THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP, RACIST:

HEALTH: Moderate drinking linked to lower heart attack risk, study says.

I GOT MY GAMES recently, hope you will order yours.
The Virtue Signal game is still in stock but the Deplorables game is now out. So if you want the Virtue Signal game, order now before it runs out.

(Bumped)

RIP, JACKIE MASON: KING OF THE POLITICALLY INCORRECT COMICS.

OLD AND BUSTED: ‘I’m Going to Shut Down the Virus.’

The New Hotness? CDC Releases New Mask Guidance.

Related: US intends to keep travel restrictions in place against UK, European countries, others.

“Others” needs to be defined a bit, though: Scoop: 50,000 migrants released; few report to ICE.

Earlier: Gov. Ron DeSantis Responds to New CDC Masking Guidelines.

STILL HAVEN’T READ A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education? :  It’s not too late to add it to your summer reading list.  With essays by John Ellis, me, Peter Kirsanow, Heather Mac Donald, Peter Wood, me & Carissa Mulder, Lance Izumi & Rowena Itchon, and Maimon Schwarzschild, it just might be worth your time.

HMM: Lower-wealth volunteers experience greater health gains from volunteering than wealthier volunteers: study. “Formal volunteering in later life is beneficial for both physical and psychological well-being. However, research has shown that older adults with key advantages, such as wealth, are more likely to volunteer and reap its benefits. In a new study appearing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, investigators found that lower-wealth volunteers may experience even greater health gains than higher-wealth volunteers.”

DEMOCRATS SURE GOT IT GOOD: Why NY Governor Andrew Cuomo May Get Away With the Scandal of the Century.

(Classical reference in headline.)

BREAKING: Gov. Ron DeSantis Responds to New CDC Masking Guidelines.

BIDENFLATION: Thanks To Inflation, American Wages Drop By Nearly 2%.

QUESTION ASKED: Did Simone Biles choke?

HMM: GM Sues Ford over BlueCruise Name For Hands-Free Driving Tech. “Cruise” is pretty generic, and that’s the only part that overlaps. “Ford compared this situation to GM trying to assert trademark ownership on a term such as hybrid or turbo.”

ADJUST NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY: Immigration Judges Forbidden to Use the Word ‘Alien.’

(Via Off The Press.)

HOME RECORDING UPDATE: How to Rebuild a Recorded Song When You’ve Lost the Multitracks.

My latest, over at Ed Driscoll.com, is a somewhat deep dive into the Music Rebalance app of Izotope’s RX8 audio restoration software for fellow DIY music recording enthusiasts.

WHAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED? The Failure of Lori Lightfoot’s Anti-Violence Plan is an Impenetrable Mystery.

NEW CENSORSHIP, SAME AS OLD CENSORSHIP, BUT WORSE: It’s worse because the Internet makes it so easy for those with power to impose their views while keeping you from reading anything to the contrary.

Writing for City Journal, John Steele Gordon points out that disagreement among scientists is precisely what drives scientific discovery. But social media censorship is radically contrary to disagreement in science, politics, medicine, and pretty much every other area of inquiry.

AT HELEN’S PAGE: From William Stroock, Pershing in Command: A study of the American Expeditionary Force in the Great War.

JIM TREACHER: Andrew Cuomo Is an Evil Ghoul and I Hate Him. “Here’s a question for my lib acquaintances who are reading this: If you think it’s justified to yell at Tucker Carlson in a tackle shop because you disagree with him about vaccines, how can you turn a blind eye to what Andrew Cuomo has done? If you actually believe Carlson has blood on his hands, why aren’t you screaming about the governor of New York? Cuomo has killed at least four times more New Yorkers than Mohamed Atta did. How do you rationalize condemning a TV pundit for expressing an opinion, while excusing a corrupt, incompetent elected official who’s been caught red-handed abusing his power? How much do you actually believe the things you claim to believe?”

HMM: Something in Patients’ Eyes Could Reveal The Presence of ‘Long COVID’, Doctors Say.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex.

Why would medical school professors apologize for referring to a patient’s biological sex? Because, Lauren explains, in the context of her medical school “acknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.”

When sex is acknowledged by her instructors, it’s sometimes portrayed as a social construct, not a biological reality, she says. In a lecture on transgender health, an instructor declared: “Biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.”

In other words, some of the country’s top medical students are being taught that humans are not, like other mammals, a species comprising two sexes. The notion of sex, they are learning, is just a man-made creation.

The idea that sex is a social construct may be interesting debate fodder in an anthropology class. But in medicine, the material reality of sex really matters, in part because the refusal to acknowledge sex can have devastating effects on patient outcomes.

In 2019, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the case of a 32-year-old transgender man who went to an ER complaining of abdominal pain. While the patient disclosed he was transgender, his medical records did not. He was simply a man. The triage nurse determined that the patient, who was obese, was in pain because he’d stopped taking a medication meant to relieve hypertension. This was no emergency, she decided. She was wrong: The patient was, in fact, pregnant and in labor. By the time hospital staff realized that, it was too late. The baby was dead. And the patient, despite his own shock at being pregnant, was shattered.

Professors Running Scared of Students

To Dana Beyer, a trans activist in Maryland who is also a retired surgeon, such stories illustrate how vital it is that sex, not just gender identity — how someone perceives their gender — is taken into consideration in medicine. “The practice of medicine is based in scientific reality, which includes sex, but not gender,” Beyer says. “The more honest a patient is with their physician, the better the odds for a positive outcome.”

The denial of sex doesn’t help anyone, perhaps least of all transgender patients who require special treatment. But, Lauren says, instructors who discuss sex risk complaints from their students — which is why, she thinks, many don’t. “I think there’s a small percentage of instructors who are true believers. But most of them are probably just scared of their students,” she says.

Read the whole thing.

ANOTHER GHOSTBUSTERS? COLOR ME SKEPTICAL: Finally, A Reboot/Sequel I’m Excited About.

HMM: Distinctive gut microbiome unrelated to diet may characterize children with autism.

IS SUBSTACK THE “LAST, BEST HOPE FOR FREE SPEECH?” I think it’s proved that people will actually pay for journalism when it’s interesting and useful (as opposed to solely click-driven) but Substack is still a single point of failure – and the pressure to censor that will be brought on its management once enough powerful people get angry is immense. It would be wise for them, or someone who’d want to compete with them, to come up with a monetized, distributed model to flee to when the time comes.

MICHAEL WALSH: Americans, Choose Freedom and Take Off the Mask.

I’M EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Twin meteor showers could spark fireballs to close out July.