Duane, in  their WSJ Letters letter, propose invest[ing] in restorative reproductive medicine as an alternative to in vitro fertilization mandates.

First, a correction to their distortion of Leonard Lopoo’s op-ed regarding IVF as a means of addressing our nation’s baby deficit. Waters and Duane accuse Lopoo of pushing for IVF funding mandates. This is textbook gaslighting. Lopoo was very much in favor of subsidies, not mandates. He did mention one mandate—one State’s requirement that insurance cover IVF—in passing at the end of his piece, but merely as one example of how financial support for IVF can lead to increases in live baby birth rates.

Given that—financial support to allay the high cost of IVF—why do Waters and Duane insist that there must be a choice between the two? Even given IVF mandates, why must there be a choice between the two?

The short answer is that there need not. Support for IVF and research into the causes and mitigations of reproduction-related medical problems actually go hand-in-hand. One treats precursor conditions, and the other treats realized after-the-fact conditions, with considerable overlap in that second set of conditions.

Beyond all that, why not these two together with a host of other means that also encourage having babies, along with other, non-medical means of achieving population growth—legal immigration, for instance, color/ethnicity-blind free markets, lower income tax rates?