OPEN THREAD: Do that comment voodoo, that you do so well.

SPACE: House subcommittee advances five satellite-related bills.

ASK CHINA ABOUT IT: ‘Unprecedented’ Surge in Ocean Plastic Waste Could Accelerate in Future.

Related:

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: If You Get an STD from Sex in Your Lover’s Car, Is That Covered by the Auto Insurance Policy?

I THINK FEDERAL JUDGES SHOULD ADD STANFORD LAW TO THE CLERK BOYCOTT LIST: Stanford University Disgraces Itself.

I didn’t think it was possible for Stanford University to sink any lower into the woke abyss, but they have found a way. This week the Stanford Law Federalist Society invited Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan to speak. A mob of students decided to heckle him such that he could not speak.

Judge Duncan requested that an administrator come and address the situation, and hence arrived Tirien Steinbach, Stanford’s Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Who then took the side of the heckling students, lecturing Judge Duncan about how his rulings and views inflicted “harm” on Stanford’s students.

Really, this should produce a complaint to the accreditors, too. And Associate Dean Tirien Steinbach should be fired for this.

UPDATE: See the letter from F.I.R.E. to Stanford on this event.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Judge Duncan pulls no punches.

I REMEMBER ALL THE FEMINIST TRIUMPHALISM ABOUT CREATING BABIES WITHOUT SPERM. BUT NOW: The mice with two dads: scientists create eggs from male cells.

Next: A man needs a woman like a fish needs a bicycle?

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Arizona Christian University Files Federal Civil Rights Lawsuit Against Bigoted School Board.

THIS WOULD BE A GAME-CHANGER WORLDWIDE IF IT PANS OUT: Kenya’s announcement to expand use of landmark malaria vaccine gives hope to millions.

Malaria doesn’t just kill people, it saps them of energy. Until the 1940s, East Tennessee, where I live, had malaria. The stereotype of the lazy hillbilly is based in part on so many having malaria. Once it was eradicated (*cough* DDT *cough*) things changed.

CLOTHING USED TO BE SHOCKINGLY EXPENSIVE: Does anyone mend clothes anymore?

People hardly had any, unless they were rich. When I lived in DC I had a friend who bought an 18th century house in Old Town Alexandria and she was impresssed that it actually had two clothes closets the size of phone booths, which made it fancy for its day.

I HAVEN’T READ THE OPINION, BUT FROM THE NEWS ACCOUNTS IT JUST SOUNDED WRONG: Federal Court Issues Flawed Decision Striking Down Missouri Gun Sanctuary Law. As I understand it, it just forbids Missouri law enforcement from cooperating with the feds. States can’t actively interfere with the federal government, but under the Tenth Amendment they also can’t be forced to execute its laws.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest.

In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:

They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).

They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).

They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3).

Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group due to their heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities that developed new disempowering ideas. These cognitive distortions then caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups. Just as Greg had feared, many universities and progressive institutions embraced these three untruths and implemented programs that performed reverse CBT on young people, in violation of their duty to care for them and educate them….

We are now 11 years into the largest epidemic of adolescent mental illness ever recorded. I know so many families that have been thrown into fear and turmoil by a child’s suicide attempt. You probably do too, given that the recent CDC report tells us that one in ten adolescents now say they have made an attempt to kill themselves. It is hitting all political and demographic groups. The evidence is abundant that social media is a major cause of the epidemic, and perhaps the major cause. It’s time we started treating social media and other apps designed for “engagement” (i.e., addiction) like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling, or, because they can harm society as well as their users, perhaps like automobiles and firearms. Adults should have wide latitude to make their own choices, but legislators and governors who care about mental health, women’s health, or children’s health need to step up.

The “Reverse CBT” reference is to this:

In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression.

What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT.

I think it’s an excellent point. Plus:

I have italicized Filipovic’s text about the benefits of feeling like you captain your own ship because it points to a psychological construct with a long history of research and measurement: Locus of control. As first laid out by Julian Rotter in the 1950s, this is a malleable personality trait referring to the fact that some people have an internal locus of control—they feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them. Sixty years of research show that people with an internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. People with an external locus of control are more passive and more likely to become depressed.

I’m somewhat familiar with this since Helen’s dissertation involved locus of control. I have to say that if you wanted to set up an undercover project to destroy the confidence, emotional health, and intellectual integrity of young Americans, you’d probably create the social media/mass media/academia axis that we have today, and that Haidt describes in this piece, which is much longer than these brief excerpts.

ICE ANKLE MONITOR DATA WAS WRONG: Not only were the numbers of illegal immigrants required in 2022 to wear ankle monitors before being released into the U.S. not way up in 2022, there was actually a big decline, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

WHEN ARE YOU EVER GONNA USE THIS? OFTEN. A defense of liberal education you can use to bolster this inevitable argument with your kids. (I still think they should replace high school calculus with statistics, at least for the 90% of us who aren’t total nerds will never understand it, though.)

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Silicon Valley Bank seized by FDIC, marking largest shutdown of a US bank since 2008. “The bank failed after depositors – mostly technology workers and venture capital-backed companies – began withdrawing their money creating a run on the bank. . . . Silicon Valley bank was not a small bank, it’s the 16th largest bank in the country, holding $210 billion in assets. It acts as a major financial conduit for venture capital-backed companies, which have been hit hard in the past 18 months as the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates and made riskier tech assets less attractive to investors.”

But don’t worry: “Silicon Valley was heavily exposed to tech industry and there is little chance of contagion in the banking sector as there was in the months leading up to the Great Recession more than a decade ago. Major banks have sufficient capital to avoid a similar situation.”

So there.

IT REMINDS ME OF A TOWABLE VERSION OF ONE OF THOSE GM RVs FROM THE 70S: Airstream and Studio F.A. Porsche Reveal the Camping Trailer of the Future.

I guess there’s no point in making a towable version of the EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicle, though.

PAULA BOLYARD: They Say We’re Dangerous. “And they’re still doing it, despite the fact that the things we’ve been saying since the beginning of the pandemic have proven to be true.”

FROM NAOMI WOLF, A FORTHRIGHT JANUARY 6 APOLOGY:

There is no way to avoid this moment. The formal letter of apology. From me. To Conservatives and to those who “put America first” everywhere.

It’s tempting to sweep this confrontation with my own gullibility under the rug — to “move on” without ever acknowledging that I was duped, and that as a result I made mistakes in judgement, and that these mistakes, multiplied by the tens of thousands and millions on the part of people just like me, hurt millions of other people like you all, in existential ways.

But that erasure of personal and public history would be wrong.

I owe you a full-throated apology.

I believed a farrago of lies. And, as a result of these lies, and my credulity — and the credulity of people similarly situated to me – many conservatives’ reputations are being tarnished, on false bases.

The proximate cause of this letter of apology is the airing, two nights ago, of excepts from tens of thousands of hours of security camera footage from the United States Capitol taken on Jan 6, 2021. The footage was released by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson. . . .

There is no way for anyone thoughtful, even if he or she is a lifelong Democrat, not to notice that Sen Chuck Schumer did not say to the world that the footage that Mr Carlson aired was not real. Rather, he warned that it was “shameful” for Fox to allow us to see it. The Guardian characterized Mr Carlson’s and Fox News’ sin, weirdly, as “Over-Use” of Jan 6 footage. Isn’t the press supposed to want full transparency for all public interest events?

Well, it’s supposed to.

TRANSPARENCY: House Votes 419-0 To Declassify All Intel On COVID Origins. “The Senate voted unanimously last week to approve a similar measure. The bill would require the declassification and release of all intelligence related to the origins of COVID and the virus’ possible connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) within 90 days of receiving the president’s signature.”

MADE IN THE USA: Anti Burst Emergency Water Rations Packets. #CommissionEarned

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY: She Certainly Livened Up that Planning & Zoning Board Meeting. “This week we have a hogtied truck thief, a post-casino heist, the Drunk Dad of the Year, and Virginia Woman with her frying pan giving all of Florida a run for its money.”

BIDEN, DEMS WANT TO END MEDICARE ADVANTAGE: It’s always the Republicans being accused of driving granny off the cliff by abolishing Medicare, but, as the Heritage Foundation’s Bob Moffit demonstrates in detail, it’s President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress who are working overtime to terminate the popular Medicare Advantage program.

I HEAR FRANK BORMAN HAS A GOOD SHOT AT BEING MISSION COMMANDER: NASA to reveal crew members in April for flight around Moon.

Classical reference in headline.

JEFF GOLDSTEIN: Of Cabbages and Kings. “We have all seen, in similar instances, political rioters favored by the political elite who were arrested by police, then released almost immediately and en masse. We have witnessed the double standard in justice being meted out. And to some of us, the perception is that, not only are we living in a two-tiered justice system, but that most reprehensibly, this hierarchy isn’t even much hidden any longer. It just is, and there’s not a damn thing we in the cellar can do about it. So right now, we should be worried less about how the legacy media will present GOP members who arrange to meet with prisoners, or who can now view footage Jan 6 committee members never viewed, and care more that in the United States of America, there are political prisoners — who also happen to be US citizens — being denied real due process.”

REMINDER: Three years ago we were finishing up the last normal week. And it still isn’t normal now. And most of the abnormality was self-inflicted. Or, more accurately, government-inflicted.

WELL, I SLEEP LIKE A BABY, AND I’M NEVER DEPRESSED: A good night’s sleep may ward off depression.