Quick Takes – Curing Dementia via Death: Bioethicist Approved; New Jersey Approved; Netherlands Just Fine With Killing All the Mentally Ill

Posted on July 9, 2026 by The Political Hat

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: They could have just given them a Pepsi!

     First, a little mood music:

     Carrying on…

Death, Rx

     Slow starvation is now acceptable medical treatment according to purported “bioethicists”.

“Last year, I wrote here warning about a bioethics paper that advocated restricting the amount of orally received food and water given to dementia patients, an intentional undernourishment approach that the authors labeled “minimal comfort feeding.”

“Well, the idea of death by intentional undernourishment has now hit the big time in the popular media with a long New York Times piece telling the story of a dementia patient who died under that regimen. I expect it to spark a national conversation. (I make a brief appearance in the piece. The reporter, Kate Raphael, could not have been more cordial and presented my views accurately. Also, she offers plenty of objections from medical professionals, so this response should not be deemed a criticism of her work.)

“The title of the piece asks: ‘She Didn’t Want to Live with Advanced Dementia. So Why Was She Being Kept Alive?’

“…

“The issue is not about patients who refuse hydration and calories or who have no interest in food, but of not providing as much sustenance as they may want: intentionally undernourishment. Indeed, the original bioethics paper offers this definition:

“‘Minimal Comfort Feeding: Only as much food and liquid as necessary to avoid discomfort . . .”

 “‘MCF is the provision of only enough oral nutrition and hydration to ensure comfort (Table 1). With MCF, eating and drinking is not scheduled; rather, caretakers offer food and liquids only in response to signs of hunger and thirst. Patients are neither wakened for regular mealtimes nor encouraged to eat or drink. Instead, they are offered frequent, fastidious mouth care, continued social contact, therapeutic touch, sensory distraction, and medications to relieve distress associated with apparent thirst or hunger before being provided with minimal amounts of liquid or food.’”

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Shut Up The Public Health Official Declared

Posted on July 7, 2026 by The Political Hat

     Censorship when it comes to healthcare related policy is never good. It induces people to question legitimate science and research while also empowering cranks and those with agendas to silence veritable dissent. But such is the call from a once vaunted publication, “The Lancet”.

“The UN and the World Economic Forum have identified misinformation and disinformation as top global risks — ranking them as higher short-term threats than extreme weather, state-based armed conflict, and cyber insecurity.”

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News of the Week (July 5th, 2026)

Posted on July 5, 2026 by The Political Hat

 

News of the Week for July 5th, 2026


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When in the Course of Human Events…

Posted on July 4, 2026 by The Political Hat

Action of Second Continental Congress, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America

WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The History of the present King of Great- Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.

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Firing Line Friday: The People’s Bicentennial as Spoilsports

Posted on July 3, 2026 by The Political Hat

     In the hopes of encouraging a more civil, and illuminating, discourse, here is another episode of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line”.

     With the semisesquicentennial right around the corner, let us look back half a century ago during the bicentennial when a “people’s” group declared that the Founding Fathers were the forerunners to Marxist revolutionaries and sough to continue the American Revolution by imposing the complete socialization of the United State, as William F. Buckley, Jr. debated Jeremy Rifkin, Nocholas Ulanov, Ned Potter, and Jonathan Kaiufman debate whether the People’s Bicentennial were spoilsports.

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Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States

Posted on July 2, 2026 by The Political Hat

     While we may celebrate the 4th of July, when the Declaration of Independence was approved, the actual resolution for American independence was approved two days later, and exactly a quarter of a millennium ago on this very day.

“On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee introduced a resolution ‘that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states,’ acting under the instruction of the Virginia Convention. The Lee Resolution contained three parts: a declaration of independence, a call to form foreign alliances, and “a plan for confederation.”

“On June 11, 1776, the Congress appointed three concurrent committees in response to the Lee Resolution: one to draft a declaration of independence, a second to draw up a plan ‘for forming foreign alliances,’ and a third to ‘prepare and digest the form of a confederation.’

“Because many members of the Congress believed the actions Lee proposed to be premature or wanted instructions from their colonies before voting, approval was deferred until July 2. On that date, Congress adopted the first part (the declaration). The words of the Lee Resolution are echoed in the Declaration of Independence.

“The document seen here shows the vote on the Lee Resolution — the affirmative votes of 12 colonies are listed at the right. New York cast no vote until the newly elected New York Convention upheld the Declaration of Independence on July 9, 1776.”

Adoption of the Resolution Calling for Independence from England; 7/2/1776; Reports on Administrative Affairs of the Congress; Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774 – 1789; Records of the Continental and Confederation Congresses and the Constitutional Convention, Record Group 360; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

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Firing Line Friday: Resolved: That the Government Has the Right to Regulate the Internet

Posted on June 26, 2026 by The Political Hat

     In the hopes of encouraging a more civil, and illuminating, discourse, here is another episode of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line”.

     With all the new bills, in England, the U.S., and the rest of Europe, to push “age verification” and other excessive regulations, let us look back 30 years ago when William F. Buckley, Jr., Susan Estrich, Ira Glasser, Cathleen Cleaver, Ariana uffington, Esther Dyson, Reid Hoffman, John P. Barlow, with moderator Michael E. Kinsley debated the resolution that the government had the right to regulate the internet.

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Quick Takes – Academic Madness: VR vs. The Handicapped; Solving Physics With Queerness; Malaysian Muslim Transwoman Social Justice Studies

Posted on June 25, 2026 by The Political Hat

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: Straight White males can’t do modern science and technology apparently.

     First, a little mood music:

     Carrying on…

     Crippled hackers gonna hack crippled. From the abstract:

“eXtended Reality (XR) technologies often embed ableist design assumptions, privileging hand-based interaction and vision-centric interfaces that presume a normative able-bodied user. As a result, many disabled people—including those with limited mobility or blindness—are excluded from the outset, with accessibility added only as an afterthought. We critique this dynamic through a critical disability studies lens, formulating the notion of a “bare-minimum accessibility paradigm”—a tendency to meet only minimal compliance requirements rather than rethinking access as a generative design concern. In response, we propose crip-hacking and crip-aesthetics as transformative frameworks for accessible XR design. Crip-hacking draws on disabled communities’ DIY technology adaptations while crip-aesthetics reimagines disability-centric creativity as a design asset. We illustrate these approaches through an autoethnographic account of an XR artwork co-created with disabled artists using mouth gestures. This case demonstrates how reimagining XR through disability experiences challenges entrenched ableist design norms and broadens the discourse at the nexus of disability theory, technology ethics, and inclusive design research.”

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Catgirl Floodgates

Posted on June 23, 2026 by The Political Hat

     Increasingly, moral barriers against genetic engineering are disappearing.

“As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, a team led by Columbia University geneticist Dieter Egli used a technique called base editing, essentially editing a single strand of DNA, to edit two genomic sites.

“The goal wasn’t to establish promising new therapeutic or medical treatments, as the scientists noted in their paper. Instead, they attempted to demonstrate that base editing was a viable way of editing sequences of DNA in embryos without risking the damage earlier attempts involving CRISPR have caused.

“But as Scientific American reports, the latest research could lay the groundwork for more controversial work, despite the embryos not being carried to term, with pioneering genome‑editing researcher and Alexis Komor, who helped develop CRISPR, telling the publication that the ‘cat’s out of the bag.’”

     Correction, the catgirl’s out of the bag.

“Komor argued that without any strict regulatory oversight in the US, Egli and his colleagues may have broken an existing ‘gentleman’s agreement,’ in the kind of research that ‘kind of opens the floodgates.’”

     Obviously this means we will get closer to a flood of genetically engineered catgirls suitable for domestic adoption.

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Transgender Potty Madness

Posted on June 22, 2026 by The Political Hat

     The literal and objective truth is that human beings are sexually dimorphic with both both acute and statistically obvious differences between the two sexes, which derive—baring a medical abnormality—from the chromosome match up of XX or XY, that is separate and distinct from any and all “gender identities”. Federal judge Amanda Brailsford, however, has this completely backwards when she(?) declared that biological sex was indeterminable while “gender identity” was the only Constitutionally permissible way of segregating people.

“Under Brailsford’s potty logic, any law that designates restrooms—or showers or locker rooms—by sex (and that imposes a penalty for violation) is unconstitutionally vague. And in practice no such law could be enforced against anyone, transgender or not.”

“Brailsford devotes most of her merits discussion to two of the exceptions that the law sets forth: one when a “single-user facility [designated for the opposite sex] is the only facility reasonably available at the time of the person’s use of the facility,” and the other when a ‘person is in dire need of urinating or defecating and such facility is the only facility reasonably available at the time of the person’s use.’ (See slip op. at 11-15.) She somehow finds that those exceptions are unconstitutionally vague because they “leave[] critical enforcement decisions to the unguided discretion of individual officers.” Why this alleged vagueness in the exceptions is a reason to enjoin the law generally (rather than to invalidate the two exceptions or construe them expansively) is puzzling.

“Brailsford then inserts a single paragraph (top of p. 16) in which she asserts that the law’s general bar ‘invites arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement’ because it depends on ‘a law enforcement officer’s ability to determine an individual’s “biological sex.”’ On that ground, she rules that plaintiffs have sufficiently established that the law is unconstitutionally vague.”

     Just because someone can “pass” as a “trap” or “reverse-trap” doesn’t mean that it’s Unconstitutional for them to have to use the sex-segregated restroom designed for their biological sex. But this goes beyond mere “traps” and declares that harry obvious dudes can just use the Ladies restroom because of their “gender identity”, despite that not being obvious until potential police questioning happens.

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